Scholarly record

PETER ABLINGER AND NEUTRAL HETEROPHONY AS AN APPROACH TO THE WHITE-NOISE MUSIC

L. Beldean

Abstract

The conditioning offered by analysis models is exclusively cultural, creating the way in which we approach the score. The analysis projects over the object score automated study operations, not seeking to extract its contents, but rather to function itself (to demonstrate the nature of ‘what is’). Often, the substance of the score may cause situations through which the ‘philosophy of analysis’ cannot grasp the subject of the music involved. The flow of the sound’s movement is expected to be understood by reading it with ‘cultural’ eyes, surrounded by conventions. It would seem that, in the music of the humming, in which the contrast (expected to fulfill convention) is the silence rather than the sound that sounds, the process of the becoming of music (described by the score’s symbols) cannot be cast into an analysis format. This is the case of Ablinger’s music. Between an exercised cultural memory and the sound medium proposed by Ablinger a gap appears, as for him “the sounds are not sounds! They exist to divert the intellect and to quench the thirst of the senses.” By enhancing the score’s risk in which the established order is a collection of investigations separated by connections to aesthetics, to language or to musical education, he warns that the involvement of analysis does not engage the reaction to the sound, it explains only what articulates it: the bundle of cultural codes. In this case, the focus does not fall upon the music, but on the instruments of thought. I will go through a few of Ablinger’s compositions referencing the concept of ‘negative heterophony’; I will use it differently from the sense which Matthias Knauer gave for the analysis of Mauricio Kagel’s “Heterophonie”. The process of “heterophonysation”, which appeared through archaic forms of playing once with music, gains influence simultaneously with the apparition of written culture (the printing press). Through the suggestions of its transposition from pure human feeling to intellectual cliché, a dystopic situation perpetuates: the human natural takes the allogeneic form of ‘civilizing’ culture. I will sample the whole heterophonic arsenal embraced by music – from oral to written culture – differentiating between positive and negative heterophony. Ablinger’s perspective – of neutral heterophony – exfoliates the sound’s texture from the constraint of theory; positive and negative heterophony mix, turning into murmur, such that “sounds exist to hear (not to be heard...)”.

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