Maure Coise: Images of Music + Belief in Diagramming + Book Realism: Philosophy of the Library

Workshop, November 6th, 10 am PDT

Meeting Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86219419705

Images of Music

A musical score organizes sound data for retrieval as musical information. Off the score, musicians modulate their environment. The organicist genealogy dominates the interpretation of standard music notation. Organicism conflates life and mechanics, conceptualizing systems of parts and wholes. Some composers think differently about the underpinning operative contingencies in writing and performing a score. Wadada Leo Smith delimits the origin of musical information through overlapping notation languages. His eleventh string quartet (2019) mixes a variation on standard notation with brackets indicating repetition with colors and shapes that, while visual, do not subordinate hearing to seeing. The score filters without reification.

What is the role of the image in techniques for musical composition? Arising as the bodies of the musician, "who?" determines the environment of frequencies and resonances. Yet Smith works without an agential or authorial framework. His music unbinds from developmental theories of harmony.

A new chaotic science, in terms of densities, might consider the structural function of music. Placing gestures transform the quality of air pressure into electrical cognition. Through the elastic strain of molecular masses, formant sensitivity potentially vaporizes temporal experience.

Link to assignment: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PNjlBSqp-0YQP7jfx17VeZsZK8aJsVT0MC18dGo-Fvk/edit?usp=sharing Suggested readings Robert Rosen, "The Church-Pythagoras Thesis”, in Essays on Life Itself (1999). Aby Warburg, "The Theatrical Costumes of the Intermedi of 1589”, in The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity (1932). Eileen Jackson Southern, “The African Legacy”, in The Music of Black Americans (1971).

Warburg-Theatrical

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Southern-African

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Rosen-Church

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Reading Group, Sunday, June 23rd, at 10 am Pacific Time

Meeting link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88249368285

In this library in New Art City: https://newart.city/show/turquoise-library, portals to PDFs stored on Google Drive are in positions in a virtual space. The space and somatics of the library differ from an index. The location of an item impacts how the item is known and accessed in search. There are differences in embodied movement between searching a stack of books and scrolling through Google Drive. As an experiment, I tried placing poetry written by AI in the New Art City space. Starting with a Miro board diagram with tokens for each PDF, arrange them, not following an alphabetical sequence by author or any subject predication, but moving them around and making a shape. You might call this a personal aesthetic choice, an association, or finding compatibilities. Following the line from one item to another, to say "this relates to that" might be considered a symbolic gesture not lacking in meaning or intention.

In information retrieval, generally, there is a signification of a text. It might be an icon or hyperlink, a way of noting a particular class of items by assigning a token to a text. The token retains significance in a significant grouping, such as a folder of texts that share a publisher. How are the semiotics of a collection different when the association means following a line of movement/thinking? Indices often start with diagrammatic schemas to specify narrower and broader terms. For example, algorithmic information theory is a subcategory of complexity science. Database design begins with an ER or entity-relation diagram, to say a text about algorithmic information theory is an item and a text about complexity is an item, and the former might be an excerpt from the latter, a relation defined as isFrom.

Diagramming for berry-picking in a space differs because the line from one item to another is not necessarily a predication of a subject and object; the goal for this NewArt.City library was to believe I was walking in a library, not the image of walking in a library.

If I want to verify that I remember something, for example, a poetic moment I read somewhere, I need more remembering. I gauge my confidence in my ability to describe by measuring how it will correspond to my willingness to act. Do I search for the book in this or that direction? It requires memory. It takes time to know why there is a desire to remember. Looking for a book, I should know why sometimes I have this feeling that I believe a book describes and sometimes I do not. The weight of connections between descriptive events and the universe is not dependent more or less on observations or measurements. I may not consciously remember what I felt, and I want to feel it again when I read what I read. When trying to remember, I start walking. I think, "Oh, I will look here," but then, if I don't see anything, "Oh, I thought I'd look there.”

New Art City navigation is not so different from Google Drive. Both use the computer as the instrument and the computer, whose design comes from a history of scientific management with specific theopolitical commitments (efficiency maximization). In the conceptual framework Emily Dolan calls new organology, an expanded concept of the instrument or performance medium, a twist on technologies of the self (as well as fourfold causality and worker alienation), an instrument is described in four sections: 1. The material elements that make the instrument. 2. The relationship of the instrument and the instrumentalist, or the instrument's relationship to the activity or work of performance. 3. The relationship to times and places or social milieus, or the relationship to society through institutions or locations. 4. The purpose evoked in the activity (what it is for). Associational compatibility, what Aby Warburg called living and not a mechanism- in a spatial library- is the fourfold description of the social life of the instrument. New organology moves from an encyclopedia of musical or scientific instruments and their material elements to describing ranges of activities. A flute has certain morphological conditions that differentiate it from a drum, and it is also the mediation of relationships and their social potential and multiple intentions and senses. The instrument directs the breath to decisions about the shape and its situations with other shapes, exposing different angles on the performance event as specifying access to rhythms. Knowledge becomes shareable or retrievable through libraries of instruments or spatial and gestural constraints.

Working toward creating a living archive, what is the role of instrumentation in institutional remembering? Are you or I instruments?

An instrumentalist-instrument differs from the instrument, as a different plane, a double. If the relationship is too close, maybe everything is too smooth. Of course, you don’t want amputation, the clarinet never reaching your mouth. Regardless of always failing to maintain the best distance, managing anyhow through the repertoire exposes it. The instrumentalist-instrument begins and ends, sets the rhythm.

A rhythm can be described as series of sounds or groups of sounds, where each sound can be evaluated relative to silence. Each sound has a place or position providing the basis for the following sound. However, this does not imply remembrance of a sound from seven sounds prior. Moving from each sound to the next proportionally connects to the vastness of rhythm, unfolding and lingering in multiple groupings, finding assonances. Any grouping of phrases, modulating as a genetic cell, maintains compatible relations in a group or groups. The decision of variable repetition of sounds, by both the writer and the reader, is a decision of shaping the causal order. Spatial factors of accessing determine the rhythm, in an expansive semantic regime, where the straying line exhumes meaning.

Readings:

Diana Garza Islas. 2015. from Black box named like to me.

Tori Kudo. 2019. Je est un autre.

Link to Readings: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1LBet4kCFR_lMNnzWm1AHIahfCCWqZlme?usp=drive_link