Introduction
What kind of musical practice is capable of engaging the present conditions of contemporaneity, defined as the coming together of multiple times to create ‘an overarching temporal form of global crisis’?Footnote 1 In summer 2017, the popular Swedish music streaming platform Spotify announced an in-house creative production project designed to bring musicians from countries affected by Executive Order 13769, widely referred to as president Donald Trump's ‘Muslim ban’, to Toronto in order to collaborate with American musicians.Footnote 2 The result, I'm with the banned (2017), comprises a documentary, a number of short promotional videos, and six songs recorded by musicians hailing respectively from Iran, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, Sudan, and Libya. Four of these artists collaborated in person with the American musicians during their stay in Canada. Owing to visa issues, however, Sudanese musician and record producer Sufyvn was unable to make it to the Toronto studios in time to work with R&B artist BJ the Chicago Kid; and singer-songwriter Ahmed Fakroun was never granted a visa from Libya. Both artist pairs were able to work together remotely, though, to complete their contributions. ‘In the end there [were] too many barriers for us to collaborate in person’, Sufyvn explains, ‘but music has no barriers.’Footnote 3 Such a statement accords with one of the primary contentions of the project: that music has the power to create and hold together communities on a transnational scale, even as those relations are increasingly threatened by contemporary forms of nationalism and political-economic isolationism. Being with the banned, and through the form of musical organization implied by this titular pun, the project reaches, synecdochally, towards a kind of musical solidarity imagined to cross even the most rigid of geopolitical borders. As the voiceover in one of the project's promotional videos insists, ‘Music is the ultimate, you know, connector of people, and it knows no boundaries.’Footnote 4
Yet boundaries in music abound. Consider two that music studies challenges and reifies, namely, between Western and non-Western, and between popular and art music.Footnote 5 Both distinctions doubtless apply to I'm with the banned: non-Western because it explicitly involves musical traditions from the Middle East and northeastern Africa; popular because both the American and ‘banned’ artists deploy musical conventions drawn from those traditions, at least as they might be construed in a geographically expansive sense. Nevertheless, boundaries often seem to exist only to be traversed, and critical judgement of I'm with the banned might be similarly uncontained. At worst, the project could be dismissed as mere marketing material in support of a transnational, digital tech corporation valued at over $20 billion.Footnote 6 After all, the concluding intertitles of the video documentary refer not to the project's cultural or political impact, but rather list the number of plays the six songs received together on Spotify – over 5.5 millionFootnote 7 – which, as we know, translates directly into revenue obtained from ad placement and subscription sign-ups. At the same time, the project can be compared with some of the more interesting, and perhaps critical, post-relational and social practice work of contemporary art.Footnote 8 One recalls, for instance, Ai Weiwei's contribution to documenta 12, Fairytale (2007), in which the artist facilitated the travel of 1,001 Chinese citizens, many of whom experienced similar visa issues as the musicians in I'm with the banned, to visit the documenta site in Kassel, Germany. Or, for a particularly musical example (though notably, still, taken from contemporary art), consider Emily Jacir's Entry Denied (a concert in Jerusalem) (2003), a video documenting a concert by an Austrian national of Palestinian origin who was denied entry to Jerusalem and Bethlehem for a performance in 2002. To different ends, these projects relate not as much to modernist notions of progress and the new than to a complex multiplicity of simultaneous historical presents, what Peter Osborne calls a ‘living disjunctive unity’, at play in the concept of global contemporaneity.Footnote 9
Still, I'm with the banned can be seen as filling a certain void in today's art music, with respect to such an understanding of the contemporary. New music is characterized by a nominal and substantive investment in the new, as inherited from artistic modernism in both its aesthetic and medium-specific varieties. Regarding aesthetic modernism, on the one hand, new music identifies its content as the aesthetic qualities of sound expressed through various technical means, and is often judged on the basis of their novelty. On the other, this restriction of new music's proper materials to sound mirrors the structure of medium-specific modernism, which strove for formal purity by excising elements deemed inessential to each medium. Both the new and this kind of formalism contribute to a sense of ‘soft autonomy’ that characterizes today's new music: no longer restricted to the radical formalism of, say, the 1954 Darmstadt composers that Theodor W. Adorno famously criticized,Footnote 10 new music nevertheless sequesters itself through a kind of cultural-artistic isolationism. Even where one would expect to find a genuine confrontation with the heteronomous registers of the extra-artistic, new music often circumscribes meaning within the musical work, or, perhaps more symptomatically, the ‘piece’.Footnote 11
In some ways an exception, Johannes Kreidler's 2009 Fremdarbeit (Outsourcing) provides a kind of imaginary inversion, politically perhaps as well as ethically, of I'm with the banned through the German composer's employment of fictional Chinese and Indian artistic labourers to whom Kreidler purports to have ‘outsourced’ the task of composing a series of chamber music pieces. Such a project invokes a series of questions: does it merely repeat the (imaginary) exploitation it claims to reveal while reproducing a variety of colonial stereotypes?Footnote 12 Or, does this work reflexively underscore and challenge audiences’ own stereotypes of musical others?Footnote 13 Are such tensions to be valued in themselves as fuelling critical discourse?Footnote 14 Intriguing as such questions may be, when considered outside the disciplinary confines of new music, which Fremdarbeit no doubt challenges, the work is hardly the extreme, controversial, or indeed novel gesture it is seen as from within: just consider the sometimes shocking examples of artistic outsourcing, including music, that art historian Claire Bishop catalogues since the 1990s.Footnote 15
Such an exception also proves the rule, since it is precisely a claim to formal-disciplinary novelty – rather than a sustained engagement with, say, transnational or post-colonial labour relations – that unites Kreidler's body of work. His broader project revolves around what he, along with a small group of other mostly European new music composers, has called Neue Konzeptualismus, or ‘New Conceptualism’. But is new conceptualism really new? And should such a goal of novelty even be considered a good thing? In any case, what role can it play in a moment when art at large has moved through and, in some ways beyond, conceptualism into its purported post-conceptual state?Footnote 16 In a 2013 text defending new conceptualism against charges of anachronism (specifically, its status as ‘neo-conceptualism’), Kreidler insists: ‘It remains for me beyond question that New Conceptualism brings something specifically new to music; its expression is thoroughly contemporary [gegenwartsbezogen], its agenda progressive.’Footnote 17 This is a striking claim, not least because of precedents dating back to the 1960s including Henry Flynt's ‘concept art’ (and his lesser cited ‘concept music’), John Baldessari's 1972 musical ‘art song’ setting of Sol LeWitt's Sentences on Conceptual Art (1969), and Adrian Piper's conceptual work, including her proto-social practice project Funk Lessons (1984).Footnote 18 These examples, beyond mere prefigurations, serve as coherent articulations of both musical conceptualism and conceptual music since the 1960s. Setting aside the question of how ‘progressive’ new conceptualism may be, its status as ‘contemporary’ is contentious, even though, taken on its own terms, new music has been largely resistant to the kinds of conceptualism Kreidler promotes.
