Document (original) (raw)

Was 1974 the End of Music History? Universalism, cybernetics, and the International Conference of New Musical Notation

2022, Material Cultures of Music Notation

For Open Access: https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/37372927 In this chapter, I examine the underlying principles and historiographical consequences of the Index of New Musical Notation (1970) and its associated event, the International Conference on New Musical Notation (1974 Ghent, Belgium). The goal of this enterprise was to rationalize the various and diverse forms of notations European and North American composers had invented since the 1950s. I relate this objective to Hegel’s and Francis Fukuyama’s teleological versions of history, as well as the neoliberal values of the post-war United States, in order to show how cybernetics and information theory offered a means for overcoming differences in compositional aesthetics and giving coherency and strength to the teleology of Western art music. I argue that, by reinforcing an understanding of notation as code, this enterprise reinterpreted music as information, ready to circulate without the obstacle of culturally bound hermeneutics in a manner consistent with American neoliberal democratic values. I conclude by showing how, in hindsight, the basic posthuman tenet of cybernetics, i.e. the equivalence of humans and machine, however, has challenged the ‘transcendental value’ attributed to the human by neoliberal humanitarianism. The consequence of recognizing the agency of notation is that we can no longer think of it as a transparent ‘mark’ of an ideal music. I suggest that, by disrupting the naturalization of teleological history, along with its hierarchies and history of exclusions, the posthuman tenets of cybernetics has opened a space for rethinking the politics of historiography and the ethical role that a medium like notation might play in it.