Exordium
Ceci n’est pas un CD-booklet. Well, it obviously is. But we right away thought of what the painter said: Is a milk bottle, then, the symbol of milk? Therefore, what was the point in our digitalized, holographic, virtual world – yes, it was necessary to include a bit of what I call the “world general/don’t-mean-anything explanations” – to fully reproduce information which can be found on a more free, plural and direct way through Internet? Furthermore, what is the point at all to try to describe music in words for an audience which surely knows what is going on in this CD? Let us enjoy the sensuous pleasure of hearing and let’s reserve these following lines to dive into the mysterious words which inhabit the title of this collection of sounds of all kinds and forms, from futuristic nights to American dance halls, from verses of love poetry to crude sarcasm. A myriad of expressions.
Stimulation/Expression/Mimesis (I)
Aus-druck. Ex-pression. Pressing out, ultimately. But one presses against something, not out. Or is it that when pressing out, one is pressing against something? What is that something then? Audiences, stage fright, cultural industry? Would it be that one, instead, presses in to find what should be expressed and, when found, the pressing hand goes to the side and everything which was kept under the chaotic order of the forcefully minimized space simply jumps out? It would then be instead an inverse ex-pression, a description of a project of action, an Inner-druck – Aus-sprung.
Advertisement: We are performers. We work on stage. That’s our point-of-view-shot location. That’s where the snapshots are taken from and of. Everything that remains behind the curtain are spectral appearances, forerunners which condition our whole body, but don’t give a hand in survival situations. We are being savagely thrown out (ex-pressed) towards a minefield or towards heaven, depends on the day. Perhaps a concert shouldn’t be that after all, or if it is, then expressing seems the right word. But that’s another issue.
Minefield (Ratespiel)
A musician cannot move others unless he too is moved.
He must (…) feel all of the affects that he hopes to arouse in his audience, for the revealing of his own humour will stimulate a like humour in the listener.
Good performance (…) occurs when one hears all notes (…) played in correct time with fitting volume produced by a touch which is related to the true content of a piece.
I consider that music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all (…). Expression has never been an inherent property of music. (…)
For the phenomenon of music is nothing other than a phenomenon of speculation (…) [on] sound and time.
The aporia of art between regression to real magic and surrender of the mimetic impulse to thing-like rationality helps formulate art’s law of movement; (…) The process which every work of art represents is as deep as it is because mimesis and rationality are irreconcilable.
Truth (?)
…the true content of the piece. Let’s face a double hypothesis.
Is it true, as honest, real feelings? Then we are before a theory of performative acts, in which what counts is not the work, or the traditions, not even the audiences – on a first step –, but being fully on stage. Believing fully in the illusionary act of standing in an elevated platform and passing out objects of thought and sensuality. Illusionary in all its possible polysemes and digressions. A theatrical theory, after all.
If true means truth – unidirectional movement, totalizing vector – then dots and lines on a page become traces of hidden meanings in which we stand as mediums between spectra and materiality. Or, not even that, they could rather be positive facts to be displayed and reproduced infinitely.
What if performance is a provisional truth? What if what counts is the possibility and conditions to allow Inner-druck – Aus-sprung? What if dots and lines were actually signs, symbols and games, resignifiable, polysemic, historical? What if performance wouldn’t happen on stage but at our kitchen?
But what about the content of that truth?
Feelings/Speculation (Mille Plateaux)
If machines and factories would have not existed, if people would have not cut King’s head, if my nation would not be a nation, I would not be here. Because I am not anymore part of slavery or servitude. I am an individual with right to feel, that defines me. Das Verstand irrt, das Gefühl nicht. The world is as it is, because I see it through my eyes. It is my world, my real world which I share with you all. But what if a machine which could take exact reproductions of reality would be invented? What if factories were full of misery and poverty? What if a World War would break out? The faces I paint would become of all colours. I see the world through my eyes, but I don’t express what my eyes see, but rather what my eyes feel. Deformation, sarcasm, sordid scenes. But I’m still anchored to a reality which is unbearable, which no eyes, no hands, no body can stand. What if I would liberate myself from material reality? What if only my feeling would be the matter and the result, because feeling, after all, is always and everywhere the one and only source of every creation? What if shapes and colours would be my only palette, like it was for the primitive man? What if feeling was a door towards a higher form of knowledge? We ought to elevate art to its essence.