This is because new conceptualism's claims to novelty are emblematic of new music as a modernist discourse – distinct from, but not simply opposed to, the contemporary – in both its adherence to the new and its aversion to viewing itself as part of an expanded cultural-artistic field.Footnote 19 This tendency of disciplinary circumscription, which expresses a variant form of medium-specificity, here encourages such an adherence to the new: if music is truly separate from art, then an artistic movement that music supposedly missed out on historically – in this case conceptual art (if we accept ‘new conceptualism’ as novel) – can be recuperated within new music and then termed ‘new’. But, while failing to grasp the interdisciplinary exchanges between art and music that occurred throughout the twentieth century, including those of the historical avant-garde, such a view also misses the way conceptual art overturned the modernist understanding of art, defined as a closed taxonomy of separate mediums. ‘If one is questioning the nature of painting’, Joseph Kosuth famously contended, ‘one cannot be questioning the nature of Art.’Footnote 20 Needless to say, this has not stopped anyone from questioning painting's nature.Footnote 21 And there is an issue with construing such a monolithic ‘Art’ that can so readily be ‘questioned’. Neither is it to suggest that conceptual art has led in any meaningful way to the dissolving of institutional divisions between, for instance, visual art and music; in many ways they have been strengthened. But it is to note that, coupled with notions such as Dick Higgins's ‘intermedia’, conceptualism marked one of the ways contemporary art has shifted towards transdisciplinarity as a prevailing methodology. In place of formalist modernism's monodisciplinary medium-specificity, contemporary art has become generic.Footnote 22
This is not to say then that music, as a species of art, simply inherits its self-conception ‘from above’; on the contrary, music has exhibited the capacity, historically, not only to transform itself, but also to shape its very art genus from below, thus calling into question the stability of this taxonomy of music as a species of art. Music was, in this sense, pivotal not only in the development of conceptual art (including Flynt, Baldessari, LeWitt, and Piper), but also in the creation of the modernist medium-specificity out of which conceptual art arose as its negation.Footnote 23 Music, and in particular absolute music, was a principal model for art critic Clement Greenberg. Discussing music's role in the development of the avant-garde and medium-specific modernism – and echoing Walter Pater's notorious 1877 statement concerning art's supposed striving towards music's condition – Greenberg contends:
music as an art in itself began at this time to occupy a very important position in relation to the other arts. Because of its ‘absolute’ nature, its remoteness from imitation, its almost complete absorption in the very physical quality of its medium, as well as because of its resources of suggestion, music had come to replace poetry as the paragon art.Footnote 24
Greenberg's privileging of poetry is widely acknowledged, but music's influence on his thinking is less commented upon, due perhaps to continental and disciplinary divisions between North American art criticism and the mostly German historiography of absolute music starting in the early 1800s.Footnote 25 Then again, it should be difficult for theorists and historians of artistic modernism to ignore the effects of a movement that had elevated instrumental music not only to the highest form of music but also to the highest of the arts in general.Footnote 26 Compare this to the fact that music was also the model for Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, itself a kind of philosophical Grundrisse for recent theories of contemporary art, notably (and somewhat counter-intuitively) in support of conceptuality in John Roberts and the critical necessity of an ‘anti-aestheticist use of aesthetic materials’ in Osborne.Footnote 27 Yet if music was so important to the development of the artistic modernism that gave rise to contemporary art, why does music today appear so effectively divorced from art's present concerns? Why does contemporary music seem to lack contemporaneity, perhaps most sorely, in the field of art itself?
Contemporary art's own contemporaneity has been the subject of intense debate in recent years, although the very concept of contemporary music has only begun to receive such scrutiny. This article elaborates recent conceptions of the contemporary from art theory, along with formal differences between contemporary music and contemporary art, as expressed in their respective historiographical constructions. The fields of contemporary art and music developed from initially entwined but eventually distinct art-historical genealogies, constructed through diverging views of artistic medium, the status of language, and the social. Contemporary art, on the one hand, emerges as a result of the radical transformations of the historical avant-garde and neo-avant-garde that have led to what Osborne and others have called post-conceptual art – a generic art beyond specific mediums that prioritizes discursive meaning and social process – while contemporary music, on the other hand, continues to struggle with its formal status as a non-conceptual, sound-based medium of art that inherits its concept from aesthetic modernism and absolute music. New conceptualism can be viewed as an attempt from within new music to break with this paradigm and become contemporary. I will also consider a different movement, sound art, which, unlike new music, has been articulated within contemporary art, while discussing some of the ways it, too, falls short of contemporary art's generic post-conceptual condition. I argue that, despite their respective claims to contemporaneity, neither sound art nor contemporary music is contemporary in the philosophically and historically significant sense of the term. This is an evaluative claim: I privilege a radically generic post-conceptual contemporary art that, as a consequence of its open-ended use of transdisciplinary artistic and extra-artistic operations, is capable of producing meaning that exceeds the field of art and impinges on social life – contemporary art not only engages the contemporary but also produces it. By contrast, the product of contemporary/new music, as a result of its ideological adherence to aesthetic modernism, remains limited to the intra-artistic aesthetic contents of musical sound – contemporary/new music, in its present configurations, is thus structurally inadequate for the task of interfacing with contemporaneity. As an alternative, I propose ‘musical contemporary art’ to describe exceptional practices that depart in specific and consequential ways from the tenets of new music and sound art: against sound art's quasi-medium-specificity and new music's aesthetic formalism, ‘musical contemporary art’ refers to post-formalist musical art practices based on a post-conceptual approach that meaningfully confronts the contemporary. What, then, is the contemporary?
