Drone and Response: Pierre Boulez and Dassault

The above image is an artist's impression depicting the nEUROn Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle (UCAV, or drone) whose prototype, designed by French defence contractor Dassault, was first displayed at the Paris Air Show in 2005. The name, presumably, is intended to indicate its pioneer status as one of the first combat drones developed by a European company. 

I happened across the nEUROn drone when browsing through recent posts from the official Wikileaks Twitter account. After a somewhat catty blog post at the New York Times by former editor, Bill Keller, the 'Leaks are currently using their tweets to explain exactly why they decided to go home and take their ball with them, and while we're at it we dropped the NYT, Guardian, Le Monde, El Pais, etc., not the other way round, thank you very much. 

One of the reasons for their ire was apparently the amount of redactions insisted upon by their media partners - not just names of diplomats, but frequently also names of banks and major corporations. So they're publishing the unredacted versions over at Cabledrum.net. Including this one in which someone evidently insisted on redacting Italy's interest in investing in Dassault's new UCAV.

There's an interesting connection between Dassault and the world of avant-garde music. Back in 1984, Pierre Boulez's IRCAM institute needed its new 4X computer put into production - and fast! The premiere of Boulez's Répons was looming and four such machines were required to make work its delicate interplay of acoustic and digital music interacting in 3D space. So, IRCAM sold the designs to Sogitec to put them into production. Sogitec had at that time just been bought by Dassault.

In her book, Rationalising Culture, an ethnographic look at the inner workings of the famously secretive IRCAM institute, former Henry Cow / National Health bassist, Georgina Born recounts the frustration of some IRCAM workers at the sale of their baby to the notorious arms manufacturer:

"The 4X-Sogitec saga was kept quiet during 1984 and was not spoken of freely within IRCAM. A few workers mentioned confidentially that they were upset by the militarist implications of the deal, and equally b the failure of the 4X to reach a larger musical public, but most remained silent."

Since the early 80s, Sogitec has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Dassault, with a particular speciality for flight simulators and 3D imaging. IRCAM sold them the 4X on the basis that it would be able to create realistic flying noises for their flight sims. The 4X was IRCAM's flagship computer, probably the most sophisticated piece of music hardware ever built, capable of real time filtering and morphing of sounds, and the last of its kind - after Sogitec made only a small run of 4Xs, insufficient to be put into use at other music research centres around the world, the emphasis largely moved to software based systems like MAX.

Of course, Sogitec make simulators - not actual combat vehicles. Except of course that with drone warfare the line between simulation and real warfare becomes increasingly blurry. From the pilot's point of view - and perhaps even from the point of view of at least some of the hardware and software components - controlling a combat drone in an actual field of war and taking part in a flight simulation might be almost impossible to distinguish.

As one final note, it may be amusing to recall that in his April 2000 column for The New Yorker about Pierre Boulez ("a great but ungenerous artist"), Alex Ross singles out Répons for criticism precisely because of its over-reliance on drones!

Opera Houses

Driving out of Oslo, from its shiny glass and steel centre towards a country that still doesn't really have anything you could call a motorway and only 60 km of high speed rail (principally, from Oslo to Oslo Airport), one is offered a panoramic view of rapidly encroaching modernisation. From the soon-to-be-replaced E18 highway, overlooking the once-rundown dockland area of Bjørvika, you can see that the only thing separating the enormous 1960s container port from the "€500 million stone behemoth" (Icon) of the new opera house is a wasteland of cranes, half-built bridges, and projects in-development. Google "Bjørvika" today and you'll be offered an awful lot of hotel rooms and not much else.

A great deal of very interesting stuff has been written about container ports as vectors of contemporary capital, heralds of the hypermodern, in the wake of series two of The Wire. The curious thing about driving out of Oslo, however, is that it draws your attention to what might otherwise seem an absurd collocation: container ports and opera houses.

