Keywords

This is the basic narrative of my series of opras (not ‘operas’) called Ø: A kind of mysterious monster, let’s call it Mother (the musicologists quarrel around the question if she/he/it is loosely based on Ymir from the Norse mythology, Herzeleyde from the Parsifal legend, Francis of Assisi, or Erda from Wagner’s Ring) wakes up in an unknown place. She/he/it utters the sound ‘øøøøø’ and gives birth to three figures that will be the protagonists of the following episodes. These three slowly develop a form of private language, and their first communicative interactions seem to gravitate around the notions of ‘Existence’, ‘Time’, and ‘the We’. They have barricaded themselves in a cellar in a hidden location in a forest in Sweden. Their aim is to live as disconnected as possible from ‘the Outside’, from ‘the System’, from the ‘Networks’ and from all practical considerations (family, work, money, Internet). In this centripetal world—through contemplation and concentration, meticulous planning and private experiments in art, politics, and alchemy—a big world changing ‘Event’ is prepared.

Thus the setting in Ø is outspokenly anti-institutional. The only way to break out of the deadlock and silent violence of the status quo is to force an independent position. A radical withdrawal from the terror of society with its constraints and inherent prohibitions is necessary. But what exactly is the pre-history of the Mother? How long has it been sleeping? Why was it so exhausted? Where did it come from and why did it need to escape?

It is a strange time to write about or against institutions. With environmental disasters, the growth of anti-democratic forces, digital dystopia and even war in Europe, even people like the prime ministers of Sweden and Finland seem to want to rethink their relation to institutions (like NATO), in a move that seems conservative at first sight. And: What powers other than the democracy-deficient, market-celebrating economic cartel of the EU can, in today’s political reality, save what is left of the welfare state and perform some minimal action in response to the climate disaster, in a fight against no-limit capitalist exploitation of human and natural resources? Is it our job at this point in history, even though one should wish for a radically different society from the one that prevails today, to explode institutions like the EU? On a more local level, art institutions, especially the ones subsidising the free scene, are also under constant attack, and threatened with de-funding. Who are artists to engage in institutional critic when the hard ultra-populist economical right, the big corporations, and neo-fascist groups are doing this in a much more spectacular way? It is surely a sad time to be an institutional critic…

None the less, I will hereby make an exclusive revelation for you, dear readers: I confess that I identify somewhat with the Mother and the three protagonists of Ø. The truth is, there is a bit of autobiography involved. In the year 2009 I woke up from a long intellectual sleep, after an exhaustive period of manic masochistic attack on the institutions of new music (this failed revolution is described in allegorical form in Ø episode 12 which functions as a prequel to the episode 1 already mentioned). When I finally opened my eyes again, I was pregnant with my OWN INSTITUTION. But more about that later. Let’s stay in the past for a while.

In the hard years before 2009, I was lacking faith concerning the ever less convincing exploration of musical ‘material’ that seemed to still constitute the mainstream of the musical festival scene (especially the ever increasing, but still pretty worn-out catalogue of ‘extended techniques’). I did find the ensemble structures suspiciously static since at least the time of Schoenberg and his Privataufführungen (with the consolidation of the sinfonietta). Music seemed much too closed for impulses from contemporary theatre, from the art discourse, from recent philosophy, or even from pop music. My feeling was that the superego of contemporary music was a strict bureaucracy of academicism, and that its subconsciousness was a dungeon of artistic fear.

Very little about contemporary music was self-evident for me anymore. Accordingly, my artistic approach became to investigate the very basic conditions of the genre in all its aspects. Let’s consider a case study from the year 2012:

For me, it was natural that when I was invited to the very institution embodying the avant-garde since its beginning in 1921, the Donaueschinger Musiktage, I decided to compose a piece simply called Musik (‘Music’). As is maybe clear from its title, the ambitious programme was to confront the art form of contemporary music in its totality.

A small episode in the (too?) long piece (which changes perspectives, listening contracts, media, and format several times) got a lot of unexpected attention. After a section of some meaningless MIDI fake new-complexity music, there comes a blackout and a pre-recorded trio of digitally manipulated voices singing “Danke Armin Köhler!” The lyrics continue something like this: “Thank you, dear festival director that we can perform here. It is very good for our careers. This we can use next time we apply for funding from the Cultural Council in Norway”. Somehow this little banal intermezzo became a small scandal. I always loved the works of the pioneer institutional critic Hans Haacke, who famously exhibited carefully researched material and diagrams exposing dubious real estate businesses of the trustees of the museum he was exhibiting in (Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971.).Footnote 1 The exhibition was cancelled and the curator was sacked, but after this seminal work, no museum boss or festival director is safe anymore! My intention for the Donaueschingen-piece was nothing of this kind. I didn’t have anything dark or hidden to reveal about the festival director or the festival itself. While Haacke pointed at serious and criminal circumstances that in an ideal world should have started a revolution concerning the connections between art and money (which it didn’t), I for my part plainly stated the extremely banal circumstances of how a festival and its totally necessary inclusion/exclusion mechanism functions. If anything, I merely staged myself, and the ensemble, as complete amateurs and tourists from a provincial backward culture (which on some level is always true). That there IS a festival director, and that this person has an important say on which composers and ensembles are invited, should be no breaking news.Footnote 2

