Post-Music Post
A blog dedicated to new music discourse in the form of articles and concert reviews
I. Institutional Polemic
Institutions of art exist in no small part as instruments of power in the form of culture. Justifications for the founding of our own academy in Basel include the “Verbesserung der Kirchenmusik1 ,” and the “Bildung des Volkes…durch Musik2.” Musical institutions of education in previous centuries were thus positioned as a way of promoting a type of social order sanctioned by the elite: strengthening the rituals of the church and molding the ideal subject. Despite proclamations of “l’art pour l’art” that accompanied the onset of modernity, music has never really been autonomous3.
Today we should remember these past motivations and ask ourselves whom our current trends serve. Could today’s interdisciplinary turn contain a dark side, whereby institutional engineering results in a de-disciplining of musical craft that leaves us dependent on the tentative alliance between Taiwan, Foxconn, and Silicon Valley? Nevertheless, this new interdisciplinarity is a heady brew: it contains on the one hand the liberating scent of fresh air injected into the stuffy halls of the classic’s museum culture; on the other the invigorating tang of historical necessity that would propel us into a bright beyond. However, just as multinational megacorporations find it prudent to adopt inclusionary rhetoric to sell their products and catch-all political parties champion both domestic human rights and foreign drone strikes, we should also be wary of art education institutions that de-skill their curriculum in favor of the “immediacy of experience,” justice, or diversity4.
For what? Big data, YouTube tutorials, bedroom producers, the economy of attention… this landscape yields new sources of revenue that instrumentalize artistic production as a part of the soft sword of gross domestic product. Perhaps paradoxically, as war looms, cultural budgets will grow alongside military ones, as the demand for “immersion” becomes an economic powerhouse in its own right5 – with the added benefit of being able to mythologize the great fictions of our time in the latest fashion. More lights, more sound, more video, more staging, more costumes, and more feeling will make up for the un-specificity (or hyper-individuality) of the practice. The brutal efficiency of the technical means of the 21st century is unstoppable in achieving this end. Music, as a result, draws closer to the spectacles in visual art, cinema, or theater. Our secret fantasy for a return to the greener pastures of consumerism resurfaces.
Yet the opposite position is untenable: that the richness of sound and fullness of presence given by the instruments of tradition, played by a thinking, feeling subject who has painstakingly mastered their craft can never really be replaced. Furthermore, that music should be “difficult,” a concentrated effort of contemplation, a confrontation with new sounds and forms, which should counter immediacy of feeling with intellectual weight. This position says we should resist these new trends that straddle boundaries, that give in to profane entertainment, that are immediately accessible to the layperson, and which dazzle the public with technological gimmicks. If our music becomes ever more niche and erudite, if it retreats from the mainstream, kept on life support only by universities and the odd philanthropist, then so be it. New Music must remain unblemished even as it shrivels, destined to regurgitate pre-masticated matter until death. Its concert halls will look more like hospitals as a hush descends and the average age climbs.
Regardless of how one keeps the problem at arm’s length by mixing and matching from the positions caricatured above, the knockout punch of economics, politics, and technology continues to threaten the ecosystem. It is clear that institutions must adapt, but how to do so without becoming puppets to the profit margins of the neoliberal state? Surely, we want to resist (shrug), but how to do so without becoming an ivory tower of irrelevant curmudgeons? Perhaps one could shrug their shoulders here and feign indifference. “I just want to make music.” I claim this is giving up: your music will be used against your will unless you build your will into your music.
As if we could simply will our music into existence. Just as geopolitical gravities persist in and between starry-eyed serial chords, the problem of material has not disappeared in our time. In fact, one could reverse Harry Lehmann’s proclamation of a paradigm shift to “relational music:”6 instead of the end of the material aesthetic, perhaps the end of aesthetic is a materialist one. As composers fail in their search for new avenues by making recourse to combinations of notes-rhythms-chords-squeaks-scratches-moods, their increasing reliance on extra-medial content (concepts, situations, themes, concretizations) leaves strange residue.