What is the contemporary? Contemporary art and contemporaneity
Answers to this question come from history, critical theory, philosophy, art history, and, most interestingly, the interdisciplinary field of contemporary art theory. The emphasis on the latter is due to the fact that the very concept of ‘the contemporary’ actually gained its initial historical and conceptual meaning in the context of post-war art: art institutions and theorists were the first, that is, to use the term to refer to a post-war period of global capitalism distinct from yet related to the modern.Footnote 28 As Osborne defines it, referring to Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism, ‘if modernity is the temporal culture of capital (as Jameson discerned), within its current form, contemporaneity is the temporal structure that articulates the unity of global capitalism.’Footnote 29 For Osborne, the contemporary is the ‘spatialization of [the] historical temporality’ of globalization, which further represents ‘a new kind of totalizing but immanently fractured constellation of temporal relations’.Footnote 30 In its most radical articulation, the contemporary yokes together both a periodizing diagnostic concept and a distinct, art-historical condition, ‘contemporary art’, out of which the very notion of ‘the contemporary’ eventually arrives in its fullest, philosophically significant sense. A resulting aporia is that contemporary art, as (more than) a species of ‘art under contemporaneity’, appears, retroactively, to produce the very category of ‘the contemporary’. Contemporary art bootstraps itself and, in the process, produces ‘the contemporary’.
The contemporary is set into motion through a complex relationship both to the modern and to the avant-garde, while it throws into relief the project of postmodernism. The modern can be conceived as the historical production of the temporality of the new, exhibited perhaps most transparently in German with the lexico-historiographical shift from neue Zeit (new time) to Neuzeit (modernity) that occurred in the late eighteenth century.Footnote 31 Writ large, Neuzeit refers to the period of time following the Middle Ages, but used more specifically it marks the onset of industrialisation in the late eighteenth century. In this sense, the modern can be conceptualized as the historical time of the new and its requisite capitalist production. Jumping ahead to the late nineteenth century, the historical avant-garde, as a kind of homeopathic treatment internal to modernism, emerged according to Adorno and Peter Bürger as an immanent negation of capitalism through a doubling of modernity's logic of the new.Footnote 32 Yet with the avant-garde's various post-war death proclamations, and further through neoliberalism and global market deregulation, the dialectical, temporal logic inherent to the avant-garde (inclusive of its neo-avant-garde afterimages) can be seen as increasingly tested by the spatial dynamics of globalization. This is not to say that the avant-garde avoided problems of space; just consider Guy Debord's dérive and the Situationist practice of psychogeography.Footnote 33 Nor is it to answer the question of how, or even if the logic of the avant-garde can be resuscitated in any meaningful way today.Footnote 34 Post-colonial critiques of Western modernity's spacetime can be seen, for instance, in the ‘non-synchronous’ global/national time of Homi K. Bhabha's ‘third space’.Footnote 35 Meanwhile, theorists of postmodernism addressed globalization's expanding spatiality, for example, in Jameson's notion of ‘cognitive mapping’.Footnote 36 Following the global financial crisis of 2007–8, however, and a return from the critique of grand narratives to that of political economy, postmodernism, either as a diagnostic concept or a historical condition, has lost perhaps much of the critical force it may have once offered.Footnote 37
Rather than an interruption of modernity, the contemporary marks the complex temporality of its fractured geopolitical unity. How then is this new historical temporality, here ascribed to the contemporary, distinct from modernity's own new? Does not the contemporary have to be in some sense ‘new’ in order to be distinct, if only to, as it were, escape from modernity in the first place? This is where, for art theorist Suhail Malik, the contemporary is paradigmatically ‘posthistorical’, in that, although the contemporary arrives as a historical departure from modernity, and is in that sense new, contemporaneity is characterized precisely by its lack of continued historical progress: the absence of a modernist new.Footnote 38 The new of modernity, following Hannah Arendt, is produced only by human-directed or anthropogenic action, which creates the historical time of modernity.Footnote 39 Post-history does not rule out the new as such, but, as a constitutive feature of contemporaneity, it designates a state of ‘additive yet progress-less anthropogenic experience’:Footnote 40 no more meaningful human action, no more historical new. For Malik, contemporaneity's eradication of modernity's new, formerly created through consequential human action, renders the contemporary as archetypically and pejoratively postmodern.Footnote 41 Osborne defines the contemporary against postmodernism, although he also argues that the contemporary is not a matter of one period simply replacing another, which is ‘the mistake of the kind of stagist, historicist periodization we find in mainstream history and art history alike’.Footnote 42 We'll discuss some competing notions of the contemporary later. Yet we'll retain an understanding of it as a non-stagist post-historical stage distinct from yet in some ways continuous with the modern that, while traceable to 1945, the 1960s, and 1989, describes the complex, overlapping temporality of global capitalism.
