music

Architecture and its image

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Or, must one visit a building
in order to write about it?

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The following article was originally published in Issue 17 of Princeton University’s architecture journal Pidgin, which took as its odd theme: “Do You Even Lift?” Other contributors to this issue include the excellent Beatriz Colomina, Michael Meredith, Andrés Jacque, Jonah Rowen, Anna-Maria Meister, and Lily Zhang (amongst others). Definitely pick up a copy if you’re interested. Most architecture and design bookstores should carry it.

Right now their website is being revamped, in any case, so the appearance of these articles online has been delayed. I’m posting the original version I submitted here, which is a bit longer and isn’t quite as tightly argued as the version they published. You can check out a PDF of their copy here. Enjoy!
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At MoMA’s “In Pursuit of Architecture” conference back in mid-September, a ten-year retrospective on the output of the journal Log, a pair of questions kept coming up: Must critics first visit a structure in order to write about it? Which is more important, the image of a building or the building itself?

Though billed as a conversation between emerging architects and eminent critics, the most interesting exchanges were the ones that disregarded this format entirely. Sylvia Lavin, a frequent contributor to Log, traded questions and comments with Cynthia Davidson, its editor-in-chief. Davidson insisted that critics must physically travel to a building’s location for their opinions to be considered valid. Her emphasis, therefore, was on the primacy of the built object over its secondary representation through images. Lavin argued this was a false dichotomy. Why separate them at all? Might the building and its image not prove complementary? Critics should of course make every effort to witness a given work of architecture firsthand, but shouldn’t let that stand in their way if circumstances don’t permit. One can get the basic gist of a structure, she maintained, simply by looking at photographs and floor plans. Inferences may be drawn from there.

Neither side can be said to have decisively carried the day. During Q&A, the issue was brought up again, this time by architecture critic Jeff Kipnis, who was in attendance. “I don’t understand why Cynthia thinks one has to go see a building in order to write about it,” he wondered incredulously. “No composer feels like he has to go hear a performance to ‘get’ a piece of music. He looks at the score. Some scores he’s interested in; others not.”

Before Davidson or the panelists had a chance to respond, however, another member of the audience interjected. He challenged Kipnis’ remarks by relying on the very same analogy: “Not true. [Johann Sebastian] Bach walked twenty miles to Denmark just to hear a performance of [Dieterich] Buxtehude’s music.”

“That’s because Buxtehude didn’t publish his scores!” Kipnis swiftly shot back, evidently eager to cover his tracks.

“Again, that isn’t strictly true,” the man started to reply. But this time the speakers on stage managed to intervene and put the discussion back on track.

Unfortunately, no one from the panel subsequently took up the suggested parallel between music and architecture. Of course, the building art is no stranger to such metaphors. Ever since the German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling first described architecture as a form of “petrified” music in 1804, the comparison has frequently been made.1 (So frequently, in fact, that the critical theorist Theodor Adorno, a musicologist by training, declared a moratorium on the use of the cliché).2 Nevertheless, despite its familiarity, the panelists seemed reluctant to weigh in on the question of its aptness.

How might the two examples — the architecture critic with an architectural construction and the music critic with a musical composition — be related in this instance? In either case, if distance separates the critic from the tectonic structure to be seen (or the harmonic structure to be heard), the element of mediation enters in. That is to say, if he is unable to experience the object of criticism in person, in terms of its sensual immediacy, then a more intermediate substitute must be found. All this raises the old problem of the artwork in the age of its technological reproducibility, most famously theorized by the Marxist critic Walter Benjamin. Of particular interest here is the way a work of architecture or piece of music is disseminated on a mass scale. Lost in this process of reproduction, as Benjamin pointed out, is the object’s “unique existence in a particular place.” What results is thus a kind of spatial and temporal dislocation, by which the object reproduced becomes perceptible at a greater remove. Furthermore, this process allows for the transposition of aesthetic experience into settings and locales where it had hitherto been impossible.3 Continue reading →

The tragic failure of Adorno’s emancipatory modernism

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Bret Schneider
Platypus Review 21
March 1, 2010

Book review:
…Theodor Adorno
…Philosophy of New Music (1947)

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Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor.
University of Minnesota Press.
Minneapolis, MN: 2006..

