The Subject gains access to bliss by the cohabitation of languages working side by side:

the text of pleasure is a sanctioned Babel Roland Barthes,“The Pleasure of the Text” (1973)

INTRO

I write this reflection in the midst of the composition of my Corde Vocale, for

string quartet, a work whose challenge lies at the fusion and organic integration of

distinct types of musical languages (as a metaphor for styles)1; each with its own unique

morphology, syntax, and systems of representation whose origins can be traced back in

the history of western concert music. Several generations of composers since

approximately the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century worked in a time that

lacked even a shade of a musical lingua franca. The problems of such condition appear

in various magnitudes; from musical notation to the issue of discursive coherence, and

are yet to be resolved. However, the advantages of such reality are not to be taken lightly,

as the subject is required to go against itself in its presentation, and it’s forced to

negotiate the otherness of the multilingual world.2

The various attempts of finding one universal language have not been at all in

vain during the entire duration of the twenty century, for it produced several rather

discrete new ways of treating sound, time and their representations in concert music. I

will focus on three distinct types of musical languages: Mobile (intervallic or

permutational), Spectral (timbre/harmony), and tone-color (noise, nuance, gesture).

These are certainly other “self-sufficient” musical languages produced in the twentieth

century (aleatoric, minimalism, stochastic, neo-whathaveyou), but these are the ones that

interest me the most for the purpose of unifying, reckoning, juxtaposing, superimposing,

1 (Adorno 2002, 113)2 (Sommer 2004, xv)

and sculpting these asymmetrically dissertating differences. Optimist writer Doris

Sommer celebrates the range of refinements that follow from the “open-sesame” of

Babel3: “If language speaks the individual…then individuals with more than one

language can exploit the contradiction spoken through them…because contradictory

codes demand judgment and exploit creativities.”4

MATERIALS AND (RE)REPRESENTATIONS

Corde Vocale: vocal chords or vocal strings? The concept for this hypothetic,

perhaps even idealist meeting point is that of instrumental models. Music happens inside

the representations of sound. The work is divided formally and conceptually in four parts;

the four strings of the violoncello respectively. The string family is the most

homogeneous instrumental family in the symphony orchestra making the string quartet an

ideal chamber medium for concert music; the instrument’s timbres, articulations,

dynamics, and implied idiomatic gestures (gettati, ponticelli, pizzicati, vibrati) are

consistent throughout the register of each of the instruments. Based on those notions of

reliability and evenness the results of the sonogram analysis and partial tracking of each

of the strings of the cello could them “speak” for all of the others. The cello is also the

richest, in terms of harmonics, from whole the ensemble. The acoustical model of the

cello becomes a neutral window through which the subject can roam freely between

conflicting systems. Foucault proclaims these types of deliciously perverse encounters of

“psyches”5 as being the genesis for new types of relationships and contexts. “The very

subject – which is the same – has been elided. And representation, freed finally from the

3 (Ibid, xii)4 (Ibid, xv)5 (Ibid, xvi)

relation that was impeding it, can offer as representation in its pure form.”6 Dead sound

models (out of time) are employed and implied to represent sounds (in time), now alive

with discursive energy and aesthetic intention. “In the midst of this dispersion which is

simultaneously grouping together and spreading out before us, indicated compellingly

from every side, is an essential void: the necessary disappearance of which is its

foundation…”7 These poetic relationships between interior (micro) and exterior (macro)

of the work of art and their very contradiction allow rather fertile and dramatic musical

situations. Here’s a parenthesis from Foucault’s analysis of Velasquez’ Las Meninas.

“(I mean the room as well as the canvas, the room represented on the canvas, and the

room in which the canvas stands)”8.

I should now try to articulate how this layer of representation (acoustic models) is

translated into each of these stylistic/linguistic networks.

Spectral: The precursors of this style are composers Messiaen, Scelci,

Stockhausen (the work Stimmung for example), and even Debussy. This

approach was initiated by a fascination with the very nature of sounds.

