In the UK, the Research Excellence Framework results have
been released.
A simple internet search shows only those
institutions eager to display pride in their ranking (e.g. University of Bristol, Royal Holloway, Guildhall School and Cambridge). Via (social) media, a more
troubling picture can be found, with arts departments under some type of threat
despite seemingly encouraging results. Wolverhampton University seems to have
done well, but intends to slash a significant number of jobs,
reminding us (cynically?) of the many it had added before submitting its REF
report. Similarly, De Montfort University boasts positive ranking yet its employees cry for help.
With the financial implications of the results as
yet unknown, it is difficult to assess to what extent this negativity is
related to the REF. Anyway, some have stated that practice-based subjects are not
negatively impacted. Indeed, whereas for the previous REF in 2014,
university-employed composers lamented having to seek approval for their
creative work by adding academic output, sparking a debate about
composition-"as"-reserarch (cf. here, here, and here), this time around, such composers’ sighs
seem largely to have dissipated. This may mean that composition itself is
(more) acknowledged as research output than before, at least in the UK.
Surely less coincidental is the 2021 Leuven
University Press publication of the 373-page multi-authored volume, Sound
Work: Composition as Critical Technical Practice, edited by Jonathan
Impett, whose roles as composer, director of research at the Orpheus Instituut,
and associate professor at Middlesex University, makes his voice(s) especially
noteworthy. The book can be acquired for 62,5€ here, where the table of contents can be viewed.
Since the publication represents a constructive addition to the debate about
composition and research, Jonathan’s introduction, including summaries of the
chapters, is reproduced underneath.
Music-Making and Storytelling
Jonathan Impett
This volume is concerned
with storytelling: the stories composers tell about composition, to
themselves and to others. In the past, the self-reporting of composition
has tended to consider the areas in which it aspires to be innovative, or
the theories—musical, aesthetic, social, scientific,
technological—that have informed the work, rather than the activity of
composition itself. The knowledge presented in such cases often lies outside composition.
There is no lack of accounts by composers demonstrating how their work
embodies this theory or that principle, or introduces a new technical
concept. There is no shortage of investigation of the ontology and
epistemology of the “work” as a persisting historical cultural phenomenon,
but the technologies and context of composition have undergone a paradigm
shift. The present, to repurpose a phrase, is another country.
In contemporary science,
the role of storytelling is increasingly recognised not only in science
communication but also in its self-image and hence in scientific practice
(Davies et al. 2019). In the discussion of music creation, several factors
contribute to the urgent need for new discourse, new voices, and new kinds
of story. The cultural landscape is transformed, and with it the perceived role
of “art” music and the nature of public critical discourse. In a
prevailing atmosphere of individualism, the commonality of creative
experience is all the more important—both among artists themselves and
with their audience. And composition is largely supported as an activity
of knowledge-production, as research, rather than as creative development
per se. We need, therefore, to tell more material, honest, and useful
stories—to seed discourse, to find resonances, to encourage critical
engagement.
To paraphrase Brian
Ferneyhough ([1982] 1995), composition walks a tightrope between formalism
and the arbitrary, a process informed by theory and intuition, constraint
and contingency, expectation and experience. It is a continuous, situated,
iterative process of inscription and reflection in which its models,
metaphors, aspirations, obligations, tools, and technologies all play
a part; it has a narrative, or rather multiple narratives (Impett 2016).
This process and its products embody assumptions, choices, and intentions
that have significant implications for the position, role, and impact of
artist and artwork alike—critical implications, whether the artist chooses
to regard them as such or not. The artefacts of composition—however
notated, improvised, virtual, embodied, or technologically implemented—are
hybrid technical objects and require a technicity of engagement on the
part of artist and listener.
The hypothesis of this
volume is that we might rather consider composition as a design process,
and that we might usefully study its dynamics and decisions in the spirit of
what Philip Agre described as critical technical practice.
