Keywords

[I]n the realm of public music, the concertgoer is secure in the knowledge that the amenities of concert going protect his firmly stated “I didn’t like it” from further scrutiny. Imagine, if you can, a layman chancing upon a lecture on “Pointwise Periodic Homeomorphisms.” At the conclusion, he announces: “I didn’t like it,” Social conventions being what they are in such circles, someone might dare inquire: “Why not?”

Admittedly, if [new] music is not supported, the whistling repertory of the man in the street will be little affected, the concert-going activity of the conspicuous consumer of musical culture will be little disturbed. But music will cease to evolve, and, in that important sense, will cease to live.

— Milton Babbitt: “Who Cares if You Listen” (Babbitt 1958, 40; 127)

In relation to (for lack of better terms) contemporary new music, institutional critique is at its heart an implied critique of the music-going audience. I say this because the audience at a contemporary art gallery, museum, or space is often already a contemporary art audience. So in that setting, the power to alter the institution can shift to the artist. In live music, the power is totally with the consumers, the audience; the entire and sole economy of music is one of quantity. One might go so far as to say that music institutions are the way they are because that’s exactly how the audience wants them to be. Not that we as artists can let the institutions off the hook: the institutions are only too glad to oblige because they themselves are, again, reliant on audience, maximum ticket sales equalling maximum success. If no one visits a philharmonic hall concert it’s a disaster; if no one visits a museum exhibition, it’s a Wednesday.Footnote 1

Milton Babbitt already spoke to this in his essay from 1958, “Who Cares If You Listen?”. Although not the central point of his infamous text, he correctly perceived that the main purpose of the existing Western classical music institutions (summed up in the wonderfully evocative phrase ‘the amenities of concert going’) was to protect the listening audience (and it must be said, a fairly homogenous listening audience at that).Footnote 2 The concert hall as a place for the audience to engage in an historically set ritual, and thereby a place to first and foremost feel safe. A safety also related to the fact the modern concert hall and indeed the modern concert are set up to replicate the personal listening experience, at-home or via headphones: high-quality sound, perfect acoustic, silence, dim lighting, etc. and, in particular, anonymity of the listening public itself. It is therefore interesting to note that when faced with this situation, Milton Babbitt chose to directly speak with the audience, not the institutions.

But looking at it from the artists’ perspective we could ask: for whom do the music institutions work well and for whom not? For those for whom it works well, there is obviously little to no need to even contemplate an over-arching programme of institutional critique. And for those for whom it doesn’t work, are they even important enough (economically viable enough) for the institutions to consider? The ‘music business’ would clearly say no. And therein lies the rub. For the artists for whom the system works there is little incentive to, as it were, mess with a running system, and for the artists who urgently need the institutions to change—in order to do their work or even be let into the system to find an audience (a new type of audience) in the first place—there are no practical means to make this happen. It is therefore a question of will but also very much of agency. For the visual contemporary artists who have made up the different generations and phases of institutional critique, both will and agency were on their side.

It was this observation that led me to consider my own action towards music-institutional critique, not positioned as a composer within the music world but as an artist working with music in the contemporary art world. And the prime manifestation of this is my meta-institutional work Kunsthalle for Music. Here then follows a brief description of the Kunsthalle for Music, including its inception and creation, as it pertains to my thinking around music-institutional critique.

The first time I used the phrase Kunsthalle for Music in print was in an extended interview with the art historian Marie-France Rafael that later became the book Music on Display. This is what I said there:

In today’s classical concerts there is very little room for this, for the unrehearsed, the so-called extraneous or the contingency, even (or one could say especially) within contemporary music performance practice. We need the Philharmonie or La Scala in all its perfection like we need museums to display the old masters, but we also need another kind of space for contemporary music performance that hasn’t really existed until now, let’s call it a ‘Kunsthalle’ for music. We as composers and musicians haven’t traditionally had this playground as we know it in contemporary art. As a composer I feel a strong pull towards a non-goal oriented musical space, the derive. An art space has of course its own rules, but is still a space you can navigate at your own pace (Rafael 2016, 38).Footnote 3

Defne Ayas, who was at that time the director of Kunstinstituut Melly in Rotterdam (at that time called Witte de With) read this book, which lead to her invitation to me to create the inaugural iteration of Kunsthalle for Music there. About 6 months after our initial exchange the project was officially announced via e-flux with the Kunsthalle for Music manifesto:

