Living Electronic Music (review)

Abstract

The way music is composed, performed, and consumed has been radically altered by rapid technological developments in the last sixty years. Even acoustic music from earlier periods is now most frequently mediated by electronic means. For new music the possibilities afforded by the new technology are numerous. It is, for example, possible to construct music from recorded environmental sounds, immerse the audience in sounds from a 3D array of loudspeakers, improvise live on stage with laptops, or use EEG data from performers to shape music. What are the aesthetic implications of these developments? Does the involvement of technology make the music less ‘human’ or less ‘alive’? Are there any relationships between the many different styles of music that now employ very similar technologies?
Simon Emmerson is well placed to tackle such issues. His first book, The Language of Electroacoustic Music (London, 1986), an edited collection, played an important role in establishing the study of the aesthetics of electroacoustic music. Twenty-two years on, this publication remains an important text. Emmerson’s second edited collection, Music, Electronic Media and Culture (Ashgate, 2000), is notable for the breadth of musical style it embraces and its broader engagement with issues concerning culture and electronic media. In Living Electronic Music, his first monograph, Emmerson continues both the concern to develop the aesthetics of electronic music and to place it in a wider musical and cultural context. The book is virtuosic in its juggling of many different musics and many different interdisciplinary references. As the author has admitted, it ‘proved impossible to construct a straight-through narrative for this book. Each chapter is designed to be a self-sufficient essay, yet all cross-reference and “need” each other to get the bigger picture’ (p. xiv). Many threads (e.g. space, causality, performance) run through the book, reappearing in several chapters in different contexts and each essay is in itself a rich and complex interweaving of materials. This is a distinctive strength of the book but one that makes it difficult to encapsulate in a review.
The first two chapters consider relationships between the musical and the extra-musical: firstly the relationship between music and sounds recorded from the environment, and secondly the ways in which extra-musical ideas can be used as models for musical composition. Electronic music often makes use of recorded environmental sounds, and the opening chapter, ‘Living Presence’, investigates the relationship between recorded sound and perceived meaning. Starting from Pierre Schaeffer’s concepts of acousmatic music and reduced listening, in which real-world associations of recorded sounds are ‘bracketed out’, Emmerson examines the ways in which various composers have ‘undone’ this elimination of extra-musical association and have employed source recognition creatively. Luc Ferrari, for example, in his ‘anecdotal’ music sought ‘to make music and bring into relation together the shreds of reality in order to tell stories’ (p. 7) while at the same time respecting aspects of the acousmatic tradition. Others such as Trevor Wishart, Murray Schafer, Hildegard Westerkamp, Luigi Nono, and Katharine Norman provide further examples of the variety of ways in which composers have deliberately worked with source recognition in their music.
Emmerson links the discussion of these wide-ranging musical examples to an equally broad range of theoretical ideas. These include Luke Windsor’s work in adapting to sound James Gibson’s ecological approach to perception, in particular his concept of ‘affordance’. The ‘ecological approach assumes that the environment is highly structured and that organisms are directly “sensitive” to such structure’ (p.17, quoting Windsor). Christopher Small’s work on the sociology of music is used in discussing the importance of the personal and social presence of music.
In ‘The Reanimation of the World: Relocating the “Live”’ the focus moves from how humans relate to sound itself to the metaphors and extra-musical models that influence the compositional processes of composers. The scientific theory of models is examined and Emmerson concludes that composers often drive this theory in reverse. Whereas in science models are used to help explain existing phenomena, in music models are used to generate new musical material in one form or another. External models become generative rather than explanatory tools.
Illustrations are drawn from models...