Week 75: Conceptual Music

Ok, here I go trying to play smart again, the curse of a college education. What follows requires many more days and nights of research before it can be said. But this is a blog, and I am not getting paid, which suits me because I am generally lazy. So what follows is me not saying anything, not saying much anyways, and the little I am saying is probably incorrect. I won’t know unless the research is done. So please feel free to contradict me, correct me, educate me.

And now you hear the sound of some vaguely scientific music, bleeps and beeps, black and white, 8mm music, with audible pixels forming block letter words in the middle that you can’t make out at first, but which slowly form a monotone human voice and sound the words CONCEPTUAL MUSIC.

And then a narrator in a fake Boston accent:

Conceptual Music. The term is hardly used, certainly not in most musician’s everyday activities. However, when it is used it seems to apply to a variety of only slightly related musical and mostly to extra-musical activities. If you were going to search the world’s virtual and physical libraries for conceptual music your search would not amount to much, and you would certainly find no consensus definition of the term.

A common grouping of Conceptual Music recordings was made by Ron Rice in A Brief History of Anti-Records and Conceptual Records. Here, he says that the one common bond between the records in the category is that they are self-referential. “Shifting emphasis away from the music, they point to their own existence as cultural artifacts and objects to be consumed. These recordings transcend the sound contained within their packaging (often there is no sound at all) to question "'extra-musical" elements such as music industry practice, the notion of "quality," the role of the music critic, the role of the listener, etc.”

However, notice that Rice refers to Conceptual Records and not so much Conceptual Music. But even if we were to apply his definition to Conceptual Music, it is only partially true, and misses on the defining aspect of Conceptual Music. Conceptual Music does not shift emphasis away from the music. Nor does it transcend the sound of the recording (or performance).

Consider how most music is composed. The composer has an idea. He then translates that idea into sounds which are either recorded or played. The listener then hears the final results. The sounds themselves thus work as an imperfect bridge between the original idea and the listener’s experience. The result of this is the subjectivity we’ve come to associate with the experience of listening to music. You might hear one thing, I might hear another, the composer might have intended yet another. Even when the composer is available to explain his original concept, the end result might not convince us of that plan in our own minds.

Conceptual Music, however, is the music where the idea of the music is the music. The conception is at once the origin and the end result. As such, Conceptual Music exists at the exact point where composer and audience meet, making it the most transparent of genres. At its best it works the way telepathy does, creating instant and perfect communication between composer and listener. Conceptual Music is the only music that expresses, through recordings or performances, the pure and unadulterated idea of itself.

This begins to sound like Improvised Music, which in its truest sense is Conceptual Music. However, in most cases Improvised Music is concerned either with the formal elements of music, in which case its conceptual palette is very restricted (this without taking away from the many ideas that can be communicated formally), or concerned with creating an emotive response in the listener in which case the conceptualizing is more emotional and less intellectual, and I would therefore consider it beyond the scope of purely Conceptual Music.

Many of the experimental composers have flirted with Conceptual Music. Most Conceptual Music experiments though, have failed in that ultimately they need an accompanying explanation to the recording or performance in order to carry it into the conceptual realm and away from other genres that might sound very similar in execution.

For example, let’s use Stockhausen’s idea of a super slowed down and stretched out tone from a Beethoven symphony, so stretched that the one tone becomes a composition in and of itself. As described by Stockhausen the composition is Conceptual Music. However, upon execution, the experience of the concept would be lost an unknowing listener, probably sounding like some work of Minimalism as opposed to Conceptualism. But if the listener could actually hear the Beethoven tone being slowed down until it became its own composition, then that would be Conceptual Music. And therein lies the contradiction that makes this composition such a brilliant work of Conceptual Music, it can not have a physical execution. Once the process is exposed, the one tone ceases to be its own composition. The beauty of Conceptual Music is such that one does not need to hear a physical manifestation of the composition using traditional methods, such as a record player or your ears to appreciate it. Conceptual Music by its very nature can be instantly audible in your mind’s ear, though physical expressions of it are also possible.

John Cage’s 4’33” is a perfect example of the physical expression of a Conceptual Music composition. Many analysts of Cage’s 4’33” have focused on its Aleatory Music qualities, focusing on the sounds that are audible by Cage’s silencing of the musical instruments. However, the composition itself is about silence, though the aleatory elements form an integral part of that silence, it is the silence that makes the composition possible as Conceptual Music. And as such, it can not only be heard with your mind’s ear, but it can also have a physical performance at any time the listener wishes to hear it.

Another Conceptual Music composition that conveys its concept during its physical execution as well as outside of it, is Jem Finer’s long player. The listening experience of this 1000 year composition unfolds so slowly that it’s conceptualization for a listener that doesn’t know about it’s construction, would take longer than a human life span. The composition then becomes impossible to fully conceptualize. I can only imagine the conceptualization of the composition by a dedicated listener who never had the longplayer “explained” to them as s/he takes her last breath. In the case of the longplayer, as with most Conceptual Music, the explanation ruins the physical performance of the composition, but it also works independently as a Conceptual Music piece.

In some cases, however, the explanation is the only element of the Conceptual Music composition. The aforementioned Stockhausan is an example of this. Even though it wasn’t meant as an example of electronic manipulation, and not as a composition, it works as a Conceptual Music composition that can only exist in explanation, the explanation becoming the transparency through which the composition is experienced.

In Conceptual Music the idea is the execution. The idea of the composition as arrived at by both composer and listener simultaneously, the composer merely acting as an initiator, and not as holder of any divine keys to any sort of virtuosic skill.

In Conceptual Music you can then find rock groups like Reynols. Reynols first CD was “dematerialized,” meaning that it was just an empty jewel case. A genius move in Argentina where they are from and where CD's cost as much as $80 each to buy on an average income of $500 per week, and where manufacturing prices are prohibitive. As such they burst into the non-existent Conceptual Music scene.

Here’s an animated version of Reynols composition Symphony of a 1000 Chickens.


Currently, Reynols is working on a recording of famous graves at the Père Lachaise, the famous Parisian cemetery. “Oscar Wilde on the right channel, Maria Callas in the middle and Chopin on the left. And there's Edith Piaf, Michel Petrucciani, Stéphane Grappelli, Max Ernst, and Jim Morrison, of course.” Says Alan Courtis one of the members of Reynols. Apparently Peron (not sure if the dictator or his wife) will appear as a guest artist directly from Argentina. Of course this is one of those Conceptual Music compositions that work only as an explanation, since an actual recording or performance would most likely destroy its conceptual quality in the listener. But maybe not, Reynols might be able to pull it off.

Here are twelve Reynols tracks numbered 1 to 10, also from UBUweb. I recommend listening to them without reading the liner notes. Try to determine which ones are Conceptual Music and which are not. Or don’t, the thing about Conceptual Music is that it’s so simple to get it, that if you have to think about, ask anyone, or read anything, then it’s probably not Conceptual Music. Unless, of course, the thinking or asking or reading is in itself part of the concept of the composition….

***

Cherry Blossom’s PEI (Project of Extreme Importance) is also a brilliant work of Conceptual Music in progress. I only hope that she can keep the concept alive once the recording or performance is executed.

Just like this post started with a Conceptual Music composition, so will it end with one. This one starts with the sound, in the middle of a quiet night, of the head of a 208 pound unconscious man landing on a concrete floor after falling backwards down a flight of stairs. That sound then travels from apartment to apartment through an apartment complex building of eight apartments rousing each occupant’s attention as it reaches them. Then I get to spend all night in a hospital ER listening to 11 staples being gunned into the same head.