The 45SIS, No.6, 2017: Chris Corsano

Robert Rauschenberg - Ice Egg Metropole (1982)

Dear Readers,

[#a general remark#] I am very proud to present the sixth installment of The 45SIS (45 sentences, infinite sounds) featuring this time the american free form drummer, percussionist and multi-instrumentalist Chris Corsano. Chris Corsano plays the most refined and inventive free form music imaginable today. To get an impression I highly recommend to look into yesterday's Sounds of the Day completely dedicated to the works of Chris Corsano and friends. A more detailed portrait you find in the portrait section below. The 45 SIS is a questionnaire consisting of 45 sentences to be completed. This feature tries to close or at least bridge the gap between contemporary philosophical theories and contemporary sound-production by asking their most important contributors. The public reception and perception of sounds/music seems to be stuck in a weird consumer-convenience and commodity-oriented approach since ages. But music and sounds are and should be more than this: an excess of the minimal and the maximal: the invisible and the secret, maybe. Over the months and years a serious encyclopedia of debatable positions in the aforementioned field will be build up by giving leading artists and theorists a space to present themselves without further commentary by the editor. 

[#the portrait#] I discovered Chris Corsano several years ago mainly through his solo works, and his collaborations or inter-actions with Paul Flaherty, Nate Wooley and Bill Orcutt. Chris Corsano's impressive works open immense new spaces to rethink the idea of micro- or polyrhythmic space time grids or subversive, hybrid stackings for unheard of energetic fields and fiery articulations in the spectrum from tender embers (say Morton Feldman's "King of Denmark" (1964) levels) to ultra-expressive and ultra-explosive backdrafts (traceable back in time maybe to japanese power trios and other drumstick bending oddities of all ages and cultures pushing the fast forward button to reach out to the immensive spectrum of Corsano’s aural embodiments  (eg. his Star Spangled Voltage Worlds climbing Seven Storey Moutains with the Admittance of Six Organs finding An Idea in Everything letting out All the Ghosts and Spinning Jenny at once playing Chikamorachi with Psychic Armors under False Flags aiming at The Heretic's Bargain) beyond High Art Snobisms and their neatly orchestrated body/mind splits excluding trance-personal energy flows from their well known aseptic Tuxedo Mafia Worlds without even trying. Chris Corsano’s music is EBM - (this time) - spelled out as a superimposition of Energetic Body Music and Event Body Music. His body gives signals, yes, but they are not necessarily linked or limited to clean ear-cpu-cognitions or -operations because they are barely anticipatable event-sounds: free form embodiments or free(d) body formations of the highest order. “Corsano” plays radically different channels and plays them radically different, elegantly and often swift like a chameleon. Robert Rauschenberg's artwork Ice Egg Metropole (1982) used above could well be considered as emblematic here. As a depiction of a trancendening, tranceformative, corsanic drumkit in action or in statu nascendi having always two crystal balls in animal claws, several drum kits and once stacked in multiverses, and a third Eye/I open for the “activité stéréographique d’une autre oreille” (Derrida) or in the words of Antonin Artaud’s “Tarahumaras”: “Temps creux, / une espèce de vide épuisant entre les lamelles du bois / coupant, / néant qui appelle le tronc de l’homme, / le corps pris en tronçon de l’homme”.

[#discography/links/contacts#] I highly recommend to visit Chris Corsano's homepage (click here), the impressive discography (click here). And look for some live action in your neighborhood (click here) And visit of course yesterdays collection of  Corsano's impressive group of works in my Sounds of the Day Section.

[#the presentation#] The white font shows the grid of my 45SIS-questionnaire, that will remain unchanged for each featured artist. This makes each contribution at once singular and comparable. The answers by each featured artist or scholar in this case Chris Corsano always be presented in green font.[SKG]

This is The 45SIS, No.6

brilliantly completed

by Chris Corsano

[1] “Music” and “Musician” are concepts which people get hung up on nearly as much as “art” and “artist.”

[2] The term “Sound-Art” depending on the context, could be a totally valid way to describe something or it could be a fancy-pants way of dressing up some kind of personal-cultural artistic/music practice in order to sneak it into high-falutin places where things are called “hors d'oeuvres” instead of “snacks” when it's all really just pigs in a blanket.

[3] A Sound Artist becomes better paid than a Noise Musician.

[4] Inventing/finding sounds is , an alternative tool for, but not a guarantee of, breaking worthwhile new ground.

