Playing back reality
|
M.K.: I believe that the only way not to create misunderstandings is to be silent. This is because it is very difficult to report on work one undertakes on a daily basis. One's questions to oneself pile up in such a way that I have asked two friends [Klaus Schöning and Frans van Rossum] to draw up a list of questions they would like to ask me. What Frans van Rossum asks - How do the eye and ear function? - is something I believe I can scarcely answer, since I'm not a physiologist. And one of the reasons I have seized upon this profession is that I don't have any answer myself: I don't know what music is either. I am always astonished that many people are so certain of what music is. It's just as hard to define what is going in these terms "Play / Playback". When I made my first Hörspiel - called A Recording Situation - what I was particularly concerned with was what made it different from music. In music, sounds are put together in abstractum, but with an inner relationship to reality. For me, the discussion about whether music is an abstract art or a realistic one has long since been decided ideologically: in favour of reality. Yet in the Hörspiel, we are constantly concerned with something rather striking: we are constructing realities. The broadcast realities are almost all invented. They are not freely invented: either they have a basis in reality, or they develop a new reality from relics of a reality which is broadly familiar. But how is this reality produced (and this applies not just to my pieces or my art - it applies in general)? Hörspiel is based on the art of playback. What preoccupied me ever the since the beginning of my work in Hörspiel was to see whether the "playback" is being made in realitas. The term "playback" [in English] is something we have inherited - it doesn't exist in German - and it means producing something new in relation to something that exists, so that at times a certain synchronicity is apparent. Whether this synchonicity is produced realiter, that is, either made "live" or with a conserved recording, or whether it is put together daily at the editing table and mixing desk, with technicians and producers, as here in the Hörspiel studio or the Studio for Acoustic Art, doesn't matter. I see absolutely no philosophical difference there - it's a technical difference, not a philosophical or aesthetic one. So this construction of realities that occurs in Hörspiel or acoustic art, is based essentially on playback, on the replay and completion of something that exists. We should really speak of these realities only in the plural: each reality is composed of different degrees of understanding and perception. The "realities of reality" might perhaps be the most accurate definition. That's what we do every day with music and noise, noise and music, music and speech: crossing the borderline between the invention and re-invention of realities. These topics were actually not so clear to me at the beginning, because I was blinded by the possibilities in the studio. So I am always trying to come into the studio without ideological preconceptions. I have nothing to defend, and also nothing to lose. What particularly interests me in the work I have done here in the last 25 years is a typical tape-recorder invention: always starting back at the beginning. At some stage I or other people will analyse all that, and see exactly where the relationships lie. In fact, these relationships are quite clear. On the one hand, all of this work - not just mine, but that of many colleagues - is based on a playback which is very concrete, or else it is sublimated, and supplemented by the listener's imagination. This is the second point that has constantly preoccupied me. In radio we are obliged (perhaps I'm being a little too crass here) to make acoustic situations clear to the listener, without visual supplements - if that's what interests us. Naturally, we can also produce completely hermetic broadcasts: we've done that, and Klaus Schöning in his Studio for Acoustic Art has done it many more times. This hermeticism is part of the aesthetic of acoustic art , but what interests me is trying to make situations clear right from the outset, so that in the course of my work I can, if I wish, vary (obscure or illuminate) them. I approach my work without any didactic ambitions. I find that an approach simply makes things complicated, but not really complex: it sheds no light, it doesn't help. But here we're already dealing with terminology, and this in a time where concerts are called "performances" and performances are called "concerts". Even definition can be a subject of definition. Now for "Play". Why Playback Play? I think that "play" is part of the clarification of relationships that I was just discussing: a play with situations that are utterly clear. That's why I subtitled the piece News from the Music Fair. For you to bring your imagination to bear on a Music Fair, I have to give a free musico-poetic interpretation of this fair. If I were to say Chronicle of a Music Fair then, like a journalist, I would be obliged to deliver an account. This I avoid, and I avoid it by taking these relationships, which are geographical, musical and social, and trying to create from them a texture of variations. Here I need a "play": a play with these given factors. To pick up something from one of Schöning and van Rossum's questions: it is true that I am very interested in the shaping of spaces. That is one of the noblest tasks that we have to undertake in studio work. The difference between music and acoustic art, or music and Hörspiel, is that we can shape space at the mixing desk. In music that doesn't exist, or only very modestly (very often we mix musical spaces by moving our head: the "ears-mixing-desk"). And that's why, in the past 30 years, people have