THE CALARTS EYE THOUGHTS ON VISITING ARTIST, CHARLES CURTIS, and Beauty (i.e. Cognitive Consonance) ∆ Ben Levinson ∏ 4 Charles Curtis visited Friday 1 to tell us about the wolf tone on the cello and the ways in which he and Eliane Radigue (in their piece, “Naldjorlak”) approach something near magic through fault and failure. Although, he didn’t say that. I suppose, I am saying that.
A place to start: the wolf tone is a disturbance on the cello. It wavers, croaks, and insults the ears in the settings that we most often give the cellist. We give the cellist directions: eliminate the wolf, obfuscate the change in bow, maintain a nice tone (rich and warm), etc. The cellist obliges. She may be lauded for her doing so (all the while achieving cathartic expression nonetheless!). 2 This is the classical mode. The cellist is a channel, an avenue for the heart of God, perhaps. The composer: an everlasting divinity that must be expressed. She allows breaths of style and ornamentation to be left to the machine—the cellist, the stylist. This is not to say that the cellist becomes a slave. A certain cellist may be relieved by this divine capability of transmittance. 3 He is suddenly free and able to receive the composer and her content. 4 This is no condemnation. This is fodder for an essay into the troubling matters of music-making: beauty, agency, voice, style, material, and ideology. If I make one decisive statement in all, it may be that beauty itself is a normalized construct, built up from a tradition of claiming certain qualities as beautiful (i.e. positive). 5 I think I can make this statement and back away without much repercussion. But, if this is so— if beauty can be conceived as an expression of power (a norm to be wary of )—what can one do about it? We know the traps: hold too tightly to the patterns of beauty and we find kitsch, or worse, cheap material for propaganda; divorce ourselves from beauty (i.e. recognizable patterns) altogether, and we find nothing: true noise and the experience of drowning in a sea of information all the while floating among it. 6 What of stretching the bounds of beauty? One might push the elements of beauty until the edge of a breaking point. Surely, it has been done, and where does it get us? To new styles and new voices! New iterations of that disturbance, beauty. How do we approach it without expressing and reinforcing the powers that act through this beast? is a product only of the entirety of the experience it took to make it—an investigation of sorts of the prospect of attempting to tune the entire cello to resonate at the normally decried of wolf tone. The resultant sounds of this experiment are otherworldly and doubtlessly beautiful, yet they seem to purport a removal from the ideals of beauty. They are supposedly nothing more than the full exploration of the sounds typically tossed aside. Here is a materialist approach to the task of beauty. It’s appealing. 9 1 Music Workshop (Prof. Michael Pisaro): Friday, April 17, 2015 Experimental 2 Not to say that there is no virtue in navigating the harshest constraints! Many find freedom in this terrain, and who am I to tear them from it? 3 Freddy Perlman said it was the only –ist that he would allow himself to be called! 4 A reiteration of the dead, of dead iterations of beauty, that aesthetic purity which we gather around and devour its essence. It will make us all the more human, we beg of it. 5 We project its patterns upon all that we view. Michael Pisaro tells us of the grids of Agnes Martin: perfectly imperfect so we know their aspirations despite their failure. The viewer is only aware of the flaws of the grids because the viewer’s reductive perception supposes that the grids themselves wish they were not flawed—a sort of suspension of disbelief. Perhaps all beauty works something like this. 6 Of course, this is an appealing prospect to some. 7 But he has no interest in claiming authorship! 8 Without a score it can hardly be replicated by another or even analyzed compositionally. Furthermore there is no reasonable way to discern what each collaborator lent to the piece in the first place. Through a process of collaborative authorship, the piece becomes somewhat illusive. 9 But, to be certain, the listener (myself and others) must then bring their own ideals of beauty to the piece. They project their beauty on top of it, denying its denial. Betraying it. These sounds are beauty and will continue to shape beauty. It doesn’t matter that you found it in the trash, it will be beautiful nonetheless. 5 We come back to Eliane Radigue’s “Naldjorlak” for Charles Curtis’ cello. Curtis explains that it was written cooperatively. 7 It has been born out of experience and leaves no mark other than its own. 8 The piece THE CALARTS EYE
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