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OUTSOURCING PROGRESS: ON CONCEPTUAL MUSIC

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 December 2015

Martin Iddon
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Abstract

This article addresses the phenomenon of New Conceptualism, otherwise known as conceptual music, or Konzeptmusik, and locates it within the German new music scene of the last decade. It is suggested that conceptual music may perhaps be a contradiction in terms, representing a nostalgic desire for the semantic strength of conceptual art. In particular the article focuses on Johannes Kreidler's 2009 work, Fremdarbeit, and scrutinises the composer's claim to have ‘outsourced’ the composition of the work to India and China. The significance of this – whether actual or fictional – as an example of globalisation is examined and set within its political and economic context.

Type
RESEARCH ARTICLES
Information
Tempo , Volume 70 , Issue 275 , January 2016 , pp. 36 - 49
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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References

1 G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, vol. 1, tr. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988 [1818–29/1835]), p. 605.

2 Joseph Brodsky, quoted in Alexandra Berlina, Brodsky Translating Brodsky: Poetry in Self-Translation (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), p. 143. As Berlina notes, this aphorism was minted by Brodsky in Russian, causing the clumsy number agreement when translated into English.

3 Malcolm X, quoted in bell hooks, ‘Spike Lee Doing Malcolm X: Denying Black Pain’, in Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (London: Routledge, 2006 [1964]), pp. 180–92 (181).

4 Stefan Prins, Generation Kill programme note. Online at http://www.stefanprins.be/eng/composesChrono/comp_2012_03.html (accessed 20 April 2015). One might recall – with this combination of stadium rock and the virtual realities of modern warfare – that on this occasion the most mainstream of mainstream rock assuredly ‘got there first’: the media saturation, particularly of rolling news, and virtuality of the first Gulf War lie at the heart of U2's early 1990s ‘Zoo TV’ tour.

5 To be sure, not all of the pieces already noted neatly map onto this description precisely: Schubert's Lucky Dip is, to my mind, a very strongly crafted piece where the conceptualism is precisely to do with the thorough integration of a techno aesthetic ostensibly wholly alien to the territory of new music; by contrast, Nemtsov's implicated amplification seems, to the ear at least, to be a quite straightforward, elegant bass clarinet study, but for the ‘tasteless’ bluntness of the effects pedals, especially the exaggeratedly clunky shifts of tone between, say, distortion and octaver.

6 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 60.

7 It should be noted, however, that despite the clarity of the usual English translation, the German word is both a curious and interesting one to have selected. Literally, to be sure, a Fremdarbeiter would be a ‘foreign worker’, but historically it referred to (principally civilian) workers ‘of foreign nationality or citizenship employed in German economic enterprises’. During the period of World War II it could be used to refer both to ‘forced labourers’ (Zwangsarbeiter) and to those working in German territory who originated from countries friendly to the Nazi state, although in this latter case the word which would come to supplant Fremdarbeiter in the parlance of the Germany of the later 1950s onwards, Gastarbeiter (‘guest worker’), was already in use. Despite the significance of the term's usage in the Nazi era, it is important to note that it is, in fact, of much older currency, common throughout the first half of the twentieth century. It is doubtless hardly surprising that the most neutral, but also most clumsy, possible expression was avoided, which would have seen the piece titled ausländische Arbeitskraft. See, Ulrich Herbert, Hitler's Foreign Workers: Enforced Foreign Labor in Germany under the Third Reich, trans. William Templer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997 [1985]), esp. pp. 397–8.

8 Johannes Kreidler, in Day, Julian, ‘The Culture of Copying: Monetary Value and Exploitation. An Interview with Johannes Kreidler’, Runway: Australian Experimental Art, no. 25 (2014)Google Scholar. Online at http://runway.org.au/culture-copying-monetary-value-exploitation (accessed 1 April 2015).

9 Day, Julian, ‘Pop Will Eat Itself: Hidden Cycles of Exchange in Contemporary Sound’, Runway: Australian Experimental Art, no. 25 (2014)Google Scholar. Online at: http://runway.org.au/pop-will-eat-hidden-cycles-exchange-contemporary-sound/ (accessed 1 April 2015).

10 Seth Kim-Cohen, Against Ambience (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), n.p [e-book].

11 Kim-Cohen, Against Ambience, n.p.

12 Jacques Rancière, ‘The Politics of Literature’, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, trans. Steve Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2010 [2004]), pp. 152–68 (152).

13 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto, 2008 [1952]), p. 8.

14 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 30.

15 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 2004 [1994]), p. 127.

16 Kobena Mercer, ‘Reading Racial Fetishism: the Photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe’, in Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1994 [1986]), pp. 171–219 (176).

17 bell hooks, ‘Power to the Pussy: We Don't Wannabe Dicks in Drag’, in Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (London: Routledge, 2006 [1994]), pp. 9–26 (23–4).

18 Kobena Mercer, ‘Black Art and the Burden of Representatiojn’, in Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1994 [1990]), pp. 233–58 (249).

19 Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013 [2002]), p. 319.

20 Thomas Gorton, ‘Brett Bailey: “I'm pissed off” with Barbican cancellation’, Dazed, 25 September 2014. Online at: http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/21940/1/brett-bailey-im-pissed-off-with-barbican-cancellation (accessed: 26 April 2015).

21 Indeed, precisely this breakdown between the mediatised and the ostensibly real is one of the central ongoing concerns of Kreidler's output, literally thematised in Feeds. Hören TV, framed as a sort of TV game show, including a closing section in which an actor depicting ‘Tristan’ is repeatedly, and unconvincingly, stabbed to death to the accompaniment of an assortment of 8-bit and 16-bit game over musics.

22 See: https://physics.stanford.edu/people/faculty/shoucheng-zhang (accessed 1 April 2015).

23 See: https:// www.linkedin.com/pub/ramesh-raghupathy/0/48a/762 (accessed 1 April 2015).

24 Johannes Kreidler, in Julian Day, ‘The Culture of Copying: Monetary Value and Exploitation’.

25 Jacques Rancière, ‘The Paradoxes of Political Art’, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, trans. Steve Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2010 [2008]), pp. 134–51 (140).

26 Rancière, ‘The Paradoxes of Political Art’, p. 139.

27 Michael Rebhahn, ‘No problem! Approaches towards an artistic New Music’, lecture given at ‘New Perspectives for New Music’, Harvard University, 13 April 2013. Online at: http://hgnm.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Rebhahn-Lecture-Harvard.pdf (accessed 26 April 2015). The points raised here reiterate and amplify those made in Rebhahn's earlier lecture, ‘I hereby resign from New Music’, delivered at the Darmstadt New Music Courses in 2012, that title echoing Beuys's 1985 statement, ‘I hereby resign from art’.

28 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 131.