Christian Scheib:
Static's Music - Noise Inquiries
fundamentals about Peter Ablinger's work
CalArts 1997/1998
edited by Bill Dietz
In the last years the composer Peter Ablinger has focused his
artistic work on research in static noise. This lecture gives a
survey of his findings so far, the ideas and conceptions that
brought static noise to the center of his interest, and of the
pieces he’s actually written and/or developed. Ablinger writes
music for soloists, ensembles, and orchestra; he makes
installations and performance art; he works with electronics and
live-electronics.
Peter Ablinger is one of the few artists today who uses noise
without any kind of symbolism — not as: a signifier for chaos,
for energy, entropy, disorder, or uproar; not for standing up
against, being disobedient, destructive; not for everything or
for eternity, or for what-have-you — as in all these possible
cases of music deliberately involving noise (but for Ablinger,
this alone), noise is the case. Peter Ablinger has also come a
long way in questioning the nature of sound, time, and space, the
components usually thought central to music—and some of his
answers have jeopardized or made dubious conventions usually
thought irrefutable in music. These insights pertain to
repetition and monotony, reduction and redundancy, density and
entropy.
Until 1994 I wrote music for instruments and voices
exclusively. A basic tendency of these pieces is heading
toward increased density and toward static noise. (I mean
static noise, not noises. This to me is exactly the
opposite.) (1)
A few words on his biography: Peter Ablinger is an Austrian born
composer who has lived in Berlin since the early eighties. As a
student he played piano in free-jazz groups and studied graphic
design. Around 1980: composition studies with Gösta Neuwirth and
Roman Haubenstock-Ramati. In this period he writes his first
notated pieces: mostly experimental scores that already combine
notions such as dense multi-layeredness (via his free-jazz
experience?), graphic scores (study of graphic design) and the
thematization of the act of writing music or performing music as
such.
Many of these pieces exist somewhere between music performance,
abstract theater, installation, and performance art. Something he begins exploring in these early years as a composer is what he
calls "die Haltung": carriage, in the sense of the quality both
of your inner and outer position [posture], where composure and
alertness meet: performance attitude. There is, for example, a
piece involving an actress trying to find —to impersonate— a
position exactly between a private posture and a stage behavior.
Or, a piece in which a performer is asked to impersonate "doing nothing", which —as one soon realizes in thinking about this problem— cannot simply be done by doing nothing, as there is a
categorical difference between doing nothing and conveying the
idea of (or playing the role of) doing nothing. And in later
years he develops pieces that further require musicians to behave
almost like actors (though - obviously - it should never look
like "acting", as it is music, or performance, that requires
impersonation of a certain attitude). From the late 1980s, a
piece for trombone and twelve tape-decks (La Fleur de
Terezín/Monolith I und II): the tape-decks are installed like
objects in an exhibition and the trombone player positions
himself between them while playing; the tape-decks (among other
things) play the sound of footsteps on pebbles—though the
trombone player never steps on any. And thus, part of this
piece’s subtle tension derives from keeping your (the listener’s)
attitude fixed within this minimal yet irritating environment.
Occasionally these notions of performativity are not even
mentioned in the score but simply arise while the composer and
musician are at work in rehearsal. I recall a performance (2) of
another trombone piece, Annahme 2: the trombone part is sparse,
full of long pauses and short, intense fragments of music. It’s
very difficult to hold any tension in these long intervals and to
make these short outbursts sound justified; so, while rehearsing,
Peter Ablinger suggested to the trombone player that he keep a
certain idea in his mind throughout the piece: imagine driving a
car over a long, long curve, a curve as long as the piece (about
fifteen minutes), and you’re driving almost too fast to keep the
car on the road—you’re constantly in danger of loosing ground—so
you actually have to go on and on in order not to loose ground,
to make it through the curve. And with this, the trombone player—
the ingenious Roland Dahinden—played a performance of the piece
that made everybody in the audience shiver, though nobody could
tell exactly what it was that was almost frightening. It couldn’t
have just been those few outbursts of trombone-sound in a fifteen
minute long piece. It was the combination of these sounds, the
long non-sounding intervals between them, and, especially, the
attitude the player conveyed while performing: this notion of
being on the verge of taking off, of being ceaselessly
threatened.
