Liza lim

Jeremias Schwarzer plays 'weaver-of-fictions' (photo: Evaristo Aguilar)

A few weeks ago I took part in a rather unusual event in Berlin called ‘Muss das so klingen?!’ - ‘Does it have to sound like that?!’ - ‘the consultation hour for contemporary music’. It was set up rather like a ‘therapist’s clinic in new music’ involving myself as ‘the composer’ and Jeremias Schwarzer, the recorder player as ‘the musician’ with Natalie Knapp, a philosopher acting as a mediator. The aim was to explore together with an audience the question of why listeners often find contemporary music difficult to understand. Jeremias played my recorder solo Weaver of fictions and the audience was asked ‘what do you hear? what does it mean to you? how does one start thinking about something unfamiliar? how does one expand one’s capacity to listen to the unfamiliar?’

Interesting as those questions were, what actually came up that day, more strongly than a search for meaning or an audience’s need for interpretation, was the way in which the presence of the performer was crucially important to the reception of the work. The audience placed primary importance, in how they experienced the performance, on a quite different factor than explanations about how the music was made, its background story and so on. The factor that was really important for them was the way in which the performer was so utterly and intensely focussed that it was as if he ‘became’ the music. One member of the audience described seeing the musician as a kind of bird and the music as ‘like seeing an x-ray of that bird’, and later, that ‘the music was like a seed inside the performer which was then growing and taking over his body’.² What was being articulated here was a perception that a one-to-one relationship was created in which there was no separation between the musician and the music. This is the state of dynamic elegance that is referred to when you say about great athletes that they are ‘in the zone’ - that ecstatic, effortless quality of performance that arises when you feel that a swimmer is at one with the water, a footballer is the game or that a runner is the sprint.

What emerged from the discussion that day was that this condition of embodied ‘oneness’ creates a sense of integrity or authenticity for the audience, and it is the emotional impact of this authenticity that is powerfully transmitted. The distances between performer, the music performed and the listener were suddenly collapsed to create a tangible nearness, a sensation of everything being in sync. The key factor here seemed to be the body of the performer, his physical presence and the particular state of his ‘being present’, simultaneously relaxed and intensely alert in every moment of performance, which enabled the audience to bypass a need for meaning as something that is explained and to jump to a kind of immediacy of experience as it impacts on the senses.

The literary scholar Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht describes this kind of immediacy of experience as a ‘presence effect’ - the unaccountable aspect of aesthetic experience which is revelatory and which is surplus to the dimension of meaning. Central to his study is really an epistemology, a way of knowing about the world, that includes what we might call ‘magic’. He talks about aesthetic experience as being ‘an oscillation (and sometimes an interference) between ‘presence effects’ and ‘meaning effects’. ³

George Steiner in his book ‘Real Presences’ (1989) makes a more direct connection between art and the theological saying, ‘the wager on the meaning of meaning, on the potential of insight and response when one human voice addresses another, when we come face to face with the text and work of art or music, which is to say when we encounter the other in its condition of freedom, is a wager on transcendence.’⁴ What he’s saying is that art at some fundamental level engages with an ‘otherness’ which is a ‘bet’ if you like, a gamble on Divine presence.

What particularly interests me in Steiner’s comment is the idea that ‘revelation’ might be a fundamental part of art experience (whatever one thinks is being revealed) and that part of this condition lies in the sense that all art can be considered radically ‘other’. My understanding of what is meant by ‘otherness’ here is the sense that one can never reach a total understanding or complete interpretation of an artwork. The ‘condition of freedom’ Steiner points to, arises in part from the way art is ‘unverifiable’ in its meanings (one can’t scientifically prove things about it) but also in the sense that there is a limit to what meaning itself can convey. In this space, beyond conceptualisation, like Jeremias’ performance, beyond thinking about ‘what something means’, is what we might call the ‘presence’, the transcendent aspect of the art work.

I explored these ideas further in relation to my compositional work as a ’staging of an aesthetics of presence’ in my inaugural lecture at Huddersfield University (3 Nov 2009) and am planning to publish that paper.

Notes

¹ ‘Muss das so Klingen’, concert/discussion event with Liza Lim, Jeremias Schwarzer, Natalie Knapp, 11 Oct 2009, Hybrid-Arts Festival (Australia-Berlin), RadialSystem Berlin.  Supported by the DAAD, Berlin.

² Comment made by Mexican percussionist Evaristo Aguilar.

³ Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (2004), The Production of Presence (what meaning cannot convey), Stanford, Stanford University Press, p.2.

⁴ George Steiner (1989), Real Presences, London, Faber & Faber, p.4.