It's the summer of 2011, and the Horrible Histories troupe has taken over the BBC Proms. In a prologue to their first ever concert – a selection of greatest hits from the musically adept children's TV series – the show's frenetic historian Bob Hale delivers the Orchestra Report. Even the grumpiest academic would be hard-pressed not to raise a smile at a character who manages to cram so much history, social context and sheer fun into a five-minute account of the entire history of the orchestra. And, after outlining moments and works from history – Mozart's Piano Sonata No. 16 and Beethoven's Fifth Symphony – Hale, played by Laurence Rickard, concludes with a John Cage joke, involving the presenter jiving along to 4’33”.
This is the sort of instance that Ed McKeon describes in his short book Heiner Goebbels and Curatorial Composing after Cage, as Cage is brought back within the structures he sought to deconstruct. McKeon borrows from musicologist Lydia Goehr the idea that Cage's most famous piece reinforces rather than deconstructs the idea of the musical work; it's therefore entirely reasonable for Hale to draw a line that tangentially connects Mozart and Beethoven to Cage, despite their obvious aesthetic differences and diversions. With 4′33″, McKeon writes, ‘Cage may have weakened the discourse of music's essence, the work-concept's “internal” articulation, but its external border – its separation from the everyday – remained firmly secure.’
McKeon's thesis involves introducing, fleshing out and eventually embedding the idea of curatorial composing to understand a particular moment where compositional concerns shifted from ideas orbiting the work-concept to a concern for composing public encounters. McKeon doesn't quite form a polemic on the modern-day phenomenon of ‘curationism’, but you feel that giving a more thorough elucidation of a word often trendily and uncritically deployed might have been a motivating factor in his writing. A problematic characteristic of the field of contemporary gallery arts, McKeon writes, is the curatorial practice where authorship is sovereign: ‘a kind of silent partner to the artists on display – especially for solo or duo shows – or, more often for group shows, becomes herself an author of the exhibition, signing it off as a work in its own right’. McKeon's research is focused on exploring, interrogating and reframing curation in a musical context, and he lists three more of his texts on similar topics in the bibliography.
In order to achieve his aim – while critiquing the curator-as-programmer position in music today – McKeon detaches composing from the idea of the musical work by paying close attention to Goehr's seminal book on the work-concept, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works. While Goehr's thesis – that, following philosophy's castigation of music's ephemeral, emotional essence and owing to a desire to solidify the status of music as an artform capable of revealing universal truths, werktreue emerged as a foundational concept on which an ever-shifting selection of galleries containing what is considered a musical work was built and future considerations were regulated, fundamentally shaping Western classical music and its structures for years to come – has become an essential text in the past 30 years of musicological thought, the secondary argument – about what happens to music after the work-concept – has been less successful in formulating a radical new world.
One example of a way out of an aesthetic dilemma, which retains the idea of musical value while questioning the authority of the work-concept, is, McKeon suggests, shown in the work of Heiner Goebbels, in a mode of curatorial composition that rejects both the singularity of the Foucauldian ‘author function’ and its medium specificity – that is, works of music – while maintaining some of the characteristics of compositional practice through which – and by switching focus to empowering audiences – new forms of authority can be consolidated. He compares Goebbels’ practice to late-period Cage, whose musicality after 0″00 (1962) became ‘less “about” time… and increasingly an articulation of relations through time’.
The example he gives across Goebbels’ diverse artistic practice is his directorship of the Ruhrtriennale from 2012 to 2014. McKeon is expansive, even a touch nostalgic, about a staging of Andriessen's De Materie and the length to which it goes to dislodge the work-concept. As Goebbels takes Andriessen's idea that ‘music is always related to other music’ to the extreme, McKeon explains how he is able to maintain consistency and coherence through an ‘absent centre’, in this case the continued backdrop of the Ruhr basin's post-industrial landscape and the huge, almost limitless warehouses of the festival (plus the range of encouraging yet hands-off support from relevant bureaucratic structures), allowing ‘a limited set of possibilities from which a space for improvisation – for something unanticipated – [can] appear’.
McKeon's book is dense yet short, and thus an accessible way into concepts that are difficult to grasp. It also makes me a little sad, realising that the kinds of things made at the Ruhrtriennale (and the atmosphere which they are made in) are almost impossible to imagine happening in the UK any time soon. It could do with a finer copy-edit, and yet conversely could be a bit more expansive than its svelte 68 pages allows. Nonetheless, it's admirable in its concision, and I hope that composers who don't fit into the mould – sonically or philosophically – find some solace in it, and take some inspiration from the distinctive outlook of Goebbels. On page 46, McKeon includes a footnote from Goebbels’ Aesthetics of Absence:Footnote 1 ‘What we urgently need in addition to the repertoire theatres are laboratories for theatre and music-theatre, in which everything can be called into question’. Amen to that.
