[1] In Music, Deconstruction, and Ethics, I cite Lawrence Kramer's observation that music was connected to a 'logic of alterity' in previous centuries. Music represents the other, the irrational vs. reason and the rational, the female vs. the male, fragmentation vs. unity, etc. Music is synonymous with the subordinate, the secondary, the subversive, the supplementary, the marginal. Music as the other. When music as the other can bring us in contact with the other other, it is ethically charged. [2] In Noise, Jacques Attali presents music as the opposite of the other. Music is a representation of the same, the self, the existing order, that which holds a dominant position. By taking this position, Attali, like Kramer, assigns an ethical-political function to music. Music disciplines and normalizes. It banishes subversive noise. It brings about order (differences) in a world that would otherwise be characterized by indifference and chaos. 'The code of music simulates the accepted rules of society' (Attali, p.29). Disciplining takes place in musical education that passes on existing conventions. It can be observed in the hierarchical organization of a (classical) orchestra that puts itself in the service of conductor and soloist. Attending a concert requires us to comply with a code of conduct. In short, music is a means of social control. [3] The omnipresence of music bans or prohibits subversive noises. It silences people. But it also makes silence impossible. Many thinkers on music deem silence disturbing and connected to speechlessness, impotence, an inward escape, and the refusal to assign meaning (cf. Schlünz in Nauck, p.31). Silence is 'what frightens us the minute we find it. Fear of the fact that nothing is happening, of emptiness, of a confrontation with oneself, of death and of life' (Schlünz in Nauck, p.32, my translation). According to Walter Zimmermann, the experience of listening to a piece of music that can be intellectually understood differs from the experience of listening to silence and noise (in music) in that the latter forces the listener to rely upon his own resources because a basis for any other possible orientation is missing. Zimmermann mentions the silent pieces as well as the intense stratification and almost unidentifiable digressions in the music of John Cage as examples of music that has no univocal line that a listener can detect. The emptiness or chaos that the listener then experiences can leave him in absolute despair (cf. Zimmermann in Nauck, p.5). At the same time, however, Zimmermann and other authors make different associations with silence: carefulness, tolerance, and meditation (Schlunz), a space for reflection (Zenck), and inner concentration (Zimmermann). Perhaps, the musicalization of culture protects us against all sorts of negative experiences that silence may unleash in us. Apparently, however, it also deprives us of the opportunity to contemplate and to accept. [4] How can one escape the imposition of silence through music? [5] Silence/noise as the other of music. How to think through the opening towards this other, the admission of the other of music within music? How to think through this form of hospitality? (According to Derrida, ethics coincides with the experience of hospitality.) Could we think of Cage's music as an example of an ethics of deconstruction in music? In Music, Deconstruction, and Ethics, I state that recognition of the other opens the ethical dimension of deconstruction. 'To get ready for this coming of the other is what I call deconstruction', says Derrida in 'Psyche: Inventions of the Other' (Waters and Godzich, p.56). Deconstruction acknowledges traces of the other without absorbing, assimilating or reducing it to the order of the same, the order of the calculable and the familiar. [6] Cage's music gives both silence and noise a voice by supplying them with a context. (They cannot exist without a context.) His work turns silence and noise into experience, into something we can come to, surrender to, lose ourselves in; it re-shapes our attitude towards silence and noise. Cage re-writes the cont(r)acts between music, silence and noise so that we can experience the relations between them differently and thus 'think' them otherwise. His work is ethical because it offers hospitality, hospitality to the stranger that does not speak the language of music, to a hostis called silence or noise. (In Latin, 'hostis' means both stranger and enemy but it can refer to 'host' or 'guest' as well.) But this hospitality cannot exist without borders, without a certain sovereignty. Cage (Cage's music) can offer hospitality because (his) music has a house of its own, its own domain, although its borders are undecidable, insecure, shifting. ('Deconstruction must neither reframe nor dream of the pure and simple absence of the frame', Derrida writes in The Truth In Painting.) [7] Cage does not merely introduce new sounds or noises to the domain of music. His compositions demand attention to noises that are always already present in music, that reside and resonate in the margins of the music, but that have been disavowed or suppressed. Cage points us to the other of music within music. 4'33'' (Play music) draws explicit attention to unintentional sounds that music can never exclude, and that are always already part of every composition. The other does not reside outside the same, but is an inextricable part of it. The hostis was always already inside the house of the host, the uncanny already part of the familiar. Noise as an inextricable part of music. This implies the possibility of a reversal of the relationship between noise and music. Cage's Waiting (Play music) is an exemplary instance of this reversal. Where musical tones were once the norm, in Waiting (Play music) they appear in a context that is dominated by random noises. Cage's written notes seem to be deviations within an enormous diversity of possible sounds. This heterogeneity has no order in itself, but is revealed only by virtue of its break from the conventions of musical order, and therefore remains connected to it. It is the music, the musical frame, or perhaps the expectation of music that turns noise (and silence) into experience, into objects of attention. Context. Demarcation. No hospitality without exclusion. [8] According to Derrida, the 'invention of the other' cannot be compared with a traditional notion of 'capacity to invent'. Contrary to the capacity to invent, the invention of the other withdraws from every plan or conceptualization. Any conceptual meaning should be abandoned as much as possible, or at least delayed. An encounter with the otherness of the other can only occur in a state of passivity or susceptibility. Cage recognizes and admires this susceptibility in the work of Morton Feldman, composer of many pieces that are extremely long and contain hushed volumes and slow tempos, that seem to arise hesitantly from a silent ground. 'He has changed the responsibility of the composer from making to accepting. To accept whatever comes, regardless of the consequences' (Cage, 1966, p.129). |