vorüberlegungen

auf die vorschläge folgen die hauptnoten. besser noch, die unterscheidung zwischen haupt- und nebengedanken, rede, nachvollzug und gegenrede wäre allenthalber "temporär und gradweise" (hölderlin), mithin durchschaubar, austauschbar, aufhebbar.

diese konzepte möchten etwas beitragen zur verallgemeinerung des einstweilen einseitigen rechts, sich etwas einfallen zu lassen. bei deren ausarbeitung habe ich mich von einigen vorüberlegungen leiten lassen, die ich mitteilen will, um sie zur diskussion zu stellen und um offenzulegen, daß meine vorschläge keineswegs immer allen meinen eigenen forderungen genügen. damit ist zugleich die richtung angedeutet, in die ich mir vorstelle, daß gedanken dieser art weiterentwickelt werden könnten:

diejenigen spielregeln sind die besten (und am schwersten zu formulieren) die nach vorne offen sind, ihre reflexion erheischen oder voraussetzen, in denen ihre selbstaufhebung, ihre verflüssigung und verüberflüssigung angelegt ist. spielregeln für musik, seien sie vom komponisten als anregung vorgegeben oder aufgrund von oder ohne eine anregung gemeinsam entwickelt, sollten nicht am resultat orientiert sein, nichts haben von strikt zu befolgender verkehrsordnung, sondern in jedem augenblick ihrer ausführung zur disposition stehen. die regel soll beeinflußbar, veränderbar, ja abschaffbar sein und es kann, auch wenn ihre geltung erhalten bleibt, gegen sie verstoßen werden; es wird sich zeigen, daß ein gezielter regelverstoß mehr wahrheit ans licht bringt, als eine regel jemals haben kann. oder andere, nicht vorformulierte gesetzmäßigkeiten sollen durch proben- oder ad-hoc-entscheidungen überhaupt erst entstehen, wogegen, zum besseren des ganzen, wiederum einspruch, widerspruch möglich und erwünscht ist. was diese musik darstellt, ausdrückt, ist, bestimmen die ausführenden und zwar jeder von ihnen.

entscheidungen fordern sachverstand. sie wollen so abverlangt sein, daß sie auf jeder stufe der bildung möglich sind. praktiziert und geübt wird die künstlerische kompetenz vor der spezifisch musikalischen, die musikalische vor der instrumentalen oder der handwerklichen, die immer an ein relativ fixiertes regelwerk gebunden ist. nebenbei bemerkt soll die ästhetische entscheidungsfreiheit auch nicht durch gesellschafts-spielregeln zurückgepfiffen werden. es geht um musik. nur wo soziale prozesse nahezu unmittelbar klangliche sind, dürfen sie in den vordergrund treten.

pädagogik und didaktik haben in der regel lernziele. und es ist dem, der etwas weitergeben möchte, unendlich schwer, besserwisserei zu vermeiden. sie ist das gegenteil von ästhetischer erfahrung. ich habe versucht, nur solche konzepte aufzuschreiben, an deren realisierung ich selbst gerne mitarbeiten würde.

das alt-griechische wort schule heißt auch: muße, freie zeit, (philosophische und gelehrte) gespräche; und langsamkeit, verzug, müßiggang, saumseligkeit. hierin steckt das schwer zu ertragende privileg, von der sogenannten nützlichen arbeit freigestellt zu sein und die erfahrung, daß die lernenden, denkenden, musizierenden dem ziel am nächsten kommen, wenn sie es nicht vor augen haben.

absichtslosigkeit, wie sie die ausführung dieser konzepte braucht, ist mit passivität oder fatalismus nicht zu verwechseln; sie war schon immer eine künstlerische und denkerische tugend und sollte eine soziale sein. gegenwärtig scheinen die chancen nicht groß, daß in absehbarer zeit der wille jeder/s einzelnen, ihre/seine wünsche und träume richtig und wahr werden. ein selbstbeobachtendes, auch kritisches verhältnis zum eigenen willen, zu dem seinen und zu den seinen zu kommen, ohne sich durchzusetzen, will geübt sein. fangen wir ruhig damit an, obwohl und weil es vielleicht zu spät ist. wir werden sehen, wie hölderlin sagte, daß der freiere auch der innigere zusammenhang ist.
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die vorschläge können in jeder beliebigen auswahl, reihenfolge und kombination, auch synchron, ausgeführt werden. einzelne konzepte können betsandteile von anderen sein oder andere beinhalten. insbesondere jede form der variantenbildung und weiterentwicklung ist erwünscht.

