From: The Cassette Mythos, Autonomedia 1990, previously published in Re Quarterly
i.
Music has its origins in ritual, in the collective, reflexive, even instinctive activity of a whole community--being and acting as one. Clearly, in such cases there is no possibility of contradiction--since there is no distance--between the function or meaning of the music, the technical and formal means of its production, and the tribe or group who create and embody it.
With the differentiation of the social group, the rise of specialization, and the division of labor, comes also the distinction between Dance, Drama, Poetry, and Music--increasingly recognized as different forms of expression and often precipitating as specialized crafts embodied in different groups and individuals. Still, this precipitation of cultural skills does not necessarily imply any division in the unity of the organism of a society, nor the alienation of its parts, and, for so long as this remains true, there will still be only one culture and therefore no contradiction between a whole people and the products of its musicians. As specialists though, musicians are bound to pursue the innate qualities of the instruments at their disposal and of the media of creation and reproduction. But they will do this only in so far as it enriches the expressive language of the whole community, and under the iron hand of a conservative tradition. Further they can not go.
For instance, among the Cooper Eskimos--and this is typical of all "primitive," hunter/gatherer peoples--there is no expressive division or specialization in the making of songs. Songs are made by everyone with something to say and are given as a gift. Here content is at the center, and it is only with the rise of specialists that form comes under pressure, and only under the patronage of a class divided from the whole that new forms can, under the care of such specialists, flourish as the vehicles of new contents.
ii.
The Folk Mode:
What I will henceforward call the Folk Mode encompasses all the above stages of musical differentiation and development. This mode can be distinguished by the following characteristics:
First, The medium of its musical generation and perpetuation is tradition and is based in Human, which is to say biological, Memory. This mode centers around the EAR and can exist only in two forms: as sound and as memory of sound.
Second, The practice of music is in all cases an expressive attribute of a whole community, which adapts and changes as the concerns and realities it expresses--or as the vocabulary of the collective aesthetic--adapt and change. There is no other external pressure upon it.
Third, There can be no such thing as a finished or definitive piece of music. At most there could be said to be "matrices" or "fields." Consequently there is also no element of personal property, though there is of course individual contribution.
Finally, There is no productive distinction between the roles of Composer and Performer. The generation and production of music is a socially seamless and single process, and one in which improvisation plays or has played a central part.
To define a mode from its innate elements alone, however, would lead only to formalism, a taxonomy of complications and marginal cases. We must therefore seek the determining factor of a music outside the strictly musical realm, in the nature of the society which sustains it--and also, if different, in the nature of the society as a whole of which a given group is a part. Thus, for instance, in rural parts of Britain in the seventeenth century a kind of folk music certainly did exist, but it was inevitably mutating--as social relations in the whole of the country were mutating--under the pressure of Bourgeois Commodity forms. And in the towns too, the broadsheet sales of specifically written songs, though retaining traces of their Folk origins, were increasingly consolidating their commodity character. What would be important here would be to trace the major changes in the socioeconomic relations of the period and the interrelation of these changes and relations with the expressive needs of special communities and classes: How did these factors affect the concomitantly mutating forces of production and circulation of music? How and why was it that, in these specific conditions, the Folk element was eventually destroyed? What would be important here would be to understand how and why socioeconomic, cultural, and historical forces ensured that Folk elements survived and indeed flourished. This would involve understanding with what deep expressive needs they meshed, and what new productive forces they alone were able to develop.
The categories I propose (based on biological, written, and electronic memory) are, in other words, not so much descriptively historical as analytical. Elements of more than one may be present in particular forms and at particular times. Still, a clear distinction can be made between one mode and another--and in the West there has been a chronological, dialectical development which can unambiguously be traced. One mode has given way to an opposite. I hope to show this below, and to isolate the core of what I think was the first major revolution in the production of music.
II. Written/Printed Memory: The Classical or Art Music Mode
Out of and alongside the Folk Mode there emerged piecemeal in Western Music an entirely new mode of music production, a mode opposite to, and in its crucial attributes a negation of, the multiplicity of Folk forms. Its most important element was not new in the world, but had never before been developed systematically. That it was developed now was one intimate component of the decline of Feudalism and the rise of the Bourgeoisie: a clear case of the external nourishing the innate. At the technical and productive core of this new mode was a qualitative and not a quantitative innovation, with an innate, revolutionary potential. This innovation was notation.
Notation had been waiting in the wings for some time before conditions arose which favored its thorough-going development. Its first appearance in Europe was in the medieval church, as a mnemonic, an aide memoire, certainly no more than a sketchy adjunct to biological memory. Its revolutionary generative potential remained invisible and unimagined; yet a whole new mode of music production was innate, implicit, in it, for notation is an objectified, schematic form of memory, with qualities quite opposite to those of biological memory. Indeed, if we understand one of the limits of folk music to be the limits of biological memory, we shall understand one of the limits of Bourgeois music to be the limits of notation.
