10/26/2020
10/09/2020
Autonomous and Heteronomous Music
In chapter four of “Formalized Music”, Iannis Xenakis established the distinction of two musical
practices according to the autonomy of the musical work in relation to outside actions, its self-
contained character. There are autonomous musical pieces which follow a set of rules
predetermined in a score according to a historical tradition, which even when they leave room for
improvisation or the open combinatorics of chance, their unfoldment follows a linear programming.
The constructions of these works are determined by and restricted to the “score practice”. A second
class of works, the heteronomous, could be described roughly in opposition to the previous
category as being determined by forces beyond the score tradition. In this class, we could include
music whose interactive action produces complex patterns of feed-backs (not necessarily
predetermined) in which the purpose of the interaction does not even follow the internal structure of
the musical art.
What Xenakis is talking about is the projection of different kinds of order structures upon sound, or
even upon different kinds of time canvases. The result is a different kind of musical phenomena, a
divergent tradition which has old roots in the world of the Pythagoreans. Lejaren Hiller told me
once about a conceptual piece of music (I mean a piece which does not require its actual
performance) which fits the category of heteronomous music. The idea was to put the estructural
vibrations of a building into actual sound via a morphism that would transform the inputs of several
sensors distributed throughout the building into audible frequencies produced by a synthesizer.
Hiller, like Xenakis, were more interested in the “intelligence” put into the work than in the
aesthetical results. I think that conceptual music opens new worlds of possible aural experience and
that beauty enters into the system not as a primary consideration, though it is precisely beauty what
makes the concept to be a musical one.
A closer look to Xenakis distinction raises two basic questions: in relation to what are score rules
autonomous? In what sense is the traditional practice of music an independent realm in relation to
the more general one of human aesthetic action?
10/05/2020
10/02/2020
Pianoforte
No sé si los programas de inteligencia artificial que operan en Youtube tienen algún tipo de
sensibilidad musical, si las armonías y simetrías numéricas de una obra musical les son ajenas
o, por el contrario, ofrecen algún tipo de respuesta a este tipo de estímulos (en su caso meramente
numéricos). Más allá de este potencial público de inteligencia artificial, no creo que nadie escuche
esta pieza de principio a fin. La obra no está pensada para una escucha lineal, aunque una escucha de ese
tipo es una posibilidad. Su núcleo es una inversión retrogradada de mi obra “Mímesis” en la que las
duraciones han sido cuadruplicadas y alteradas con la superposición de cánones hasta formar un
tejido nada aleatorio. El punto hasta el que el oyente se aventura en “Pianoforte” está
condicionado subjetivamente por su exposición a los más de 100 años de “música no tonal, no
modal y no modulatoria” que llevamos en la tradición occidental. La pieza es liminal en más de
un sentido, y va más allá de la experiencia interpretativa posible. Es contraria al estrés de la sensibilidad
contemporánea popular inmersa en océanos de incertidumbre y falta de significado para la vida humana,
aunque a la vez abraza ese estrés de igual forma a la que el hierro se entrega al fuego que lo templa.