Peter Ablinger also loves to write, make notes, draw sketches,
scribble down drafts, & write conception-books. Though these are
not intended to be read by any public, he occasionally publishes
a text or an essay. In a way his texts are crucial—or at least
helpful—for understanding his music because his work as a
composer is sometimes not so much about putting together sounds
or notes—com ponere—but much more about formulating questions (3),
about being precise enough in your ideas that a second step
results in music. But in his texts you won’t always find
something obviously referring to music: there are, for example,
passages on (similar to the above mentioned scenario) driving
your car on the highway at night from one city to the next, or
reflections on European paintings as categorically opposed to
Eastern icons. A reason for this is that Ablinger is very much
concerned with perception as such, with our ways of experiencing
the world: How do we construct information out of totality? Which
strategies do we apply for notifying, understanding, remembering,
forgetting? But as his thinking is nevertheless always closely
related to music, many of the texts, no matter what they seem to
be about, deal with time-related processes: successive and
simultaneous experience, repetition and variation, memory and
forgetting.
Writing - even these lines now - is always related to
forgetting. I write it down in order to get rid of it.
Whatever I write down begins to change at the very moment
the words seem to fit. Exaggerated a bit: As soon as it is
written down correctly it is wrong. Which is true for
written music, too.
In his music you will find a variety of strategies for provoking
seemingly paradoxical experiences, as well as either overly,
impossibly demanding procedures, or almost unnoticeably simple
ones (4). He constructs situations in which any familiar way of
listening is jeopardized: an irritation that is supposed to
initiate new experience.
What I said before: As soon as it is written down it is
wrong. This could be a good way of starting to talk about my
onetone-pieces. Think about the described phenomenon and you
understand why it does not get boring writing down the same
note again and again. When I look at a row of such notes,
they look like let's say the curbstones of a country-road.
One slightly to the left, the other one to the right, they
are never a real row. And from each single note the row just
behind this one looks totally different. Introducing a
second pitch seems to be totally far away then. Far too
dramatic! At the most, suitable for a dramatic opera!
The irony in this statement is obviously not only in the idea that the drama of a second pitch is such that one could write an
opera with it, but that in a strange way Ablinger's instrumental
pieces are already music theater pieces.
Anfangen (:Aufhören) for solo violin in viola-tuning is a twenty minute
long piece. The main theme of the piece, at least the layer of
the piece one might recognize as its main one, is a single tone
played by the viola player with a sharp attack. This tone appears
again and again, played as though there was never another before
it. It’s the paradox of a constant beginning: that each of these
repeated tones be played with the energy and surprise of the
aggressive opener of a piece. You may have seen the famous Akira
Kurosawa film "The Seven Samurai". Before the night of the
showdown one of the samurai is doing his exercises: again and
again—and exclusively—pulling his sword from its hilt, just this
one (opening) movement. He makes no successive stroke, the idea
being that the first pull is, in any case, at the same time the
last one. So again and again he makes this one initial movement,
unsheathing his sword. It’s always the same and of course it’s
not the same even twice.
This is exactly the idea of these, so-to-speak, repeated tones in
Anfangen (:Aufhören). And obviously—once again—the performance of
this piece requires much more than being able to play an
instrument the way one is taught a music-academy. Yet it does not
require acting either—instead, it is exactly this idea of
attitude or pose or carriage that makes the piece conveyable to
an audience. And it’s in this sense that some of Ablinger's
pieces are almost theatrical. Anfangen (: Aufhören) combines the
idea of the onenote-piece with the importance of ‘attitude’ and—
as another element we have yet to talk about—a whole variety of
small, mostly low-volume, dirty-sounding, fast, irregular,
tissue-like sounds—virtuosically played, though they sound almost
unintentional. This web of sounds reveals a few of the features
we will come across again in the later static noise pieces.
Although it might seem we have not been dealing with noise or
static noise so far, the boundary between varying one-note
repetitions and all-note static entropy is perhaps only apparent.
After all, repeating—in the Ablinger or Samurai sense of it—means
focusing and differentiating. That means: redundancy produces
information. And from here, it is not a long way to entropic
noise as information in Shannon's sense.
