WeeklyWorker

01.08.2007

Quixotic windmills

Is the detailed notation of musical composition more democratic than free improvisation? Composer Wieland Hoban responds to Gordon Downie's article, 'Art and commodification'

I was pleasantly surprised to see the cover featuring an extract from a musical score by Gordon Downie, and read his article with great interest (Weekly Worker July 26). Having followed some of his writings of recent years, I observed that the formulation of his aesthetic position and critique of certain approaches to music and culture in general has become ever clearer and more convincing. Most of his arguments concerning accommodation and commodification are incisive and applicable. This, however, reinforced my disappointment at the fundamental blind spots that also continue to characterise his view of art and society.

Though the article consists largely of responses to an ongoing debate that I have not followed, the points it contains are fundamental enough for me to address nonetheless. The first important reference is to Adorno, followed by a delineation of Downie's own position as an artist who rejects and attempts to counteract attitudes and modes of listening based on easy classifiability and consumption.

He argues that his mode of notation, for example, opposes reification by presenting the performer with cognitive and interpretative obstacles. It is to be assumed, however, that performers will have found some way of dealing with these obstacles by the time they present a rendition of such a piece, and that this is therefore only a preliminary step to aesthetic appraisal - especially as, according to Downie, "composer intent is transparent and open to more or less immediate verifiability".

This statement is remarkable in itself; I challenge Downie to state after a single hearing of the featured excerpt from his Piano piece 2 whether all details have been rendered with the required precision (and as a composer of music that sometimes includes a similar degree of detail, I am all too familiar with such problems). In fact, I challenge Downie to tell me after listening to any piece of music (a) to what extent the composer's intentions are unequivocal and thus enable an immediate perception of their violation and (b) to what extent these intentions have been fully realised in the respective performance.

For someone who criticises the assumption of transhistorical aesthetic values, he is a surprisingly unquestioning purveyor of what one could perhaps call a transmedial ideology. Surely he is not unaware of the innumerable studies on historical notation practice, performance practice, editing history and the like? Though certain expressive features of a traditional work may be fairly unequivocal, or at least familiar, few - if any - listeners are in a position to state with certainty that the choices made in a performance as to tempo, articulation, dynamics or even orchestration are identical to "composer intent". It is precisely this naive positivism that sabotages the critical potential of Downie's position.

The statement cited above is made in the context of a debate on the respective political predispositions of free improvisation and of composition that uses highly detailed notation. Downie writes: "I am antipathetic to free improvisation because it is inherently antidemocratic" - supporting his statement with references to the leeway offered in that field for the self-indulgence of performers. He characterises free improvisation as a creative process "that is not open to verification", and hence its exponents "cannot be made accountable for their creative actions and decisions. It is thus a discourse that is non-transparent, and one that offers significant opportunities for deception, pretence and fakery."

I have already addressed the aspect of verifiability in music, which, though widely overestimated, is far more present at an intuitive level in traditional 'classical' music than in free improvisation. Certainly there are charlatans in any field, and artistic disciplines present such figures with many possibilities for "deception". It is regrettable, however, that Downie applies such a crude model; dismissal of art or intellectual discourse as 'pretentious' or 'fake', though justified in some cases, frequently serves to block thorough debate. While Downie claims that the improviser's flight to the realm of non-verifiability is an act of deception, there are many people in that field and numerous others who would argue that his own reliance on notational and structural opacity is itself a form of "fakery" - a mannerist smokescreen to obscure the fact that the music is devoid of any other content.

