Recent Pasts 20/21 Words Series - Christian Wolff, Page 10

“Experimental” has earlier senses worth remembering, for example, indicating what belongs to one’s experience, what one has oneself encountered first-hand, directly. It belongs also to the vocabulary of science, where its sense is usually rejected by musicians: if it’s experimental, it should stay in the lab, in the sketchbook, and not be part of what is brought to the public. But it’s worth recalling the first associations of the term with such Renaissance thinkers as Galileo, DaVinci or Francis Bacon, for whom it was anti-metaphysical, indicating a purely human way of proceeding, discovering and producing. In music, rather than indicating preliminary work preparatory to making a final object, it can express an attitude in the making and performing of the work. It points to the work’s continual condition of being in progress, of being in a life-process.

The notion of experimental will also be dependent on context. Once, as part of the accompanying music for a dance of Merce Cunningham and his company, I included, along with my usual music, the singing, informal and quite raucous, of the Woodie Guthrie song “Union Maid”. The audience, most of whom had routinely encountered with Cunningham’s dances, and more or less tolerated, the most advanced kinds of music (notably Cage’s and Tudor’s), audibly gasped in shock. An unexceptionable tune and text with old and familiar, if assertive, labor movement sentiment, had, in the context of a modernist (and very beautiful) dance, become experimental. We had had no deliberate intention of producing a shock. Experimental I don’t think has to do with shock, though it doesn’t exclude the possibility of it. We did know we were taking a risk singing that song. Experiments are full of risks (one of which is that what at one time had the vitality and edge of an experiment at a later time, under other circumstances, may lose these qualities). In connection with Cunningham I should recall that he allows the music to go its own way independently of the dance. Usually the two don’t come together until an actual public performance. That’s one aspect of his experimentalism.

Experiment in the context of the unexamined norms and routines and contradictions of a prevailing culture may be oppositional. It can mean trying to find and put into play new sources of energy. It can mean clarification or calling into question and looking anew at what is taken for granted (both Cage and I have noticed pedagogical aspects of our music). The process need not be aggressive, but can be forceful, perhaps even explosive. An example would be Cage’s silent piece, 4’33” (from 1952), which from the point of view of sound is perfectly unassertive, but worked quite otherwise in the context of normal concert performance (I never had a problem with it because it reminded me of the long silences of the Quaker meetings which took place every week at my school). (One might think that silence is a sign of death, but for Cage it was rather a window open for sound; in a musical context silence is an artifact that allows us to hear sounds as such, the sounds of the life around us.) Structures come to light when things are dismantled. New energy can work like a clearing storm, or with sharp focus can have a cutting edge.

Experiment, one could say, is the dynamic within music working on its social-cultural setting. Experiment should sustain a hope of renewal that is both aesthetic and political-social. The philosopher Richard Rorty refers to John Dewey’s “experimentalism” that “asks us to see knowledge-claims as proposals about what actions to try out next”. He then quotes Dewey as follows:

“The elaborate systems of science [we could, modestly, put in parallel the systems of musical language] are born not of reason but of impulses at first slight and flickering; impulses to handle, to move about, to hunt, to uncover, to mix things separated and divide things combined, to talk and to listen. Method is their [the impulses’] effectual organization into continuous dispositions of inquiry, development and testing…” [Rorty citing Dewey’s Human Nature and Conduct (1922), in Consequences of Pragmatism, pp. 208f]

Rorty continues: “Dewey, because his vocabulary allows room for unjustifiable hope, and an ungroundable but vital sense of human solidarity” allows us best to function freely, that is, free of metaphysical or rationally totalized systems, with the “haphazard and perilous experiments” which we are continually required to perform.