« A Single Tone Coming Out Of A Vast, Empty Space » : John Adams, le contemporain au risque de l’anachronisme
Is there such a thing as contemporary music? Answering this question requires a preliminary understanding of what is meant by “contemporary,” but this turns out to be a highly problematic notion. For a musical work to be truly “contemporary,” it must be an audible revelation of something essential a...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Centre de Recherche "Texte et Critique de Texte"
2013-12-01
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| Series: | Sillages Critiques |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/sillagescritiques/3769 |
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| Summary: | Is there such a thing as contemporary music? Answering this question requires a preliminary understanding of what is meant by “contemporary,” but this turns out to be a highly problematic notion. For a musical work to be truly “contemporary,” it must be an audible revelation of something essential about my current experience; but I cannot acknowledge that this is the case without distancing myself from it and behaving as if I did not wholly belong to the present moment, which I say it reflects. What is more, the phrase “contemporary music” is bound to remain meaningless unless there is, in the first place, such a thing as “music”—but this is something that can no longer be taken for granted at a time when the very definition of this term has become a matter of debate. As is well known, Adorno answers both of these questions pessimistically. According to him, the only music that deserves to be called “contemporary” so violently expresses basic facts about our current mode of existence that it sounds frighteningly inhuman and is therefore doomed to remain “unheard.” Besides this, there are only vestiges of past musical forms whose relevance has wholly disappeared as they have been turned into meaningless commodities by the American culture industry. The purpose of this paper is to raise once more the question of music and the “contemporary” in the light of Adorno’s argument and in connection with an American composer known for his keen interest in current events. While John Adams’s operas often rely on anachronism and temporal distance, his early cantata Harmonium (1980‑81) already raises the question of dissociation and remoteness from the self: first, because it gives pride of place to a famous Emily Dickinson poem about alienation and disaster; secondly, because it also conducts a musical exploration of sound perceived as a paradoxical combination of immediacy and estrangement, presence and emptiness, as if music itself were seen as expressing the quintessence of the contemporary. |
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| ISSN: | 1272-3819 1969-6302 |