Essay, will be posted in 6 parts:
The
Active Listener;
Fluxus Experience and the Recent Rebirth of
Interactive Music
Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Fluxus Experience
Part 3: Fluxus in Protest
Part 4: George Brecht
Part 5: Spirit of Gravity
Part 6: Conclusions, Bibliography, Audio Sources, List of Works
Introduction
Avant-garde movements in twentieth century
Western music have challenged traditional structures and themes. They have
deployed a range of strategies to explore sound and the capabilities of
technologies designed to produce it. This progression of experimental music has
made clear that different methods of presenting sound to the encounterer change
our interpretation of the sound and the way in which we perceive music. An
interesting dimension of this is when the audience is invited to actively
participate in the realisation of the composition, thereby proposing a paradigm
shift in role from one of passive receiver, to creative respondent who
communicates with the music.
In his landmark essay of 1968 ‘The Death of the
Author’[1],
Roland Barthes famously wrote that 'The birth of the reader must be at the cost
of the death of the author'. This transfer of authority, when translated from
the sphere of literature to that of music, has been dramatic. When the role of
the composer is dismantled, the audience must interact with the sound work; the
artist no longer dictates a message, but acts as a pivot to centre the audience’s
focus. Through their new role of 'interactor' they are made an essential part
of the composition process. The individual's encounter with the sound becomes
the experience of music, obscuring the perceived division between 'art' and
'life'. Barthes' comment is a reflection on the newly empowered position of the
audience in the arts, which developed in the early 1960s.
The Fluxus movement has been key in
establishing the ideal proposed in Barthes’ essay, playing out the shift from
the author to the receiver across a range of media. Through radical protests
against conventional Viennese traditions, which limited timbre and structure in
composition to contain music in institutions, Fluxus artists introduced sound
as a personal, explorative, and interactive event. Musical form was emancipated
to allow a focus on sound in its natural state.
The work of the artist George Brecht (1926 - 2008) between the
years 1962 to 1964 are particularly important in this respect. They
demonstrated the degree to which an object does not exist outside of the
participant's interaction with it. Brecht invented a new mode of musical
notation, which incorporated the audience into the composition, that he named
the 'Event score'. Through sound performances and a series of visual art works
he sought to make a stand against ‘high culture'. Brecht believed art should be
an experience reflective of life, rather than the representation of
‘autonomous’ or otherwise romanticised forms of reality.
In contrast to other avant-garde sound concepts
of the mid twentieth century, the Fluxus practice included all sound in their
composition: not just the twelve tone musical scale of traditional Western
music, but all frequencies and timbres. Amongst the strategies they embraced
was the use of chance procedures, and with them the invitation to a new freedom
of interpretation for the receiver. Fluxus music highlighted the value of experimentation,
and inaugurated a radically altered form of sound event.
Chapter one of my dissertation will examine the
arguments advanced for Fluxus as having formulated a new ‘attitude’, as
articulated recently by Hannah Higgins, herself
a Fluxus artist and the child of Fluxus artist parents[2].
In the exploration of its context, the essays of pioneering experimentalists
have been essential primary sources, particularly the writings of John Cage and
Allan Kaprow. The Walker Arts Centre catalogues, and sound recordings in An Anthology, have documented the
progression of musical ideals, and preserved early reports and manifestos,
importantly those of George Brecht and George Maciunas, which were to establish
new concepts in contemporary music. Chapter two will explore the key strategies
employed by Fluxus artists in more detail. Chapter three offers a case study on
the nature of the notations devised by Brecht and the role of sound in his
Event scores from 1962-64, and chapter four looks at how the method of exhibiting
music through an active audience, as developed by Fluxus practitioners, has
been recently revived by a group of artists working under the name ‘Spirit of
Gravity’. Both the Fluxus movement and Spirit of Gravity artists deconstruct
the role of the composer to allow their audience to influence the outcome of
the sound work, thus creating a new mode of active, rather than passive,
listening. In what follows, I seek to analyse how, and why.
[1] Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text: essays selected and translated
by Stephen Heath (Fontana Press, London, 1977), page 148.
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