November 22, 2023
Henrik Frisk - henrik.frisk@kmh.se
A multidisciplinary, structured approach to the digitisation and exploration of electronic music heritage
A collection of electronic instruments used by composers in Sweden during the 1960's and 70's collected by the Swedish Performing Arts Agency (Musikverket) and archived by the Performing Arts Museum (Scenkonstmuseet).
Michel Foucault's volume 3 of his History of Sexuality.
However, exactly how it will be possible to determine this is not obvious
from a flexible variety of possible control configurations, the synthesizer eventually stabilised into a keyboard instrument
Pinch & Trocco (1998) The social construction of the early electronic music synthesizer, Icon.
An attempt to understand an instrument should include:
Compare a cembalo with a sampler playing a cembalo sound
Swedish organist and pianist Karl Erik Welin playing Rendez-Vous 1963 by Théodore E Libèr
He dismantles a piano with a chain saw - but even this way of "playing" the piano relies on the instrument's history and context
Wiggen (1972) De två musikkulturerna, Sveriges Radio.
Finding out the particular associations the instrument provides may be difficult.
Dataton is a good example (see Holzer, Holzapfel & Frisk (2021) Sounds of Futures Passed: Media Archaeology and Design Fiction as NIME Methodologies)
with the introduction of electronic instruments: it's a mess
(Transformations: study of cultural traditions in constant change)
What is the difference between the traditional method for musical interpretation and the excavation of the technological and cultural significances of a particular electronic musical instrument of the past?
Isn't it just the same thing?
(see Roland Barthes in the famous essay /The death of the Author/)
It could be: There is nothing outside of the object to paraphrase Derrida. The object can tell os a great many things.
Nor is my sole interest an artistically driven project where the end goal is a work
It is the interactions that are made possible by engaging in an artistically driven play with the objects:
In this free play I can engage with certain questions in a way that would otherwise not have been possible. Improvisation is part of the method that allows me to do this.
between the musicological model and the historically informed exploration of a electronic music heritage:
first has an origin (the composer) and the second supports a network of relations that includes an originator but does not necessarily privilege them
The added value: it opens up for an expanded ethical dimension of artistic practices
It is a particular development between self and others that is at the core, similar to Foucault's notion of the care of the self, a self that is rooted in "practices of freedom"
Freedom is the ontological condition of ethics. But ethics is the considered form that freedom takes when it is informed by reflection
Foucault, Rabinow & Hurley (1997) Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, New Press, New York.
Foucault further makes possible an artistic evaluation of the investigation of old instruments:
Freedom is the ontological condition of ethics. But ethics is the considered form that freedom takes when it is informed by reflection.
Foucault, Rabinow & Hurley (1997) Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, New Press, New York.
As long as I care about the relation between myself and the instrument, and the instruments relation to its context, I can be free to follow my artistic and ethically informed intentions, and these will develop into a sort of freedomm in and of themselves.
The concept of an ethics of instruments is explored by Tresch & Dolan
They derive from Foucault's technologies of the self, the:
The care of the self is rather the activity of which these elements are a part.
The care of the self is not a solipsitic activity that is focused on ones physical body or individuality
When you take care of the body you do not take care of the self. The self is not clothing, tools, or possessions; It is to be found in the principle that uses these tools, a principle not of the body of the soul. You have to worry about your soul–that is the principal activity for caring for yourself. The care of the self is the care of the activity and not the care of the soul-as-substance.
The principle that uses the tools of artistic practice is in essence the aesthetics of the creative act: the practice itself.
The idea of an ethics of instruments is leaning on the notion that the material aspects, mediations and the telos of an instrument can provide grounds for an analysis of its ethics.
It may appear odd to speak of ethics in relation to dead objects when not even alive objects are ethically treated
Their main interest here is to use their framework to study historical instruments, both musical and scientific
Main ideas:
There is a state but no process
The causal relations in this network are contributing to both the knowledge in the system and to its output
The second is where knowledge may be developed as a result of the developing relations and that whatever knowledge there is rests on the ethics of these relations.
rejecting the freedom of material objects […] does not imply their moral neutrality
Dalton (2018) Towards an Object-Oriented Ethics: Schopenhauer, Spinoza, and the Physics of Objective Evil, Open Philosophy.
Henrik Frisk