It was Arnold Schönberg who stated that variation is necessarily
a form of repetition as at least something must return between
variation and variation. And he thus shifted his attention from
the changing aspect of music to the continuous, the repeated.
Ablinger's attitude is something like the hidden, reverse secret of the same story: that each repetition is also variation, that
there is necessarily always something changing (5)—that, in other
words: repetition does not exist except as an abstraction.
But, by repeating, Ablinger focuses our attention as listeners
not so much on the fact that something is repeated, not even so
much on the fact that in repetition there is always change, but
on the effect of something like a time magnifying glass. You are
forced to look at this one moment again and again, this one
moment when the viola player "begins" his piece anew. Ablinger
tries to problematize your assumption that time passes as a
linear phenomenon. Time is thrown out of itself. Linearity is no
longer the guiding temporal concept (just as, for Ablinger,
linear narrative has also never been). His music is static even
when it constantly attacks (or ‘exercises’ the attack). Even in
this reduction of Anfangen (:Aufhören) there are a huge variety
of sound-events taking place: from the never really "repeated"
single note to those hundreds of small intended/unintended events
in the background. The music is constantly changing: it moves
like the psychic process of someone’s listening to something that
really is (for example, mechanically) repeated: for even in this
case, perception itself would change the repeated event. And this
process is meticulously composed, transformed into music by the
whole of the piece. One could say that this is one of the stories
the piece tells: of the annoyance, the anger, the patience, the
not-giving-up, etc., of a person listening to something repeated
again and again for a very long time. A vast variety of sounds
that at the same time really are reduced to almost one pitch.
Static and lively at the same time. (And it can be a really
annoying piece; one that really drives you crazy if you don’t
find a way of playing with your perception or if you’re waiting
to be served something that doesn’t require your perception to
work—to move beyond the familiar.)
Peter Ablinger's music is about perception and it is about sound
as a phenomenon of time and space (though it will turn out later
in this essay that space might be a phenomenon of sound). Music
is a time-related process, so we deal with memory and forgetting,
with repetition and variation, and—this is another step in the
same direction—with successive and simultaneous experiences.
Human beings are able to think of simultaneous things as
successive ones. This is thinking. Thinking is making a
successive order out of the surrounding whole, out of
totality. Thinking therefore might be thought of as the
negation of simultaneity. Thinking then is the negation of
any actually accessible lived experience.(6)
Writing pieces reduced almost to a single pitch did not only occur parallel to Ablinger's development of pieces approaching
white noise, there are even pieces suggesting that these two
things are not at all contradictory. The ensemble piece Ohne
Titel für 14 Instrumentalisten is almost exclusively constructed
with or around one pitch, but with the totality of those already
mentioned other small, mostly low-volume, dirty-sounding, fast
played, irregular, tissue-like sounds that are also constantly
played by all fourteen musicians, there evolves a hardly audible,
yet nevertheless distinct and dense web of static noise.
Ablinger’s next piece, for a small orchestra of almost thirty
musicians, Der Regen, das Glas, das Lachen [rain, glass and
laughter] —and Ablinger must forgive me for this abridged way of
putting it— eliminates the one-note layer of so many previous
pieces for the benefit of six succeeding (and simultaneous)
segments, each of a flickering, nervous, low-volume, high-energy
texture. Static noise appears in the disguise of a traditional
orchestration. Obviously however, this static noise is not white
noise, but differently colored noise, with each segment
predominantely devoted to one shade—though within each segment,
due to the composite instrumental activity, the texture, and by
that I mean the color, is constantly changing. Immediately after
this piece was composed, Ablinger went to audio-studios to begin
actual research on static noise.
But before we go into that I want to refer to one more piece of
Ablinger's composed in the period we’re now talking about, the
early nineties, and this one for three pianos. The line of
thought that eventually lead Ablinger to static noise in its
orchestrated form was pointed to by pieces such as this,
Ablinger’s Grisailles. In this piece, one repeated pitch spread
over all the octaves of three grand pianos functions as a means
of redundancy dependent focusing, whereas all the other softly
played sounds and pitches function as something like the
illumination of the piece. And what I mean with this
"illumination" metaphor, the color of not just one tone, but of
whole processes, will reappear in our discussion of static noise,
its colors, and about transferring the time of something linear
into something either omnipresent, or static, or spherical: that,
for example, as soon as you give up the discrete steps of a
melody unfolding in linear time, all the information held in
these succeeding tones reappears, remains, as the
characteristic(s) of a particular colored noise. But we’ll come
back to this when we talk about vertical and horizontal layering
of sounds.