[5] Hearing back live recordings sometimes forced me to admit the shortcomings of some new-found sounds.

[6] The obvious tensions between classical systems of musical notation and composition, sound-sourced field-recordings, free-improvised-real-time-composition, and technology based sound processing don't need to be “obvious” or “tensions.” Is there “tension” between, say, frying and broiling and baking? Just different ways of cooking is all it is.

[7] Composition is about, among other things, structure and it can be done beforehand or on the fly;  writing  sounds to me more like something that happens at a time before any performance of said writing. But I could be wrong.

[8] The main theoretical aporia, existential tension or trigger that keeps me producing and/or made me produce (and/or: writing about) sounds is a red herring. I play because I love and need to, plain and simple. And I got that way by being moved by musicians before me who seemed to be coming from the same place.

[9] The immense scope and variety of musical inventions forced into canonized music history and its basic distinction of music and non-music in the XX.Century (say) since “Arnold Schoenberg” and the counter-explosions of new underground music paradigms, non-europeans traditions and playing techniques since the 1940’s --Well, I'm not sure I understand this question, so I'm not going to finish it, but you can leave this part in as my response all the same.

[10] Time, Space and Volume all come in handy now and then.

[11] A musical instrument is, like a lot of technology, sometimes mistakenly valued more for what it symbolizes than what it produces.

[12] The musical encounter of my dreams would be collective, ecstatic, empathetic, and maybe a touch psychotic.

[13] The point zero reoccurs constantly.

[14] Sounds don't usually come to me as invisible sculptures  , except for Paul Flaherty's sustained low notes. The strength and beauty of them makes me think of a cylindrical, horizontal column of air (but really better than “just” air) moving into/through the audience

[15] Sounds(capes) should do what you want them to or make you do what they want you to.

[16] Sounds and destruction are two great teenage pasttimes.

[17] The human voice will disappear before or after the human ear?

[18] Listening is the key feature of a musician's playing that most writers don't seem to “get.” But then some musicians don't get it either.

[19] The commodity factor of the way you've chosen to spend your life can fuck you up if you think too much about it.

[20] Programs and algorithms are sometimes accurate analogies human personalities and interactions.

[21] Names, words and titles of compositions are often misleading, sometimes intentionally so. Be forewarned!

[22]Duplication, sampling, sound-sourcing and mani-pulation reaches a high point with DJ Premier.

[23] Replay-Machines, architecture …..…… the listening …….

[24] Knowledge of musical theory or history can be a real drag when it creates a prescribed narrative in the listener's mind that interferes with being per/re-ceptive to what's actually going on in the music.

[25] The materiality of sounds is something I enjoy messing around with, but there's the temptation to over-prioritize the material at the expense of the sound, and I'm trying to be less guilty of that as I go.

[26] To connect sound and psychology would have to be a very individualized affair.

[27] The eye, the ear and the brain all share the work that people credit to just the ear.

[28] Sonic processes …………………… mimesis…….

[29] Life and Death …………………………….silence ….

[30] My deepest listening comes when trying to hear the aspects of a sound that are just on the threshold of being audible.

[31] The distinction sound/music/noise generates far too much blowhard armchair philosophy. Speaking words of wisdom, just let it fucking be, already!

[32] The constant jamming of the Western classical tradition down our throats with its notion of the all-powerful composer has lead to a constant underestimation of improvised music.

[33] Live performances are the things that matter the most to me, where everything (ideas, intentions, musicians, audience, transcendence, expectation, failure, etc.) interfaces with everything else in infinitely varied ways.

[34] Sounds …….. travel from hand to hand, ear to ear, through space and time …...

[35] I heard that if you play 4’33”  you should make sure to open a window or two; otherwise you're just gonna get stomach grumbles, squeaky chairs, and the occasional cough.

[36] Privacy, Secrecy & Sounds ……...

[37] Singularity, originality get quickly duplicated into musical genres until the next hopeful weirdo comes along to re-start the process.

[38] The total liberation of sounds begs the question, liberation from what? We don't need to liberate the sounds. It's the other way around.

[39] Free form music or sound …….. into …..

[40] Cryptic minimalisms …….. techno …..

[41] Outsider sounds are great. Just let's stop treating the outsiders who invent them like animals at the zoo.