Agre developed his ideas in the context of his work in artificial
intelligence (AI), at a moment of deep transformation in that field, of
moving from “mentalist” to “interactionist” models. His fundamental
insight is that individual practice— what he described as “the practical
logic of computer work” (Agre 2002)—is indivisible from the social context
and implications of its products; they constitute a single critical
activity:
The word “critical” here
does not call for pessimism and destruction but rather for an expanded
understanding of the conditions and goals of technical work.... Instead of
seeking foundations it would embrace the impossibility of
foundations, guiding itself by a continually unfolding awareness of its
own workings as a historically specific practice.... It would accept that
this reflexive inquiry places all of its concepts and methods at risk. And
it would regard this risk positively, not as a threat to rationality but
as the promise of a better way of doing things. (Agre 1997a, 22–23)
Agre criticises conventional accounts that present
work and theory as a mutually justifying pair—one as the natural
embodiment of the other—as insufficient. Such accounts hide narrative,
decisions, and parameters, avoid critical context. Instead, he outlines a
practice that is reflective in two directions: in terms of what it
actually involves—intentions, conditions, means, theory, actions, constraints, events—and
in terms of its context—cultural, social, technological, and, in our case,
artistic and even personal. He describes a single disciplinary field: “one
foot planted in the craft work of design and the other foot planted in the
reflexive work of critique” (Agre 1997b, 155). This is not the place to hazard
a reductive summary of Agre’s concept, but we must point to a recent
resurgence of interest in areas such as software studies (Kitchin and
Dodge 2014), intelligent design (Somerson and Hermano 2013), architecture
(Parisi 2013), and artificial intelligence itself, which has been
massively re-energised with recent advances in machine learning. Like the
artefacts of these fields, music inhabits a liminal material state, is heavily
dependent on the means of its realisation, retains its identity across
manifold instantiations, is adaptive to the context of its embodiment, and
is the product of deep concept, abstract imagination, and painstaking
technique and experiment.
In critical technical practice,
reflection and its articulation are integral and essential to the process;
there is no single model any more than there is a single model of
composition. This volume explores the potential of critical
technical practice (CTP) as an ethos and discourse for the articulation
and sharing of knowledge production through composition across styles,
practices, and contexts. The technological context, materials, and
practices of composition have always been closely coupled. The wider
cultural role and understanding of composition as an activity has been
transformed with each technological paradigm shift. This volume considers
the new cultural, professional, epistemic, and institutional situation of
composition in the particular contexts of the wide range of current
technologically enabled practices: music information retrieval, live
coding, live notation, intelligent instrument-building and hacking,
interactive, autonomous, and algorithmic approaches,
distributed creativity, sound art, and computer-assisted composition. As
an inherently reflexive approach, CTP brings implications for the
development of these same contemporary practices.
The opening chapters
consider the relevance and potential of critical technical practice in
music from wide perspectives. Alan Blackwell’s “Too Cool to Boogie” sets
the scene by locating Agre’s thought in the field of artificial
intelligence, its issues and subsequent developments. Critical technical
practice presents a critical response to the impasse of AI in the 1980s;
technical and philosophical views are inseparable if the field is to
realise its potential for good, and this relationship is reflected in the
stories practitioners tell about their own work. The author explores
Agre’s thought by situating it in a specific instance of his own practice:
studying funk bass. The interaction of technical methods with the
embodied, situated, complexly motivated narrative of human
practice emerges as the object of critical reflection.
David Rosenboom’s
magisterial “Illusions of Form” presents a body of creative thought that
has evolved in parallel and kept pace with the developments that have
produced the concept of CTP, the current 4E view of
cognition (embodied, embedded, enacted, extended), and recent advances in
biotechnology. Rosenboom invokes Agre’s ideas to construct a critical
reflection on the development and implications of his own radical concept
of propositional music. Received boundaries of genre or
discipline are abandoned, not to indifference but to a new mode of
artistic-technical-scientific endeavour—an artscience, its
methodology informed by the current concept of emergent
engineering. Composition becomes an activity of world-model building, an
imaginative process that engages with the cognitive processes of
performers and listeners alike, using means and models derived from and
developed with advances in science and technology. Through examples of
neuromusical propositions, musical configuration spaces and emergent
collaborative projects, Rosenboom lays the ground for a new artscience
discourse. In his vision, critical technicity is in operation throughout
the acts of composition, performance, and listening.
The software-hardware
binary central to current technology-based practice is examined in Nicolas
Collins’s “What to Ware?” He suggests a taxonomy, a series of axes along
which their different affordances and constraints might be understood.
This illuminates the artist’s selection of tools as a series of
conscious choices, all informed by a fundamental critical question in art,
that of truth to materials—in this case, whether music made with
electronics should sound like electronic music.
Collins’s fine-grained
analysis of craft is complemented by Ann Warde’s broad recontextualising
of the very activity of composition. She pursues a process of substitution
to explore the prospect of a “critical musical practice,” such that
composition becomes a way of imagining and modelling “a world we’d like to
perceive and experience—an environment: a social, physical,
tactile environment.” Warde performs a further inversion: by seeing
music as a technology, she presents it as having a wider
function in its own present. These substitutions shed new light both on
the wide relevance of Agre’s ideas beyond their apparent subject area, and
on the potential role of music as a critical instrument.