The piece Grisailles takes its name from a medieval technique of
coloring glass windows. Opposed to the famous multi-colored
windows of Gothic churches, this style is one based exclusively on working with shades of gray. These windows from the early
Middle Ages were always rare and there are few left today. The
theological or perhaps philosophical impetus for these gray
shaded windows was not to vividly tell stories or praise the
omnipotence of god via instantly impressive color-effects (as the
familiar multicolored windows were supposed to do), but instead
to refer, to suggest a more subtle concept of god as something
inexplicable, as the Mystery. This dichotomy resembles in part
Immanuel Kant's differentiation of the beautiful and the sublime,
the colored windows as the beautiful, the gray shaded as the
ungraspable sublime. And what made these gray shaded windows so
appealing—maybe more to medieval theorists than to churchgoers—
was that they were said to produce no shadows: that whatever
passed into this gentle gray light left no traces on the floor.
That is sublime. And so in this piece for three pianos, the
medieval notion of sublime traceless shades of gray is
transferred into a notion of static noise articulated on pianos—
that is, gently dipping these repeated notes into the sublime
light of a shimmering, nervous, low-volume, high-energy sound
texture —as John Cage said when reflecting on the handling of the
boundlessness of silence and noise, "Instruments that leave no traces."
Some time after Der Regen, das Glas, das Lachen, Peter Ablinger
decided to take the constantly occurring references to static
noise aroused by his pieces seriously and to finally do some
research. (Again: "Until 1994 I wrote music for instruments and
voices exclusively. A basic tendency of these pieces is heading
towards increasing density, towards static noise. (I mean static
noise, not noises. This to me is exactly the opposite.)")
Debussy said: I take all notes, leave out those I do not
like, and let in the composition those I like. He probably
considered the piano-keyboard when saying "all notes", and
definitely not something like the totality of white noise.
But with me this notion of white noise and the sum of all
notes or sounds let arise the idea of complimentarity, that
is, the conception of adding two differently colored noises
up to white noise. In other words, that one could actually
orchestrate white noise with traditional instruments if one
knew the exact combinations. Or, as Debussy suggested it,
take away something from the totality (of static noise) to
see what remains.(7)
In various electronic studios (TU Berlin, Experimentalstudio
Freiburg, Peter Böhm, MHS Graz) Ablinger began to examine the
possibility of manipulating white noise. At first, this seems
meaningless as white noise is said be the composite of all
frequencies—and many technicians therefore expressed their skepticism about his research. Yet Ablinger soon found what he
was looking for. The decisive element in his experiments turned
out to be space, or rather, specific location. In one of his
experiments white noise is played in a room via two loudspeakers.
With the help of filters this white noise is exactly divided into
two complementary parts over and over again, each part projected
by one loudspeaker. The sum of the two loudspeakers is always
white noise, no matter what division you choose. Changing from
one division to the next therefore does not change the extant
frequency spectrum, it is white noise again and again.
Nevertheless one is always able to hear decisive differences from
a given division to the next—which is exactly what all the
technicians had denied. And which suggests that the concept of
white noise is something far less ‘absolute’ than the common
dogmatic authority holds. "Experiencing the change from one
partitioning of white noise to another gives one the sensation
that at the moment of change the walls slightly widen and at the
same time the ceiling moves down a little bit. Everything in the
space changes with every change. The changes are experienced more
as body-related phenomenon than acoustic ones, the sound-total
after all remains the same."
After these experiments Peter Ablinger began working on his
series Weiss/Weisslich. Some of which, as works, are deliberately
or even provocatively simple arrangements for producing or
perceiving static noise; others, fully developed works. Among the
22 written up to 1996 are the following:
Weiss/Weisslich 6: for twelve tape-decks divided six on one side,
six on the other side of a row; through which a sound is recorded
and played and recorded and played and so on until colored static
noise itself is the result.