There have nonetheless been proponents of a conception of the contemporary as a sharply periodizing break from modernism. Both Alexander Alberro and Terry Smith, for example, define the contemporary as a period beginning in 1989 with the triumph of neoliberalism and its heightened inequalities, the integration of electronic and digital culture, along with globalization and its production of post- and decolonial subjectivities.Footnote 43 In What is Contemporary Art?, Smith describes the contemporary as playing ‘second fiddle’ to the modern, up until the last decades of the twentieth century: ‘In the visual arts, the big story, now so blindingly obvious, is the shift – nascent during the 1950s, but unmistakable since the 1980s – from modern to contemporary art.’Footnote 44 Although Alberro allows that contemporary art owes much to its ‘modernist forbears’, he ultimately understands the contemporary as a distinct, even hegemonic historical phase. Furthest in this direction is perhaps art critic Cuauhtémoc Medina's claim that the contemporary marks the ‘death of “modern”’.Footnote 45
Whether or not a death of the modern has ever occurred remains a point of debate, yet there are those who would contend that ‘the contemporary’ was never born in the first place, at least not in the historically significant sense proposed in art theory. On the one hand, capitalism has been, in a non-trivial sense, ‘global’ since the late eighteenth century, with earlier international roots in the beginnings of colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade.Footnote 46 Note, though, that the contemporary addresses a post-war (and post-Cold War) state of global market deregulation and global finance capital – a state in which extended effects of its origin's racism and colonial oppression nonetheless persist. On the other hand, there are perhaps additional implications of ‘the contemporary’ apart from its periodizing function. Art historian Richard Meyer, for instance, draws on an alternative definition of the contemporary as belonging to the same time to define the concept as a coterminous relation between the critic, or art historian, and their living subjects of study. Distinct from a historical era or phase, Meyer's contemporary refers to the relationship between artist and historian wherein their lives overlap as the writing of history takes place. This allows him to take ‘a longer history of the new’, unconventionally attributing ‘the new’ here not to modernism but to the contemporary, and thereby shifting Smith's titular question to the past tense to arrive at the paradoxical inquiry What was Contemporary Art? Footnote 47 Such a perspective replaces the contemporary as a historical, diagnostic category with a transhistorical relationship between an artist and the fact of living in the same moment. Yet can contemporary art be reduced to art that is contemporary (in Meyer's sense) with contemporaneity (in Osborne's sense)? If it's not about being present, living, or even ‘current’,Footnote 48 what is contemporary art?
One claim is that contemporary art represents a privileged site for engaging the contemporary.Footnote 49 Indeed, such a perspective accords with contemporary art's role in the contemporary's production. It may also help to explain the emergence of socially engaged art practices since the 1960s, or the rise of social practice Master of Fine Arts programmes over the course of the past decade. Engagement, in this sense, represents an immanent encounter within a site of struggle; in the context of the contemporary, it accepts that there is no unambiguous outside, no exterior from which one could simply overcome its imposition, only an interior within which one can negotiate particular conditions through the production of meaning. But can contemporary art engage with the conditions of contemporaneity if we accept the impotence of the anthropogenic action Malik finds constitutive of the contemporary? Contemporary art is often defined diachronically, as suggested, in terms of the periodizing function of the contemporary itself, whether or not one takes 1989 as its determinate beginning. Osborne complicates the possibility of the latter, and offers three interrelated historical points of departure: the end of the Second World War, the 1960s, and the end of the Cold War.Footnote 50 Rather than choosing any one of these historical points – as much as Osborne privileges the 1960s in his post-conceptual art schema – they define strata that interact non-linearly. It is difficult to find abstract expressionism genuinely contemporary today, for instance, just as even a pre-war Duchamp speaks to our contemporary moment a whole century later.Footnote 51 As opposed to stagism, such an understanding appeals to contemporaneity as a contestable distinction: art's ability to confront the contemporary, in each case, must be critically determined.
Contemporary art can also be characterized synchronically, for instance, as a set of material-conceptual conditions of possibility, or as a power operation governed by the production of contradictions. On the one hand, Boris Groys describes contemporary art as a field of ‘paradox objects’: artworks that appear simultaneously to contain thesis and antithesis. Although Groys does not limit such a function to contemporary art (paradox objects, he claims, can be found as far back as classical modernity), he contends that ‘a contemporary artwork is as good as it is paradoxical’, and through such paradoxes contributes to a balancing of art-institutional, and even extra-artistic political power.Footnote 52 Consider the potential of Groys's paradox objects to respond to Malik's problem of post-history: there's no straightforward answer to the question of how to interface with contemporaneity when human action itself is inconsequential – except perhaps precisely through the use of suspension, aporia, self-contradiction, or paradox. In this sense, contemporary art does seem to offer a privileged site for engaging the contemporary. On the other hand, taking the conceptual art of the 1960s as a point of departure, Osborne's primary contention, in both Anywhere or Not at All and The Postconceptual Condition, is that post-conceptual art is contemporary art. From this thesis, he derives a schema based on:
1. Art's necessary conceptuality. (Art is constituted by concepts, their relations and their instantiation in practices of discrimination: art/non-art.)
2. Art's ineliminable – but radically insufficient – aesthetic dimension. (All art requires some form of materialization; that is to say, aesthetic – felt, spatio-temporal – presentation.)
3. The critical necessity of an anti-aestheticist use of aesthetic materials. (This is a critical consequence of art's necessary conceptuality.)
4. An expansion to infinity of the possible material forms of art.
5. A radically distributive – that is, irreducibly relational – unity of the individual artwork across the totality of its multiple material instantiations, at any particular time.
6. A historical malleability of the borders of this unity.Footnote 53
It is important to note that Osborne's schema represents only the foundations, or the background against which post-conceptual contemporary art operates, not its necessary and sufficient conditions. There is plenty of art produced today under the banner of contemporary art that does not fit these criteria, just as art that does fit them can fail the test of contemporaneity. For instance, both I'm with the banned and Kreidler's Fremdarbeit appear to satisfy all six of the criteria: they are conceptual yet materialized; aesthetic but not necessarily aestheticist; make use of a variety of materials and practices (video, sound, performance, even ‘social practice’); and they are distributive and relatively open-ended in their respective identities (each involves or could involve multiple realizations).