Bright and resonant sonorities are a signature of this music that unfolds in

a continuum in time. The two composers that have been mostly associated

with this musical language are Gerard Grisey and Tristan Murail, but they

are by no means the only ones using the techniques. Originally in spectral

music virtually every parameter a work would be dictated by the metaphor

of sound: rhythm (attack-life-decay) and form (anthology of processes) for

6 (Foucault 1970, 16)7 (Ibid)8 (Ibid, 6)

example. The feature that interests me the most however is the fusion of

harmony into timbre and vice versa. Once any sound (instrumental, sounds

from nature, noise) is analyzed it is represented by a chord, in other words,

the DNA of sound is a vertical structure, which can then be manipulated,

distorted, filtered, in order to generate material for a composition, or in

this case material for one dimension of a composition.

Mobile: I refer to the intervallic, variational, permutational procedures that

composers have been experimenting with its contexts since the very early

stages of western music, through J.S. Bach multilingual contrapuntal style,

straight (or not) through Schoenberg’s “pan-tonal” vocabulary, through

the (deceptively) prophetic intentions of the passionate and youthful post-

war radicalism of Stockhausen and Boulez, through the extreme

complexity of Brian Ferneyhough. What interests me in this dimension is

not the “rigor”, the fact that the notes should never repeat themselves

ahead of time, or the pseudo-mathematical applications, but that regardless

of which angle we look at the musical material we get a consistent

representation of it. The way I integrate the helix of sound to this mobile

dimension is by stipulating tetrachords, hexachord, and tone-rows based

on the degree of amplitude from each harmonic partial; for example basic

structures consisting of the four “loudest” or most audible frequencies of

the sonogram analysis from each of the strings of the cello. Even inside

this category there are dichotomies whose poetics happen inside the

gradual (or abrupt) process: the gamut in between natural and tempered

tunings. Each of the pitches from these intervallic structures are given

their respective and always optional microtone inflections; based on

aesthetic or purely technical issues depending on context. Some fast, or

leaping passages for instance make microtonal precision close to

impossible, both for the hands to execute or the ear to perceive.

Tone-color/noise/gesture: Not so many composers have used these

features exclusively in instrumental music; however electro-acoustic

composers and researchers have been exploring them for decades. Two

influential composers that have used noise in instrumental concert music

are Helmut Lachenmann and Salvatore Sciarrino. Many works by these

two composers ignore pitches almost completely; relying in so-called

extended instrumental techniques (multiphonics, key clicks, percussive

noises, harmonics, sub-harmonics) and pure gesture. Composers have used

these techniques as effects since the nineteen-sixties, but these two (and

several others) have made a whole lexicon out of these. For my Corde

Vocale this realm serves the purpose of carefully sculpting every attack,

doubling, release, nuance, vibrato, and duration of sound in each and

every moment of the composition. Natural harmonic glissandi on each of

the respective string from cello (according to the place in the structure) are

implied in order to emphasize the “string” that is governing each section

of the piece; in other words we get the very object of representation (the

cello’s open string) and also all of the individual harmonics for that

particular passage. A simple device that helps to mark the form, timbre, as

well as the harmony.

TECHN(IQUE)OLOGIES

These three different types of languages despite their singularity do share several

common features, and in fact each of them (particularly Spectral and Tone-color) are

greatly indebted to technology for their current state. Futurist Edgard Varese “saw” many

of those opportunities for the collaboration between science and art as early as the

nineteen-thirties. “The role of color or timbre would be completely changed from being

incidental, anecdotal, sensual or picturesque; it would become an agent of delineation,

like the different colors on map separating different areas, and an integral part of form.”9

Varese himself never quite achieved most of his prophecies probably due to the limitation

of the technologies of his time, his ideas on spatialization, timbre, form, and rhythm were

some of the most influential of the twentieth century. In this passage he dreams about the

wonderful possibilities of computers assisting composition.