Baron Hatherley suggested to me, via email (well, Facebook actually...), that, "Opera and ornament do seem linked in some manner..." But although Oslo Opera House's architects, Snøhetta, may be most famous for the super-ornamental new Alexandria Library (dismissed by Charles Jencks here), this particular building doesn't really evoke either the swishy expressionism of Zaha Hadid, nor the "doily-tecture" pooh-poohed in Douglas Murphy's post on the Shanghai Expo. Actually, particularly from behind, the Operahuset has a rather South Bank-esque stark blockiness to it. It's an edifice, "a rogue iceberg" as the Icon piece linked above puts it, "crashed into the eastern edge of Oslo's harbour." It resembles in some ways a cracked open freight container - or a series of them, badly stacked, as if by some automated robotic crane gone haywire.

Markedly similar in its jutting frame - if somewhat more decorative in the detail of its surfaces - is Copenhagen Opera House. Completed three years earlier than Oslo's, in 2004, the Operaen occupies a similar space in the city's harbour, separated form the container port only by an expanse of empty polluted land that was, last year, the subject of a Reclaim the Streets-style action. Reffen, described as a "utopian building project," involved the temporary occupation of the land by "constructors" who built ad-hoc dwellings out of found materials. If anything, the link between the opera house and the port is made even more explicit in Copenhagen by the fact that the $500 million required to build it were donated by Maersk, the largest container ship and supply vessel operator in the world.

How to make sense of this juxtaposition of the totally inhuman face of freight transportation with perhaps the quintessential humanist art? Of course, there is an issue of gentrification, which was the focus of the Reffen occupation. And of the attempt to paper over (and launder the proceeds of) "dirty" industry with supposedly elevated culture, which we might relate to the presence of the Cité de la Musique and Parc de la Villette in Paris at the site of the old (pre-containerisation) Port de la Villette, glimpsed in Jean Vigo's poetic realist masterpiece L'Atalante. I would by no means wish to diminish the force of such explanations with the perhaps more figurative exploration that follows.

An hour's walk, south of La Villette, will take you to the Opéra Bastille, a building which, as much as the Oslo Operahuset, seems to invite the public onto its great slopes and surfaces as much as it lurchingly imposes itself on its surroundings. A project initiated in 1968 by Pierre Boulez and inaugurated on the bicentenary of the storming of the Bastille, it is significant that the very site of the violent surging forth of the modern world should be marked by an opera house.

Opera may be associated in public consciousness with fusty old-fashioned ideas, and of course it is true that the form became established in the baroque period and the first opera houses were built at this time - even many late-nineteenth century opera houses were built in a neo-baroque style (so the esteemed Mr Hatherley is, of course, right, as usual). But the rococo was really a period of opera's sedimentation and formalisation. As a genre, it emerged out of the Renaissance and arguably flowered into maturity in the revolutionary period from the late-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, broadly between Gluck and Wagner. Revolutionary governments in France and Russia placed enormous stress on the importance of opera (to Lenin, it was second in importance, amongst the arts, only to cinema).

As Gary Tomlinson points out, "No artistic genre... has more often called for purgation," no genre has so frequently called for its own transformation and reformation, no genre has spoken so much and so consistently about its own future. One of the major vectors of this permanent revolution is its relation to the notion of the human - principally in terms of the voice as the medium of operatic truth. From the Florentine Camerata's development of monody to emphasise the solo melodic line of the individual subject, through the successive reforms of Gluck, Cherubini and Spontini in France, placing greater emphasis on the massed singing of the chorus and away from the virtuoso soloist, and on into the twentieth century.

Over the last century, from Berg's Wozzeck to Birtwistle's Minotaur, the operatic voice has become increasingly monstrous and inhuman. In the midst of which we find Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry's musique concrète opera, Orphée 53. The only fragment of this last I have been able to find is Henry's Le Voile d'Orphée, which was later used standalone as the music to a Maurice Bejart ballet. In this fragment, the voice emerges only at the end, painfully rupturing the already fraught texture of Alan Splet-esque electronic ululations, barking the Greek Orphic hymn like Marinetti, only transfigured and distorted by concrète tape manipulation techniques. Orpheus, the emblematic figure of the opera, moves from voice as transcendence to voice as trauma.

The roots of the new anti- and/or post-humanism of twentieth century opera are to be found in the music-dramas of Richard Wagner, where for the first time, the orchestra itself becomes a privileged vehicle of the truth, in competition with the voice. It may be no coincidence that, today, the most recognisable element of the Ring Cycle is the so-called Wurm-Motiv that accompanies Alberich's transformation into a dragon with slow menacing tritones. From Max Steiner's (1933) music for King Kong to the alien invasion cycles of the 50s and 60s, various subtle transformations of this Wurm-Motiv became the go-to riff for virtually all movie monsters.

