Ole Lutzow-Holm
Composer and Professor, Academy of Music and Drama, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Progress and The Beauty of the Incomplete
I must admit that the thought of an avant-garde position seems a bit awkward to me. As does the idea of an autonomous aesthetic progress and the invitation to reflect on viable complexity or refinement scales of an artefact, be it with the aid of computable information quantum or any other value system.
Why? Because it assumes a terminology that is intricately associated with historical implications of development and subjectivity – the origin of which points to a selective and entirely rational concept of civilization known as the Enlightenment. And given various less successful consequences of occidental progress and refinement projected on others than our selves throughout the Age of Modernity one is not likely to rejoice when being asked to evaluate these emblematic, though perhaps once evident, epithets. However, it would also be ignorant to renounce an opportunity to suggest slightly new ways of understanding them today. Progress in the arts – or elsewhere – may only be distinguished and seriously discussed by the analysis of what the progress brings about. Viewed as an isolated phenomenon it is a purely narcissistic category. Whilst the framing of such a claim will cause inconvenience, the effort alone to articulate certain aspects of a relational context adds a quality to the work. Imagine a situation where this effort has in fact replaced the hard and conventional labour to balance form against contents much the same way as timbre once replaced harmony!
Compositional ideas that question e.g. the principle of copyright using electronic distribution may, thus understood, be regarded as progressive if they encompass the prospect of mutual pervasion, an element of public as well as general access, affecting the creative process to an extent where it destabilizes the identity of a work. An inquiry, therefore, examining fundamental conditions for this kind of transformation in order to develop tools that support and facilitate the conduct of different interaction probabilities and actually enable one to exploit discrete stages of identity dilution should consequently be called advanced. Noise Music and in some respect even Sound Art maintain an aesthetic position similar to the strategy outlined above. Here one notices a desire to perpetuate infinite chains of metamorphosis where the artefact as a self-contained entity evaporates:
Over and over again continually altered versions of borrowed tunes, objets trouvées and sonic disturbances – acoustic events of amazing beauty – travel across the planet, merge with other nomadic sound sources, divide, transform, integrate and divide again. I acknowledge those artistic activities to be avantgarde that challenge conventions celebrating values such as exclusive rights, confirmatory limitations of a material and the notion of a masterpiece. It is by no means my intention to recommend particular genres of music making but rather to evoke a perspective that concerns itself with the implementation of contemporary techniques and modes of practise prevalent in independent, subcultural environments. We only have to think that the alternatives involved are at least as many as there are classical forms in the history of music.