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The new translation and republication of Theodor Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music is a further clarification of modernism, necessitated by the latest discontents with postmodernism’s vulgarization, which keeps it at a fictitious distance. Perhaps as his remedy for the most fragmented part of the whole of the arts, namely music, translator Robert Hullot-Kentor has in recent years been steadily reintroducing Adorno’s aesthetic philosophy to English readers.[1] Philosophy of New Music continues this process, further introducing readers to Adorno’s complex aesthetic theory, also elaborated recently in Current of Music, which embodies Adorno’s aesthetic hopes for the early emergence of radio transmission. Republishing Philosophy of New Music serves the purpose of clarifying a nexus of art history where the relationship between aesthetics and theory could have been drastically reformulated.

Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951), whose works Adorno considers at length in Philosophy of New Music.

Austrian composer Arnold Schönberg (1874-1951), whose
works Adorno considers at length in Philosophy of New Music

Philosophy of New Music is one of Adorno’s more obscure, niche analyses. Split into two sections comprising intricate dissections of Schönberg and Stravinsky, it is tighter and less ambitious than Dialectic of Enlightenment, co-written with Max Horkheimer around the same time. However, New Music can be understood as Dialectic’s complement, its object being entangled with that of the culture industry critiqued generally in the more famous volume from the same period. Operating in an inverse way, Philosophy of New Music seeks to exacerbate and expose the same symptoms from within modernist music itself. American readers may have a difficult entry into the text, not only because the writing styles itself on Schönberg’s esoteric manner of composition, but also because of Adorno’s object of critique, the historical complications provoking the European modernist avant-garde. The text pays strict attention to Schönberg’s music technique, while delving into historical comparisons to previous composers like Richard Wagner and the regressive, constrictive trajectory implied by their music styles. The volume also incorporates some of Adorno’s most sustained ruminations on the changed significance of the musical “material,” one of Adorno’s most pivotal and least understood concepts for approaching new music as a response to rapidly changing social conditions. As a concept, it seeks to articulate possibilities emanating from the split in idealization and materialization in art — possibilities we now identify as reaching a climax with the music of the mid-century avant-garde that Adorno anticipated. Continue reading →

Review: Orbital, Orbital 2 (Brown Album)

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IMAGE: Cover to Orbital’s
Brown Album (1993)
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Orbital 2 is a sophomore release for the ages. With expectations riding high off of their already revolutionary self-titled LP, Orbital set to work on a sequel in the winter of 1993. The fruit of their labors during these months, Orbital 2 (also known as the Brown Album), constitutes an astounding accomplishment — a timeless masterpiece still virtually unmatched within the genre. On this album, the brothers Hartnoll achieved an almost perfect balance between the ambient sound they had developed on the previous record and a new strain of hyper-futuristic trance. It cemented Orbital’s place as pioneers within trance and ambient techno and prepared the way for artists like Aphex Twin, who toured with them following the album’s release.

The songs on Orbital 2 are constructed methodically, according to a set pattern of mutation that persists more or less throughout the album. This grants the album its uncanny integrity. Each track typically proceeds in a cumulative fashion, establishing a central motif around which successive layers are then added. As new elements enter in, others recede into the background or fade entirely, only to reappear in fresh combinations later in the song. Every part simulates the whole to which it belongs, similar in this way to a fractal. Orbital weave together these constituent parts in a manner that almost approximates a lemniscate infinity — an arching ebb and flow along a laser grid whose contours have been swollen by constant digital effluxion.
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A music review of Converge’s 2001 album Jane Doe

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Converge’s 2001 record Jane Doe is, more than anything else, a symptom. A symptom, of course, is a surface phenomenon that points to its derivation out of something deeper — something that lies at its root, concealed from view. It is the manifestation of that which remains latent. As such, it is the expression of another thing, distinct from itself, of which it is an unwitting reflex, purely epiphenomenal.

But in its very superficiality, Jane Doe simulates profundity. The illusion that results is, in fact, so perfect as to disguise its origin even from itself, lost in the night of its own paramnesia. Jacob Bannon might be the one singing on the record, but make no mistake: the words are not his own. In truth, they are words written by no one. Words that are the product of a thoroughly impersonal dynamic, generated by a mindless web of relations that inscribes itself into the consciousness of a human vessel — a human vessel which for it is nothing more than a mouthpiece, a means for expression.

In other words, Bannon is the puppet of forces beyond his comprehension. He dances to a tune that was not of his own making. Nor was this tune the making of any other member of Converge. His frenetic flailing during their songs is the enactment of a total powerlessness, the involuntary spasm of a marionette.

Very well, a symptom — but if so, a symptom of what?

Continue reading →