Weiss/Weisslich 7: a technical device called a noise-receiver is
used to receive noise.
Weiss/Weisslich 8: a shell is used for a receiving noise.
Weiss/Weisslich 12: recorded on DAT are the hardly audible,
humming ground noises of empty, quiet churches.
Weiss/Weisslich 13: a vinyl record, especially produced, with
silence on it; to be played at various speeds. (Maybe DJ Spooky
owns a few of these.)
Weiss/Weisslich 15: on five CDs are five differently colored
static noises to be played at low volume in five adjacent rooms.
Part one: the experience of these five rooms; part two: the
experience of the transition from one room to another.
Weiss/Weisslich 18, the noise of: birch, mountain-ash, ash,
alder, willow, whitethorn, oak; evergreen oak, hazel, wine, ivy,
sloe, elder; fir, broom, heather, aspen, yew.
Weiss/Weisslich 22: the condensed symphonies of Haydn, Mozart,
Beethoven, Schubert, Bruckner, Mahler
Das Rauschen / static noise - Keywords by Peter Ablinger,
1995
Some Observations
- the wind: in different kinds of corn, grasses, varieties
of trees;
- water: running, rivers, water pipes, the sea, waterfalls,
rain (Weiss/Weisslich 9, 10, 11);
- situations of density in daily life, loosing yourself in
it, "mysticism of the everyday", giving yourself up to the
background, train station, highway, cafe;
- Weiss/Weisslich 12 (empty churches's spaces on DAT)
- static noise contains all information on space, site,
state, humidity, position in space ...
(this "containing" contradicts the opposition of information
and noise)
Results
- static noise: vertical series: a 1000 variants of the
same: simultaneously
- verticalisation ("everything/all the time”): After one
year of not composing: a new series of works, IEAOV (:
Instrumente und ElektroAkustisch Ortsbezogene Verdichtung)
(:Instrumental and ElectroAcoustic site-specific
condensation). Everything happening horizontally is tipped
into the vertical; everything happening successively is now
in every moment: not a metaphor anymore, but a precise
technical formulae (: Computer: Peter Böhm)
- (density: condensation)
- complementary sounds (another Weiss/Weisslich but without
a number): work with sounds having a discrete harmonic
spectrum heard alone, but that result in static noise heard
together (Freiburg, April 95)
- "static noise + static noise' = space":
“... yet that means: If N(oise) plus N(oise)' equals
more than N, N could not have been ‘everything’! Space
is neither contained in N nor in N', but it results from
N + N'. If, however, in (white) N(oise) not yet
everything is contained: what is it that is missing?
What is absent? Is the complement to N(oise) illusion?
or silence? If phase-shifting is audible even in white
noise, the shifted phase cannot have been contained in
the original white noise. That means white noise is not
everything. The addition of everything plus everything
does not equal everything. It equals something else. As
this "something else" is a doubling of everything,
everything is always just half of something. Everything is just half of something else. (Everything exists no
more than its complement: nothing: silence.)" (another
Weiss/Weisslich without a number)
A few remarks on the non-opposition of information and
noise:
Information is redundancy: Tautology - according to
Wittgenstein - tells nothing about the world and does not
hold any relation to the world. I hold the opinion, however,
that tautology is the basic principle of language,
respectively the basic principle of the relation between
language and world. Every description, explanation,
analysis, definition is doubling, repetition, redundancy in
exactly the same way tautology is all that. Something
similar holds true for information: Information is not what
stands out of redundancy. Rather information is not even
possible without redundancy. The concept of redundancy is
related to the concept of a "frame": repeating something
means, grasping it more intensely, fixating on it, cutting
it, framing it. This, too, holds true for "meaning": Meaning
and doubling or emphasizing are almost synonymous, anyway.
Meaning, information, understanding, are all redundancydependent
transformations of what is. But what is, is the
irrelevant, uninformative, ununderstood: the world as it
surrounds us and as we are in it.
