Keywords

Institutions are social arrangements.

This implies orientation and alignment.

They give directions

Something to go by.

Sometimes you have to align with them too.

They are systems of rules

They are made of rules.

Sometimes these rules are precisely articulated

Some change and are subject to organic processes. Mostly both.

Institutions of the state and the church

For instance

Have to be fairly rigid and binding

Like the parliament

The Taxpayer’s Union

The Catholic Synod

Others have a form that is more loose and open, like the Chaos Computer Club or the Alte Feuerwache community centre in Cologne.

At what point can something be considered an institution?

Maybe once its rules are so advanced that the societal metabolism can continuously and safely rely on the institution and interact with it.

By the way, the word rule is derived from Latin regula and originally means the “straightedge” or “gauge” with which and by which things can be measured.

Within a specific societal metabolism defined by its usefulness, we use the institutions to gauge ourselves.

At any rate they always pursue a certain aim.

The institutions of musical life in general, like concert halls, broadcasting companies, festivals, music academies but also the music industry and institutes of musicology are there to foster and promote music.

MUSIC. In a common understanding this is still the isolated, decontextualised sonorous event, as it was built, understood and—institutionalised in the nineteenth century in the course of the development of reception.

Has this music thus become an institution? A set of rules that can be interacted with safely that gauges and provides orientation?

We will return to this.

The fact that we can return to it suggests that MUSIC assumes a specific space in society, a place in the public mind that has turned it into an institution. At least we seem to still know what we are talking about when we say “music”. This talk is part of the institution. The particular language (including professional language and terminology) defines and formulates the relevant set of rules.

By promoting the rules of musical life and keeping them going, the music institutions perpetuate their specific language regimes, like the one that says what music is. The most established one is that music is what can be heard (“tonally moving forms”). This used to be truly progressive. Until it bit its own butt. The bite was the reproduction and commodification of sounds. The first phonograph was invented in 1876. Its impact could not have been anticipated. A few decades later an industry has developed that taps this purely SOUNDING substance and packs it into LOUDSPEAKERS. No, into memory media, records at first, which can store the sounds and from which they can be retrieved at any time. Music as ‘musicmusic’, that which only sounds, and is turned into a commodity. GEMA, ASCAP and the like are founded. Everyone profits.

Especially the representatives (almost exclusively men) of ART MUSIC. That is the one that slipped from the island (and isolation) of the nineteenth-century illusion into the islands of the loudspeaker.

The music industry, based on new technology, is an institution.

It is determined by the rules of the maximisation of profit, determining what works, what is supported and funded and what isn’t.

State institutions also enter into intimate relations with the institutions of the industry. You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. Liberalism. No objections…

But what happens, then, to the intellectual (rather than monetary) metabolism that music could or should be about?

In the treasured concert space (hall and ritual), our beloved concert music turns into a museum-like event. Bow, ye lackeys! Be moved, ye masses! Buy, ye enthusiasts!

Art—in the specific sense, referring to its precision, its painful analytic force, its aspiration, its essential impact, its variability, its nutritional value, its emptiness, its exemplariness—cuts its own path again. It is pragmatic. What do we experience? How do we not understand it? What are the things, the rules and connections we just cannot avoid in real life? What are we REALLY thirsty for? Art regulates this subliminally and superficially at the same time so that we will keep searching. This endless search and also the fact that all answers will be temporary establishes points along the way, different forms of being in between, of intermediacy, metaxy.

In all, a rigid, performative set of rules, no matter how powerful and weighty, has no chance. Art (in the sense that it has to move into the infinitely small in order to bring its weight to bear), the spiritual in art will create new rules, i.e. straightedges, guidelines, new alignments, new arrangements. At least in the long term.

Because this concept of musicmusic, which can be turned into profit so well and which can populate a museum of sonorous ritual for society’s inertial force, this concept is too rigid, too inert and it impedes the creative potential of the compositional thinking of the next generations, of society, of the societal metabolism, of collective interaction. Hence it hardly matters whether the new art (I can’t think of a better word right now), this formation that is alive and possibly has not been contained by definitions, that performs model experiments that pay no heed to the boundaries and limitations of the concert hall, the institutions, etc. perforates the old institutions or creates new ones. This something that grows from a profound and painful degree of attention (in life), the resultant precision in perception and the resultant articulation calls for a honing of the instruments (tool box!) and creates its own sets of rules. This arrangement from within generates centres of gravity. Sometimes it moves by leaps and bounds from one work, one workplace, one dispositive to the next, sometimes latently, slowly, furtively, subliminally, protected or dangerously unprotected and open, unnamed, employing languages, creating the languages it needs.

This art is necessarily pragmatic, not just in perceiving the current situations but also in perceiving opportunities to unfold.

Everyone is an autodidact, every scene is free. Everything that is absorbed by the given institutions—which do this with good reason and out of the profound instinct of self-preservation of the pork barrels they are built around—everything comes from humans and groups of humans who found each other, let’s say freely, and then accrue to the pre-existing institutions. And why not. By the way, the word scene is derived from Greek skené, the tent. Small (free? what does free mean when something necessarily emerges?) scenes are created. A meta-metabolism arises that begins to question musicmusic. Oh what suffering for the keepers of the Grail. The concert (as institution) is in danger. The rules of sitting, then applauding, then being silent, being moved or not, waiting (“to express in action passivity of thought”), unsettledness, etc. are themselves unsettled. But don’t worry, my dears. First of all, this protected space of listening will continue to exist. It is still very useful. But not just that. It is not only useful. It is also harmful in its absoluteness. There will always have to be new forms and rules for the use of performative events. Secondly, there will be new forms of events (and some of them already exist), which neither aim for the concert nor the hubbub of the picture stage nor technological reproduction but which produce their own rules from inner necessity, from a thirst for composition, for a third space (transgression!), from compositional thinking that mediates itself into itself. The question of the framing of the work, the conditions of its perception, produces new, friendly monsters. But not in order to perforate compositional thinking, as is often presumed, but in order to reshape it. Which will probably raise the very old, the even older questions, as timely as they are.

This creates new institutions from within. First they are like cleaner fish, attached to the big animals, festivals, broadcasting companies, etc. Then, little by little, if civilisation gives them a little time, they create their own organisations, etc. Then also the physical ark (hopefully). Later, the next ones will arrive. History breathes. Maybe eventually even tighter spaces will be sought again, new rituals again to enable other types of mobility. Who knows.