1.
Tell me briefly what your music is all about, Alex.
'Briefly' could be a problem, but in some sense it's about reconnecting with nature. By 'nature' I don't mean trees and clouds and things in the physical environment, but that which stands before music as the condition for its very existence, and I mean this in a truly primordial sense - the thing we haven't created which stands before all our creations, and which has given rise to our creations. That's what I identify as nature....
Why do we create music? For most people it's because they're inspired by other music, but why has that music been created? If you keep asking this question you eventually hit a brick wall because at some point there's a world without human-created music. Yet we can't have created music from nothing. Music simply has to have roots beyond human creation. So it's really about identifying these roots and reconnecting with them.
So, would it be fair to say that music for you is 'non-human'?
Of course music is a human activity, but there is always this underlying purely sonic reality, without which the human activity could not occur. It is this vital level, this core, which can never be absent (nor completely isolated), which interests me most, because it is where music really lives. We even see that most major historical developments in musical practice, even though they occur through the human, begin ultimately in this vital level. That is to say, there is a curiosity in, or imitation of the complexes of the laws of vibration and the way in which these laws manifest in sound. Melodies, for example, emerge as linear or 'moment-by-moment' expressions of the simultaneous 'moments' heard within the drone - in other words its harmonics, which it contains just because of the way sound is. Harmonics are not 'human-constructed', yet they stand at the very roots of human-constructed melody.
Paradoxically, as soon as melodic movement is present, harmonics are no longer noticed. This is the concealing power of human-construction. We only get to hear harmonics if constructed melody is absent, in other words, if we are able to focus at length on the unmediated sustained tone. We don't hear them in music which is forever travelling towards the next variation, key, or orchestral colour, because in this music there's always something more conspicuous drawing our attention and distracting us.
What would you say to the person who enjoys listening to variations, key changes, and orchestral contrast?
Well, of course that's fine, but they should recognise that an illusion is at play in that these more conspicuous elements of music, these "created" elements of music all have roots in non-created realities, and the more human-created variation is present, the more these non-created roots are likely to be concealed in perception. Human-created variation can be suggested to humans by non-created realities. People tend to think that the non-human world is empty and structureless and that all perceived structure must have been imposed by humans, but the non-human world is full of structure - overtones are evidence of this. What humans impose is structure with a boundary, structure with limits. The harmonic series is infinite, it's us who want to settle on a twelve tone limit.
So I guess I'd warn this person that a violence is committed by acts of creation, that created things have a tendency to conceal their given precepts and assume a "given" status all of their own. But we shouldn't be fooled by this. The initial "gift" is the priority, I think, and it can remain our point of focus.
So it's almost like listening through the music.
Yes, absolutely. This is my idea of 'transparent music'. The violence can be averted if we look through its 'createdness', which is limited and deceptive, back to its primal roots in the 'given', the actual condition for its being in the first place. It's about prioritizing the 'given' over the 'created'.
You feel as though the 'given' is something we've lost sight of. Tell me more about that.
Yes. We've lost sight of the 'given' because it has been covered-over by the 'created', this is despite the 'created' having its roots in the 'given'. If you can imagine all 'created' music as a tree, then we've become completely unaware of its root system! Worse than this though is that some musicians want to deny there even exists a root system. The root system is not easy to see, that's the problem. The tree is, but the root system isn't. But the tree needs the root system to survive, you see.
We're in a process of severing music from these roots. It has similarities with the technological enterprise Baudrillard talks about. "The universe has no other destiny than to be the universe itself" [1]. In other words, despite all our cultural and technological advancement, we cannot actually invent anything that didn't already have some sort of presence in the 'given' world. Following McLuhan, we might say the car for example is just an "extension" of what the foot was already capable of [2]. Okay, we might want to say the car has improved travel efficiency, but hasn't it just established a new standard of travel efficiency -- one, mind you, that we continually want to outdo? It's also given rise to all sorts of atrocities like road death, land-clearing, and environmental pollution. What's more, it's exclusive to particular ideologies and particular lifestyles -- how does a poor person, for example, acquire a car? And that's another important point: cars have to be acquired; feet don't. And yet we're all expected to meet this standard of travel efficiency normalized by the car, whether we own one or not.
The car is not a 'transparent' technology anymore because we don't just see it as a convenient 'adjunct' to our feet -- it actually is our feet, you know, it's our new standard means of travel. At first the car seemed fast compared to our feet, now our feet seem slow compared to the car. All technologies seem to emerge 'transparently', but eventually they accumulate enough 'opacity' to conceal or even substitute the very things they were 'extending' in the first place.
So how does it all relate back to music?