Peter Ablinger has approached his work with static noise via his
earlier and continuing occupation with questioning assumptions of
occidental music making—such as: music’s unfolding linearly in
time, the idea that music is a phenomenon more directly related
to and dependent on time than to or on space, that music is a
matter of a few distinct and discrete parameters such as pitch,
amplitude, color, duration, etc., and that music is a semantic
system similar to language. Instead, in his work over the years
Ablinger has come closer and closer to a notion of undivided
totality. As a result of his unyielding questioning it turned out
that the embracing of noise instead of splicing it up was the
phenomenon that most satisfied his artistic needs—providing a
spherical instead of linear paradigm of listening.
However, we should keep in mind that Ablinger never romantically
wished to or looked for ways to grasp totality as such. On the
contrary, Ablinger simply arrived at his states of aggregated
density that almost tip over into static noise on his way. As we
have seen or heard from his texts, he began to work with actual
white noise only after he had deconstructed it into complementary
parts that were renderable independently when put together again.
He demystified white noise as an absolute or synonym for the absolute and only from that point on began his direct use of
static noise (even in a few apparently mystical constellations).
It is the selection out of totality from totality that makes
totality palpable and Ablinger's unique mode of selecting from
(the Debussyan) totality is to apply procedures of redundancy,
repetition, and condensation.
Weiss/Weisslich 15 was originally planned for a gallery space.
The gallery had five adjacent rooms with doors from one to the
next. Ablinger produced five differently colored noises in an
electronic studio based on the five German vowels a-e-i-o-u.
These static noises were played in the five rooms, one in each,
at such a low volume that while in a given room one might not
notice any additional sound, but as soon as you would walk from
one room to the next, you would notice a strange difference, so
subtle that at first it wasn’t clear if it was a change due to
temperature, light, sound, walls, or material. Only after walking
from one room to the next again and again was it obvious that the
slight change in a room's atmosphere was dependent on the
artificial adjustment of a room’s ground noise. This is a work
that very obviously and very subtly plays upon our perception
procedures. The rooms seemed almost to be painted in slightly
different colors.
Weiss/Weisslich 22 was conceived and produced in an electronic
studio as well. About six to eight hours of symphonic music by
each of the chosen composers were recorded onto hard-disc: a
selection of symphonies by Haydn and Mozart, as well as all
symphonies of Beethoven, Bruckner, Schubert and Mahler. As we’re
already aware, Ablinger had been looking for a method of
transforming the linear experience of time into a momentary or
perhaps aimless/formless, static one. He and the technicians
finally found a way of condensing the stored information in a way
that made the linear time-line tip over into a vertical column of
condensed information. They looped and folded the music’s
horizontal time line into a vertical sound column exactly forty
seconds wide. Instead of a few hours of Beethoven in a straight
line, Ablinger turns it around on top of itself at 90 degrees
into a 40 second sound column. And though it seems that one could
call this compression, this word neither describes the idea
behind it nor does it—as Ablinger and the technicians assured me—
accurately describe what the software-program they designed
actually does. Peter Ablinger has decided to use the term
condensation. One of the ideas being: not to loose any bit of
information - technically as well as philosophically. (On the
contrary...: Make available all the information of 150 years of
European symphonic tradition in an all-at-once-audible hit-single
time-span of four minutes.) Of course the information—about 45
hours of symphonic music—in this density turns into noise. But noise is information now—and even in a rather precise way. What
this means is that for those who know the symphonic tradition, it
will be surprisingly unsurprising which composer's noise sounds
which way.
The traditional foreground/background conception, even a signalto-
noise ratio conception cannot be applied to a work such as
this. Noise is not the enemy of information, it is by its
coloredness, by its texture, by the change from one texture to
the next one, the enabler of information.
After Weiss/Weisslich was underway, Peter Ablinger continued
making works for instruments with electronics in a series called
IEAOV, Instrumente und ElektroAkustisch Ortsbezogene Verdichtung
[Instrumental and ElectroAcoustic site-specific condensation].
This title tries to define exactly what it labels: an instrument
(or instruments) plays a few notes; a computer immediately
transforms these notes in a similar way that the symphonies have
been treated; the instrument keeps playing; the condensed,
"timeless", colored static noise and the sound of the instrument
begin subtly to interact. The instrument may leave an imprint on
the noise or the noise may overlay the instrument, but more
interesting are those phenomenon of the static noise (derived
from the instrument) that actually reinforce certain instrumental
sounds. A fabric arises, constantly moving and aimless, still.