In each instance, though, history complicates diachronically such a synchronic determination of the contemporary. In the case of Fremdarbeit, a broader, art-historical knowledge of artistic outsourcing and conceptual art shrinks the work's inflated claims both to novelty and contemporaneity (this is not simply to criticize Fremdarbeit on the basis of it not being new but rather to question the value it and new conceptualism place on novelty as a goal). Regarding I'm with the banned, an understanding of the double recuperation of conceptual (and social practice) art strategies in contemporary advertising, whose very sites of mediation (billboards, magazines, mass media, etc.) were first appropriated by conceptual art,Footnote 54 neutralizes a shock that might otherwise be felt from the project's corporate appropriation of post-conceptual art tactics. Neither its resemblance to contemporary art nor its status as non-art should therefore seem controversial. At the same time, in I'm with the banned we encounter a musical practice that, through its actual engagement with the contemporary, is more contemporary than many practices considered under the category of contemporary music today. Yet both projects, while operating through post-conceptual contemporary art's conditions of possibility, fail to achieve the status of contemporary art conceived as an art that meaningfully addresses the contemporary. As demonstrated with abstract expressionism and Duchamp, we must determine an artwork's critical value in the present through contingent judgement: in each instance, how contemporary is contemporary art? By a similar token, we can ask: how contemporary is contemporary music?
How contemporary is contemporary music? Towards a musical contemporary art
Before answering the question of how contemporary contemporary music is, we must first inspect its historiographical construction. Where do we encounter ‘contemporary music’? How does it compare with the notion of the contemporary found in contemporary art discourse? Phrases such as ‘contemporary music’ or ‘contemporary composition’ are often used casually to mean something like ‘recently composed art music’, or simply as stand-ins for ‘new music’. Yet rarely are such expressions explicitly attached to a world-historical periodizing function or the concerns of art history. In short, there has not been anything comparable to contemporary art's articulation of the contemporary to emerge from art music's institutions or their discursive contexts. We can nonetheless find three distinct meanings of ‘contemporary music’ at play in music scholarship: first, the phrase is used to refer to music that is composed during the present and/or is contemporary with its reception and/or criticism; second, as a periodizing concept denoting music created or composed during the twentieth century, since 1945, the 1960s, and/or 1989; and, finally, ‘contemporary music’ is used, often in tandem with one or both of the first two meanings, as a synonym for and/or qualifier of new music.
Regarding the first meaning of ‘contemporary music’, which recalls Meyer's art-historical redefinition of ‘contemporary art’, such a usage found functional expression in the Vereinigung für Zeitgenössische Musik (1927–32), the international ‘Association’ established in the Weimar Republic for the purpose of promoting the works of ‘living composers’.Footnote 55 Notably, this use of Zeitgenössische Musik, like the phrase l'art contemporain in use in Paris during the First World War, predates the conceptually and historically significant post-war use of ‘the contemporary’ that would not arrive in anything like its present form until the 1950s and 1960s.Footnote 56 Decades later, Contemporary Music Review (CMR) expressed a similar concern to the Vereinigung's for the work of present-day composers. CMR evidently sought to address various issues such as the encroachment of a perceived postmodern pluralism, while responding to music's burgeoning intersections with a host of new artistic and scientific disciplinary convergences. Editor Nigel Osborne begins the 1984 issue by describing a need to increase scholarly attention to works composed during the 1970s and early 1980s.Footnote 57 In these formulations, we find a meaning of ‘the contemporary’ that refers to the term's etymology as con tempus, or being with the same time.Footnote 58 At the same time, as Adornian Max Paddison points out, contemporary music did not ever quite ‘fit in’ during its own time.Footnote 59 Contemporary music is, in Giorgio Agamben's sense of the contemporary, both disjunctive and anachronistic.Footnote 60
‘Contemporary music’ has been used in tandem or interchangeably with ‘new music’, despite the latter's implications as a modernist discourse distinct in certain ways from the contemporary. Recalling the lexicographical congruency, in German, between Neue (the new) and Neuzeit (modernity), such an integrality of the new to the modern – along with the modern's tension with the contemporary – can be felt in the first English translation of Adorno's Philosophie der neuen Musik (1958) as Philosophy of Modern Music in 1973, a moment on the cusp of modernity's ostensible displacement by both ‘postmodernism’ and ‘the contemporary’.Footnote 61 Before new music's Philosophy, which figures for Robert Hullot-Kentor as no less than a ‘manifesto of the primacy of the object’, and decades prior to Adorno's well-known indictment of its Darmstadt representatives’ ‘aging’ published in 1955,Footnote 62 one of its earliest articulations emerged in Paul Bekker's canonical 1919 essay ‘Neue Musik’. While sharing the spirit of the newfound in Ferruccio Busoni's Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music (1907), along with a similar interest in microtonality, ‘Neue Musik’, an archetypically modernist text, centres on a call for a ‘new melodic style’.Footnote 63 Not unlike ‘contemporary music’, ‘new music’ results from a set of contested categorizing and periodizing functions. In terms of its categorization, Seth Brodsky offers a set of seven Venn diagram circles intended to describe current new music as a set of (primarily) material practices. These include:
1) Agents who call themselves composers; 2) some sort of specialized training, often but not always at universities and conservatories, and following some kind of apprentice or studio model; 3) direct engagement (from unreflective adherence to ostentatious antagonism) with the concept of the musical work, often involving the creation of textual objects (anything from traditionally notated scores to written words to Max/MSP patches); 4) their delivery to a distinct body of often highly trained laborers for realization (occasionally including the composer in a different role); 5) engagement with Western classical instruments, frequently in provocative dialogue with technologies from other traditions and practices, or technologies that don't yet have a tradition or standardized use; 6) a substantial reliance on the economic model of the external commission (from performers, but more often from institutions such as the state, corporation, or festival); and finally, 7) the presentation of these scores in concert venues in which the works of the Western classical canon are also often presented, to an audience with a living memory of such works.Footnote 64