And here are the advantages I anticipate from such a machine: liberation from the arbitrary,

paralyzing, tempered system; the possibility of obtaining any number of cycles or, if still desired,

subdivisions of the octave, and consequently the formation of any desired scale; unsuspected range in low

and high registers; new harmonic splendors obtainable from the use of sub-harmonic combinations now

impossible; the possibility of obtaining any differentiation of timbre, of sound-combinations; new dynamics

far beyond the present human-powered orchestra; a sense of sound-projection in space by means of

emission of sounds in any part or in many parts of the hall, as may be required by the score; cross-rhythms

unrelated to each other, treated simultaneously, or, to use the old word, “contrapuntally”, since the machine

9 (Russcol, 1972)

would be able to beat any number of desired notes, any subdivision of them, emission or fraction of them –

all these in a giving unit of measure or time, is humanly impossible to attain.10

Most of the composer’s desires are unquestionably possible to achieve today,

except for the new dynamics; our ear is still only able to hear so low (20Hz), or so high

(16.000Hz) without getting hurt. Also this idealist desire for machines to take over

humans for the production of music has fortunately vanished long ago. Real instruments

are able to produce richer sounds with their imperfections and microscopic sonic

impurities; noises are a crucial part of most instrumental timbres (air for the winds, the

rub of bows against strings, not to mention percussion and even the piano). Their residues

and variants are what make instrumental sounds “alive”. Many of Varese’s dreams are

actually perfectly realizable with the finesse, accuracy, and highly sophisticated current

instrumental techniques, as performers get better and more instigated by the infinitude of

music every generation. There is and there will always be room for interpretation

regardless of the complexity and precision of musical notation, simply not in a romantic

sense.

All three of the linguistic layers were deeply influenced by the advances of

electro-acoustic music. Serial music was integrated to the world of electronics as early as

the nineteen-fifties by Stockhausen in Germany, Pousseur in Belgium, Boulez in France,

Babbitt, Luening, and Davidovsky in the United States, and Nono and Berio in Italy. This

incorporation was on the spirit of the interdependence of all musical parameters. Spectral

music owes as much to electro-acoustic music as to Messiaen and Scelsi for even more

obvious technological reasons. “Noise” music could not have been born without the

concrete music of Pierre Schaffer and the GRM of Paris; any sound became a musical 10 (ibid)

sound. Innumerous composers have been incredibly influenced by electronic sounds even

without having “really” worked in electronic music studios. Would Ligeti’s orchestral

work Lontano for example be ever possible without these influences? My generation,

whether we want it or not, is obliged to reflect on these issues in order to contribute with

anything vaguely interesting whatsoever; just as the previous one had to reflect upon

serialism and find new contexts for it (I never seized to reflect).

For Corde Vocale I used IRCAM’s software OpenMusic to a very slight and basic

extent. This computer program is basically an enormous calculator and a virtual

environment for sketching and representing musical structures. This tool can be used

ultimately to represent an entire musical process, and control every parameter of a

composition, but I can’t help being suspicious when the sketch of a piece is the piece, or

even when after hearing lecture (or in fact reading a paper) about a piece one no longer

needs to hear the actual work. My usage of the program was really rather limited partly

because of my even more limited knowledge of the program at this point, but also

because I was only interested in extracting and creating raw material for later to be

sculpted and contradicted. One of the dangers of technology in that it creates almost as

many limitations and problems as it solves and emancipates. I used AudioSculpt, another

IRCAM software that’s serves the purpose of analyzing instrumental models in order to

then transfer the representation of the structure from the strings of the cello to

OpenMusic. After that I used OM only for a few spectral treatments: distortions,

interpolations, and modulations. The software is particularly useful if one is interested in

working with (and rearing for once) microtones.

TEMPLES AND RUINS

This section should briefly clarify some issues on the formalization of musical

structures. Sculpture is a better metaphor than design for illustrating the creative

approach towards Corde Vocale. When asked about some formal issues of Prelude A

L'Apres-Midi D'Un Faune Debussy replied: “I first built a Greek temple, then I destroyed it”.