The stickiest of which is the instruments, those highly developed technical artifacts from previous times: they define the practice, they reproduce the practice, they shape its direction. These expensive machines, with which we are locked in a death dance, help us achieve an end, but also simply block the way. Hauling them forward, inch by bloody inch, has been part of tradition for ages. And even against the promise of progress, certainly no pragmatic person would suggest deleting this tradition outright. But for lack of ability, will, or desire to erase, perhaps it would be better to simply squeeze around the side and walk away. Should the cellist not, in adapting to the fluidity (or precarity) of a de-disciplined world, also take dance lessons, perform as a DJ, engage in obscene instrument preparations, or better yet, ruminate on theoretical deadlocks? Should she not, in an act of final consequence, take this boozy cocktail directly to the practice room to mix and match with her scales, string crossings and concerti? This raises a slew of further and yet more difficult questions: how is an institution set up to encourage or punish this type of behavior? Is such a musician really a competitive player in the dog-eat-dog double niche market of the cancelled classic, or are all deviants destined to disenfranchisement at the hands of the aggressively normative? Quickly we spin out of control as the goalposts of our discourse turn utopic
I admit – I’m just a composer. Mostly, I’m at the mercy of the tastes of musicians, artistic directors, and curators, and I must take care not to step on toes as I make my advocacy, lest my nonparticipation in social ritual or artistic convention be viewed as threatening. Already here, at the ground level of the building we call music and just the same in the actual academy, institutional hierarchy is formed and with it the wider landscape presses in. In the face of a de-disciplinary attitude towards labor – the composer-performer and the performer-composer that are predicated on the inherent value of the individual’s expression – we could reiterate a certain labor division: the composer-as-architect who spends their time drawing up blueprints and thinking about what exactly could or should be drawn up. Perhaps they know something that the musician-as-engineer, who spends their time learning techniques of execution specific to this or that material, does not. Fortunately for us, nobody dies if we miscalculate and the building of music comes crashing down, but there are still winners and losers in the marketplace. I propose it would be to everyone’s benefit if this relationship – always looming in the background – was reevaluated, without confusing the one role for the other. One can be both, but both can’t be one.
Furthermore, in the face of hyperefficient institutions that would prioritize a particular type of composer-performer relationship by predetermining a particular type of composer or particular type of musician, I suggest we can break the institutional and aesthetic deadlock of vague-intermedia/dusty-neoconservative by taking direct action. Let’s occupy the academy! Let’s take our musical tents and pitch them directly in the hallways, blocking way of passage, course of business, and logistics of equipment. A further offense would put our prized skills to work: a clamor, an acoustic disturbance that would make our presence and action unmistakable. To top things off, let us back up action with talk. Let’s argue the points at hand incessantly, spreading this very journal in which I write across our shared institutions, the pages raining down on the desks of go-out-for-lunch administrators and spaghetti-smeared cafeteria tables!
Do I speak metaphorically or literally? No matter: instead of the engineering of social order that comes with top-down adoption of trends like interdisciplinarity, or its possibly worse counter-reformation, we could instead obstruct and dismantle the hallways of communication and practice-based consensus. In order to straddle the tightrope between two forms of puppeteered eunomia, we could carefully orchestrate disorder in our own house. In clearer words: to render the institutional problems explored above unavoidably visible, we can simply break the institutional framework. When things we’re accustomed to rely on don’t work right, they confound us the most. Perhaps in a land of flawless infrastructure, breaking something is expedient.
II. Media Aesthetics
Now that the polemic is over, one may exclaim: “enough posing, let’s see what YOU can do!” Let’s bracket the problems that come with reducing discursive provocations to sharing intellectual dick pics – the game of weaving the world with terms and categories and colliding them is indeed an existential one requiring counter-maneuvers instead of road closures. I wager with a trucker’s swagger to provide an exit ramp from the tangled superhighway of the New Music interstate 7877.
The institutional predetermination previously posited as music’s speed bump (a help against excess and a hindrance against progress) can be said to function by streamlining production of techniques and the accompanying theoretical justification that themselves constitute a medial condition. The violinist spends hours on bow control so as to not break the continuous buttering of hair-on-metal that produces the warm resonance of the tone. This is a fundamental condition of the medium of the classic. Modernism introduces nauseating ponticello, shrill pizzicato, and grating overpressure to break this medial condition – by now such an established break that it becomes a concerted mental effort to ask a colleague “why do you need such techniques?”
A medial condition of second order is thus constituted by rupture with a tradition that only exists in the negative; in the aftermath of the modern, tradition is firstly a tradition of counter-tradition, secondly as a prosthesis of anti-modern folklore, and thirdly as a ghost of a supposedly “common practice” era that is presupposed by both interdisciplinarity and it’s opponents. Insofar as this condition of the modern (the one New Music is founded on) is still treated as possessing the speculative power of the new, it becomes ideology and silently imposes conformism upon those who do not take it seriously.