The intimate dance of the
technical and the critical is explored in Nicholas Brown’s “The Composer’s
Domain.” The essentially transdisciplinary nature of the work of composing
with computers emerges from two case studies. Such work becomes a way of
interrogating both assumptions about music-making and the world-views
embodied in technology; it proposes alternative ontologies for music and
poses new questions concerning our relationship with the natural,
cultural, and engineered world we inhabit. At the heart of this music
is the fulcrum between the digital and the mechanical, developing the
thesis of the chapter by Nicolas Collins. The abstraction, conditionality,
and absolute nature of the digital are balanced by the situated and
responsive materiality of the ways in which the work is shared.
The editor’s “Dissociation
and Interference” considers the relevance, implications, and enactment of
critical technical practice in the current environment of art as knowledge
production. Crucial differences emerge between CTP and actor–network
theory: a CTP approach addresses the significant gap in current music
discourse between material and social perspectives. Agre insists on the
identification of moments of dissociation and interference as a key
component, and this is discussed in the context of the practical business
of composition.
McLaughlin, Di Scipio, and
Romero examine particular aspects of contemporary composition, as they
emerge from the writers’ own practices—aspects with broad common
resonance. Scott McLaughlin pursues the question of material indeterminacy
in “The Impossibility of Material Foundations.” The composer sets the
conditions for the development of a relationship between performer and an
unpredictable and unstable performance environment—a combination of
technique and instrument. This essentialises and micro-examines the
situation that effectively obtains in any “conventional” performance. A
touchstone comes from Agre, in his description of such a process
as “embrac[ing] the impossibility of foundations, guiding itself by a
continually unfolding awareness of its own workings as a historically
specific practice” (1997a, 23). Composition is thus acknowledged as a
situated experimental process, the recursive exploration of the infinite
possible networks conceived as a “phase space.”
Agostino Di Scipio puts
forward a view of live electronic music as an inherently critical practice
in “Thinking Liveness in Performance with Live
Electronics.” His chapter begins with a comprehensive historical survey of
practice and concepts. Di Scipio’s concept of liveness involves not simply
human presence or “real-time” operation—itself a very plastic idea—but the
real lived time and space of performance. He proposes the performance
ecosystem as an operative unit, such that system and site are
coupled in performance. Critical technicity runs through practice and
performance into their social context: “By way of turning the hybrid
constitution of techno-ecosystems into phenomenologically shared auditory
events, these mediators audibly expose the human, all-too-human reality of
our pervasive technological condition.”
In “Experiment and
Experience,” Lula Romero resists the notion of mastery—of craft or materials.
In the pursuit of openness of relationship between composer and work, she
finds Cage’s apparent rejection of the subject insufficient as a response.
Instead she sees a continuous intra-action between composer and materials;
the resulting music is a product of their interference. Such openness
becomes a process of continuous critique, evading commodification and
offering alternative world models. This critique is confronted with
each technical decision: the spatial distribution of multiple possible
outcomes, the design of and negotiation with systems. Romero proposes a
reformulation of the composer as a feminist subject.
The accounts of Magnusson,
Fantechi, Haddad, and Zattra set out from very practical aspects of
contemporary composition practice. Metacompositional thought in the design
of a performance system is a theme developed in Thor Magnusson’s account
of his development of the Threnoscope, a live coding environment. As a
mode of compositional inscription, code has its own dynamics in terms of
imagining and structuring work—or rather potential work—and in its
dissemination and reuse. Here it becomes a context for experimentation as
well as a creative tool; conventional categories of modes of practice
and expertise dissolve as questions of music theory, cognition,
technology, interface, and instrument design provoke and inform one
another. Projects such as the Threnoscope invite us to dynamically
re-evaluate notions of design, composition, performance, improvisation,
and collaboration.
The activity of com-posing—the
putting together of music—is predicated at some level on a conceptual
model of the resources and materials to be used. The management of
resources—their representation, their perceived or ascribed relationships,
their disposition—is so fundamental an activity, so practical, that it may
seem pre-technical and is certainly lost in most accounts of
practice. Instead, the decisions it embodies reflect a critical stance
that informs all its artefacts. Daniela Fantechi explores this topic in “A
Few Reflections about Compositional Practice,” a refreshingly candid
account of personal practice as revealed in a series of case studies.
Awareness of choice—of taste, of the changing objects of attention and of
provisional, variable parameters of categorisation— evolves from an
autoethnographic discipline to a guiding critical stance. This generates a
narrative of form emerging from levels of compositional memory and the
inherent temporality of the material.
Karim Haddad’s “Temporal
Poetics” presents a way of conceiving musical time and of manipulating the
temporality of musical entities mentioned by Fantechi. This is contiguous
with the roots of Western mensural notation in the ars nova, but also with
Hölderlin’s assertion of rhythm as the essential property of art, of
nature, and of knowledge. Computer-assisted composition restores the flow
of time to the working environment; the temporalities of imagination,
experimentation, composition, and performance modulate each other.