been desperately trying to emphasise that we have a kind of "musical space" that can be geographically located. We only have this possibility through interplay with the listener, by offering spaces which the listener actually completes. And that happens ceaselessly in radio, if one is working in these terms. We are now in a position to offer spaces which are no longer virtual, but concrete. The listener believes in the shaping of these spaces, and he doesn't have to kid himself that they are taking place: they are taking place, and are extraordinarily suggestive. That again is different to music, where this option doesn't exist. Composers are always trying to achieve such depths, but it's almost impossible. Not harmonically, not by splitting up the ensemble, and not - as people constantly tried to do in the seventies - by putting the players in different rooms. The result was boring,because the players were playing without a context, and the listeners were bored, because they couldn't concentrate on the music. That can't happen with loudspeakers. A piece may be good, bad or indifferent, but this loss of concentration through loss of space never takes place. One can reject a piece, or like it, but the relationship between loudspeaker and listener is quite different: it is a spatial one. One of the questions relates to something I said last week in an interview in a Cologne newspaper, namely that my Hörspiele were my operas. Perhaps that was put too simplistically, since the literal meaning of "opera" as "work" tends to be forgotten. But I no longer believe in opera. In times with such a palette of possible forms in which music can have contact with something extra-musical, there is truly no need for opera. It's a relic that has placed a burden on us. That doesn't mean that I don't love Mozart's operas, and Alban Berg's too. But I see that opera's conservative business aspect, and the appalling conservatism of musical life, impedes our imagination. In radio I have had the possibility of developing this imagination, of pushing it further. And my radio pieces, Hörspiele and films are my operas in this sense: that they are, from the outset, "impure" - just like operas. Music theatre is an impure art, just as acoustic art is. And anyway, I am no purist - I don't believe in purism. The greatest purists were also secret sinners. Finally, a question which also relates to many other pieces of mine: "Is the composition Playback Play a playback of a music fair?" Of course not. When I visited the music fair in Frankfurt, it became clear that for me, only a musical interpretation of this chaos was possible. I'm no journalist, no chronicler. What I saw there was an extraordinary mixture of commerce and art, of imagination and hard cash, of situations which were (involuntarily) like a circus, and a constant wash of music. Of concerts of twenty minutes' duration that started every half hour, and passionate people who lived mainly for music, and depended on it as if it were a drug. Of people who were wandering around with headphones like erratic logs, and others who incessantly touched everything by way of musical instruments that could be touched. And when I saw this mixture of trying things out and fantasising about owning the things that produced the sounds, the conversations, the reactions, the "distinguished personalities" who have absolutely nothing to do with music, but seem necessary so as to endow a music fair with a certain "relevance" - when I saw all this, I began to conceive a piece in which the whole thing is passed through a close-meshed aesthetic filter - a filter that only lets music get through, and not the things involving the noise-world of the music fair. So I concentrated on music, and indeed on a single leitmotiv that links this whole chaos, and creates a certain unity. This involves another of van Rossum's questions, concerning my "musical figures". Yes, I'm interested in musical figures, because in music, no realistic art can be created without them, and for me this is the Alpha and Omega in enabling the listener to come to grips with music. This identification and re-identification, and understanding how these figures relate to other figures, allows the listener to complete a musical architecture in his own mind. Without it, the music seems to be going nowhere, and he gets bored - passively so, because he can't gain access to it. Since music can be absolute in abstracto, it needs this link to reality. There is always a dialectical situation here, a question to examine incessantly. And for this reason, in Playback Play the playing with the devices and
concept of "playback" becomes important. "Play" relativises the playback to a
fiction. Because the music fair was just a pretext for me to get a clearer view
of things I was trying to understand - that people were being forced into a very
active playback role, partly through the industry, but partly through their
longings. They need this kind of gigantic Walkman in order to gain acoustic
confirmation that they can hear. The familiar man in the street listening to
music over headphones usually seems happy, not only because he hears it (perhaps
he doesn't), but because he adopts the stance of someone listening to music. He
becomes a playback of himself: his public's public. It's a completely new
situation, it didn't exist before. This is the present day's present, or
offence, to us all, and one has to come to terms with it. So does radio -
because it produces uninterrupted broadcasting for listeners who are occupied
with something else. They are not listening to the radio actively, not missing a
second; radio knows that it is broadcasting to people who only take in part of
the broadcast. So we are being forced into this extraordinary play with playback
as media, as consumers, and as authors.
Translation: Richard Toop
|