projects     reviews      fotos      links      releases      essays      CV      contact

autonomous interpretation

"Furthermore, when we speak the word "life”, it must understood we are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach. And if there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames.” (*1)

In the spirit of Artaud, one could say that we are judged prisoners who are obliged to emit signs from atop our own funeral pyres, signs which necessarily become decoded by their receivers through a process of designation, decoded in order to ascertain their meaning; for, "signs stand for a thing that could, in some respects or due to some ability (at a certain point in time), stand for something else in another person’s eyes.” (*2)

The system of signs known as composition does not refer to any object (except for itself).
A composition manages to potentiate abstraction because it abstracts and symbolizes music—an already abstract phenomenon—anew.
The work of interpretation also becomes itself potentiated in that it gets executed at one and the same time by an instrumental—but also by a hearing (ex.: in the audience)—interpreter.
This effort of interpretation has influence on society’s discourses and thereby exercises feedback onto the composer: a work changes the interpreters; the interpretation varies and changes the work and, thus, the composer’s mindset and action.
Consequently, interpretation becomes a language, as it represents a quasi-interpersonal form of sign-behavior / abstraction.

Within every sign’s imperative of becoming utilized itself in order to enable communication, a partial dispersal of signs into a meshwork of correlations, which are engaged in continuous, new self-structurings, occurs—how those signs disperse into changing cultures and societies depends on the context.

In the exemplary vis-à-vis of composer / interpreter, EVERY participant objectifies and constitutes themselves in a culture that was there before they were.
Their "I” is already a product of a perpetually transitioning development—the development of a particular history. By equating myself with the subject of my expressions/utterances ,

I lose my subjectivity; I objectify myself within my culture, the predispositions of which I am, to a certain extent, trapped by, though I can, through my actions, change them.

I would like to imagine a concept of autonomous interpretation as a tool for the creation of a continually changing system of relationships between compositional practice and interpretation.

The decode-work which accompanies interpretation requires decisions about which codes the significant parts of a sign-system should refer to and, accordingly, accept, while being conscious of the simultaneous appearance of several, or contradictory, meanings. Interpreters, therefore, can also decide to understand a work according to a reason of codes that the composer had not at all thought of during the production process. These decision processes create an autonomous co-responsibility on the part of interpreters, turning them into co-composers.
When aiming for an autonomous interpretation, a composer can only produce a dynamic system without being able by default to predict any results.
The practice of autonomous interpretation spans, then, from an interpretation which is as closely oriented toward the object—work—as possible to a total and intentional ignorance of the score, where the work is taken as nothing more than a motivation to make music, to hear music.
But between both of these poles lie innumerable possibilities for explorations throughout the "land of signs”. (*3)
Just to give a few examples of, and suggestions for, such a practice—the clef could be changed; the different performing voices could be varied freely within the score; the tempo or the dynamics could be shaped quite differently. Parts can be repeated or even left out; pauses can be inserted liberally.
The time structure of a piece is open; one can "take a leap” in a piece.
It is possible to bring in one’s own material, preparations and electronic alterations. The instrumentalization can also be changed.
One can be sure that a statement A reveals just as much as its alternative non-A, which could mean that a sign for a pitch A, for example, is open to be understood as a substitute for a sign for eleven other non-A’s which "co-vibrate”, so to speak, as connotations: transpositions.

This practice should avoid the propagation of a general criticism of the process of composition proper.
Autonomous interpretation poses an additional opportunity to cooperate, and it amplifies only the interactive, recursive aspect of the composer / work / interpretation / reception relationship. The interpretation becomes, therewith, an appropriation, and not a hubris; it vividly represents a valuing of the compositional process and of the personality of the composer in that it engages fundamentally with the work, melts together with it, in a way, and takes it seriously in a radical sense.

The composer, thus, is able to become an "ignorant schoolmaster” who allows interpreters to stay on their own routes.
Here, in place of direction, understanding, method and execution, enter interrogation and guessing, translation without hierarchy ranging from in-the-know to unknowing. What is at stake is attention and alertness, experimental set-ups, the testing of hypotheses:
"Tell me the form of each letter as you would describe the form of an object or of an unknown place. Don’t say that you can’t. You know how to see, how to speak, you know how to show, you can remember. What more is needed? An absolute attention for seeing and seeing again, saying and repeating. Don’t try to fool me or fool yourself. Is that really what you saw? What do you think about it? Aren’t you a thinking being? Or do you think you are all body? […] You have a soul like me." (*4)
Hence an ensemble is no longer an acoustic body, but rather a reflector.
Reflection understood as a "translating back” of a work and, therefore, also as a coming back to oneself. The material ideality of a composition, as well as the conditions proper to reflection, must be verified—and hence updated—time and again.
The distance between and duality of the Work and interpretation should undergo reduction through the autonomy of the individual.
There is no saying or recognizing of any truths here; much more, each individual circuits around truths, on their own tracks, never quite reaching them.

(*1) Antonin Artaud, The Theater and its Double, transl. Mary Caroline Richards, (New York: Grove Press, 1958), p. 13.
(*2) Eco, Umberto (1973, 1977): Segno. (Milano: Istituto Editoriale Internazionale, 1973), transl. into German, Günter Memmert: Zeichen. Einführung in einen Begriff und seine Geschichte. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977) [quote transl. from German by W.W.]
(*3) Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, transl. Kristin Ross (Palo Alto, Calif. and London: Stanford Univ. Press, 1991), p. 30.
(*4) ibid., p. 23. Rancière quotes J. Jacotot, Enseignement universel: Langue étrangère, 2nd ed. (1829), p. 219.

Many thanks for translation to William Wheeler