Current Thoughts on what I think I am doing writing music…
eldritch Priest (2007)
Lately
I have been working to actualize in music a radical melodic purpose. By
this I mean that I am trying to write the sense of sound’s advance, to
compose the pure presentiment of melodic desire. I used to be
captivated by music’s vertical inertia and the way sheer sonority
cultivated interest in a parade of harmonic curiosities. However,
I eventually grew weary of these simple curios and their denial of the
force that duration bears upon itself. My experience of music as
a “motionless pageant” changed from appreciating a timeless interest to
suffering a false eternity. It seems to me now that the “musical”
in sound, the (musico)logic that “keeps us waiting in someway for the
result…of [sonorous] order,”[1] derives from the way sound acquires an
“Idea” of itself over time. This Idea is the “musical” as such, and it
is exactly what happens when in listening when sound “never stops
exposing the present to the imminence of a deferred presence”[2].
Thus, musical sound is sound that impinges, that inflects and strains
the space and time in which it both opens up and opens onto.
Lacking this modulation, sound fails to become musical, being instead
only a dumb emission. Straining sound has become increasingly
important in my work, not only as an aesthetic hinge but as a focus for
exploring music as something productively forgetful.
Memory and Forgetting…
I
think that Deleuze is correct about remembering, that it threatens to
make “something unique or singular which has no equal or equivalent”[3]
become law or a regularity. Forgetting might therefore be
considered not a loss of memory, but rather a peculiar species of
memory, a species that functions like desire and invention. When
Deleuze writes, “Desire is always assembled and fabricated on a plane
of immanence or of composition which must itself be constructed at the
same time as desire assembles and fabricates,”[4] he is describing the
way in which the process of creation invents itself in the alchemy of
connecting heterogenous entities and events. In other words,
desire expresses the logic of relations that inhere in all forms of
coupling.
Musicologically speaking, the desires we sense in the coupling of
sounds are the affects and moods we experience in hearing music.
Affects and moods are the expression of music’s logic of a deferred
presence; they indicate moments of forgetting, moments when the
continuously suspended arrival of a musical presence forgets pitches,
rhythms, melodies, etc, and gives its work—its labour of promising a
development—an expressive sense. Like “air” in breathing, musical
sound is forgotten. Yet also like “air,” this forgetting is what
animates that which forgets it. We laugh when we forget about
“air,” and we hear music when we forget about sound. In this regard,
memory, and its desire to forget, is not a passive aspect of experience
but an active and productiveprinciple. Remembering does not
involve the recollection of a dim and distance copy; instead memory
actually re-members or re-creates perception in the repetition of its
difference. By straining the differences that express a
(musico)logical desire, we remember to forget the “laws” of music and
re-member the alchemy that increases the Ideas that may be had about
it.
My work
is about inventing (musico)logical expressions of desire and maximizing
the affective differential in music. I try to achieve this by
weaving generic melodic tendencies into an asymmetrical surface where
one can forget global coherence and multiply sites of local
interest. I consider much of this work to be a memory of desire,
a memory-desire characterized by glacial durations and entropic drift
that tries to forget its innate fatalism. Although I don’t claim to
have accomplished this, I consider my efforts to create “forgettable
memories”, or “memorable forgettings,” to be modestly successful, if
not entire failures. Perhaps then, if I my failure is my success,
it is more accurate to say that I do not write anything other than what
has always been forgotten.
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[1] Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2007. Listening. Trans. Charlotte Mandell. New York: Fordham University Press, 66.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Deleuze, Gilles. 1994. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1.
[4] Deleuze, Gilles. 2002. Dialogues II. Trans. Janis Tomlinson (et al). New York: Columbia University Press, 103.