Music is not necessarily what you think it is. Can we imagine a space for music that exists outside of any media and beyond the stage? A space for unrecordable music, music of undefined duration, existing even when no audience is present? A dissolution of performer and audience, of rehearsal and performance? A music existing in the world based in a space of musical action and activity, production and performance that can be entered into and exited from at will. A space wherein the ideal listening and viewing position is determined independently by each artist, performer or visitor, not determined beforehand by a seat number on a ticket. Having an ensemble at the center of its activity carrying out or otherwise enacting the work which continues during the opening hours whether there are visitors present or not (Kunsthalle for Music 2016).

This was the first part of the manifesto, basically an outline of some of the formal conditions of this envisioned institution, conditions that would practically work towards a new framework for the composition, presentation, and perception of music, and at the same time potentially trigger some reflection about the rules and conventions that prevail in the concert hall on the one hand, and the ways in which music could be present in the art space on the other. The manifesto continues:

Music today is encountered primarily as that which we consume, through a remove, usually neatly pre-packaged, either as a recording or on a stage. And yet throughout most of its history, to experience music one had to perform it. Music was by definition: live, social and spatial. In other words also: messy, political, meta-temporal. Music was not merely in space; it was space. Music was not only social through listening; it was social in its conception. Music didn’t happen in time; it defined time.

Music is not necessarily what you think it is. (Kunsthalle for Music 2016)

Here it was important for me to stress the great extent to which music has fundamentally changed from what it was since its inception until about roughly 90 years ago with the advance in recording technologies and amplification as well as the rise of commercially available recordings and home radios and later, stereo systems. This extreme shift from an exclusively live, social form to a predominately mediated one cannot be overemphasised in terms of the impact on the classical music institutions. In fact, it is precisely this situation that has led to their ossification. The manifesto goes on:

Music is inherently not about perfection or reproducibility. Music is the act of an orchestra rehearsing. Music is “John Baldessari Sings Sol LeWitt”. Music is a group of people becoming a choir, or a band, whether they perform publicly or not. Music is two strangers singing a duet.

In short, how can we imagine contemporary music, composition, and music performance as contemporary art today? When did we forget that music—compositional strategies, formal structures, harmony and dissonance, orchestration, scoring, arrangement, rhythm, tempo—is at the base of it all? Music traditionally had been a driver of the contemporary; all the more striking then the situation wherein music qua music has mostly separated itself and been separated from what is considered to be contemporary art. It is in this schism that the Kunsthalle for Music operates (Kunsthalle for Music 2016).

And in fact, John Baldessari Sings Sol LeWitt later became one of the central repertoire pieces in the inaugural show. Precisely this kind of work, a loose collection of seemingly tossed off melodies albeit inside a tight conceptual frame arranged from a video work into a musical work, was a perfect starting point for imaging the Kunsthalle’s ‘collection’. The video itself already hints at a performative mode somewhere between rehearsal and performance that would become a central line of attack, since ‘perfection’ is so often used as a catch-all excuse for keeping the concert—and concert hall—ritual as it is (Baldessari 2019 [1972]). (Not to mention music schools and conservatories.) The manifesto concludes:

So what, in this sense, would be the institution for music inside and alongside the contemporary art institution? What would be its repertoire? What kind of a school and educational attitudes would it have at its heart? How would it contemplate the state of musicians and music today? How should it relate to the musical and visual avant-gardes of the past that strived for a symbiosis of sound and image, music and concept? Would its ensemble include musicians and non-musicians alike? Would it have a collection and if so how would music-works enter the market in the first place? What kind of mythical audience would it desire? (Kunsthalle for Music 2016)

In other words, the creation of a new institution to create a new audience. The manifesto is not dictating anything but rather asking a series of questions around the notion of institutional critique as it pertains to the music institution, including its modes of performance and rehearsal, and its economies. Specifically, it imagines a new institution for contemporary music performance within the model of a contemporary art institution. Worth noting is that, like Milton Babbitt, in the last sentence of the manifesto I address the audience issue directly, underlining the fact that audience critique and institutional critique are very much related when it comes to music.Footnote 4 Not so much ‘Who cares?’ as much as ‘Who are you, who could you be?’ And then further: ‘Where are you, what do you need to exist?’Footnote 5