Whereas Osborne's post-conceptual art schema is theoretical, Brodsky's new music list is descriptive. Such material practices are nonetheless supported by a set of ideas that have enabled the continuation of new music relatively undisturbed as an ideology now for over a century. Brodsky locates such an ideology in aesthetic modernism; another point of congruence is the nineteenth-century discourse of absolute music, which then confronts modernism's thrust towards the new and results in the various formal and technical innovations of the twentieth century. Many thus periodize new music, in a manner similar to contemporary music, as a turn-of-the-century phenomenon found, for instance, in the work of Andreas Ballstaedt – whose Wege zur Neuen Musik derives its title from the series of lectures Anton Webern gave in Vienna in 1933 – and Christoph von Blumröder, who focuses on new music as an ‘idea’ developed throughout the twentieth century.Footnote 65
The contents of this largely German idea of new music, which consolidates the notions of artistic autonomy, aesthetic modernism, and absolute music, received a rigorous challenge in the North American movement of new musicology beginning in the 1980s. New musicology, as a postmodern movement sceptical of such musical grand narratives, sought a kind of discursive solution to the problem of the anti- or non-representational formalism inherent to absolute music and its extensions in new music. At the same moment art discourse started rearticulating ‘post-formalist’ practices as ‘postmodern’ – and just as modern art institutions began rebranding themselves as ‘contemporary’Footnote 66 – new musicology laid the groundwork for the possibility of a post-formalist music. One way this could have proceeded would have been an integral recovery of the possibility of language inherent to music's premodern concept as harmony, rhythm, and logos (or language): music had previously included language as constitutive of its form, that is, and thus might be capable of reincorporating it.Footnote 67 But new musicology ultimately misrecognized the object of its critique. Rather than understanding absolute music (and the new music it heralded) as a moment within a longer history in which music's concept had once included language – and which could therefore embrace meaning in the form of an inchoate musical conceptualism – new musicologists such as Susan McClary, Lawrence Kramer, and Rose Subotnick paradigmatically sought conceptual meaning within ‘the music itself’, or instrumental sound.Footnote 68
Doubtless new musicology's introduction of feminism, and other forms of critical theory, to the discipline were invaluable. Furthermore, new musicology did not limit its analyses to art music, and scholars such as McClary and Robert Walser have been pivotal in the study of popular music, a form in which language – including but not limited to lyrics – has remained an integral feature.Footnote 69 To this extent, popular musics may provide material and/or sites for engaging the contemporary, notwithstanding some of the complexities and limitations seen in I'm with the banned.Footnote 70 (The question of how or even whether popular music as such can reflexively confront contemporaneity, however, is beyond our present scope.)Footnote 71 In the domain of art music, new musicology focused on identifying musical meaning within (absolute) music's formal structures; thus in ultimately accepting music as instrumental sound, new musicology failed to provide a path for art music's (re)incorporation of the conceptual – an operation that might have otherwise provided a model for a post-formalist music. One result of this has been a disconnect between music studies, especially as it relates to new music practice, and the kinds of art theory that would go on to articulate the contemporary.Footnote 72 Another was the widening of a gulf between new musicology's vanguard ‘postmodern’ music hermeneutics, which in this case tended to interpret pre-twentieth century music anyway, and musical practices that actually pointed beyond new/absolute music. Specifically, certain strands of experimental music (and its interdisciplinary artistic offshoots), which were themselves once labelled ‘postmodern’,Footnote 73 posed significant artistic challenges to a hegemonic musical discourse that were never quite matched let alone articulated in theory.
Now that we have looked at the construction of ‘contemporary music’, and we understand the coordinates of the concept of the contemporary, we can begin to ask which if any of contemporary music's practices might qualify as contemporary in this critical and historical sense of the term. How, and to what extent, does contemporary music engage with or confront the contemporary? When, if ever, was contemporary music contemporary? Here I want to argue that, in short, as music becomes genuinely contemporary – that is, it reflexively confronts the contemporary defined as the historical temporality of global capitalism – it requisitely (also) becomes contemporary art. Which is not to say that it is then recognized as such. As early as the 1950s, John Cage might have had something similar in mind when he wrote, ‘Very frequently no one knows that contemporary music is or could be art.’Footnote 74 Of course, Cage himself wouldn't have known of ‘the contemporary’ in its present conception, and doubtless ‘contemporary music’ here likely means something like ‘recently composed new or experimental music’. But with this passage Cage suggests something important, since his influence stretches far beyond the discourses and institutions of music, including new, contemporary, and experimental, and has permeated the field of post-war art in a manner on par with a figure such as Duchamp. In fact, the first, and in some respects primary, example of this crossing from music to contemporary art, the exemplary musical contemporary artwork, is Cage's 1952 silent composition 4′33″. Why?
Cage's 4′33″ fits virtually all the criteria discussed earlier for contemporary art practices, including a status as both paradox object and as post-conceptual (despite its predating of 1960s conceptual art), while it critically interfaces with the contemporary just years following the Second World War. As a paradox object, 4′33″ can be considered, elementally, as a negation of musical sound in a context that had come to be defined by an expectation of sound. But it can also be construed as pointing to music's historical relativization of sound, or even the radically non-sounding dimension of its premodern conception as harmony, rhythm, and logos. Footnote 75 Regarding its post-conceptual status, 4′33″ figured as an invaluable precursor to the conceptual art practices of the 1960s, as Liz Kotz has argued, through its status as a scored prompt for a performance composed entirely of text.Footnote 76 That text scores figure as a component of today's new music practices, as Brodsky's list confirms, does not diminish the radicality of 4′33″ in its historical context as a critically reflexive, proto-(post-)conceptual artwork. Rather than a work of new/contemporary music, or even an artwork limited to the ‘sonic’, I want to conceive of 4′33″ first as an exemplary work of contemporary art.