The formal plan for Corde Vocale work is nothing but a map describing several simple

processes wihin each and all. This scheme suggests to the macrostructure what is also

represented in the in the microstructure. I propose in different degrees of magnitude

simple dichotomies and work in the variable continuum between them: harmonic

stability/saturation, tempered/natural, pitch/noise, loud/soft, vibrato molto/senza vibrato,

sul ponticello/sul tasto, overpressure of the bow/flautando, tenuto/stacatto. On a larger

scale in the material goes from stable to unstable and vice versa. In the mobile dimension

material is represented in the gap between small and large collection of pitches, with their

respective microtonal inflections. In the spectral gamut there are continuums between

timbre/harmony and harmonicity/inharmonicity that are implied with the use of

distortion, frequency modulation, and frequency interpolation; each and every one of

them genuinely imperfect and empirically interpreted. In the tone-color/gesture gamut

there are similar intensity scales on activity, rhythm, noise, pressure, and other idiomatic

techniques. As Debussy once replied “Works of art make rules, but rules don’t create

works of art.”

This is a representation of the layer behind the background of the composition.

It’s the plans one makes for their life, not life itself with its dramatic unpredictability.

Neither a perfect mechanism nor arbitrary chaos. As Barthes suggests: “Neither culture

nor its destruction is erotic; it is the seam between them, the flaw, which becomes so.”11

This space between absolute and capricious is by nature the space in which where all art

inhabits. “The qualities of a first-rate writer cannot be defined, but only experienced. It is

just the thing in him which escapes analysis that makes him first-rate. One can catalogue

all the qualities that he shares with other writers, but the thing that is his very own, his

11 (Barthes 1975, 7)

timbre, this cannot be defined or explained any more than the quality of a beautiful

speaking voice can be.”12 Asymmetric cuts and perforations on dead discourse (ready-

made formal plans) pose crucial question marks, without rendering it meaningless. These

channels of empirical jouissance and intuitive bliss still lay in the core of the creative

gesture.

MULTILINGUALISM AND TRANS[L](N)ATION(AL)

Times of technical change are like times of handicap.13 However these times or

technical (re)formulation not only are a crucial investment for an artist but a perpetual

reality. Content is challenged by the constantly transfiguring forms. Each language has its

own virtues and limitations. Mallarmè states that the imperfection of languages consists

in their plurality and that the diversity of idioms on earth prevents everybody from

uttering the words which otherwise, at one single stroke, would materialize as truth.” 14 It

seems rather ironic that such master of the dissolution of undeviating meaning would not

share a greater longing for linguistic complementation15. For Walter Benjamin languages

are not strangers to one another, but are, a priori and apart from all historical

relationships, interrelated in what they want to express16. While he suggests that all

individual elements of foreign languages – words, sentences, structure – are mutually

exclusive, he insists that these languages supplement one another in their intentions.17

These detours of representation always mark communication with a cut or tear that comes

12 (ibid,vi)13 (Cummings 2000, 7)14 (Mallarmè, quoted in Benjamin 1955, 77)15 (Benjamin 1955, 77)16 (Ibid, 72)17 (Ibid, 74)

close to producing an aesthetic effect.18 They open new pathways in which the subject

can then blissfully roam free, regardless of its fear of getting lost.

“What did the thought consist in, as it existed before its expression?”19 As

complex as this question of Wittgestein is the one on the phenomenon of translation, let

alone these allegories represented in the aesthetic space of sound-in-time. What did the

thought consist in on the very moment of translation? Music can indulge herself by being

both poetess and translator, simultaneously spontaneous and derivative. In Corde Vocale

certainly make use of this gamut between individual tongues and one larger language in

order to explode my discursive palette. “Unlike a work of literature, translation doesn’t

find itself in the center of the language forest but on the outside facing the wooded ridge;

it calls into it without entering, aiming at the single spot where the echo is able to give, in

its own language, the reverberation of the work in the alien one.”20 In this passage

Benjamin disconnects the two concepts and maintains them inevitably apart. Bringing

these two extremes together in music could relieve any traces of one-dimensionality by

turning the symbolizing into the symbolized, fully formed in the linguistic flux.21 Any

aesthetic gesture can then be multiplied or simply be questioned by means of perpetual

translational processes; which creates a reciprocal linguistic relationships.