Artist-Critic

"Without the critical faculty, there is no artistic creation at all,
worthy of the name ... All fine imaginative work
is self-conscious and deliberate."

- Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist

As both a critic and a practitioner, someone who both does and makes stuff and also writes about the stuff that other people do and make, I seem to find myself in a slightly precarious position. A friend who is both an actor and a screenwriter recently wrote to me on Twitter, having just read some film reviews I had written for The Quietus, "You sound like a real critic. Are you sure that's a good idea?" Knowing the man in question, I suspect that this was intended with a certain arch good humour which might tempt us to dismiss the comment as mere banter, were it not for the fact that it is by no means in isolation. In film and pop music alike, anyone who attempts to cross the great divide is often regarded with a certain suspicion - as are auto-critical works of popular art. 

"Pop music about pop music," sniffed Popjustice dismissively a propos The Pipettes, and K-Punk recently asked of popular films that they "dare to be a symptom," as though the work must stand dumb and inert awaiting outside critical enlightenment. Is it not the case though that being a mere symptom is in fact the least that a work of popular art can do? It can hardly help but be a symptom - but isn't it somehow more exciting if the work is both symptom and diagnostician? Able not only to exhibit the trace of some greater syndrome but also, in a further step, to comment on and analyse, either explicitly or implicitly, the syndrome itself as well as its own relationship to that syndrome, to make us think and pose new questions to us, rather than simply providing example to an answer we have already decided upon. This needn't be dismissed as mere po-mo eyebrow-raising, and works of this nature go back much further than anything we might sensibly call post-modernism - indeed, isn't the verse philosophy of Parmenides just that? 

It is therefore my contention that the world might profit from greater consort between critics and those they critique and that some fine work might result from this collusion. The nouvelle vague and British Free Cinema movements provide some support for this assertion, likewise the horror films of Dario Argento, and Paul Morley's involvement in ZTT records, but otherwise examples in popular culture have been relatively unusual. In 'classical' music however the opposite is almost true, and has been for nearly two hundred years now. Mendelsohn, Lizst and Wagner all wrote extensively about music, both in the form of prescriptive essays and more standard review articles. In the twentieth century, the career of Pierre Boulez has almost been defined more by his polemical writing about other composers than by his own actual music (anyone who doubts Boulez as a writer would be wise to recall that roughly half of Deleuze and Guattari's concepts are lifted straight from the pages of Boulez), and lest we forget, no less a music writer than Theodor Adorno had a parallel career as a composer. These two are far from alone in proving that aestheticians need not fail ontically in order to fully grasp artistic ontology.

Under market capitalism, critics and producers are engaged in a curious dance. Each is basically addressing the other at all times and acting as big Other for the other, whilst constantly pretending otherwise. The artist claims to be working for some reified and mystified entity called the Audience, secretly aware that it is the critics' judgement that will more decisively shape their future, and the critic claims to speak for the consumer, the man on the street (this obscure beast, the Audience again), but really longs for recognition by practitioners and prays that their barbed comments will strike the artist to their very marrow, perhaps even encourage them to work differently. For some reason, however, full assumption of this dance - for the dancers to actually look each other in the eye, perhaps even kiss - is strictly taboo.

On the part of critics, this may be due, at least in part, to the roots of popular cultural criticism in anthropology, to engage would thus be to 'go native' and any work that is itself critical can safely be dismissed as being 'uppity'. For practitioners, it may be an odd mix of fear and envy towards the subject supposed to know. In fact, I rather suspect that people who make films and pop music regard critics more highly and rate the power of the critics more highly than anyone else does - and this precisely is the source of their resentment. The critic can then safely become a scapegoat for all personal feelings of failure. If these two can be overcome, what of the notion of critical distance? Where goes the critic's objectivity if they are forever canoodling with the objects of their discourse? Surely, the only good materialist response here is to admit that there never was any critical distance in the first place, that critics do not stand aloof from the world, able to pass objective judgement on it from some olympian height, nor should we want them to. Granting this, I fail to see how a more intimate 'insider' knowledge of the process of production could possibly harm the critic, nor how greater critical reflection, or even academic abstraction, could possibly harm the author. Artists are not children and it is time we stopped treating them as such. Critics of the past have hitherto sought only to comment on the world of popular culture, the point is to change it.

