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The politics of composing, performing and listening
By Michael Parsons
Music is everywhere among the most sociable of human activities; it can play an important role in popular protest and resistance movements. However, the idea that it can have a direct influence on wider social and political issues often fails to take into account the complexity of political, economic and cultural forces in modern society. There are many different ways in which politics and music can be associated, and there need be no single prescriptive model for the relationship between them. A number of experimental composers have been inspired by political causes, by protest against injustice and exploitation, or by an explicit programme for social change. Music of this kind has almost always depended either upon the use of a text, or of melodic material derived from popular traditions - as, for example, in Cardew's Thälmann Variations, Dave Smith's Second Piano Concert, or Frederic Rzewski's variations on the Chilean resistance song, The People United.
Christian Wolff has used folk and popular music associated with a wide range of protest movements, though not in ways that are likely to reach a mass audience. In his work the original material is often transformed by the use of experimental techniques: it can affect the perceptions of performers and listeners in subtle and indirect ways. Wolff's approach has also involved trying to find ways of dealing with what might be described as the 'internal' politics of music itself, the relationship between composer, performer and listener and the dynamics of performance activity.
The direct engagement of the performer in the creative process is central to this approach. In emphasising co-operative discovery and inventiveness, rather than exact reproduction of fully worked-out scores, indeterminacy has played a key role in the experimental work of Cage, Cardew, Wolff, Earle Brown, in the early, Fluxus-related pieces of LaMonte Young and George Brecht, in Terry Riley's In C and in many pieces by composers associated with the Scratch Orchestra. This approach involves a flexible attitude to musical notation, and the process of working things out collectively in rehearsal. Graphic and verbal scores can be realised in many different ways: they invite diversity rather that unanimity of response. Performers have wide scope for intervention and choice, and, therefore, greater responsibility for the results. The composer's role is no longer that of controller, but rather of initiator, facilitator or catalyst of musical relationships, proposing a range of possibilities, setting up a framework of rules and procedures to be explored, or providing material for performers to put together in ways of their own devising.
Experimental music also involves a different attitude to listening. It is no longer a matter of receiving messages from the composer, but rather of discovering and making new connections; listening becomes a creative activity in itself. The use of 'silence', i.e. openness to the environment, offers the listener time and space for reflection. The relationship between composer, performer and listener is no longer a coercive one, but an open process of shared awareness. Alvin Lucier's work is exemplary in this respect: he devises situations in which the composer is listening and making discoveries on an equal basis with everyone else. Morton Feldman's phrase - 'not pushing the sounds around' - also means not pushing the listener around: i.e. not using music as a form of social manipulation. This attitude has clear implications, beyond the immediate context of musical performance, for acoustic ecology, for attentiveness to each other and to the environment generally. It can help to transform our perceptions in a non-didactic way. As Cage remarked, a performance of music can be a metaphor for society: it might conceivably provide a model for other possibilities of social organisation.