Tomorrow I will be giving a talk at the ‘Exploring Xenakis: Performance, Practice, Philosophy’ Symposium with colleague and critical theorist Michael D. Atkinson. Our talk discusses Xenakis, the Avant Garde, May ’68 and the legendary quote ‘Xenakis, not Gounod’ which was scrawled in graffiti during the protests in France.
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May ’68 saw a time of political tension in France: the Situationist International signified a growing desire to move away from capitalism and the world of boredom and alienation it entails, and, likewise, young radicals wanted to free music from the shackles of reification that contradicted the notion of ‘avant garde’. People protested via music, vandalism, public broadcasts, sexuality, subversive behaviour, and vandalism. Graffiti was rife, with phrases such as ‘Commute, work, commute, sleep…’, ‘In a society that has abolished every kind of adventure the only adventure that remains is to abolish the society’, and ‘Art is dead, don’t consume its corpse.’ Upon the walls of the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris were graffitied the words ‘Xenakis, not Gounod’.
This focus on an avant-garde practice that exemplifies experimentation, chance, subversion, and the like was part of an effort to sublate art with everyday life, that is, to enact a revolution of everyday life. In this talk, we will explore the intertwining of such revolutionary desires with the avant-garde tendencies of the day, and, further, how the ageing, commodification, and subsequent reification of the Avant Garde is antithetical to the desires and ideology behind itself. We will focus in particular on how Xenakis and those like him became central to the revolutionary consciousness of the day, and what it is about Xenakis’ practice that paradoxically disavows such possibilities.
Interstice is an artwork and iPhone app that enables users to record, and listen to, an audible representation of their heartbeat. It also allows users to select a musical fragment to accompany their heartbeat. As such, users from all over the world are able to collaborate in the formation of a composition comprising an intricate cacophony of audible heartbeats and musical fragments.
The acts of composing and performing are central processes to the formation of a musical work. Performance is a medium through which music is formed. It is a significant part of a work’s compositional process and, as such, forms a symbiotic relationship with the act of composing. An iterative cycle between performance and composition comes about when the composer performs their own work or composes through performance. Performance in this manner can be seen as a form of practice-based research that can guide the compositional process.
Primarily engaging with music of the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries, (Per)Forming Art: Performance as Research in Contemporary Artworks focuses on performance as a type of compositional technique and as a mode of practice-based research for the act of composing a work. It addresses how performance and composition are reciprocally entwined and what role this hermeneutic relationship plays in creative practice today. This publication is the work of multiple authors from academic institutions around the world; each approaches the topic “(Per)Forming Art” from their own perspective. As such, the contents of this book will appeal to a variety of academic interests pertaining to various “styles,” traditions and cultures, all of which are unified by the relationship between performance and composition.
I would like to thank the following researchers for contributing to this book: Michael D. Atkinson (Sheffield Hallam University); Gabriele Cavallo (Goldsmiths, University of London); Hans–Peter Gasselseder (University of Aalborg); Jacopo Gianninoto (Assumption University of Thailand); Maria Kallionpää (University of Oxford); Marina Liontou Mochament (Leiden University, Orpheus Institute); Adilia Yip (Royal Conservatoire Antwerp); Cornelia Zambila (Orpheus Institute Ghent)