I don’t want to exaggerate the weight of these three minutes (I was even close to cutting it out just before the premiere, because it is, well, just a bit silly), but at least for myself, this more or less unimportant episode in the history of the Neue Musik-Szene pointed to the fact that the institutional framework of music is not very much reflected. And that to suddenly put it in an unexpected spotlight create a form of unease. And maybe even that to challenge the paradigm of ‘absolute music’ or some kind of ‘pure listening’, and instead shifting the attention to the whole framework of music production (and listening), still has (or had) its taboo sides.

But how did it come to this (you may ask)? My trajectory as a student of composition was fairly mainstream and modernist: I spent quite some time trying to approach, more or less chronologically, what in my view constituted the new music canon (which was also the music that I loved the most): serialism à la Barraqué, algorithmic composition à la Xenakis, extended instrumentalism à la La-Lachenmann and new complexity—o la la!—à la Ferneyhough, but soon I became disillusioned (tra la la) à la Kagel.Footnote 3 Taking for example his Sur Scène (where famously a lecturing mock musicologist is the soloist of the ensemble) as the paradigmatic work on which to orient myself, I began a period of maybe 15 years. Let’s call them the ‘Institutional Critique Middle Reinholdtsen Period’. Like Kagel, but hopefully in a more contemporary manner and with different use of media and references, I wanted to investigate power structures, the relation composer-musician, the festival dispositif, conservative structures of the ensemble world, the score, the ritual of the concert and the Commission. And maybe most importantly (although it is stretching the concept of ‘an institution’ a bit far) I wanted to challenge the institution of listening in contemporary music. I found that there was a kind of hegemony of listening practice with too strong roots in the idea of absolute music, like say Mozart’s string quartets (do I need to add that this is my favourite music? No, it is beside the point), but where the pieces themselves follow a very different logic.

I did a very unscientific study among colleagues and musicians, asking them immediately after hearing a new piece: What did you actually hear? How was the piece organised? What information came across? Very seldom my (un-knowing) objects could extend the elaborations of their experiences beyond an appreciation of one certain ‘sound’ (very often one bit of instrumentation), or the remembrance of a certain nice ‘moment’ that stuck out. Using this admittedly meagre data, I made a grand generalisation, concluding that rhetoric in any traditional sense (meaning that the piece is supposed to be ‘followed’ in real time) is (often) missing in contemporary music. At the same time, when you ask composers how they construct their pieces, it is not lacking in formal or architectural constructions, nor in intricate systems of compositional technique. I saw this as a legacy of a modernist practice where a new music theory was developed in parallel to the actual pieces. The clearest example of this maybe Xenakis, whose early pieces only make aesthetic sense if one carefully reads his theoretical explanations in the book Formalized Music. Pushing my theories even further, this would mean that this very influential form of modernist music already is an interdisciplinary art form. Instead of asking ‘Who cares if you listen?’, I claimed (to myself) that ‘listening is not enough’. Contemporary music had become an art form that now involved reading of text (and often diagrams), and in Xenakis’ instance included the disciplines of mathematics, physics, and pre-Socratic philosophy. This was my response: There is nothing wrong with this! This is not a fault! Reading is fine! Interdisciplinarity is ok! It was probably always here (except maybe for the eighteenth-century string quartet heydays)! Music was always also theory, cosmology, social situation, dance, ritual, visuals, and drugs. Xenakis toyed with the notion of ‘Meta Music’, and for me this moment in music history defines a distinctly conceptual turn, something like 15 years before the term established itself in the context of visual arts. The whole interdisciplinary circus in all the art forms has of course challenged (if not exploded) the idea of ‘pure listening’ even more. As an immediate response to the new problematic relation (in my brain) between listening and theory, I wrote the piece Faust—or the Decline of Western Music in 2011, where the formally complex piece is analysed in real time on a screen, thereby lifting the cognitive experience of the audience to hopefully new unexpected heights. The textual comment on the music is not something outside, but a necessary part of, the piece.

But I also needed to challenge the institutional boundaries in a more profound way. In 2009 I founded The Norwegian Opra. It was located in my own living room in the slums of Oslo. A direct inspiration was the Musée d’Art Moderne by the Belgian poet turned visual artist Marcel Broodthaers (another obvious inspiration was Richard Wagner’s Bayreuth, but let’s leave that reference for now). His conceptual museum was initially more or less empty. It consisted only of a space and an announced ‘opening event’. The genre in question was ‘the museum’, the institution in itself (although later his different ‘departments’ of the museum became content with a very specific aesthetic). The work is considered a classic of the branch of institutional critique and is of course a kind a negative of the traditional museum, like a dead skeleton. But the essential aspect for me was that it was doing this in a powerfully affirmative way: Broodthaers formed a NEW institution, not limiting himself to criticising the existing ones (like Haacke, one might say). The void of the old museum became the birthplace of a kind of museum that could be defined from scratch.