Notation appears in the medieval church precisely in the absence of a Folk context able to sustain an increasingly specialized and institutional music. It reaches its first crisis in the essentially secular soil of the Ars Nova, and finally blooms in the broad summer of the bourgeois revolution. Its quantitative development finally brought it to a new, and terminal, crisis, maturing in the early twentieth century; a time when, as we shall see, a new medium was already in embryo, a medium qualitatively the opposite of notation: the medium of recording.
What then are the innate qualities of notation (written memory) which distinguish it from biological memory, the productive medium of all Folk musics?
First, As a fixed memory, external to its user, notation cannot organically adapt, or forget itself. In this sense a score is a definitive version and every score is finished. As a score, this version can be circulated and stored. It is the first form in which music can become property.
Second, Notation is a medium which encourages and reinforces a specializing division between Composer and Performer. This is a division which becomes more absolute as its productive potential is unfolded (leading eventually to a destructive contradiction). Third, Notation is primarily a medium of the EYE, not of the EAR. It is thus subject to the laws which govern visual systems of representation. Melody and the division of time into equal parts for instance are horizontal, harmony is vertical. Notation is the medium of the fugue, of mathematical calculation, of the wide harmonic extension of Polyphony and Counterpoint, of invert and retrograde melody, of the abstract and personal marshalling of massive orchestral voices--and indeed of the "industrialization of music."
This objectivized, abstract, "scientific" mode took center stage and revolutionized music--both in its form and content--precisely because its innate, evolutionary potential meshed so perfectly with the ideology and needs of the revolutionary rising class: the Bourgeoisie. Its property aspect was indispensable to the exploitation of music as a commodity; its organizing and hierarchical qualities led to the expansion and ordering of "families" of instruments and to the rational and efficient factory production of the modern orchestra. This above all--it was rational and efficient, able to make the maximum use of all the materials at music's disposal, and able to hone and refine the aesthetic sensibilities of the Bourgeoisie in a form that was unequivocally their own: a form that was progressive even as the Bourgeoisie itself was progressive. (And, of course, the combination of notation and printing totally revolutionized the circulation of music, creating a new kind of musical entrepreneur, establishing property rights, and permitting for the first time the application of mass production techniques to the reproduction of music; and all this without a sound being heard by anyone!)
In any case the cultural and expressive needs of this revolutionary class--in common with the technical demands of the new productive media--were beyond the scope of the Folk mode. Indeed the Folk mode was in every way an obstacle to the transformation of musical culture--particularly because it was essentially collective and conservative, where the ideological imperative of the Bourgeoisie was individual and revolutionary. It was in the context of the struggle for economic freedom and the releasing of revolutionary productive forces that music found in notation the untapped foundation of a new mode of production and, in the care of the triumphal rise of Capital, brought it to glorious fruit.
ii.
It is in the summer of notation that we can see most clearly the negation of the Folk mode: internal or biological Memory has given way to external, notated memory; the primacy of the ear has given way to the primacy of the eye; a sense of the whole has become a concentration on the particular; the unity of Composer and Performer has given way to an almost complete functional separation of the two roles; improvisation has been replaced by calculation or following a score, and music as a form of collective expression has become music as a commodity, which is to say, a thing no longer produced organically by a community of people, but rather speculatively, for a market--even where the speculation exists as an act of faith and the integrity of the producer is undeniable, reception still depends on a consumer choice.
But like the Folk mode, the mode mediated by notation has quantitative limits, and in our own century these limits have become obstructively clear. Bourgeois "Art" (or "Classical") music has developed to the point of breakdown. From the constructive and liberating order of equal temperament through the whole-tone to the duodecaphonic has been a process of fulfillment that has brought the harmonic basis of "Classical" composition to the end of its road. In serialism we can see the rigid mathematical and visual mechanisms of notation at their peak: the tone row, guaranteeing the absolute equality of all the notes and even their appearance in strict order; the four permissible ways of reading the row--forward, backward, inverted, backward and inverted; the extension of this organizing principle to apply to timbre rows, dynamic rows, etc. Entirely logical of course, but leading to computer music, (unperformed music) which is far better suited to the accurate reproduction and extension of such notational techniques. Notation now has the problem too of what organizing principle it could offer after rendering the old harmonic order irrelevant, and in pursuit of this problem the last decades have seen notation progress to greater and greater complexities of exactitude--increasingly impossible for musicians to perform--and inexactitude, as for instance in "graphic" scores; yet both of these developments have necessarily found themselves in deepening contradiction with the highly specialized and alienated performers which notation itself has called into being.
iii.
And this is another quantitative limit: the division of labor between Composer and Performer, a division which has become increasingly untenable. Virtually all performers in the "Art Music" sphere are now utterly out of touch with the sources of music, unable to improvise and unwilling to experiment, indeed, unwilling any longer to be answerable for the expressive quality of their work. It is no wonder that so many composers are frustrated by the increasing distance between what they want and what they get; already in the twenties and thirties Varse, Eisler, Honneger, and others had begun to dream and write about machines which could directly realize their compositions without involving troublesome, inexact musicians at all--a dream finally realized, after a fashion, by recording technology and computers. But there is another way to understand this dream: at a functional level, Composers wanted once again to become Performers.
