Text by Edwin Prévost was originally published in the booklet of the Sound Disobedience compilation double cd, released by Zavod Spoh and L’innomable in December 2012
The music on this double CD album is either extremely modern or
immensely old. The basis for the material is sound. It is not music
mainstream opinion recognizes. However, if we think of music as sounds
organized by human beings then this truly qualifies as music. What
distinguishes this music from the more conventional forms of folk,
classical and popular music? Why are the participants on this CD, making
music this way? These, in my opinion, are interesting psychological and
social questions. They lead to a possible cultural realignment.
When, in 1999, I first convened a workshop in London based upon the
experimental principles which informed AMM¹ I had not reckoned on the
growing thirst for a new ways of making music. Obviously, this desire
for a different kind of music and social expression, goes beyond the
reach of the London workshop. However, this Ljubljana workshop CD
reflects, and has connections with, the originating impulse in 1999. This
is Tomaž Grom, who while in London joined our weekly sessions. The
connection was maintained through a visit to Ljubljana in 2010 by two
long-serving members of the London workshop, Sebastian Lexer and Seymour
Wright. And again later in 2011 when Guillaume Viltard and Paul Abbott
also participated in the Ljubljana project.
So, there are connections and continuities. But, of course, there are
important, necessary and essential differences. Whatever, this
burgeoning movement for a new music is, it is not searching for a
universal answer. Rather, its rationale is more likely to be a universal
search for answers.
Maybe Homo sapiens has always made music. We need, however, to be
careful how we define ‘music’. The songs of birds may be music to our
ears. The birds, however, are not making music. Their sound-making
attributes and purposes sing to their survival strategies. Human beings,
through our cultural evolution, have found joyous sustenance in many of
these avian calls. But our joy does not often include the often
life-sustaining meaning these calls have for the birds. However, our
appreciation of an avian chorus perhaps leads us towards a perception of
what drives human kind to make sounds. For we are fellow biological
beings. Might human music making have its roots in evolutionary survival
strategies.
Cornelius Cardew, in describing how AMM made its music said:
We are searching for sounds and for the responses that attach to
them, rather than thinking them up, preparing them and producing them.²
This, deceptively simple statement tears up the music manual. It is
at the root of the London improvisation workshop practice. Of course,
this philosophy must be fleshed out and developed — something which sadly
Cardew never did. The ingredients for a comprehensive and radical
programme for new music-making are, however, implicit. My own
twin-analytical formulation of heurism and dialogue — perhaps a mite too
reductionist for many — follows Cardew’s lead in teasing out more
meaning and develops a route for investigation, consolidation and
continuities: towards a new music. There are also powerful suggestions
from cognitive biology: speculating the amalgam of social (dialogic) and
technical (heuristic) domains within Homo sapiens leads to ‘cognitive
fluidity’ and the general development of human consciousness.³
Searching for sounds: this is a major contrast to the way most music,
in historic times, has been formulated. This new approach calls upon
individual enquiry and development. However, Cardew’s playing imperative
is an active and a social search within the process of making the
music. It is also places the musician at the heart of the
decision-making process. It will also reveal the musician’s relationship
to the materials at hand.
Searching for responses: in performance the listening imperative is
one of assessing the value — technical, social and psychological — of
the incoming of aural material and responding further in a dialogical
fashion. This is a context and a place for the musician to sense the
social dynamics of the creative environment.
These, in brief, are the founding moments for a fundamentally new
musical format and attendant co-defining musical relations. This explains
why the music under discussion sounds the way it does. It also
delineates its own critical environment. Music which is pre-formed and
presentational will not accord to these principles. Music which is not
social in its intent and delivery, resists these humanist imperatives.
Listening to the work on this double CD I sense some of the ideas
mentioned above are being worked through to form a new, positive and
processive kind of music. This approach is demanding and perilous. The
support and prompting of a composition is not there to help. Gone is the
reiterative comfort of the familiar. The musicians are working with the
unique and thrilling compact of personal discovery and collective
creativity that is the mark of a confident and self-sustaining cultural
community.
¹ AMM was an experimental music improvisation ensemble founded in London 1965.
² First formulated by Cardew in the 1960s: ‘Towards and Ethic of Improvisation’ Cornelius Cardew A Reader, Copula, 2006 p 127.
³ Mithen, Steven, The Prehistory of the Mind, Phoenix, 1996.
