Silence and Noise

A different time has come upon all of us, and while things could turn completely back to normal in the blink of an eye, we are now at a standstill. Artists, and classical musicians in particular, I think, live in their own type of bubble. The culture of our work, the attitudes of the people around us, and the mutually-agreed-upon understanding of how we conduct our day-to-day lives seems to require it. As a result, it would be possible in times like these to continue the solitary aspects of our individual work - practice our instruments, study, research, listen to recordings. We can even virtually collaborate, continue rehearsing and planning projects. What is most obviously missing, of course, is our audience. What is more profoundly missing is an awareness of our relationship with the outside world.

As a freelance musician, I mourn the loss of concert opportunities, of performing for audiences, of collaborating in an orchestral environment. As a doctoral candidate, I am forced to postpone my next doctoral concert, “Elollinen”, which has been the core center of my attention for the last three months. I should, and do, value the extra time I now have to prepare, to continue to go deeper into these eight pieces, and to continue conceptualizing and planning details of the concert itself, things like program notes, transitions between pieces and how to move around the garden. But the uncertainty - when will I actually be able to perform this program? when can I close this chapter of my project and work towards the next? how do I focus my research? how many future projects will be canceled? - is unsettling.

Between silence and noise.

As did many of us, I work for now from home. As someone who thrives on a schedule, I made one. I read for my research every morning during breakfast, followed by walking the dog and practicing B-flat and A-clarinets. I had lunch, walked the dog again, and practiced my bass clarinet repertoire in the afternoon. The book I read this week was Noise: The Political Economy of Music by Jacques Attali. Apropos, no?

Attali’s book is an attempt to theorize “through” music by examining theoretically, philosophically and economically the relationship between music (or sound) and people and their systems. There are examples from antiquity through the twentieth century, from different sound traditions and cultures. The examples tend to be general, and the writing maintains a Marxist tone. Attali writes of the “the means by which silence has been imposed and is maintained by our theories and histories of music, by our performance practices and educational institutions of music” and the ‘violence’ that erupts from the enforcement and resistance to societal and cultural implementation of musical understanding (Attali 1985: 149-150). This awareness of performance practice is particularly important in my doctoral research - I consider my own background and music education integral to how I, as a performer, understand and practice contemporary music. I also study how Finnish and American cultures understand, or implement, the practice and performance of contemporary music differently.

I have never used the terms ‘silencing’ or ‘violence’ to explain my being subjected to classical/art/western music, or subjecting others to sound sound (or music), but the more I have thought about it the last week, it is not far off. More times than I can count, I have tried to coax non-musicians into conversations about the music I perform and I am constantly told, “I do not know anything about music so I cannot say”, or “I am not an expert, so I cannot say”. When I attended SAAR last August, I wrote about this extensively in reflecting on my listening experiment. And that was amongst fellow artists and artistic researchers, let alone “regular people” (forgive the expression). In effect, music, my music, if I can be so bold, is silencing people by positing or pressuring that so-called non-experts cannot speak about it. And if they cannot speak about it, they cannot possibly understand. So why listen at all?

In the Afterword to Noise, musicologist Susan McClary argues that musical education and educational institutions, especially in the United States, have effectively ‘silenced’ both musicians and composers by reducing the meaning of classical music to formal structure and harmony, and by training composers to operate in the closed university space, away from audiences and the public. The result, she says, are compositions that are “increasingly abstract, mathematically based, [and] deliberately inaccessible” and performers who are trained “not to interpret” and to “strive for a perfect, standard sound” (Attali 1985: 153). This ‘picture’ might not resonate with Finnish musicians and composers, who have had in increasingly intimate relationship with the public, most especially over the last 40 years, but it certainly rings true for me, someone who trained and worked for the first 15 years of my musical life in the United States. Perfomers, and composers, are “happy slaves”, performing our tasks unaware of a supposed lack of creative freedom (de Assis 2018: 193).

This week, with “quarantine practice” and “at home concerts” abound on the internet, performers of western classical music are making noise in a new silence. With those sacred, ‘elite’, culturally controlled spaces, as Attali would say, violently closed by a global pandemic, performers and artists are making noise in much the same way as the ‘composers’ Attali refers to in the final chapter of Noise - working for oneself, performing for oneself, working independently of the systems and institutions under which they usually function. Are they all of a sudden freed from the ‘chains’ of their training, to refer to Assis and McClary? Probably not. There is a whole lot of Bach and Beethoven on the internet right now, a new ‘imaginary museum’ of sorts. But in street clothes, in living rooms, on balconies and over the internet, performers are creating sound differently than they did mere days ago.

For me personally, this text continues to make me more aware of my own performance perspective and the decisions I make through performing. Along with Professor John Rink’s talk at the Sibelius Academy Research Days (March 11 2020), I am appreciating rather than resisting greater plurality in my research methods and sources. As Professor Rink discussed, antagonism and tension between methods and theories quite simply contradicts the complexity of music performance and conceptualization. And as a performing artist, I insist that the greater awareness I have of how and why I create the way I do, the better, more convincing, more inspiring, and more authentic my artistic product will be.

And in that vain, I continue my reading this week with Lydia Goehr’s The Imaginary Museum of Music Works. Stay healthy, all.

Works referenced:

Attali, Jacques, Fredric Jameson, and Susan McClary. 1985. Noise: The Political Economy of Music U of Minnesota P. http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003&xri:pqil:res_ver=0.2&res_id=xri:ilcs-us&rft_id=xri:ilcs:rec:abell:R04731032.

de Assis, Paulo. 2018. Logic of Experimentation: Rethinking Music Performance Through Artistic Research Leuven University Press.