Even beyond the largely formalist concerns of early conceptual art (which nonetheless heralded a post-formalism), 4′33″ had already marked the possibility of a post-formalist conceptualism in its engagement with the politics of its moment. Specifically, as Caroline Jones, Jonathan Katz, and Philip Gentry have argued, it served as a historically specific form of queer resistance, deployed during McCarthyism and the Red and Lavender Scares of the Cold War era.Footnote 77 Cage composed 4′33″, that is, as a semi-closeted, bisexual man, during one of the most violently homophobic eras in history. He turned to silence as a form of artistic negation because open political protest was often met with even worse forms of violence. Finally, the indeterminacy of 4′33″ – Cage's attempt to render non-intention as intentional art practice – suggests a kind of paradox-object response to Malik's problem of the contemporary as post-historical. Through a desire to remove desire from the artistic process, that is, Cage's indeterminacy prefigures the post-historical loss of human agency endemic to the contemporary. In a moment marked by the impotence of human action, Cage deploys silence as a paradox-object response to the problem of post-history.Footnote 78
What to name this music-that-is-also-contemporary art? Elsewhere I've termed it ‘critical music’; Osborne refers to a similar approach as ‘music qua art’.Footnote 79 Here I suggest calling it musical contemporary art. The adjectival function of ‘musical’, which suggests a qualifying or diminutive role, or indeed its categorical subsumption within contemporary art, is counterbalanced perhaps by the priority suggested in its appearance at the beginning of the term (not to mention a more pragmatic function of avoiding ‘contemporary art music’, which is of course synonymous with ‘contemporary music’). The term defines post-formalist musical art practices that use music as site, subject, or form; it stands as an alternative to new and contemporary music while, through this historiographical reconstruction, it seeks to articulate a role for music in contemporary art as a site for contemporaneity. But Cage composed 4′33″ almost seventy years ago – what about musical contemporary art today? In order to apprehend such artistic practices, we must be willing to suspend many if not all of the material practices that belong to new music – in Brodsky's sense and beyond – and divest from their ideological and institutional support. In fact, considering a general lack of interest in contemporary art in music studies, they may not appear to us as music at all.
Musical contemporary art can take virtually any material form, including but not limited to sound, and use cultural (and musical and artistic) references ranging from low to high. An example that links the legacy of experimentalism to recent events is Sean Griffin's globally networked realization of Pauline Oliveros's The Lunar Opera; Deep Listening For_Tunes (1999) presented during the 2020 COVID-19 quarantines. Artists whose work has been similarly considered across music and art institutions include, but are not limited to, Nam June Paik, Yoko Ono, Julius Eastman, Marina Rosenfeld, Alvin Lucier, Laurie Anderson, Christian Marclay, Pamela Z, Terre Thaemlitz, Laetitia Sonami, and Peter Ablinger. Other examples of musical contemporary art emerge from contemporary (‘visual’) art and are rarely if ever recognized in music institutions. In the aforementioned Funk Lessons of 1984, for instance, Adrian Piper uses the Afrodiasporic artform of funk to pedagogically counteract commonly held attitudes towards race and class. More recently, in his Castel Volturno video (2010), German artist Raphael Sbrzesny strikes a snare drum while marching out to sea, in a homage to the migrant crisis in the eponymous Italian town. Samson Young's Utopia Trilogy (2019) is an animated music video song cycle that compares cross-cultural utopian visions from the 1930s to the present.Footnote 80 Other musical contemporary art practices can be found in the work of John Baldessari, Anri Sala, Candice Breitz, Stan Douglas, Adel Abidin, Hong-Kai Wang, Kalup Linzy, Clifford Owens, Kembra Pfahler, Ultra-red, and Vaginal Davis. These artists, while often recognized by contemporary art institutions and art criticism, are rarely if ever discussed in music studies. Perhaps more lamentably, neither field recognizes the content of these artists’ myriad contributions as music. Since these artists’ practices do depart from new music conventions, it should not be surprising that they are rarely accepted in music institutions. From the perspective of contemporary art, though, these artists’ contributions are often framed as relating to the medium of ‘sound’. But does this solve the problem of contemporary art and music, if not theoretically then at least institutionally? How contemporary is sound art?
Unhearing the contemporary: How contemporary is sound art?
The contemporaneity of sound art is complicated by the fact that, although it is primarily construed within the context of contemporary art as one of its ‘mediums’, it generally operates through the logic of medium-specific modernism. While typically construed as a medium of contemporary art, sound art struggles in a field that has moved radically beyond medium as a structuring paradigm. I want to argue here that sound art, not unlike new music, falls short of the status of contemporary art as a post-conceptual and generic art. The problem of how to overcome the formalist tendencies sound art inherits from medium-specific modernism has nonetheless been an important issue in recent sound art theory texts.Footnote 81 Seth Kim-Cohen, for instance, has proposed an ‘expanded sonic field’ as an adaptation of Krauss's schema from her seminal 1979 essay ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’.Footnote 82 Although it suggests a migratory expansion of medium, as opposed to the inward pull of medium-specificity, such a model seeks to conserve medium – sculpture in Krauss's case, and sound in Kim-Cohen's – as its primary site of artistic organization. In this sense, even though sound art overcomes some of the limitations of new music, it lacks contemporaneity since it is ultimately based on a modernist concept of medium.