Messiaen and Ancient Science Fiction

After that last post, I received the following email:

"But there was one modern composer for whom the natural world never lost its innocence."

No matter how original a composer Messiaen may have been, his attitude to music, as his pupil Pierre Boulez pointed out, was quite apart from the radical modernists in Vienna and elsewhere. He always retained a deep attachment to certain aspects of tradition, of which certain references to nature in his work were a symptom. It may be telling that he largely abandons this imagery during what Boulez calls his 'utopian years', after the encounter with Darmstadt. However, I am not sure if it is this traditionalism that is at work in his use of birdsong. For Messiaen sees birds less as a natural force than as fellow composers. Even more than that, birds are for Messiaen, as Deleuze and Guattari might say, a line of flight, not drawing him down and attaching him to the earth, but soaring up and away from it. His music contains a becoming-animal, in the process of which the birds themselves become something else too. Birds for Messiaen are like the Tuareg for Delia Derbyshire, rockets for Joe Meek: a means of escape from the earth and the ground. In one of the clips above he even describes a certain bird's noises as "slow, distant, lunar sounds. Like he's from another planet." 

At a recent lecture at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, Catherine Hezser developed a theory of ancient science fiction. Based on Biblical, rabbinical, and other Graeco-Roman texts concerning people being spoken to by extra-terrestrial visitors and lifted up above the earth, such imaginary voyages, Hezser claimed, are invariably connected with some kind of vision of Utopia. Like Alexander, Messiaen has been lifted to the Heavens by a flock of birds, in order that he may look down upon the earth and see it all as one, synthesizing all of its diverse sounds into his own unique musical language.

The BBC Radiophonic Workshop: Institutional Pre-History

In a 1997 interview with John Cavanagh for BBC Radio Scotland’s Original Masters series, Delia Derbyshire claimed that when the first “boss” of the Radiophonic Workshop was appointed in 1958, “there were two applicants from a drama background and three applicants with a music background. And drama won.” But things were not quite as simple as this statement implies. At the time the BBC had a particularly adventurous Drama department, heavily influenced by the ground breaking work that came out of Laurence Gilliam’s post-war Features department, and a largely conservative Music department. In the 1930s, writers like Tyrone Guthrie were already talking about “symphonic form” in radio drama, and paying attention to the significance of words as sound forms in themselves.

Though the BBC had developed a strong reputation for ‘modern’ music in the twenties and thirties, with the coming of the Second World War, a decision was made by the Programme Planning Department to move to a ‘lighter’ programming schedule against the wishes of Head of Music, Adrian Boult. In a Musical Times article from 1943, otherwise full of praise for the high standard maintained in broadcast music, the author remarks on a “falling short” in the field of contemporary music, “due to causes that nobody can remedy.”

Despite the newfound pressures of commercial competition, R. J. F. Howgill, Head of Music 1952-1959, insisted on maintaining the BBC’s commitment to the “very best” – in the ideology of the times however, this consisted of a spectacular spectrum with “at one end” the Last Night of the Proms and “at the other end of the spectrum, ‘celebrity recitals’ by Menuhin, Fischer-Dieskau, and others." Things were about to change. In 1957, William Glock conducted a performance of works by Stockhausen, Boulez and Nono on the Third Programme, 3 March 1957 and would become head of music in 1959 with a remit to broadcast “a wider selection of contemporary music.” Of course, by this time, the Radiophonic Workshop was already set up under the stewardship of the Drama department.

Born, G. (2004), Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC, 2004, London: Secker & Warburg;
Briggs, A., The History of Broadcasting in The United Kingdom Volume V: Competition, 1995, Oxford: Oxford University Press;
Doctor, J. R., The BBC and Ultra-Modern Music, 1922-1936, 1999, Cambridge University Press;
McN., W., ‘The BBC Comes of Age’, in The Musical Times, vol. 84, No. 1210. (Dec. 1943), p.367;
Rodger, I., Radio Drama, 1982, London: Macmillan