Both sides of the debate adopt an equally unproductive 'emperor's new clothes' polemic that probably reveals more about its practitioners than its objects. While the latter line of argument is blind to the virtues of dealing with different approaches to notation, Downie is blind to the different ways in which improvisation can occur. A solo improviser presenting an extended unaccompanied performance in public can perhaps be dismissed as a solipsistic exhibitionist by those who see no value in his work. As soon as more musicians are involved, however, the situation changes. Certainly one may find a collection of solipsists, each conducting a monologue and ignoring the others, but any open-minded listener should be able to discern those cases in which such a collaboration can lead to fascinating artistic cross-fertilisation and genuine interaction of a kind that is very difficult to achieve in fully-notated music. Ultimately, it is simply short-sighted and ignorant to claim that any such wide, vaguely-defined field as 'improvisation' or 'notated music' is either inherently democratic or inherently anti-democratic.

It is interesting that Downie concludes his condemnation of free improvisation in the following terms: "In addition, free improvisation is merely the aestheticisation of the failures associated with political spontaneity and decentralised, unorganised action." Considering the strict positivism displayed elsewhere in the article, it is no surprise that his standards of organisation are not fulfilled in improvised music, or that his one-dimensional scheme of cultural understanding turns that music into a symbol of failed political action.

Let us ask, then, what political failures or successes Downie associates with his own aesthetic approach? It would hardly be a novelty to argue that his position, characterised by an unflinching insistence on work-immanent autonomy and a rejection of the notion of accessibility, is a regurgitation of the same dogma that was essential for artistic progress 50 years ago, but is now little more than a worn-out cliché that symbolises the marginalisation of an art that refuses to engage with the world it inhabits. If, as Downie does in the case of free improvisation, we apply criteria of political effectiveness to his music, there is little to suggest that it would satisfy any of these itself.

Finally, addressing the question of actual political significance takes us to one of the article's points of departure - namely the question of what music 'workers' should be allowed to like or what they should be enabled to appreciate. Downie writes: "If, having had access to such means, Mike Pearn's 'young workers' still prefer to confine themselves to chords I, IV and V, then so be it: at least this would constitute an informed choice. However, I do not believe that such choices are made, because such workers are rarely, if ever, offered them."

This is a crucial question: if 'the worker' is made the arbiter of aesthetic substance and the focal point of political aims, then the matter of whether he actually places greater value on the music that supposedly 'dumbs down' or the music that supposedly enlightens once he is given the choice is of no little significance. Downie is right to emphasise that "such choices are not made"; the fact that they are not, or at least only rarely and inconspicuously, means that Downie's own arguments do not have to meet the standards of verifiability. In the same way that the failed communication of solipsistic improvisation can represent a lack of political direction or unity, his position seems to rely on the fact that its ideal is not likely to be fulfilled.

If challenged with the suggestion that even workers who were educated in the ways of avant-garde music would not find his music interesting or enjoyable, the fact that present conditions make that highly improbable ensures that he can maintain faith in his socio-aesthetic convictions. The circumstance that such music as his is not widely performed is an equally double-edged phenomenon: on the one hand, it is regrettable for any artist to be denied access to an audience, however small; on the other hand, this also absolves artists from having to prove the worth of their work to a wider group of listeners, enabling them to remain in their self-imposed isolation and cling to the certainty of their own enlightenment. To speak of 'proving' is perhaps inappropriate in the context of art, of course - it would suggest the same positivism for which I have criticised Downie.

On the basis of this and other articles, I find it difficult to see how Downie's aesthetic and political views can be reconciled in anything but an insufficient fashion. The criteria he applies to art seem no different to those of politics; so why should art be relevant at all? Art, as politically informed as it might be, cannot aspire to the political significance of practical involvement, something of which Adorno himself was all too aware; but Adorno, contrary to the impression Downie might convey, was very much an adherent to the bourgeois expressive tradition, and did not see a rigorous parametric rationalisation of music as the solution (he formulates this position especially succinctly in the essay 'Das Altern der neuen Musik' ['The ageing of new music']).

Only by having one foot in each camp was Adorno able to articulate the complex dialectic of autonomy and artistic substance; in failing to do so, Downie confines himself to the pursuit of Quixotic windmills - doing justice neither to the real demands of politics nor the experiential depth of art.