Experimental Music and Communicative Action

The alienation of lay audiences from experimental music is broadly assumed today in the academe: composers of such music, it is alleged, address primarily their peers. This problem is symptomatic of the conditions of radical modernity, as analyzed by Jurgen Habermas, who distinguishes between the autonomous productions of expert culture (system) and the everyday experience of lay people (lifeworld). Under such conditions, Habermas advocates communicative action—verbal and nonverbal exchange, oriented toward understanding—as a form of mediation between these two cultural spheres (Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vols. 1 and 2, 1984 and 1987). Recent experimental projects of New Music New College may be understood as musical forms of communicative action. One such project, Hocket Science, was created collaboratively by seven composers, who developed this piece from a basic concept (“mediation”) to a finished work for sixteen vocalists. The compositional structure of Hocket Science requires that performers engage in symbolic dialogue, an exchange of musical material that is transformational on the individual and collective level. Audience members participate vicariously in the transformation, and become mobile at key moments in the performance. The work thus addresses the boundaries of autonomous art—the boundary between performer and audience, and between individual and the collective in the compositional process. Hocket Science attempts to open the lifeworld of participants to the insights of “expert culture” by focusing on questions of agency: Who creates? Who participates? Who listens? Who controls the outcome? This article argues for the relevance of Habermas’s social theory to contemporary compositional practice. 1 Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs, Director, New Music New College, New College of Florida, 5800 Bay Shore Road, Sarasota, FL 34243-2109, USA. E-mail: miles@ncf.edu 12 International Journal of Music and Performing Arts, Vol. 2(2), December 2014 For the past twelve years, the focus of my work has been experimental music—music that largely eschews convention and that values process over product. Those of us who compose, perform, and promote experimental music repeatedly confront the perception that such music alienates audiences, and that experimental music is intended primarily for practitioners and offers little of interest to anyone else. Based on my experience as composer and performer, and on my reading of social theory, I will argue the opposite. Understood in the light of Jurgen Habermas’s theory of communicative action, experimental music mediates between the sphere of specialists and lay audiences, promoting a reflexive engagement with music and its social dimension. The bulk of this essay will be devoted to explicating Habermas’s theory and to discussing relevant projects of New Music New College, my experimental music group at New College of Florida. First, however, I wish to discuss recent music history and explore the reasons for experimental music’s marginalization. No one would claim that experimental music has ever been at the center of musical production. Even during the sixties, when John Cage, Morton Feldman, Cornelius Cardew were at the peak of their influence, experimental music was at best a challenge to the more dominant forms of musical practice, whether traditional or so-called avant-garde. Though techniques of indeterminacy differed fundamentally from the systematic controls of serialists, such distinctions were often lost on critics and the public, which tended to lump all such practices into one broad category: “new music.” The seventies witnessed a broad-based reaction against the most complex and radical forms of contemporary music, whether composed by serialists, postserialists, or, for that matter, experimentalists. Leading the charge were composers such as George Rochberg, who argued in both essays and music for a return to the musical past, not simply in spirit but in substance. A variety of “neos” followed in the succeeding years: neotraditionalism, neoromanticism, and neotonality. While the focus of this polemic was ostensibly music, the real quarrel was over modernity itself. Rochberg and others feared that the specialized techniques of contemporary music—techniques that he associated with rampant scientism—alienated composers from their audience and from themselves. 2 Here I follow Michael Nyman in using the term “avant-garde” to designate the high modernist practices of composers such Boulez, Stockhausen, Nono, and later Berio, Xenakis, Ligeti, et al. While the term “avant-garde” has been defined much more precisely in literary and art criticism (see Peter Burger, Theory of the Avant-garde), its use in music discourse is by now firmly entrenched.