[42] In the hands of the Arkestra, electronics, electro-acoustic, Modular Synths become interstellar pathways. I saw Marshall Allen play the same model of cheap keyboard synth that I have. So cheap that it can only sound two notes at the same time despite being manufactured in the last 10 years. Yet Marshall Allen can make it sound like the whole of the universe is contained in that piece of plastic, while all I can get out of it is decidedly more broke-down and busted. Sometimes it's not the spaceship, but the space-traveler.

[43] Sounds provided some of the best time-space manipulations of my life.

[44] The severest misconceptions about me and my sounds, my music, and my theories would be interesting to hear. I don't know what they are.

[45] The sentence(s) I wanted to see published for an eternity is/are ones I'll have to get back to you with.

Cordial thanks,

Chris Corsano !

Robert Rauschenberg - Ice Egg Metropole (1982)

The 45SIS No.5, 2017: Nate Wooley

Anish Kapoor - Pouch (2006)

Dear Readers,

[#a general remark#] I am very proud to present the fifth installment of The 45SIS (45 sentences, infinite sounds) featuring this time the american composer and trumpet player Nate Wooley.  Nate Wooley plays the most refined and inventive free form music imaginable today. To get an impression I highly recommend to look into yesterday's Sounds of the Day completely dedicated to the works of Nate Wooley and friends. A more detailed portrait you find in the portrait section below. The 45 SIS is a questionnaire consisting of 45 sentences to be completed. This feature tries to close or at least bridge the gap between contemporary philosophical theories and contemporary sound-production by asking their most important contributors. The public reception and perception of sounds/music seems to be stuck in a weird consumer-convenience and commodity-oriented approach since ages. But music and sounds are and should be more than this: an excess of the minimal and the maximal: the invisible and the secret, maybe. Over the months and years a serious encyclopedia of debatable positions in the aforementioned field will be build up by giving leading artists and theorists a space to present themselves without further commentary by the editor. 

[#the portrait#] I discovered Nate Wooley a few years ago. In a blink of an ear he became and remained my favorite trumpet player on this planet since then. The artwork by Anish Kapoor above might well be considered as emblematic for Wooley's instrumental thinking. As if Wooley has re-imagined or re-dreamed the trumpet accordingly in an oblique manner as an asubjectal interface or hovering machinal object in between interiority and exteriority (k)not(t)(h)ing them together or folding them back into each other easily but in a highly complex, often inter-active or inter-passive manner with mere machinal breath (the lungs considered here rather as artificial respiration machines for found metallic objects or pre-historial instrumental windtunnels now), hands and fingers: “Of breath, obedient to his trumpet's touch” (Wallace Stevens). Wooley is playing very different ciphers cutting off “his” muscular apparatus from emotive centers interrupting simultaneously the blood supply for twitching neo-romantic phantom muscles like an unheard of anarchic, âmerican Cypherborg: the "trumpet" a twisted (k)not in non-anthropic trance-personal space-time to channel the ruach (the hebrew word for "spirit" means mostly also a form of despiritualized "breath" or "wind") sometimes close to Helmut Lachenmann's ruminations in "temA"(an anagram of the german word "Atem" = "breath" linked to his seminal musique concrète instrumentale). To consider or identify this simply as “jazz” (as if “this” had been ever identical with “itself”) would be more than foolish, because it unnecessarily destroys multiple other ideas of aural stratifications and different listening perspectives and traditions (eg. read à partir de works for brass instruments and brass ensemble from Scelsi to Stockhausen, Xenakis and late Nono). Ehmm, sure, Wooley plays the trumpet in groups sometimes and sometimes alone. And ? Maybe his textures are more likely wool-ey, carefully and sometimes collectively knit pre-human, pure ARTiculation sounds (cf. his ultra-inventive work group "Syllables Music"): silences, screams, harmonies, rhythmic stutterers played into a never pre-existing, multi-dimensional time-space joycefully “lastly when all is zed and done, the penelopean patience of its last paraphe, a colophon of no fewer”. His soundworlds have also post-Cage political aspects and sometimes supportive but never illustrating narratives: his Beuys play wooley sometimes. To illustrate Wooley's immense re-invention of the trumpet choosing a slightly different angle I would like to use an anecdote. One day I did a multi hour free form listening session at home covering a lot of Wooley's works. A friend called me acccidentally with his cell phone while one of Wooley's solo pieces was playing in the background. Asking seriously and in awe "Which instrument is playing here actually ? Or how many ?" I want to close this portrait with a biographical account of this immense and important artist. I would like to quote from Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Nate Wooley was a Grant Recipient in the section “Music/Sounds” in 2016 (click here). Here one can read: “After an early education playing in big bands with his father, Nate Wooley moved to New York in 2001, where he quickly became a part of the downtown free jazz, experimental, rock, and noise scenes. Since then he has performed regularly with such iconic figures as Anthony Braxton, John Zorn, Evan Parker, Ken Vandermark, and Eliane Radigue. As a solo trumpet player, Wooley combines extended technique, noise and drone aesthetics, amplification and feedback, and vocalization. Wooley's 2016 Grants to Artists award supported the recording and production of [Syllables] (Pleasure Of The Text Records, 2017), a solo work consisting of four CDs, a book of essays, and a book of scores that raises questions about the necessity of success and failure in instrumental technique. With his award Wooley also commissioned composer Christian Wolff's first piece for solo trumpet, For Trumpet Player (2017). Wooley's Seven Storey Mountain series includes Seven Storey Mountain (Important Records, 2007), Seven Storey Mountain II (Important Records, 2009), and Seven Storey Mountain III and IV (Pleasure of the Text Records, 2013), all of which premiered at Issue Project Room, Brooklyn; and Seven Storey Mountain V (Pleasure of the Text Records, 2015) which premiered at Tectonics Festival New York, Abrons Arts Center, New York. Wooley's other recorded works include The Almond (Pogus Productions, 2012); Psalms From Hell, which premiered at Jazztopad Festival, Narodowe Forum Muzyki, Wrocław, Poland (2014); and I Am Their Wake, which premiered at Dampfzentrale, Bern, Switzerland (2015). In 2011, Wooley was an Artist-in-Residence at Issue Project Room and Café Oto, and received a Recording Program Grant from the The Aaron Copland Fund for Music. In 2013 Wooley was selected to participate in the in-gallery music series Sound Horizon at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. He has also been a featured artist at MoMA PS1 and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Wooley earned a B.M. and an M.M. in trumpet performance from the University of Oregon in 1997 and the Lamont School of Music at the University of Denver in 1999. Nate is also the curator of the online research tool, the Database of Recorded American Music and the editor of Sound American (soundamerican.org), a quarterly online journal attempting to obliterate the perceived elitism of contemporary and experimental music".