My new opera house was also in the shadows of Oslo’s new 420.000.000 (or 7.000.000.000 depending on how you count) Euro Norwegian Opera and Ballet, which opened at exactly the same time (one could actually view the building while sitting on the toilet of my The Norwegian Opra). But while Broodthaers’ initial work was a performance of emptiness, my aim was to have an overload of production as a violent contrast to the other opera house that typically produced close to zero new operatic works (other than new versions of the standard repertoire, of course). I announced 15 new premieres made on a zero budget. The art form in question is no longer the long-time dead genre of ‘opera’,Footnote 4 but rather the new and potentially virginally fresh ‘opra’, a genre devoid of the Schlamm of traditions, expectations, and definitions.

The founding principle of The Norwegian Opra was formulated according to the old Marxist maxim to gain ‘total control over the means of production’. All aspects of the institution should be treated artistically. The aim was, through a radical downscaling of the opera apparatus, to reclaim nothing less than ARTISTIC FREEDOM AT ITS PUREST. I was myself the dictatorial opra director, the composer of all works, as well as the librettist, director, Heldentenor, scenographer, propaganda minister, web-designer, ticket master, cleaning assistant, conceptual consultant, head of the Worker’s Union, restaurant chef etc. No more weak institutional criticism aiming to modify the system from the inside! From now on, I build my own institutions! A long series of masterworks were created and produced in the apartment at the now legendary address of Oslo gate 7.

In 2015 The Norwegian Opra had grown to a small crew of dedicated Opra-Superstars and moved its location to the forest in Sweden to further radicalise its quest for ‘isolation and concentration’, in the end also abandoning the concept of ‘the audience’. Instead, in the cellar of the NEW opera house, an infinite series of opra-films was begun under the name Ø. It is a mixture of dystopian science fiction, verismo, communist propaganda, outdated existentialism, and plump autobiography. In other words, a little like Der Ring des Nibelungen (but much longer of course). The operatic series counts 17 episodes at the moment of writing, and the initial narrative has already been sketched at the beginning of this text.

A meta-level has recently been introduced, at least since the performance at the Münchener Biennale für neues Musiktheater in 2018: The Ø films are posted on the so-called ‘Internet’, and a group of viewing enthusiasts, a gang of idealised audience members, a true cult of Precariat-Proletariat of Chosen Ones that go under the name of ‘The Followers of Ø’ has gathered together from all over the world, transcending all identitarian borders, to a big meadow in the forest of Sweden. Towards this unlikely spot they all gravitate: The old, the sick, the converted capitalists, the minorities, the incels, the Lumpenproletariat, the stupid, the sick, animals, monsters, un-organic things, all forms of matter—in short: the radical universal Everyone. They aim to interpret and translate the message of Ø into potent action in the concrete reality of our world: An affirmative transition from theory to PRAXIS.

A kind of nucleus commune is declared on the paradisiacal meadow in Sweden. In the new opra-film-series Followers of Ø (at the moment of writing it exists two episodes), the viewers are allowed to follow the gradual growth of the village. A big 6-hour theatrical spectacle is being prepared for 2023, where the audience at last is invited to the meadow and the adjoining buildings.

I agree with the visual artist Andrea Fraser that “institutional critique has the form of melancholia” (Fraser 2009, 307). There is a sense of loss of a beautiful tradition involved. My earlier pieces that referenced the tradition of institutional art were in a way tragic pieces, sometimes created on the edge of desperation. And, of course, institutional critique often is a highly personal affair, where institutions gain metaphorical weight and stand in for whatever private psychological troubles. The Norwegian Opra though is an attempt at insisting on an affirmative approach: The New is still possible. True Change is an option. The Followers of Ø, part two even ends with an emphatic ‘ja ja ja’ ensemble finale. This self-created context (which involves over-the-top Outsider Art theatricality with absurd masks, costumes, and non-realistic acting) is so far removed from any conventional framing of contemporary music that, perhaps paradoxically, it again opens up (for me) an unexpected possibility to compose quasi-freely again. Seen from my institutional critique point of view in 2009, everything in contemporary music felt like citations necessarily loaded with some sense of conscious or unconscious irony or careful distance. In the universe of The Norwegian Opra, this has been turned on its head. Not only can The Followers of Ø sing and play in any way they like without any stylistic limits, but also through the institution The Norwegian Opra, I am completely free in regard to choice of media, length, format, and questions of interdisciplinary balance. The framing of The Norwegian Opra, which, from the standpoint of the creator (me), functions as a non-frame, gives a possibility, a licence, to again attempt to compose true Autonomous Art! I must surely be fooling myself again, no?