Finally, looking beyond even the limitations of "translation" or performance of what was scored, it had become frustratingly clear to Composers before the turn of the century that notation alone was no longer able to encompass the possibilities innate in the new instruments available to music, even as it was no longer able to aestheticize the new vocabulary of sound which machinery, modern warfare, factories, city life, and so on had created.
iv.
For the Bourgeois Composer the dream of access to all sound for musical manipulation, and the dream once again to become a performer, were dramatically realized in 1949, when Pierre Schaeffer and others at ORTF in Paris pioneered the form known as "Musique Concrte." This form consisted in the manipulation, organization, and assembly only of recorded sounds--and significantly, as soon as the tape recorder became the fundamental tool, these sounds tended to be mundane sounds, everyday sounds, and not recordings made of "musical" instruments. These recorded sounds were to be the raw material of a new music (1), sound sources to be electrically and mechanically altered beyond recognition to create new sounds, sounds that had never been heard before, sounds freed from the "meanings" of all previous music vocabulary. It seemed as though here at last was a tabula rasa, a new medium in which to forge new techniques and a new aesthetic. The Concrte "composers" were performers, necessarily working directly with disc and tape, mapping out a vast range of new techniques and struggling to develop a new aesthetic, a new generative source of structure (2) in the new medium. For reasons I shall not go into here, this remains an unfinished story.
In this medium at least, in the world of mainstream Bourgeois music, composers had become performers--and with a new instrument: the media of electronic transformation, recording, and reproduction of sound. Meanwhile, outside the "Classical" mainstream, this same instrument was already transforming the life of music in ways which academic composers could hardly comprehend, for the process of recording (and the electrification of sound) compasses a revolution in music-production quite as far reaching as did notation before it.
III. Recording, direct transcription of sound: A New Mode
i.
Like notation, recording constitutes a qualitative advance, and in its innate potential is the negation of notation. Recording is a third form of memory. It remembers not mechanics or schemes but actual performances. More important than this, perhaps, it can remember--and reproduce--any sound that can be made. From the moment of the first recording, the actual performances of musicians on the one hand, and all possible sound on the other, had become the proper matter of music creation. Notation could not compass that.
ii.
I think it is clear already that the battle for the immediate future of music will be fought out through the medium of recording. The qualities of this medium which are useful to the status quo are already well developed and constitute the imperatives of "mass culture," mediated through the form of the Commodity. The crucial point about this is that its value to economic and political vested interest is not so much expressive as commercial--and in some cases ideological--certainly, leaving the profound and innate potential of the medium for cultural and aesthetic expression essentially undeveloped--for, indisputably, intrinsic to the processes of recording and electrification are revolutionary imperatives, which I believe can only be brought fully to fruit in an egalitarian and classless society. These qualities can be identified. In fact they are already exerting a pressure, expressing itself as a contradiction, on the whole field of music.
What are the innate qualities of the mode of recording which distinguish it from notation as a productive source of music?
First, Recording throws the life of music production back onto the ear. As with Folk music, the first matter is again Sound. Recording is memory of sound.
Second, Recording makes possible the manipulation or assembly of sound, or of actual performances, in an empirical way; that is to say, through listening and subsequent decision-making.
Third, The actuality of performance is not lost, but is freed from time; it can be taken apart. Assembly and shaping of music on tape includes manipulation of the tape itself and of the mediating electronic equipment. Since the development of multi-track recording, the ease of overdubbing, selective addition, erasure, and electronic alteration of sound--both before and after registration--has encouraged the use of the studio as an instrument rather than merely as a documentary device. Music can be assembled both vertically and horizontally over time, molded and remolded. Tape runs forwards, backwards, and at many and variable speeds. It can be cut up and glued together. Moreover, recording is a medium in which improvisation can be incorporated--or transformed through subsequent work--into composition.
Fourth, From all the above it must be clear that recording places the emphasis firmly on performance, and optimally indeed is a medium of composition for performers. We have already seen how, in Musique Concrte, it became a medium of performance for composers. In other words, it strongly favors the reuniting of those two roles.
Fifth, More than this: Constructive decisions in the assembly of sound are concrete and empirical and can be reached through discussion. A personal vision is no longer the necessary mediator between composition and realization. This can become a collective activity. Thus, as a creative unit, the group finds the maximum of resources at its disposal in a recording studio--a medium which encourages collective work, and particularly collective composition.
Where Jazz developed improvisation into a high art, recording allows its extension into composition.
It will be observed from the above that in all its main characteristics the innate qualities of recording echo those of the Folk mode. As a negation of a negation this is exactly what we should expect: not a return to the old, but a qualitative transformation of its elements onto a new level.
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1. Schaeffer has since repudiated his work as not being "music," as leading nowhere: "It took me forty years to discover that nothing is possible outside Do Re Mi." (R Records Quarterly, Vol. 2, No. 1.) In the same issue, Tim Hodgkinson, Georg Katzer, Ed Baxter, and I take up the questions raised by this in further detail.
2. Because of course harmony, tempo, melodic materials, and the developments and transformations of these which form the guiding structure of notated music are marginal materials when organizing sound on tape. One looks instinctively to the medium for different kinds of transformations, to do with timbre, dynamics, overlap, duration.