[#discography/links/contacts#] I highly recommend to visit Nate Wooley's homepage (click here), the soundamerican site edited by Wooley (click here). Here you can find and support Nate Wooley's bandcamps (click here) and (click here). Please also visit the important Database of Recorded American Music (click here) curated by Nate Wooley. And visit of course yesterdays collection of Wooleys impressive works in my Sounds of the Day Section.

[#the presentation#] The white font shows the grid of my 45SIS-questionnaire, that will remain unchanged for each featured artist. This makes each contribution at once singular and comparable. The answers by each featured artist or scholar in this case Nate Wooley always be presented in green font.[SKG]

This is The 45SIS, No.5

brilliantly completed

by Nate Wooley

[1]“Music” and “Musician” are concepts of language and practice.

[2] The term “Sound-Art” is too open to mean much.

[3] A Sound Artist becomes a person with a title.

[4] Inventing/finding sounds are not an alternative tool for creating, just a (sometimes very welcome) limitation to the spectrum of working.

[5] An introspective nature forced me to try to aestheticize mundane sounds.

[6] The obvious tensions between classical systems of musical notation and composition, sound-sourced field-recordings, free-improvised-real-time-composition, and technology based sound processing provide the necessary articulations between adversarial ideas.

[7] Composition is architectural , writing is linear.

[8] The main theoretical aporia, existential tension or trigger that keeps me producing and/or made me produce (and/or: writing about) sounds is wanting to be immortal.

[9] The immense scope and variety of musical inventions forced into canonized music history and its basic distinction of music and non-music in the XX.Century (say) since “Arnold Schoenberg” and the counter-explosions of new underground music paradigms, non-europeans traditions and playing techniques since the 1940’s seems to be given a lot of weight, sometimes to our detriment.

[10] Time, Space and Volume ..........................................

[11] A musical instrument is a machine technology; the means of making a machine. 

[12] The musical encounter of my dreams would feel redundant in reality.

[13] The point zero ..................................

[14] Sounds ............. invisible sculptures ................

[15] Sounds(capes) should ..........

