Cybernetic Phenomenology of Music, Embodied Speculative Realism, and Aesthetics-Driven Techné for Spontaneous Audio-Visual Expression

CYBERNETIC PHENOMENOLOGY OF MUSIC, EMBODIED SPECULATIVE REALISM, AND AESTHETICS-DRIVEN TECHNÉ FOR SPONTANEOUS AUDIO-VISUAL EXPRESSION JOSHUA BANKS MAILMAN INTRODUCTION HE CONCEPT OF WORLDMAKING AS TECHNÉ is a tantalizing prospect for adventurous or philosophically minded artists and musicians, taking it to mean that the creation of work is the creation of concepts, joining the efforts of theory and praxis in one process (techné), such that the results of our works are the expression of an ontological proposition (worldmaking). It is epistemologically productive while also being a unique expression of freedom, in the sense proposed by philosopher Hannah Arendt (1977, 1998). My claim to worldmaking as techné is that my work as a music theorist-analyst has always to some extent fed into my compositional and improvisatory musical activities. Technology often plays a role. In my essay (Mailman 2009a) that asserts an imagined drama of T 6 Perspectives of New Music competitive opposition in Elliot Carter’s flute piece Scrivo in vento (and comments on its symmetries, quantitative flux, and Heraclitean dimensions), I interpretively analyzed the composition through a narrative lens, such that elements of the music are imagined as inhabiting a turbulent adversarial world akin to that depicted in the Petrarch sonnet that inspired Carter’s composition. Crucial aspects of that analysis involved computational analytic procedures prompted by my hearing, procedures whose output in turn enhanced my experience as a listener and sparked my imagination for interpreting its poetic and philosophic context. Such a cybernetic circle of introspective reception and computational analysis has embedded itself in my musical activities —as well as those of others—to the extent it now seems second nature. There’s no going back. The feedback process model of artistic practice and reception swims against the tide of the fatuous cliché that artistry is magically inspired ex nihilo. I stress this because it is the feedback process aspect of the countervailing view that propels worldmaking as techné. Specifically, the lynchpin connecting recent and ongoing interpretive and creative practices of myself and some others is cybernetic phenomenology, which is both a receptive-perceptive and creative-constructive activity, to be explained further below.1 Flexibilities of categorization and ontology that arise from cybernetic phenomenology relate to Nelson Goodman’s (1978) theory of worldmaking , exemplified in his assertion that “worlds differ in the relevant kinds they comprise” (10). New methods for defining and creating enable new relevant kinds to be identified or brought into existence. Thus new worlds are distinguished, or indeed made. Like artistic works themselves, cybernetic phenomenological activities evolve out of past musical and other creative and interpretive practices. Yet that fact fails to forecast what has already started to happen. The flexibility of early 21st-century technologies is enabling technologically proficient artists to venture beyond what could be foreseen—even by its inspirers, such as the philosopher Henri Bergson. How could it be foreseen that such disparate phenomena as the buoyant color and morphological dynamism of Kandinsky’s paintings, the stimulus saturation of Scriabin’s synesthesia, harmonic palettes ranging from Wagner and Liszt’s to Schoenberg’s, to Varèse’s, to Partch’s, textural fluidities of Xenakis or Truax, or the propulsive processes of Ligeti or Reich, the expressively intricate rhythmic spontaneity of free-jazz improvisation, and the visceral visuality of modern dance could enact and activate each other, not just in some abstract poietic theory, but rather in physically experienced live Cybernetic Phenomenology of Music 7 spectacles and audio-visual documents? This is beginning to happen, and is yet still only a basis of far greater expressive potential. Much of this present and future artistic activity—a new phase of artistic practice —can be understood, and also further motivated, through a synthesis of cybernetics, process philosophy, and cognitive metaphor (embodied mind) theory—a synthesis I will merely suggest but not undertake fully in this essay. In the four sections that follow, this essay considers the historical background of techné as worldmaking in regard to music, and how recent and current practices build on, and in some ways transcend, these patterns. The first section, “Music as Worldmaking as Techné,” considers the evolution of music theory as techné and the tradition of music as worldmaking. The...