 
sometimes in music there are moments—even when the music is bound up in a more traditional form—that dispense with a logical, sequential kind of hearing: in contexts of expected quality to be sure, but also ones exhilarating in their surprise, illuminating and exceeding coherence. a light goes on, exposing the most beautiful aims and deepest motivation of the author, maybe her pattern of childhood. they reveal the genesis of a concrete, inimitable historical moment, and the individual’s experience within it. the philosophy of political economy also has its own "beautiful passages". thus karl marx, in the slog of the paris notebooks on exchange on the basis of private property, develops a few (by his standards) pages toward a theory of alienated labor and its alternative which, like all utopias with any truth-content, at once points beyond both the deepest past and the wretched present.

the present work takes its title from this text of marx. artistic work can on occasion give a sense of what would not be alienated labor. but one doesn’t delude oneself. artworks too are manufactured and distributed according to the conditions of the market, and more to the point: their innermost constitution is itself dependent on the means of production, inculcated in power relations and their corresponding patterns of thinking.

the hierarchies that are required in order to champion the ideas of composers are as deceptive as they are seemingly clear to everyone: a conductor takes the podium—and in the end the audience has no choice but to approve or reject. composers cherish this illusion, and it is further perpetuated by the notion that distribution serves production, and not vice versa. but the power of thoughts among composers is on shaky ground as long as it fails to correspond to the thoughts of power and the (for good or ill) nontransparent ways in which these operate, although or because "no power is a monarchy in heaven and on earth. the absolute monarchy is its own dissolution, because it has no object; strictly speaking, such a phenomenon has never existed." (hölderlin to isaak von sinclair)

in the seemingly harmless cultural sphere which likes to emphasize the suprapolitical and thus apolitical dimension of its activity, the means of power and production are as omnipresent and as unconscious as they are in the realm of politics more narrowly defined. they leave little room for thoughts which run counter to these means or attempt to supercede them. and just as in politics, there exists a discrepancy between, on the one hand, possibilities provided by exponentially increased productivity and, on the other, the power structures that are too rigid, concrete interests that use every form of violence to maintain anachronistic modes of production. this gap is a central characteristic of our times. music’s own backward orientation, its nearly exclusive devotion to the tonal tradition and concomitant reduction of the contemporary to a "special interest" is a prototypical example. equally prototypical within this are the production mechanisms and their rigid divisions of labor. music notation flows out of these divisions, perpetuates them, and thus provides an instructive example.

music notation is brilliantly suited for illustrating how tonal music sounds (as resultant notation), and is adequate to this task. new music, though, describes its principal characteristics by starting them all with the letter ‘a’: it is atonal, ametric, amotivic, asynchronous, etc. – its primary characteristic is openness, certainly also in the realm of form. this is a feature it does not share with music notation, whose realization it either inhibits or outright prevents. all those achievements of modernity that music reflects, questions, criticizes or changes must be carried forth, despite the added resistances of notation and its methodological, performance-practice-related, reproduction-related, pragmatic, and of course aesthetic implications.

nothing is simpler for a group of autonomous musicians, each embodying composer and instrumentalist in one, to play in as many different tempos as there are musicians. under the baton of a conductor, achieving the same thing with an absurd amount of rehearsal just because it has been set in stone by the will of a single composer in a notation system for which a 4/4 measure is the norm, a 3/4 measure of rest is already a logical problem, to say nothing of the fact that three triplet-eighths add up to a quarter. since the purpose of the barline is synchronization and all traditional music, in the sense of a unified shape, knows no alternative but to assign a uniform tempo to all participants. it’s already a contrarian act to assign two independently running tempos, and non-uniform accelerations and ritardandos even more so. the "human right to think individualistically", as asserted by adorno, is denied, prevented by traditional notation. the examples could accumulate ad infinitum. that which is not bound to tonality and meter, synchronized, tied to ‘voices’ that correlate with individuals and with their uniform timbral identity, defies representation through traditional notation, at least not without a plethora of special signs, action notation, verbal explanations, and absurdly opulent lists of instructions, that constitute a notation anti-pattern. they defy not just the notation, but also the institutional, ideological, performative and hierarchical thought patterns for which it stands. speaking of performance instructions: these are occasionally more extensive than the scores themselves. three different composers might in some cases use nine different symbols for the same sounding result. yet this too should not be criticized too much, as long as notation is superseding tradition at all. for unlike the fixed tones in the tonal system timbres can only be systematized multidimensionally – if at all – for they are prioritized differently in changing circumstances, the requirements change, the pragmatism changes, and the virtue of simplicity might dictate custom solutions.

