In his seminal essay ‘At the ends of fruitful land’ (1955, Die Reihe 1), Pierre Boulez stated that ‘[r]arely in the history of music has the musician found himself in a more radical position, faced with as unaccustomed a task as the creation of the very sound itself’. In his aim for the structural integration of sound synthesis and musical form, Boulez postulated the historic relevance of serialism as a shift of paradigms in music composition, theory and aesthetics. Since the early 1950s, Boulez claimed, to utilise acoustic instruments and to compose sound colours by merging their spectra became an artistic decision and aesthetic statement rather than a mere technique.
If the introduction of sound synthesis as a means of composition was one shift of paradigms connected with electroacoustic sound – after broadcast, recording and sound manipulation – it was not meant to be the last. However, one could doubt whether later shifts were as radical in nature. Did developments such as experimental live-electronics, listener participation and mobility, intermedia synchronisation, easier access to means of production and distribution change our conception of music as fundamentally as the disappearance of the hic et nunc that performer and perceiver of music used to share?
When preparing the call for this issue of Organised Sound, we were anticipating contributions considering the concept of aesthetic radicalism in the context of material-oriented music aesthetics. To our surprise, however, most authors framed aesthetic radicalism quite differently: not as radical approaches to music composition, musical form and means of listener participation, but as new approaches to the understanding of music itself, its work concept, and music analysis.
In his contribution, Agnostino Di Scipio draws our attention to differences and interdependences of music and sound art practices and their ideological implications. Radicalism is not understood as an attitude towards a historical situation in the development of the arts in a Hegelian sense, but as an intensification and re-phrasing of ontological discourses. Michael Gurevich, however, focuses on the inevitable historicality of media-based music works and their performance. Where the means of sound production, once radical and unknown in the realm of music, become artefacts of media-archeological interest, the continuity of the work in the emphatical sense is called into question. The phenomenological approach as established by Pierre Schaeffer and favoured by Jonty Harrison might bridge material- and perception-oriented aesthetics. Mitchell Herrmann reconstructs Harrison’s reading of Schaeffer’s reduced listening, thereby sustaining the limitations of Schaeffer’s concept and revealing the aesthetic implications of Harrison’s theory-informed artistic practice. Herrmann suggests Harrison’s title ‘unsound objects’ as a term for the latter’s dialectic observations.
A different approach to acousmatic composition is presented by Edith Alonso in her contribution on François Bayle. The subjectivity of the listener’s construction of musical space is here mirrored by the pluralism of time concepts that seem to be required to explain the morphology of Bayle’s works. Edgard Varèse’s article ‘The Liberation of Sound’, finally, is the point of departure of Michael Gatt’s contribution on electroacoustic music analysis. The author features the OREMA project, a platform to establish and foster a community for said analysis, its methodology and tools.
In addition to contributions received in reply to the call for the main theme of this issue of Organised Sound, this issue contains four off-thematic items. The first, Peter Nelson’s approach to space concepts in electroacoustic music, includes aspects we consider radical. This is followed by Riccardo Wanke’s investigation of electroacoustic genres crossing borders, Filipe Otondo’s investigation involves a new approach to spatialisation involving loudspeakers as part of a performer’s body-worn system and finally Julian Whittam’s vision of the one-man band in today’s digital culture.