Since the 2000s, a third-order medial condition has arisen in New Music. Relational music and interdisciplinary musical practices constitute a double negation of tradition. Extra-medial interventions that challenge the hard adherence to instrumental media of the modernist counter-tradition through digitally-informed concretizations not only risk becoming a tradition of their own to the extent that they can be said to form a style, but more importantly cleave together the dead flesh of pre-modern tradition and keep it in an uncanny zombie state through negative affirmation of the counter-tradition.
If the project of modernist art was supposed to redeem the values of pre-modern aesthetic experience and thereby confirm tradition, keeping it alive through its cancellation8, post-modernist music meanwhile negates the already-broken medial conditions of its predecessor, confirming through denial both the modern and pre-modern. Crucially, however, post-modernist music (or post-musical modernism) cannot directly revive the values of pre-modern music, precisely because of its status as a double negative, compounded by its existence predicating on digital reproduction technology. Call it what you will – a mixture of relational, interdisciplinary, performative, intermedia, and conceptual aesthetics: the human content of musical art in this paradigm can only be redeemed through acknowledgement of its own damned existence as an echo, forever inscribed in the hard drive of history. Shortly stated: after the digital, musical expression is expired flesh on steroids. Rebelling against this only verifies it.
I don’t mean authentic expression is impossible today, only that it is paradoxical. The laptop is ubiquitous and transforms the act of recollection into something mechanistically determinate. Samples are dead material. We are (un)lucky enough to live in their shadow, where even IRL we judge the human form through the possibility of their projection. These digital concretizations immobilize what is normally taken through the subjective faculties of perception and as such possess both a subhuman emptiness and superhuman directness. Without properly appraising such changes in the quality of perception caused by the perforation of digital technology in the human milieu one cannot begin to move towards the aesthetic valuation that the modern sought to salvage. Digital natives live with a zombie spirit that would consume the living in return for eternal unlife. Expression becomes a quotation of itself that nevertheless is yearned for.
The not-yet-finished process of de-disciplining music institutions by the neoliberal state would hide all this by pre-determining a seamlessly fluid medial condition. Isn’t it wonderful when artists can be DJ’s can be dancers can be activists? All you need is the app and a yearly subscription! Collaboration seems to be the buzzword of the day, as if all we need to do is get together in the same room to “vibe” and the synergy will flow. This is an ideology: just as musical expression today is paradoxical, there is real tension between people, artistic disciplines, and medial layers that one cannot delete forever. Musicians are not dancers, filmmakers, visual artists, etc. and that’s a good thing. One could provoke even more by extending the argumentation into the political sphere: parties that ignore the contradictory interests of investors, weapons industry, and working class are not only doomed to failure but are anti-democratic. Pretending that all media are created equal is an artistic swamp that probably should be drained.
To be generous, its unclear what new categories are as they form. That makes discourse and speculative artistic creation all the more important. Yet difference should be named. Rather than reconciliation, it should lead to intermediate categories that result in further differentiation. Contradictions never disappear. They are only resolved, becoming solute, components in another fluid. Simply said: out of the frying pan, into the fryer. Any serious attempt at new art necessitates a redefinition of aesthetic categories that, in their differentiation, would expand the scope of aesthetic cognition towards the new. This is doubly true for New Music.
III. Show and Tell
“Enough!” one might shriek as I skate by, “tell us what you really mean!”
“Don’t you see?” I would answer with a wink, “I’m already showing you!”
“But why can’t you say it directly?” they would complain.
“Because I can’t see where it begins or ends!” I exclaim.
“Nevertheless,” they urge, “give it a try.”
I take a moment to collect my thoughts and attempt to give the people what they want:
“Although time runs at different speeds globally, we at least find ourselves here9 in a position of third-order mediality, whereby the doubly negated foundational Western thinking on composed music can no longer directly survive.”
I look around to check the effect of the sentence on the audience. They’re thinking very hard. “Braves Publikum,” I whisper and continue:
“Hardened by digital media that prefigure our conceptualizations of music and musical works, the undead quality of aesthetic value today produces a contradiction that must be named, spurring in turn not only a redefinition of said values but the mode of presenting those values.”
I am met by quivering expectation. “Here it comes!” thinks one person. “This better be good,” grumbles another. I clear my throat and go for it:
“Due to the condition of third-order mediality, whereby the relation to aesthetic values can only be established indirectly, definitions of value in an artwork cannot be presented positively as media-affirming musical contents, nor negatively as media-negating musical contents. Rather, they should be presented as content-negating medial dilations. Imagine concentric circles of medial categories: the tone of the violin could be at the center, scratch tones the next circle, a Samurai-sword-like bow chop in the air the next one, and giving the audience violins to rub on each other a further.”
