Actually, I don’t believe in this project [the reasons I discuss below are heavily influenced by Ornette Coleman as well as the “non-philosophical” thinking of Francois Laruelle, at least to the limited extent I can understand the latter… but it has been helpful for me thus far]
I see all of these definitional/theoretical elements as flowing from the music itself and therefore indistinct from it.
To interpret these elements as what music “is”, in other words to grasp music according to some absolute claim to sufficiency over music, becomes self-defeating.
No matter which definition, there’s an invariant structure built around a distinction with definitional elements on one side, music on the other, and an enveloping relation in which definition/music become co-constituting and by which the definition claims sufficiency over all music. However, sufficiency (and thus attempt at definition) fails because it denies or is otherwise unable to grasp the fundamental indistinction of definitional elements from what they take as their objects. We can replace this definition with another one that grasps the previous indistinction, but not without introducing a further split.
In fact, the most “evolved” or liberal definitions such as “music is organized sound” are actually the most stifling because then one is forced to think of every possible sound as music. The problem here is not Cage himself but the way Cage has been assimilated back into the definitional structures so favored by musicologists.
Definitional elements, in other words, ultimately are determined by music, just as the other elements they take as object (rhythms, melodies, scores, sounds, performances, instruments, musicians, gestures, tools, code). But it’s strictly a one-way street. These elements cannot determine music, no matter how badly they want to.
So what is the musician to do? In the end we cannot “know” music, not in the sense of this technological thinking where we first determine what music “is” and then act upon it. It’s not the truth of an exact science: we can’t command music to use or force it to appear according to some preconceived idea.
We can at best open ourselves to music, recognize what is already forming within music, and assist it… Insofar as this involves thinking these are never thoughts “of” or “about” music, but “within” or “according to” music and its gifts. It is neither agency nor fate but destiny; we realize our freedom only in being able to follow it and give of ourselves accordingly.
This does not mean abandoning definitional/theoretical elements. They are often inspiring. It means rather, divesting them of their definitional structures and their absolute claims to explain all music. It means treating them as musical material not as “theses” about musical materials. It means becoming aware of them according to inspiration, then habituating them, taking them into one’s body or embedding them into the interface as code. The less thought-“of” perhaps the better. In other words, folding definitional elements back somehow into the unknowable, ungraspable immanent reality that is music and musical practice.
Music thus takes on a posture closer to science fiction or role-playing, in which the invention or free combination of definitional elements builds “worlds” structuring all other elements in which a performance, recording, or some other actualization takes place. One may combine electronic timbres, tonality, serialism, polyrhythms without worrying about whether this is “musical” or not, or invent new practices/ideas not yet interpretable under any prior musical basis.
This isn’t a matter of a preconceived idea or “agency”, it’s not at all “do what you want”. If this world is being built according to the act already taking place within music, then it is already an act within music, and hence musical.
Music thus determines, or issues forth, musi-fictions which take definitional elements as their basic material.
For me, a major figure is Ornette Coleman. Harmolodic practices such as “everybody solos, nobody solos”, or the idea that every instrument play in its own natural key, enact a radical heterogeneity, a true democracy of thought which define a non-hierarchical relationship between individual and community. These are not elements of theory, but initiatory practices. They do not even in themselves constitute harmolodics.
Properly considered, harmolodics is a musi-fiction that fundamentally enacts another way of being, a utopia perhaps. Harmolodics can be practiced, but perhaps never quite formulated… certainly never assimilated or reduced into a definitional structure, and attempts to do so make a complete nonsense of it, including most of the writing about it. But it represents a true liberation, in contrast to these stifling ideas such as “everything can be music” (meaning: everything, every sound, is now subject to our specific definitional structure of music… you must attend to this structure, rather than open yourself to the music actually taking place.)
What musi-fiction is NOT, is any kind of innovation or advance. It is not a matter of taking a pair of (inadequate) definitional elements, calling one thesis, the other antithesis, and taking them up into a dialectic that evolves through Bach, Wagner, Schoenberg, Cage, (completely negating any contributions from non-Western sources) etc. until history reaches an end and everything is taken up under its structure, i.e. “everything is music”. Until we are blocked from responding to certain elements because we consider them obsolete. We’re already there anyway, history in this sense (of linear progress) is already at an end.
Perhaps we can finally give up on innovation?
This is not dialectics, but heresy, and may well be treated as such.
But it is increasingly our only chance to build a utopia, to fundamentally change our way of thinking and being (and this goes way beyond music).