it is here that "doppelt bejaht" takes its point of departure. it is (not about participation but) about self-determination; and not directly about this, but through mediation: for the sake of comprehending compositional procedures and musical practices that are tied to pre-emancipatory thinking habits. the third trombone part in a bruckner symphony, as part of a highly diversified labor structure, reveals no clues about the whole; taken on its own, it is quite meaningless. it is no less sad to look at than a complex orchestral score from our own day. from this perspective, there is clearly no progress. a spontaneous "smash the institutions" would achieve nothing.

playing instructions for "doppelt bejaht" were devised with the aim of focusing the musician’s attention and responsibility on the whole—a whole which, since it involves new music, can only be a contradictory, open whole, changeable in itself and actually changing itself. and playing rules had to be formulated that keep open the ability of every particular to exert of measure of influence. the working methods of the musician, transformed, more open, ought measure up to the material of new music, which opens in all directions.

"doppelt bejaht" moves between the extremes of conceptualism and a play of communication. both relate to the fact that the performance instructions don’t conjure evocations of the acoustic or social (in contrast to the premise of the score as sum total of all the composer’s individual decisions), but rather should enable the concept itself. ideally these two approaches can be kept distinct in the following manner: it is characteristic of conceptualism that a single idea, invented in a few seconds and recorded in a few minutes, can generate many minutes of considerably sophisticated and complex music (an ideal example: poème symphonique for 100 metronomes by ligeti). even if it's nothing more than that several musicians on the same instrument playing the same sound one after the other. the timbral difference between the different instruments of the same category or of the musicians that play them (what nicolaus a. huber referred to as "human timbre") is intended to be heard as a differentiation, comes about on its own, and cannot be notated as such – and, incidentally, also defies analysis, insofar as analysis habitually presumes that all possible meaningful sensory experience in sound rests upon the intention and concrete decisions of a composer in the hierarchy of meaning represented by a score. pure conceptualism as a mechanical procedure is not present in "doppelt bejaht". a minimum of decision and communication on the part of the musicians is always possible and necessary.
the play of communication knows a handicap however, a game-rule, perhaps a repertoire of sound-material, or running, the remains hollow as such if he only from. page is played. what is asked of her musicians, is a culture, not the obligation fulfillment, but of deviant behavior. so what is expected of the musicians that they contribute, are not accidents, but the essential features. the living difference, the other sichtweise, individual and unmistakable expression, etc., which accounts for a possible or concerted running a vibrant development and movement in contradictions. just as important as the 24 numbers is the method of their being linked with one another through "branching" [verzweigung]. often the numbers are already processes in themselves, and are expected to generate contradictory decisions and readings; in the branchings with which they end, the musicians must choose between three possible paths, must find a way, through music-making, to choose one of three possible numbers.

these 24 suggestions carry the subtitle "etudes". this is not meant figuratively. to put it another way, freedom requires practice. great precursors, with whom one doesn’t want to be compared, are chopin’s etudes for piano, and particularly bach’s klavierübungen.

i would never have ventured to undertake the project "doppelt bejaht" had i not also felt a deep reverence for the swr-symphony orchestra, whose decades-long experience with new music is still able to leave me speechless. i hope that "doppelt bejaht" is a possible space (for musicians, listeners, and especially myself) to learn, practice, and understand what new music is or still could become. by no means do i see it in an exclusionary way, as the only right path. the problems of new music are many and manifold, and must be worked out in most differentiated ways. certainly the standardized ways are by no means to be expunged wholesale.

mathias spahlinger, trans. philipp blume and seth brodsky