Not only searching for ever-more expansive circles, but also jumping between these circles, savoring the breaks and misalignments therein would be the artistic equivalent to blocking the institutional production line that executes paradigm-constitutive medial conditions. Such an approach would scathe at importing a concrete message, statement or mood, and rather embrace laying bare the medial structures of perception and reception, especially as they pertain to the social body of the audience, which is the convergent point of aesthetics and politics and the prefiguration of both institution and artwork. Breaking things artistically takes on a special meaning in this context.”
The audience fidgets as the theory hits. I push my luck:
“One final provocative extension of this model would be to say: it’s dangerous when institutions try to positively define what kind of values and experiences we should have. What happens when the institutional order of the day is togetherness? Or when we’re stuck in our seats listening to music that tells us to have a “reverie.” We *should* be together, feel together. “You are all different,” says Brian to the masses. “I’m not!” exclaims one, and he is shushed. Where does that lead?”
I wager to mention here my own work. My focus for the past years has been to tease out the contradiction between concretizations of the situation of music, specifically between the social body of the audience and the radically speculative space of listening. Pieces like IT’S NICE 2 MEAT U from 2021 place this as a fleshy encounter, both literally and metaphorically between not only sonic bodies but also the actual body of performer and audience, read through the flat metaphor of flesh. My work Ex-Chill from 2023 presents a metaphor of socially stratified modes of listening in the face of the consumption of relaxation. In this situation, audience can pay for different seating/listening packages, including an acoustic massage. Recently, the piece HAPPY NO NEW YEARS exposits an aesthetic model of stages of listening: virtual, concrete, and speculative. This structure is perforated with the situation of waiting with expectation for something that never comes – perhaps the promise of civilization embedded into aesthetic experience of artworks. Here distance and immersion function as aesthetic categories insofar as they present avenues for negative experience.
There is also a sort of implicit politics in these kinds of works. Rather than creating an empathetic mood on a political theme with “New Music sounds,” the formats I use stretch possibilities not just of material but of the capacities of the institutions themselves. Separating the audience, creating multi-room situations, including food, drink, and interactive sound-actions in the repertoire of acoustic objects, demanding long durations to let intersubjective relations unfold – these are concrete compositional tools that, insofar as they extend the technique of the institutional apparatus of new music, create an occupation of sorts. What would it mean to “occupy academy?” Demand works that form institutions more than the institutions form them.
[1] Merian, Dr. W. Gedenkschrift zum 50jährigen Bestehen der Allgemeinen Musikschule in Basel. 1917, pp. 9-10.
[2] This is excerpted from the title of a lecture arguing for the foundation of a generalized music school in Basel. See: Oesch, Hans. Die Musik-Akademie der Stadt Basel: Festschrift zum Hundertjährigen Bestehen der Musikschule Basel 1867-1967. Basel, Schwabe & Co. Verlag, 1967, pp. 143-44.
[3] A further example is the extensive influence the US military government of occupied Germany exerted over the IFNM Darmstadt during the postwar years. See: Beal, Amy C. "Negotiating Cultural Allies: American Music in Darmstadt, 1946-1956." Journal of the American Musicological Society, vol. 53, no. 1, Apr. 2000, pp. 105-39. JSTOR.
[4] These are the values espoused by the Institute Art Gender Nature at the Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst Basel. See: https://www.fhnw.ch/de/die-fhnw/hochschulen/hgk/institut-kunst-gender-natur. I don’t seek to criticize these values, but rather simply pose the question: what kind of dependency may this inadvertently create?
[5] The European Investment Fund provides on its website a market analysis of cultural sector to this effect. See: https://www.eif.org/what_we_do/guarantees/cultural_creative_sectors_guarantee_facility/ccs-market-analysis-europe.pdf. “Immersion” is mentioned several times as an example of tech-driven economic growth in the arts.
[6] See his lecture “Gehaltsästhetik – Relationale Musik – Konzeptmusik” from 2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTaIT_-vtbY&t=2572s
[7] Interstate 787 is a famously tangled network of octopoidal exit ramps that span the Hudson River between Albany and Rensselaer, New York, the administrative heart of the state. It also cuts off the city from having a riverfront.
[8] “Modernism has to be understood as a holding operation, a continuing endeavor to maintain aesthetic standards in the face of threats,” Greenberg, Clement. "Modern and Postmodern." Arts 54, vol. 6, Feb. 1980.
[9] This text was first presented publicly as an Open Space lecture at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse on July 25th, 2025.