The task of the translator consists in finding that intended effect [Intention] upon the language into which

he is translating which produces in it the echo of the original… It is the task of the translator to release in

his own language, that pure language which is under the spell of another, to liberate the language

imprisoned inn a work in his re-creation of that work. The basic error of the translator is that he preserves

18 (Sommer 2004, xii)19 (Wittgestein, 1995)20 (Benjamin 1955, 76)21 (Ibid, 80)

the state in which his own language happens to be instead of allowing his language to be powerfully

affected by the foreign tongue.22

For Walter Benjamin all great texts contain their potential translation between the lines.23

AFTERTHOUGHT

“The point is not necessarily to “disidentify” as some theorists prescribe in order

to mitigate identity politics and patriotic violence, although that could possibly be fruitful

in extreme cases.24 It is to supplement one identity with others. Human beings are

complex rather than seamless abstractions.25 Of course these multilingual adventures per

se do not guaranty more legitimacy than any other approach, purist or not. The

inconsistencies of deliberate eclecticism indeed can generate unintended caricatures and

incoherent mediums for communication. My point is only to demystify provincial

disciplinary ideologies and dogmas, both from retrograde nationalism to pedantic avant-

garde, in order to approach language purely as language, and material purely as material.

Questioning music, sounds, traditions, techniques, and technologies is in my opinion

where the task of this generation of composers lays. The creation of new contexts instead

of entirely new languages. In this age of ultrasonic communication the challenge seems to

be found in filtering information, not necessarily creating from a blank slate. This ampler

spectrum of frames of reference can simultaneously distil disciplinary academicism,

mannerism, and politics. Having been born in Brazil and having lived half of my life in

three different countries these issues are on the core of my creative output. Each and

every one of these counties helped to form my subjectivity, but I surely wouldn’t join any

22 (Ibid, 80-81)23 (Ibid, 82)24 (Muñoz 1999)25 (Sommer 2004, xv)

of their armies. I can’t help being extremely frustrated when I hear “the true American”

this, or “the true national” that, let alone the “best” ore “only” ways around things. At this

point we know where this leads.

Elegant and subtle inter-linguistic collaboration between styles or musics are not

anything new in concert music. Composers such as Berio, Davidovsky, Harvey, Ives,

Jarrel, Ligeti, Lindberg have done exactly that in the twentieth century with serial,

electro-acoustic, tonal, spectral, jazz and folk musics; not to mention Bach, Monteverdi,

Mozart, Mahler, and Messiaen. I’d like to finish this reflection as I have started; with a

quote by Roland Barthes. “Now the subject who keeps the two texts in his field and in his

hands the reigns of pleasure and bliss is an anachronic subject, for he simultaneously and

contradictorily participates in the profound hedonism of all culture…and in the

destruction of that culture: he enjoys the consistency of his selfhood (that is his pleasure)

and seeks his loss (that is his bliss). He is a subject split twice over, doubly perverse.” 26

BIBLIOGRAPHY

26 (Barthes 1975, 14)

Adorno, Theodor. Essays on Music, trans. Susan H. Gillespie. Berklee: University of California Press, 2002.

Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975.

Barthes, Roland. Image - Music - Text, trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1955.

Cummings, Naomi. The Sonic Self: Musical Subjectivity and Signification. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.

Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences. NewYork: Vintage Books, 1970.

Muñoz, Jose Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

Russcol, Herbert. The Liberation of Sound: An Introduction to Electronic Music. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1972.

Sommer, Doris. Billingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.

Wittgestein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigation, trans. G.E. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995.

Corde Vocale:

Objects and Subjects

Felipe Lara