[16] Sounds and destruction are only consciously relatable, and then usually end up creating something boring.

[17] The human voice’s beauty disappears for me when singing begins.

[18] Listening is a choice and the way in which we listen is not dogmatic.

[19] The commodity factor of anything must be realized, not as a point of confrontation that can be eradicated, but as a currently necessary condition of the world we work in.

[20] Programs and algorithms are a sometimes interesting place to start.

[21] Names, words and titles of compositions cannot be given enough weight as the mind of the audience will put as much narrative into a numbering system as they will to a poetic description.

[22]Duplication, sampling, sound-sourcing and manipulation .......................

[23] Replay-Machines ........................

[24] Knowledge ........................ interferes ........................

[25] The materiality of sounds ........................

[26] To connect sound and psychology ........................

[27] The eye, the ear and the brain ........................

[28] Sonic processes ........................ mimesis ....................

[29] Life and Death ........................

[30] My deepest ........................ audible 

[31] The distinction sound/music/noise ........................

[32] The media representation of artists leads to a constant underestimation of their innate human ability to make mistakes.

[33] Live performances ........................ interfaces ...................

[34] Sounds .................. travel from hand to hand, ear to ear, through space and time, ........................

[35] ........................ 4’33” ...................... a window................

[36] Privacy, Secrecy & Sounds ........................

[37] Singularity, originality are terms that are sometimes twisted into musical genres.

[38] The total liberation of sounds is utopian.

[39] Free form music or sound ............ into ............

[40] Cryptic minimalisms and techno ............

[41] Outsider sounds ............

[42]Electronics, electro-acoustic, Modular Synths ................... interstellar ............

[43] Sounds ............ time-space manipulations ............

[44] The severest misconceptions about me and my sounds, my music, and my theories are probably unknown to me.

[45] The sentence(s) I wanted to see published for an eternity is/are ............

Anish Kapoor - Pouch (2006)

Cordial thanks,
Nate Wooley

The 45SIS, No.4, 2017: Guerino Mazzola

Antony Gormley, Rhizome III (1999)

Dear Readers,

[#a general remark#] I am very proud to present the fourth installment of The 45SIS (45 sentences, infinite sounds) featuring this time Prof. Guerino Mazzola. Guerino Mazzola is a Swiss mathematician, musicologist and jazz pianist. He graduated at the University of Zürich in Mathematics, Theoretical Physics and Crystallography and completed his PhD in Mathematics in 1971. In 1980, he habilitated in Algebraic Geometry and Representation Theory. In 2000, he was awarded the medal of the Mexican Mathematical Society. In 2003, he habilitated in Computational Science at the University of Zürich. Currently Currently he is Professor at the School of Music at the University of Minnesota. Since 2007 he is the president of the Society for Mathematics and Computation in Music. The 45 SIS is a questionnaire consisting of 45 sentences to be completed. This feature tries to close or at least bridge the gap between contemporary philosophical theories and contemporary sound-production by asking their most important contributors. The public reception and perception of sounds/music seems to be stuck in a weird consumer-convenience and commodity-oriented approach since ages. But music and sound are and should be more than this: an excess of the minimal and the maximal: the invisible and the secret, maybe. Over the months and years a serious encyclopedia of debatable positions in the aforementioned field will be build up by giving leading artists and theorists a space to present themselves without further commentary by the editor. 

