Assignments for chapter 6: music

Because music is such a broad and difficult topic, we can only come up with so many ideas. Please feel free to add your own examples as you go through these materials.

Reading Assignment: Technology and the Music Industry

• Mirarchi, Alex, 2019, Technology and the Music Industry: A Complicated Relationship. This is a blog post on medium.com by a professional musician. Though not a renowned philosopher or writer, he makes interesting points in this post that merits our attention.

Questions

1. Mirarchi states that vinyl and the CD "decoupled the musician's performance from an audience's physical presence". In the same vain, Walter Benjamin has famously stated that the technological reproduction finally emancipated the artwork from its parasatic embedding in ritual. How do you relate being present in the vicinity of an artwork with being present at the performance of a music piece?

2. After the coming of the mp3, recordings could, accoring to Mirarchi, be transported or shared instantly all over the world. Heidegger has found the fundamental property of technology to make everything immediately available on site. Can you come up with other, similar examples of literally disruptive technologies (as in: creating a rupture between hitherto tightly connected phonemena)?

3. Look at the image below. On the left you see the average length of a song between 2000 and 2020, on the right you see the average length of a movie in the same period. As you can see, music songs tend to become shorter while the playtime of movies tends to increase. Can you relate these trends to the phenomena described by Mirarchi?

Steve Reich – Drumming

Have a look at, and listen to, the performance of Drumming by the American composer Steve Reich:

Reich uses a lot of techniques that are somewhat similar to the metronomes we encountered when we talked about perception. However, Reich plays with the disharmonie that emerges when you have multiple instruments playing in their own tempo. Have a look at (or, rather, listen to) his 2 × 5 to get an idea of what this kind of work is capable of.

Questions

1. Even though this piece is also about same instruments playing different tempi, it clearly is more intentional than the metronomes. However, it also is clearly less elaborate than the Second Englisch Suite that we studied in the third session. Can you imagine a scale from acoustic chaos to acoustic structure and if so, is there a point where mere sound changes into music?

2. Reich did a lot of experiments with this kind of music. In this work, musicians are working hard to get the correct music across, but e.g. in his Pendulum Music they are only responsbile for letting go of the microphones at a certain time – thereby putting Isaac Newton in charge of the work. In what way and to what extend would you say that elaboration, intentionality and creativity are required for sound to become music? How does that relate to our discussion of identity in classical music performances?

Species Counterpoint

This is a recent work by artist Antoine Bertin that he created for the 2020 STRP festival. In it, he asks questions about the differences between humans and plants, and concludes that as we share the same DNA, we also share a lot of the same world.

(view this video on vimeo)

"Species Counterpoint makes the harmony between our human DNA and that of plants audible. A mechanical piano simultaneous plays the codes that make us human / plant. When you listen closely, you hear two different music pieces. When you listen a bit longer you will start hearing the similarities: two chords, two genes, which, if only for a moment, are the same in sound."

Questions

1. This work is 'a musical meditation on the kinship between plants and humans'. Do you think that as a listener (a passive observer of the work) Bertin is succeeding in making this kinship explicit?

2. According to Bertin, the piano 'is breathing in its own, mechanical way'. If you think back about our discussion on materials having their own biography, bringing meaning with them to those open to it, would you say that this piano has more personality than other inanimate objects? So you think that machines that seem to move of their own are more likely to become bearers of biography and personality? How does that relate to your views on the robots of Boston Dynamics that we talked about in the second session?

Stromae – Quand c'est

An impressive work by Paul van Haver, better known as Stromae. This song explores the pain caused by and fear of cancer. Stromae sings of how cancer first attacked his mother (breast cancer) and his father (lung cancer). In reality the Belgian musician's father, a Rwandan architect, was killed during the 1994 Rwandan Genocide.

The haunting black-and-white video features some silhouette work as a dark and spidery shadow looms over Stromae symbolizing cancer. The clip was created by Van Haver's own artistic collective Mosaert – which is an anagram of his own stage name.

Stromae starts the song with a sort of sexual illusion. He says cancer started with his mom and went for her breasts. Stromae refers to cancer as a sort of serial rapist. This comparison continues when Stromae mentions that cancer even preys on little kids.

Questions

1. This song has been cited as an example of the intimate connection between the physical and the psycho-social elements of being human, as an individual as well as a member of humanity. It serves as an illustration of a work of art that can be similarly appreciated from a combined scholarly and scientific perspective. In it, Stromae is appealing to a felt sense of unity between humanity on the one hand by giving allegedly autobiographical information on the other. Can you relate to these observations and can you think of similar works from contemporary popular music?

2. As is often the case in this domain, the song not only floats on the lyrics but also on the video. If you were to remove either of them, or both, what would remain of the song? Will it still be able to deliver some kind of message? How does familiarity with the song help in this regard?

3. With regards to music, Schopenhauer states that 'the addition of words (and action) would seem to be at best an irrelevant and at worst a positive distraction' (Young, 1994, p.21). How does this statement relate to songs in general and popular music in particular?