This manifesto, the many questions and issues it raised, leads directly to the next step which was a symposium held at Kunstinstituut Melly taking place on 25–26 May 2017, called Music is Not! A Symposium On and Around the Kunsthalle for Music. The title, taken from the first sentence of the manifesto, was intended by me as a kind of positive, productive negation. At the symposium we brought together artists, composers, curators, philosophers, and theoreticians to discuss the Kunsthalle for Music. Among them was the philosopher Peter Osborne, whose keynote talk focussed on the idea of negation as addressed in the title of the symposium and gave an analysis of this negation as attempted by the project of Kunsthalle for Music.Footnote 6 He outlined three possible forms of negation in relation to music that I would quickly like to summarise here.

“Music Is Not!”, he said, might be misunderstood as: “The negation of music as such, not merely in its historically developed forms, but in principle, in all conceivable forms” (Osborne 2017, 12:46) This total negation, presented for the sake of completeness, quite literally leads us nowhere. Its utter nihilism is a dead end. But the next negation was: “The negation of what music currently is, via the negation of one or more of what are taken to be its currently essential predicates” (Osborne 2017, 12:13). This is essentially the negation strategy that has produced what we call contemporary music. In other words, negating through alternative compositional strategies one or more aspects of music and/or music-making that were at one time or another in the past deemed as essential to understanding something as being music in the first place. So, for example, atonality, or later indeterminacy. And precisely this piecemeal approach could indeed be seen as a failing of contemporary music as a project writ large. It is the final musical negation that is of particular interest as it pertains to institutional critique and Kunsthalle for Music: “Music is not!”, Osborne went on, could be more correctly interpreted as: “The negation of music as a whole, in its historically developed totality, as it is currently understood” (Osborne 2017, 12:32, emphasis by the author).

In other words, neither a complete negation of all music nor a selective adjustment of particular compositional strategies but in fact a reframing, a total reframing that includes not only the sound of the music, but its presentation, its educational systems, its production models; in short, its institutions as they exist today. This is the reframing that the Kunsthalle for Music is attempting, and one critical element of this attempt has been to reframe this ‘whole’ within the context of what we think of as contemporary art. A prime example of this reframing is an early work of mine, Solo from 2009.

The idea behind Solo is actually quite simple. It is a composition for an opera singer, a soprano, performing for one audience member in a small room. The whole piece lasts around 15 minutes. It’s written out in the normal way, but the score also contains instructions for the singer involving her choreography and positions in the room. The singer’s relationship to the single audience member is integral to the piece, to the composition of the piece; it cannot be performed any other way. (Incidentally, a recording of the piece is therefore equally nonsensical.) And so, as one might imagine it was very difficult, in the end in fact impossible, to have this work performed in any of the standard concert venues or opera houses.Footnote 7 So of course I had a problem showing Solo. Around that time, I also had one of my first possibilities to show a work in a gallery setting and it was a revelation to see that in that setting there was absolutely no problem with the set-up of Solo. In an art context, it was simply a performative installation for one audience member at a time: it was performed in a loop, people waited their turn or signed up for a time slot. The same work that had little to no ‘value’ in the music institutions, that is to say a work for which no tickets could be sold and that could not be recorded, worked perfectly within the contemporary art institution. That was a very important object-lesson moving forward.

Obviously for many visual artists the white cube is the proverbial elephant in the room, or rather the elephant that is the room. But, coming from where I came from, coming from the performing arts, the white cube was nothing more or less than an empty space that one could freely inhabit. Of course, the white cube finds itself within certain institutions of its own like the gallery, the museum, the public collection, etc. But precisely because of the artists who have pushed, expanded and even rejected notions of these institutions there is this freedom, even the freedom to completely re-imagine and remake the institution itself. This is precisely why today it is hardly even necessary to talk about the white cube. In comparison, and hence this publication within which this essay finds itself, music has not yet had its institutional critique moment; this freedom quite simply does not exist within the traditional music institutions.

I want to in closing to be clear what I mean by this: there has been no fundamental artistic movement in music that would systematically analyse, question, and criticise the conditions that govern the production, presentation, and perception of new music as artistic work needing today completely reimagined institutions, modalities, and audiences. Especially now, when the very idea of institution writ large is being re-examined and questioned (and very rightfully so), this is a long overdue and urgently necessary corrective.