[#the portrait#] I discovered the works of Guerino Mazzola (CV, see above) a few years ago in a moment of discontent with the various canonized and often way to specialized theories of music lacking either analytical rigor, historical depth, or real experiences as performers or as listeners. My interests circled back then mainly around the problem of how to formalize music (in all its dimensions) and of how to find and define valid quality criteria after the highly conflictual post-Schoenberg-Webern-Berg event cluster Cage-Young-Varèse-Xenakis-Nancarrow-Scelsi-Partch-Feldman-Messiaen-Stockhausen-Nono-Boulez and the respective effects on the increasing tensions between free form music (eg. Anthony Braxton, Cecil Taylor), electronic music and classical score bound music. But the most difficult and most decisive problems or questions remained unsolvable for me despite various attempts with different theories: how can the different phenomena or paradigms called music be theoretically reunified and recalibrated without regressing towards random Geschmacksurteilen ? And what are musical thoughts (breaking with the lazy habit to regress towards "Begriffslosigkeit", "Unaussprechlichkeit" and "blumige Sprache") and/or what is formalized in and as music ? You can imagine how lucky I was to have discovered Mazzola's seminal work The Topos of Music. Geometric Logic of Concepts, Theory and, Performance (Basel Boston Berlin 2002) that offers one of the deepest, innovative and most interesting reformulations of musical theory today, helping to interrupt and/or overcome false tensions or divisions, miscanonized hierarchies and constricted eurocentrisms finding new answers to the very difficult questions sketched above by introducing new concepts and mathematical models. Prof. Mazzola presented a short sketch or very plastic image of his theoretical project in a youtube video posted in 2014. Here he says:"Music is like a dancer. It moves continuously and touches the stage floor in discrete points. The musical score represents the discrete trace, while gestures represent the continuous perspective . Correspondingly, a mathematical theory of music needs two approaches: a discrete, and a continuous one. The discrete approach is algebraic. It is framed by the topos of presheaves over the category of modules. It comprises models of harmony, counterpoint, rhythm or melody, and it presents classification theorems of local and global musical structures. Alexander Grothendieck called this the Mathematics of the New Age. The continuous approach works with gestures in the topos of presheaves over topological categories and uses algebraic topology, differential geometry, and homological algebra. It describes musical performance and gestural creativity and complies with Yuri Manin's vision of new foundations of mathematics built upon homotopy categories."(quote youtube). You can follow the unfolding of this immense project in a very impressive number of seminal publications since the 1980's. I quote the CV given on Prof Mazzola's homepage at the University of Minnesota, because I am a little afraid that I might forget or leave out something important, here one can read: "Mazzola has profiled the European school of mathematical music theory since 1980 and has written six books on the subject, among them The Topos of Music, published by Birkhäuser, and proposed by the American Mathematical Society as the mathematics book of the year 2005. His French book, La vérité du beau dans la musique, is about the philosophy of music and was published in 2007 by Delatour. Mazzola’s approach to music includes sophisticated mathematics of topos theory, but also classical tools from group theory to homotopy theory. His book Flow, Gesture, and Spaces in Free Jazz - Towards a Theory of Collaboration was published in 2009 by Springer and applies mathematical gesture theory to free jazz. His book Musical Performance was published in 2010 by Springer; it is the first comprehensive treatment of performance theory, including philosophical and empirical approaches, qualitative methods from musical ontology, and quantitative methods from differential geometry and their implementation in the performance software rubato. His book Musical Creativity was published in 2011 by Springer; it is co-authored with Joomi Park and Florian Thalmann and describes creativity in a tutorial for students, a theoretical part and a number of advanced case studies. His book Computational Counterpoint Worlds, co-authored with Octavio Agustin and Julien Junod, and his book Computational Musicology in Hindustani Music, co-authored with Soubhik Chakraborty et al. are published in 2014 by Springer. His next book, The Topos of Music II: Gestures, to be published in 2016 by Springer, and co-authored with René Guitart et al., will present latest developments in musical gesture theory and its philosophical implications. It is planned as a follow-up of The Topos of Music. Co-authored with PhD Students Maria Mannone and Yen Pang, a first introduction to Mathematical Music Theory: Cool Math for Hot Music, is published by Springer Fall 2015."(quote: Prof. Mazzola's homepage University of Minnesota). Not to forget his most recent one under his supervision (co-authored with Maria Mannone, Yan Pang, Margaret O'Brien and Nathan Torunsky) called All About Music: The Complete Ontology: Realities, Semiotics, Communication, and Embodiment published by Springer in November 2016.

[#discography/links/contacts#] I highly recommend to take also a deeper look into his discography (click here). For the titles of the Computational Music Series edited by Guerino Mazzola and Moreno Andreatta (click here). Here you can find Prof. Mazzola's Minnesota Homepage (click here), his personal Encyclospace Site (click here), and the very interesting affiliated research platform (with articles, soundfiles etc.) called Glass Bead (click here), his youtube channels you can find (here and here).

[#the presentation#] The white font shows the grid of my 45SIS-questionnaire, that will remain unchanged for each featured artist. This makes each contribution at once singular and comparable. The answers by each featured artist or scholar in this case Guerino Mazzola always be presented in green font.[SKG]

This is The 45SIS, No.4

brilliantly completed

by Guerino Mazzola

[1]“Music” and “Musician” are concepts about human communication.

[2] I dislike the term “Sound-Art”, because it neglects the structure that music adds to sound to become an art.