The historiography of medium-specificity, and its relation to sound, then, is our next point of departure. Greenberg argued in his 1939 essay, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, that the artist must turn ‘his attention away from common experience’, which was merely representational, and ‘in upon the medium of his own craft’.Footnote 83 Through a generalized reinvention of the concept of ‘medium’, which he extended a year later in ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’ from the work of eighteenth-century German writer Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Greenberg sought, not only to avoid the discursive, or ‘literature’, but also to map the specificity of each medium to human sensory experience.Footnote 84 Each medium was to be matched up to a corresponding sense modality, for example, painting to sight, sculpture to space, music to hearing, or film to movement. Such a positivistic schema seeking to catalogue the ‘totality of the aesthetic’Footnote 85 is unsurprising, given the trajectory staked out in subsequent structuralist-inflected reconceptions of medium seen decades later, for instance, in Krauss's expanded sculptural field. The historical triumph of this schematization would ultimately set the stage for its defeat in conceptual art's radically generic concept of art, while also leading to medium-specificity's afterlives in attempts to revive formalism, and in recent sound discourse.
Sound, conceived as a category of artistic practice, appears then as a kind of belated species of medium-specificity's taxonomic construction of art as a genus divided into discrete mediums, organized according to the separation of the senses. One reason for this belatedness was that medium-specificity was, in Greenberg's account, as noted, an extension of the ‘sonic’ in music, more specifically in the movement of absolute music. Beginning in the early nineteenth century, a group of German Romantic thinkers and poets elevated instrumental music – later termed ‘absolute music’ – ‘from the lowest to the highest of all musical forms, and indeed of all the arts in general’.Footnote 86 Recall, again, Greenberg's discussion of absolute music's role in the development of the avant-garde and medium-specific modernism.Footnote 87 In that sense, already by the 1810s, absolute music discourse had envisioned a kind of sound art avant la lettre. Nevertheless, these roots of medium-specificity in early nineteenth-century music discourse did not prevent artists, curators, and theorists roughly a century and a half later from ‘discovering’ sound, again.Footnote 88
Another reason for sound art's belatedness is that it first emerged in the 1960s, just as conceptual art had begun its radical dismantling of medium. Conceptual art, along these lines, sought to move beyond the constraints of particular mediums, not only in the sense of their ‘dematerialization’,Footnote 89 but also in an attempt to escape medium-specific modernism. The post-medium condition was Krauss's term for the impasse generated by medium-specific modernism on the one hand, and the complete obliteration of medium heralded by a certain strand of conceptualism on the other. As a response to this impasse, Krauss proposes that artists must reinvent or rearticulate mediums through a form of ‘differential specificity’.Footnote 90 Overall, rather than medium-specificity, contemporary art has ultimately pursued a radically generic post-conceptual art as a departure from the structural mapping of artistic materials to discretized sense modalities.
One may nonetheless ask whether such a generic contemporary art is an accurate description. Indeed, the example of sound art on its own is perhaps enough to contradict Osborne's model. If contemporary art has, in fact, attained such a radically generic condition, why do we see a proliferation of sound – as one of art's supposed species – across its discourses and institutions? Add to that the problem that sound art itself appears as an internally fractured discourse wherein, although often variously claiming and claimed by contemporary art, many of its theorists and practitioners see their work as a species not of art but of music. But here it is important to note that this schema is not descriptive or merely prescriptive but rather exists as a critical determination that turns on art's contemporaneity. This is not simply a topological account of what one might expect to find across today's heterogeneous field of art – who is included in this year's biennials, and so on – but, recalling again Duchamp and abstract expressionism, an evaluative judgement about what should be included in the category of contemporary art, what makes art contemporary. What makes music contemporary doubtless consists in a similar set of judgements.
Conclusion
This, then, is the problem of music and contemporary art: both contemporary music and sound art, despite their respective claims to contemporaneity, fall short of contemporary art's engagement with the contemporary in the historical and philosophically significant sense of the term. On the one hand, although heterogeneous in its meanings, ‘contemporary music’ ultimately renames the discourse of musical modernism, new music, which maps notions of the new onto a generally non-conceptual musical artform that inherits its concept from absolute music. This not only precludes music's achievement of contemporary art's post-conceptual status, but also blocks music's recognition of the aporetic, post-historical conditions of the contemporary that, unlike ‘new conceptualism’, exceed both modernity's purview of the new and its anthropogenic centring of human action. On the other hand, while avoiding some of new music's modernist tendencies, sound art nevertheless remains anachronistic in its reliance upon a quasi-formalist medium-specificity at odds with contemporary art's radical genericity. How then to confront the problem of music and contemporary art?
As an alternative to the categories of new music and sound art, ‘musical contemporary art’ describes music that achieves genuine contemporaneity: it defines post-formalist practices that use music as a site, subject, or form while operating through contemporary art's post-conceptual condition. But how does this category figure into contemporary art's status as generic? Is there not a risk that ‘musical contemporary art’ would be subjected to the same criticism as sound art? Namely, what would prevent ‘musical contemporary art’ from functioning as the ‘medium’ of an art that has moved significantly beyond the logic of mediums? To such questioning, we can note that music, considered historically, was never exactly a medium, at least not in the sense of medium-specific modernism, prior to its consolidation as instrumental sound in absolute music; once consolidated, it provided a model, moreover, for the very medium-specificity out of which contemporary art's current post-conceptual genericity initially emerged. Rather, musicality is a register that can and, I think, must be instantiated across a variety of media, including but not limited to sound, in order to sustain its critical meaning; musicality becomes in this sense an aspect or quality rather than a strictly defined form. Nevertheless, institutions based on restricted understandings of forms or media cannot be dissolved through thought alone, and any categorization – even ‘contemporary art’ – remains at risk of becoming another formalism; as with social practice, or more recently in what Malik calls ‘ex-art’ or Roberts's ‘general social technique’,Footnote 91 the most interesting contemporary work is often found at the limits of the very concept of art. Rather than second fiddle, music can play a central role here. Responding to the need to rethink the relationship between sound and medium and between contemporary art and music, we have explored the possibility of musical art practices that exceed the limitations of these discourses. By recognizing an important point of intersection between contemporary art and music, a possibility often foreclosed in both art and music circles, we might finally be able to articulate music capable of genuinely engaging the contemporary as musical contemporary art.
