ABSTRACT
The term experimental music is often used today. Surprisingly the frequency of its use has not had any effect in unifying the term’s meanings. In general there are four distinct views of what experimental music might be. It is the final view which will serve as our definition.
The 1970s have become known as a time of “postmodernism” in several of the arts; the term avant-garde therefore has become a cliché as its literal meaning can hardly be used for describing contemporary art. The problem was, and is still, that the modern public has been presented with so much innovation, especially in the 50s and 60s that one might say that almost all art today is avant-garde due to the relatively small amount of appreciation, or conversely, that there is no new avant-garde art as there is really nothing new under the sun any more.
Whatever the reason may be, avant-garde used as a synonym for that which is innovative and difficult to appreciate due to newness had to be labeled differently. Much music has been grouped together as “new music”, “contemporary music” and so on, but these terms are often used as well for all art music of the 20th century.
Experimental music became synonymous with avant-gardism to many as most “before its time” art is by nature experimental. The “Grove” Dictionary (entry by Paul Griffiths) and texts of Robert Fink and Herbert Eimert (all listed in the bibliography), the latter seeing this new notion as a modish cliché, all tended to merge the avant-garde with the experimental. The problem here is that most writers who choose the synonym approach do not define innovation, avant-gardism, or what they call “advanced techniques”.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s when the sonological field was growing quickly, two of its foremost composers and writers, Pierre Schaeffer in France and Lejaren Hiller in the U.S. defined experimental music as pertaining to music made in the laboratory, that is in the musique concrète, electronic and/or computer music studios. This is a very narrow definition of the term which only relates to applied electronic technology.
Simultaneously another composer-writer, John Cage, came to a totally dissimilar conclusion as to what he saw experimental music to be. To him an experimental action is one in which the outcome cannot be foreseen. In other words, as is typical of Cage, one can speak of the various ways of infiltrating purposelessness into music. Cage calls it indeterminacy; others, including Boulez and Stockhausen, who limited their purposelessness to small nuances of choice, called it aleatory.
This definition, or version of the experiment has been accepted by many prominent writers including Michael Nyman, Wim Mertens, to an extent Konrad Boehmer, and especially Joaquim M. Benitez as is discussed in his article, Avant-garde or Experimental? Classifying Contemporary Music. Benitez claims that “classical avant-gardists” (e.g., Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen) are traditionalists in that they create works of art, whereas composers of the Cage school could hardly speak of making musical works when their outcomes are unknown. Citing Earle Brown he points out that an experimental performance is composed rather than that a composition is performed. The goal is spontaneity and to an extent the loosening of fixed musical boundaries. In citing a manuscript of Susumu Shōno, Benitez presents an interesting four-level division of experimental music-making. The experiment or the indeterminacy takes place:
Between the composer and the score (i.e., one uses random-choice operations during the composition process),
Between score and performer (i.e., the score is indeterminate and demands choice and response by the musician during a performance). This can be manifested in three ways: first, the macro-structure of a piece exists, and the performer fills in the micro-structure elements – this is sometimes called the parameter-freer approach (see illustration I/1 ); second, the micro-level is completely written out, but macro-level decisions are left free, as in the Available Forms works of Brown (see part 6, chapter XVIf); thirdly, the performer is to react to a graphic image (see illustration I/2 ) or to a prose text (see also chapter VI) in which both macro-and micro-decisions must be made,
Between performer and sound recording (through electronic modification), and
Between sound recording and listener, the least common (e.g., the record of HPSCHD of Cage and Hiller supplies a unique dynamics chart for each listener to mix a personal stereo version during the duration of the recording).
An example of a score in which one parameter (in this case the duration of the piano notes – encircled ones signify unperiodically played “phrases”) is left open to the interpreter: Tone for piano by Shuko Mizuno (Tokyo: Ongaku no Tomo-Sha, 1970). https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780203066003/40cb9b4f-edec-4e79-8bda-2013e3266c25/content/fig1_1_B.tif" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/> A movement from a graphic score, <italic>Four Visions</italic> for flute, harp and string quartet by Robert Moran (London: Universal Edition, 1963). This score is preceded by Moran's instructions to the six players. https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780203066003/40cb9b4f-edec-4e79-8bda-2013e3266c25/content/fig1_2_B.tif" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>Whether one accepts this definition of experimentalism or not, these four levels can be of great use in the analysis of contemporary innovative music.
It is noteworthy that this third definition is totally dissimilar to that of Schaeffer and Hiller. The Cageians consider electronic music on tape to be traditional music created with new instruments. The experimental in electronic music is only present before realizing a tape. After a tape has been mounted, a work of art is born which is, according to this group, no longer experimental.
In a sense it is a shame that Cage and Nyman have chosen the term, experimental music for these composition and performance procedures. The reason for this discontent is twofold: firstly, any good definition of experiment 2 shows that purposelessness is by no means an experimental goal. The word is misused a bit perhaps. Secondly, the acceptance of the term for Cageian techniques has led to isolating indeterminate works from other innovative forms of composition.
One wonders whether a more natural coupling to other musical developments through the use of another name might have been more useful. It is this coupling which leads to the fourth definition, the one we will use in the remainder of this book.
Experimental music is music in which the innovative 3 component (not in the sense of newness found in any artistic work, but instead substantial innovation as clearly intended by a composer) of any aspect of a given piece takes priority above the more general technical craftsmanship expected of any art work. Innovation has always been present throughout music history, yet in this century many composers have chosen to focus specifically on the new, often rejecting accepted values and sometimes ignoring or compromising themselves in terms of accepted levels of generally known techniques. Of all the writers encountered in the preparation of this text, it was only Paul Griffiths (1981) 4 who chose this path. As avant-gardism was always to a greater or lesser extent experimental, this definition comes closest to the first of the above three. The laboratory or indeterminacy compositions can mostly be included in this wider category of experimental music. As it is a question of weighing innovation against renewal that is important here, one can indeed find some electroacoustic works which are substantially less experimental than others; to a lesser extent this may also be said of a few aleatoric pieces.