[3] A Sound Artist becomes an "alternative truth": sound per se is not art.

[4] Inventing/finding sounds is not an alternative tool for creating music.

[5] Thinking in music forced me organize, not only invent sounds.

[6] The obvious tensions between classical systems of musical notation and composition, sound-sourced field-recordings, free-improvised-real-time-composition, and technology based sound processing can be solved when rethinking creativity beyond specific technology.

[7] Composition is encoding gestures, not only writing abstract symbols, the latter being "paper music".

[8] The main theoretical aporia, existential tension or trigger that keeps me producing and/or made me produce (and/or: writing about) sounds is the art of making organisms that are expressed with sounds.

[9] The immense scope and variety of musical inventions forced into canonized music history and its basic distinction of music and non-music in the XX.Century (say) since “Arnold Schoenberg” and the counter-explosions of new underground music paradigms, non-europeans traditions and playing techniques since the 1940’s has neglegted the afrological extension of musical creativity that is a logic of the gestural making.

[10] Time, Space and Volume need to be extended: we need complex time (real + imaginary).

[11] A musical instrument is the interface technology between the musician's body and the body of sound.

[12] The musical encounter of my dreams would be a music theory that complies with scientific quality, not just rhetoric surface, such as Schenker or Schoenberg.

[13] The point zero is now: all Eurological variants have been tried out, it is time to rethink the musical presence in complex space-time.

[14] Sounds should work as invisible sculptures of intelligent gestural utterances.

[15] Sounds(capes) should ?

[16] Sounds and destruction are related if you forget about the music which organizes sounds.

[17] The human voice will not disappear if lived as an inner human gesture.

[18] Listening is imagining the musicians' sonic space.

[19] The commodity factor of New Music is the abstraction from listening, being replaced by talking, not understanding, by those who have no musical dimension at all.

[20] Programs and algorithms are useful as preliminary tools for musical structuring, and experimenting, but not to replace human substance.

[21] Names, words and titles of compositions are funny ornaments.

[22]Duplication, sampling, sound-sourcing and manipulation are only interesting if embedded in a musical logic.

[23] Replay-Machines help listening again and again…….

[24] Knowledge that is scientifically valid interferes with musical creativity.

[25] The materiality of sounds is only relevant if it expresses human gestures; counterexemples: abstract electronic sounds.

[26] To connect sound and psychology is ok, for mp3 technology, for example, but not as a foundation of musical creativity.

[27] The eye, the ear and the brain are abstractions of the gestural body, not its foundations.

[28] Sonic processes can realize Adorno's mimesis if organized as an art of the making.

[29] Life and Death are very different: death is the most trivial thing, silence is not death if you use it as a carrier of thoughts (Miles Davis!)

[30] My deepest musical experiences are audible thoughts in performance.

[31] The distinction sound/music/noise is essential, see my previous thoughts.

[32] The gestural creation of music is subject to a constant underestimation of abstract music theories created by non-performing scholars.

[33] Live performances should be interfaces between the creative making and the creative listening.

[34] Sounds can travel from hand to hand, ear to ear, through space and time, but do not make sense if done so without a gestural intelligence.

[35] The so-called composition 4’33” was not the first of this type (Alphonse Allais 1897: marche funebre pour un grand homme sourd) is a window to people who talk about music without understanding anything.

[36] Privacy, Secrecy & Sounds don't relate to each other.

[37] Singularity, originality is now a big challenge for all musical genres that seek for extensions.

[38] The total liberation of sounds must be a consequence of the total liberation of music theory from the outdated old approaches; have a look at mathematical music theory, for example.

[39] Free form music or sound leads into a music where the musicians have the full responsibility.

[40] Cryptic minimalisms and techno are musics for living deads.

[41] Outsider sounds is a question where you stand: inside or outside, better move!

[42] Electronics, electro-acoustic, Modular Synths or interstellar travels are all tools for musical creators, not for infants.

[43] Sounds must be organized in time-space manipulations that express musical insights.

[44] The severest misconceptions about me and my sounds, my music, and my theories are given by people who listen only to themselves and their prejudices.

[45] The sentence(s) I wanted to see published for an eternity is/are this one about the artistic existence of a performer:

The performer

in his 

beautifully determined 

responsibility, 

displays a 

balanced dancing 

presence.

Antony Gormley, Rhizome I (1998)

Cordial thanks 

for your contribution,

Prof. Guerino Mazzola !