Open Construction
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Central to this project were two apparently contradictory impulses that Boulez and Berio found prefigured in Joyce's writing: the artist's attempt to exert total control over the musical material, and the simultaneous interest in aleatory forms that required the active participation or choice of the performer.
Neither the control system nor the chance aesthetic was considered adequate alone: total serialism, the mathematization of all harmonic, rhythmic, dynamic and timbral parameters of a work, created a formal complexity that could rarely if ever be discovered by a listening audience, while chance composition was considered to be too great a renunciation of artistic responsibility. The model of the "open work" was proposed to synthesize these antitheses. In his influential early (pre-semiotic) study of the open work, Umberto Eco defines it in opposition to
a classical composition...[which] posits an assemblage of sound units which the composer arranged in a closed, well-defined manner before presenting it to the listener. He converted his idea into conventional symbols which more or less oblige the eventual performer to reproduce the format devised by the composer himself, whereas the new musical works...reject the definitive, concluded message and multiply the formal possibilities of the distribution of their elements...In primitive terms we can say that they are quite literally 'unfinished': the author seems to hand them on to the performer more or less like the components of a construction kit (Eco 2-4).That is, Eco's exemplary open musical works consist of rigorously composed parts that may be assembled in many different orders (as in Stockhausen's Klavierstück XI [1957]), or of parts whose relation is capable of change even if their order is fixed (as in the durations and tempos of Berio's original Sequenza for flute [1958]); an open work is not improvisatory, like jazz or Indian raga, nor is it a complete refusal of intention and control, as in Cage's Zen-influenced works. Open works are not indeterminate, not totally without pre-existing structure, but rather suspended between many different but fully determinate structures. Thus they enable a composer, in principle at least, to reconcile the apparently contradictory imperatives of complete control, which reached its apotheosis in the total serialism of the earlier Boulez and Stockhausen, and the freedom in performance that was the hallmark of Cage's aleatory works.
Both kinds of formal openness, that of sequence and that of intra-sequential relation, find privileged models in Joyce's writing, though not only there. Eco insists that the literary work in general, even when its order is fixed, is a "continuous potentiality of 'openness'--in other words, an indefinite reserve of meanings"--of which "the work of James Joyce is a major example" (Eco 10). He cites "Wandering Rocks" and its multiplication of perspectives, and more importantly Finnegans Wake, which "is finite in one sense, but in another sense it is unlimited" (Eco 10) by virtue of its circular construction and its puns. "Each occurrence, each word stands in a series of possible relations with all the others in the text. According to the semantic choice which we make in the case of one unit, so goes the way we interpret all the other units in the text" (Eco 10).
Central to this project were two apparently contradictory impulses that Boulez and Berio found prefigured in Joyce's writing: the artist's attempt to exert total control over the musical material, and the simultaneous interest in aleatory forms that required the active participation or choice of the performer.
Neither the control system nor the chance aesthetic was considered adequate alone: total serialism, the mathematization of all harmonic, rhythmic, dynamic and timbral parameters of a work, created a formal complexity that could rarely if ever be discovered by a listening audience, while chance composition was considered to be too great a renunciation of artistic responsibility. The model of the "open work" was proposed to synthesize these antitheses. In his influential early (pre-semiotic) study of the open work, Umberto Eco defines it in opposition to
a classical composition...[which] posits an assemblage of sound units which the composer arranged in a closed, well-defined manner before presenting it to the listener. He converted his idea into conventional symbols which more or less oblige the eventual performer to reproduce the format devised by the composer himself, whereas the new musical works...reject the definitive, concluded message and multiply the formal possibilities of the distribution of their elements...In primitive terms we can say that they are quite literally 'unfinished': the author seems to hand them on to the performer more or less like the components of a construction kit (Eco 2-4).That is, Eco's exemplary open musical works consist of rigorously composed parts that may be assembled in many different orders (as in Stockhausen's Klavierstück XI [1957]), or of parts whose relation is capable of change even if their order is fixed (as in the durations and tempos of Berio's original Sequenza for flute [1958]); an open work is not improvisatory, like jazz or Indian raga, nor is it a complete refusal of intention and control, as in Cage's Zen-influenced works. Open works are not indeterminate, not totally without pre-existing structure, but rather suspended between many different but fully determinate structures. Thus they enable a composer, in principle at least, to reconcile the apparently contradictory imperatives of complete control, which reached its apotheosis in the total serialism of the earlier Boulez and Stockhausen, and the freedom in performance that was the hallmark of Cage's aleatory works.
Both kinds of formal openness, that of sequence and that of intra-sequential relation, find privileged models in Joyce's writing, though not only there. Eco insists that the literary work in general, even when its order is fixed, is a "continuous potentiality of 'openness'--in other words, an indefinite reserve of meanings"--of which "the work of James Joyce is a major example" (Eco 10). He cites "Wandering Rocks" and its multiplication of perspectives, and more importantly Finnegans Wake, which "is finite in one sense, but in another sense it is unlimited" (Eco 10) by virtue of its circular construction and its puns. "Each occurrence, each word stands in a series of possible relations with all the others in the text. According to the semantic choice which we make in the case of one unit, so goes the way we interpret all the other units in the text" (Eco 10).
posted by radon at 1:44 PM
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