But what with those which never had the right to feel publicly? What about those who blend into machines and create seemingly the illusion of movement and progress? What with those which have their hands as their only valuable good? We can look to those machines as promises of a bright future. Or we can distance ourselves from reality and look closely with new eyes at those hands mistreated by time. The eyes not of every day, but eyes that strive for a new consciousness, an objective, dialectical consciousness.
Or perhaps sounds can’t express anything at all and we only feel through mediated forms of communication. If we feel at all. Music perhaps can’t express anything except itself. And reproduce anything except itself.
Stimulation/Expression/Mimesis (II)
Expression seems still unidirectional, totalizing, totalitarian. First of all, one presses, which is a violent action which, following social rules, has to have a justified object. Second of all, there seems to be only one possible feeling to be transferred. Are feelings transferable? We rather said they belong to the realm of the individual. There might be sensuous cultural codes which can be stimulated in a particular context, but their exact communication is rather poor or, seen from the other side, wonderfully plural. That word, stimulation, is rather suggestive. I don’t press out, or transfer meaning, I stimulate a context, a possibility of networks of feeling, thought and action. Thirdly, where lies the context of the performance, the sounding work? If only ex-pressing counts, what is the time and space we inhabit together in the moment of performance?
If expression is the mediation between mimetic performance and rational construction, it is necessarily crossed by reconciliation. If we escape from dualism and talk about performing bodies, then we don’t even reconcile, we are together in time and space. In any case, we don’t press out, we share out with the hope of finding a point of encounter or a moment of stimulation. Aus-teilen.
10/IX/2023
Sometimes I wish I would suddenly forget all the music I have heard during all these years. Sometimes I wish my ears would never trigger any thought. Sometimes I wish my touch would not pass any information through nerves when approaching a white key. Sometimes I wish my blood pressure wouldn’t become higher and I wouldn’t start hyperventilating when approaching a climax. Sometimes I wish I wouldn’t know what a Sarabande is. Sometimes I just wish to know what I am actually doing. It has been so many years. So many possibilities of escape. But here I am, sitting before a black mirror. Sorting out once more the misery of learning an invented language which is nevertheless dead forever, locking myself into a wooden prothesis which makes my body fight between the stiffness of the white limit and the wish for any kind of freedom and inflecting self-slavery every fucking day of my life since I can remember.
What would be of those dots and lines without my self-slavery? What would be of those sounds without my blood pressure? What would be of that wooden furniture without me crying for it? Wood, paper, ink, noise, flesh.
1841, Leipzig
Surely, I can sight-read this. Easy. I approach my fingers to the wood and start pressing keys. Many need to be pressed at the same time, there are few which try to escape the dictatorship of homophony. Right away, an imitation. A bit hidden. It is comfortable, my fingers seem to like it, they don’t need to coordinate in impossible combinations. My breath is stable, serene, moves in slow waves. Suddenly, a hint of destructive nostalgia invades my body. Nostalgia is forever distant, as distant is the codified, hieroglyphic language of ferne Philosophie. In some moments, I seem to be hanging by a thread, suspended in air. My feet dig into the floor and my bottom tries to reach heaven. In dissonance. But soon a little modulation which doesn’t allow anything, but the bitter taste of disappointment. One time. Two. Three. Breath faster, deeper finger pressure, fingers start to incoordinate. Repetition. Noch einmal. A recap is like a present you have expected for a long time, but which ends up being the ugly shoes you already have hidden at your room. But this one is somehow special. A risky jump. I sound hasty, but nevermind, the dissonance is heavenly. Sadomasochism. Und nochmal. Fingers stop. Hände weg. Totemic silence. Comeback to uncodified noises.
Philosophy is prose. Its consonants. Distant philosophy sounds like poetry – because every call into the distance becomes a vowel. On both of its sides or, surrounding philosophy, lies + and minus poetry. Thus, in the distance everything becomes poetry-poem. Actio in distans. Distant mountains, distant people, distant events, etc., everything becomes romantic, quod idem est – from this results our essentially poetic nature. A choir lies also in the untouching place of distance. In time and language. Their language lies far. Incomprehensible sounds articulated in dead grammars. Thus God. The mystical lamb, which embodies all possible meanings, because we can’t formulate his language.