And a few characteristics of pieces discussed earlier are
combined: the tipping over of time into space (Weiss/Weisslich 22
and others), and the iridescent shifting of color as a result of
condensed totality (Grisailles and others).
"Site-specific" is in the title because not only is the site of
the performance a decisive factor in how the piece will evolve,
but also the actual space itself is defined by the static
produced in it—as we know from the experiments with partitioned
white noise. And finally, “condensation” describes the
philosophical/technical procedure.
IEAOV Instrumente und ElektroAkustisch Ortsbezogene
Verdichtung (8)
The composer Peter Ablinger is a mystic of enlightenment. His
litanies and evocations aim at re-cognition and perception; his
static noise aims at perception and information; and their
transgression into reality is based on the impossibility of total
perception. Peter Ablinger's music displays a ‘being
intermediate’, a being between utopian everything and a real
totality. His music does not engage the illusory, abstract
everything of white noise, silence, space and time, but rather,
engages the realistic everything of colored static noise, being
silent, site and moment.
(:Instrumental and ElectroAcoustic site-specific
condensation).
"Being always means condensed totality." (Cusanus)
Human beings are able to think of simultaneous things as
successive ones. This is thinking. Thinking is making a
successive order out of the surrounding whole, out of
totality. Thinking therefore might be thought of as the
negation of simultaneity. Thinking then is the negation of
any actually accessible lived experience.
Linear thinking in time finds its opposition in hearing,
Hearing is simultaneous perception. Hearing is spherical. It transforms time into illusion.
Most composed music seems to contradict this conception. The
reason is that most composed European music of the last few
centuries—since the invention of the sonata—has widely been
based on the concept of music as a language. ‘Thinking
Music’ then takes place within a linear time conception. I
want to contrast this with a more immediate way of hearing
and experiencing.
f = t
By condensation successive events are transformed into the
simultaneity of a spectrum. A succession of sounds as an
input turns into a color of sound as an output. Not just
pitch but each and every characteristics of a sound—
especially the initial attack transient of the tone and its
decay transient—defines the resulting color. Time then is no
longer any different from spectrum. Frequency has become
identical to time. f(requency) = t(ime). f = t.
The dense electroacoustic structures differ only in color
and texture. The more material is condensed, the denser the
structure of the static noise, until distinctive single
sounds are hardly perceptible. Time has ceased to be a
perception-defining dimension of sound-structure. Sound
seems to stand still in time. In condensation the conception
of sound-totality presents itself as absolute presence.
Whereas in the onetone-pieces the sounding phenomenon
appears as under a magnifying-glass displaying each detail
until it almost dissolves into pure texture (noise), in the
alltone-pleces the sounding phenomenon tends towards being
boundaryless (although it never is or wants to be)—it is
hardly graspable as a distinct figure and melts into the
background or even into the overall field of perception as
such. It stands for a utopia of the immediate experience of
the totality of the moment.(9)
(1) Ablinger, Peter: IEAOV Instrumente und ElektroAkustisch Ortsbezogene
Verdichtung. Berlin 1997.
(2) Vienna, Societe de l'art acoustique, Odeon, 1989 (?)
(3) Sanio, Sabine: Portrait Peter Ablinger. Berlin 1997.
(4) Sanio, Sabine: Portrait Peter Ablinger. Berlin 1997.
(5) Sanio, Sabine: Portrait Peter Ablinger. Berlin 1997.
(6) Ablinger, Peter: IEAOV Instrumente und ElektroAkustisch Ortsbezogene
Verdichtung. Berlin 1997.
(7) Ablinger, Peter: IEAOV Instrumente und ElektroAkustisch Ortsbezogene
Verdichtung. Berlin 1997.
(8) Ablinger, Peter: IEAOV Instrumente und ElektroAkustisch Ortsbezogene
Verdichtung. Berlin 1997.
(9) Sanio, Sabine: Portrait Peter Ablinger. Berlin 1997.
Untitled: On Peter Ablinger's installations , by Christian Scheib
"Weiss/Weisslich 7": white noise received through the ether, documentation
Rauschen / noise: documentation