Well, firstly, art and technology are both forms of 'culture' in that they both shape or 'cultivate' aspects of the 'given' world; what we 'create' is born of what we are 'given', that's obvious. Secondly, just like the technological creation, the artistic creation begins 'transparently' and attains 'opacity' over time. In other words, it emerges first unambiguously as an expession of its 'given' source, but eventually it conceals and substitutes that source, the very thing it was supposed to be expressing. This is the inevitable violence I was talking about - the violence of culture. The priority shifts from the 'given' to the 'created', which then becomes the new 'given'. This is 'cultural development'. And its affect upon music is that our pool of so-called 'given' resources becomes increasingly infiltrated by the 'created', which tempts us to believe music is somehow all 'created', and that even fundamentally it has no roots beyond human creation.
But the moment we believe this, music is dead, or at least it has begun to die in that the condition for its very existence is no longer recognized. It's a bit like a tree that has been severed from its root system - it appears to be alive for quite some time after the chop, but it's actually already in the slow and painful process of dying. Its death is inevitable. I think western music was severed the moment temperament seemed like a good idea and it's been shrivelling up ever since. Only now is it becoming noticable.
That's certainly a long death.
Yes...But only in the context of literate history. It's actually not that long in the context of the preceding thousands of centuries of non-written music of worship. I imagine this is music oriented not towards the acts of creation themselves, but towards the 'divine' or 'natural' precepts (however they might be identified) which stand before all such creative acts as the very reason for their being carried out. The acts emerge from this source, and this source remains the focus; the acts never attain importance in their own right. This music is 'transparent'.
So is it possible to revive the dead?
Yes it is, because it's not this source which has died, it is our culture, and our culture can be born again as long as the source is still alive. This source is the vital 'core' from which our culture emerges as mere extension. And of course the core is still alive. Thankfully, it can't die, it can only be more severely covered-over and obstructed, hence the problem we're faced with now: finding this core through an ever-increasing backlog of cultural obstructions.
Ironically, our culture appears to be thriving precisely because of its detachment from the core - because it has attained "independence" and is operating as a kind of autonomous entity. But in reality, it has lost its lifeline and is consequently beginning to deteriorate. Much like the tree detached from its root system, it can only survive independently for a certain amount of time before death inevitably sets in.
So I guess in this sense we can't revive the dead, but then again why would we want to? Why would we try to breathe life into a dead hunk of wood when we can go back into the forest and choose another tree? - only this time let's not rip it out of the ground and cover it with decorations in some bizarre attempt to try and own it! Rather, let's accept we don't own it, and simply be in its presence. Instead of trying to cultivate it, let's experience how it might cultivate us, fill us with awe and humble us.
Just lastly, a question regarding the group you're currently forming, Music of Transparent Means: How do you reconcile this activity of 'creating' music with your belief that products of 'creation' inevitably conceal their 'given' precepts?
Don't forget, when I say products of 'creation' conceal their 'given' precepts, I mean specifically in the sphere of music where 'cultural development' is the order of the day. Music of Transparent Means consciously operates outside this sphere of 'cultural development', and within the sphere of what I call 'cultural transparency'. In other words, the music I 'create' is actually oriented away from its 'createdness', and towards its 'non-created' precepts, which are the condition for its 'creation' in the first place.
'Cultural development' operates on the premise that human-forged 'progress' actually augments and broadens the world, whereas I believe the exact opposite is true: that such 'progress' only causes a narrowing of the world by continually concealing more and more parts of it. If our goal is to create more "Culture", of course music's core will remain hidden. In fact, the more we culturalize music, the more solidly its core will be concealed. This core can only be approached if the cultural layers are removed. And that's exactly what I'm trying to do. My music asserts nothing of myself, or my 'creative talent' (whatever that means). It's not meant to be a product of my culture. What I'm trying to do is strip away these accumulated layers of culture in order to expose what it is they're obstructing. The last thing I want to do is impose upon you what I'm able to 'extract' from nature, or rather what I'm able to 'extract' from other 'extractions' of nature - you'll only then have to 'extract' something from my 'extraction' - because something is always lost in this process of 'extraction'. And this inevitably leads to a situation where we're defined by our 'seperateness' because we can no longer see the mutual vanishing point from which each of our 'extractions' initially emerged.
So what I want to do is wipe the slate clean of 'separateness'. If we begin in separateness, we only end in greater separateness. In the Music of Transparent Means performances, the focus is on the fact that everyone's individual 'extractions' are united in a common ground, which is not the music of someone else's personal 'extraction', but rather in the very roots which stand before human 'extraction' of any kind. Each listener's 'extractions' become 'figures' which are connected by an audible 'ground'. This 'connectedness' is true of ordinary life too, only in ordinary life the balance is tilted towards the 'figures', the separateness of things - consequently the 'ground' remains hidden, even though it secretly unites us all. What I want to do is bring the 'ground' to the fore, make it impossible not to notice.
But even this may be misleading, because really the music is just a 'figure' too, a channel, and the real 'ground', the real point of contact is beyond the music. That's the exciting part. The music is just the means through which everyone present is oriented towards that point of absolute universality. And if you're able to listen without expectation, the experience is truly euphoric.
Alex Carpenter (© 2001)
NOTES
1. Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime (London; New York: Verso, 1996) 42.
2. See Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1994).