***
Any sound can be preceded, sound simultaneously or be followed by any other sound. The success of the project will depend on the contextual and formal conditions and the dexterity and spirit of the composer. Let’s observe the flow of time:
The fourth is sometimes positioned as a foundation; but when this happens, the fourth has a bond of relative rather than absolute compatibility with the other consonances of the harmony.
Fourth intervals are ambiguous, because any member of the chord can function as a fundamental. Thus, 4ths chords are rarely used as dissonant structures, because of its intervallic construction.
1925, Moscow
I open the score. The paper looks blacker than I would desire. Nevermind. Notes carry me away. That’s sight-reading. You seem to be in a train in which you only see coloured lines that never form into landscape. In any case, I try. Lots of demi-semi-quavers, very slow though. Weird crossings and jumps. Oh, fuck, I missed that chord. What’s that note on the bass? Can’t even read it. Oh oh oh, messy chord, will I be able to read it? …saved. Again crossing. Wait, some things seem to be repeating. Can’t really decode it, but something lies there. Don’t think, play! You see? You missed the climax! I’ll practise a bit the scale right before and will try to play it again. Again the scale. Again. Now… jump! Okay, done. Again the climax repeated? That feels strange. It’s like ejaculating two times in the interval of 10 seconds, highly improbable. At least to me. It has a metal flavour, a machine scent. Beginning slowed down. Descent into darkness.
Okay, I will try again. In fact, everything seems to repeat a couple of times, even the climax, as if it was an imposed rule, a mechanical form of architecture, trying to get away from my breath and my moves. Do machines express something? Everything repeats anyhow two times, invariably. I didn’t realise when I heard it before in YouTube. Wait, wait. Why is suddenly everything made of fourths and sevenths? Wait. 4 + 4 = 7. A hidden network of infinite colourful fourths starts to appear under my eyes. A spider web crossed by moonlight and smoke. But as long as I keep playing it seems that my arms become loser and I need to sit deeply on the bench, as if embracing the wooden elephant. I seem to perform a ritual in which motors, angles, and mysterious forces seem to take themselves by the hand. I love the ending. Feels like being free. Feels like inflicting violence on the wood, giving back to it my tears. I feel powerful.
Ancient life was all silence, but with the invention of machines, Noise was born. To be convinced of the variety and beauty of noises, one needs only think of the rumbling of thunder, the whistling of wind and of the full, solemn and white breath of a city at night, when all lights are switched off and noises appear in shyness. When space is given for their appearance:
I call you to life, O mysterious forces!
Drowned in the obscure depths
of the creative spirit, timid
shadows of life, to you I bring audacity!
***
1922, Frankfurt
An antique ostinato. Where bows and jumps are no longer. Where one cannot expect the skirt to accidently reveal secrets, because there ought to be no secrets. Where joy is frivolity. When men have died along and along, what is left is the sobriety of night. A night that passes by and takes us up in penelopian possession. In smoke glass. In tears. Glass full of Irish whisky. Cigar smoke. Blue notes which nevertheless penetrate like a needle and slowly cross my epithelium, then my muscles and my blood vessels. Always an antique, hypnotic, dangerous ostinato, which slowly cancels my thought, my moves. Just my breath is left, that same breath which was taken from millions of men, succumbed to the promise of light and motors. The sound of spilled blood and moans is no longer dissonant, sevenths and ninths take place on our daily sequence. No scandal, no outrage, no chance of hearing calling voices. Therefore a man, who got back for himself a music to his measure, to his night, to his time. A time where poetry ought to be possible, one should only ask which kind. Poetry which carefully takes you by the neck and makes you watch through the window. A book of revelations.
As our airplanes grew even better
We flew yet higher and higher
The oceans were soon mastered
And even the mountains humbled.
I had been seized with the fever
Of building cities, and of oil.
And all my thoughts were of machines and the
Attainment of even greater speed.
I forgot in my exertions
My own name and identity
And in the urgency of my searching
Forgot the final goal I sought.
But I beg you
To come to me and
To give me water
And place a pillow under my head
And to assist me, for
I do not wish to die.
P.F.B., N., V.P., J.B., L.R., A.S., B.B.
18/IX/2023
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