Haddad’s approach recognises the particular temporality of materials while
being situated in both the historical flow of musical culture and a
critical exchange with contemporary technology.
Music research has recently
focussed on collaborative work in contemporary music creation; we might
more accurately observe that music research has recently come to take note
of the extent to which collaborative or distributed processes are vital to
music creation in general. As the technological possibilities available to
musicians have proliferated, distributed technical expertise has become
crucial at the stage of composition. A very particular mode of
collaboration obtains in institutional studios where composers are invited
to work with the assistance of technical experts. Laura Zattra examines
the dynamics of such situations in “Collaborative Creation in
Electroacoustic Music,” by exploring three cases in detail. Useful terms
derive from design practices; workflow, communication, and the
co-evolution of musical imagination with technical experimentation emerge
as significant factors. The complicity, empathy, creativity, and openness
of the assistant are crucial, and yet their professional status is not
always resolved.
Finally, Alessandrini and
Zhu, Field, and Ciciliani present visions for new ontologies of music,
each taking a unique critical stance and exploring its ramifications for
their technical practice. Patricia Alessandrini’s feminist
multimedia monodrama Parlour Sounds is the case study at
the heart of her chapter with Julie Zhu. In the spirit of Haraway-inspired
cyberfeminism, the project challenges predominant practices of technology,
confronting those of music with those of the domestic environment. Such
displacement brings the work into new critical relationships with many
aspects of its production and context: the collaborative processes of
composition, of interface design and construction, the physical location
of work with music technology, the relationship of art with daily life,
and the power structures at play in the soliciting and production of
music. Cyberfeminist principles inform the proposal of an alternative
to dominant paradigms of electronic music, and a theoretical framework in
which roles and distinctions between composition, design, improvisation,
and performance are blurred.
Ambrose Field seeks to
change the vocabulary of creative practice from another perspective. Much
compositional activity now happens in an academic context, where it is
supported and expected to explain itself as research. This transition has
been extensively discussed: from the epistemological implications to the
ways in which it reflects a new mode of supporting cultural and creative
development. From the composer’s perspective, however, such discussion has
largely been concerned with defending creative freedom or
claiming epistemological relevance. Instead, Field addresses the question
of the practice itself directly. When creative practice also becomes
experimental practice, what are the ramifications for both the self-image
and the practical behaviour of the practitioner? Field considers the
formulation of questions and especially the development of new approaches
to workflow, which he describes as “the creative envelope.”
If the practices of music
creation are to enter a more dynamic phase of critical awareness, the
relationship with the listener, audience, or co-participant becomes
crucial. For whom is this work intended? How is it to be received, in what
circumstances and with what expectations of attention or investment? Marko
Ciciliani’s “Designing Audience–Work Relationships” explores this in
detail through three of his audiovisual
projects—performance/installation hybrids. They work with time, space, and
multiplicity of phenomenon to experiment with modes of social and
individual interaction. Hall’s “proxemics” provide a metric of intimacy.
Patterns of temporality and attention emerge from the engagement of
performers and listeners, not as an epiphenomenon but within the scope of
compositional imagination, design, and critical reflection.
Through such processes of
critical technical reflection, of detailed discussion of the practical
narrative of composition, common themes emerge from this multiplicity of
creative practices. Technology is present not for technology’s sake, but
because our evolving relationship with technology is one of the defining
paths of our current state. A systems view of practice and its
artefacts appears often, just as the mid-century visions of cybernetics
are informing recent work in the new AI—currently searching for ways to
confront its own hidden assumptions, tastes, and prejudices. Above all we
see references to building models of possible worlds; David
Rosenboom’s propositional music stands as paradigm in this
regard.
Composition is not the
sudden, unitary embodiment of an idea but a situated, distributed,
time-extensive activity. And the products of this activity, of these
decisions, reflect world views and values; they propose new models. If
we are to talk about music in material ways and music is to do its
important work in the world, then composers must begin to have new kinds
of conversation with each other and with the wider community. It is hoped
that this volume will contribute to such a development.
References
Agre, Philip E. 1997a. Computation
and Human Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 1997b. “Toward a Critical
Technical Practice: Lessons Learned in Trying to Reform AI.” In Social
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Divide, edited by Geoffrey C. Bowker, Susan Leigh Star, William
Turner, and Les Gasser, 131–57. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
———. 2002. “The Practical Logic of Computer
Work.” In Computationalism: New Directions, edited by
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Davies, Sarah Rachel, Megan Halpern, Maja
Horst, David Kirby, and Bruce Lewenstein. 2019. “Science Stories
as Culture: Experience, Identity, Narrative and Emotion in Public
Communication of Science.” JCOM: Journal of
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