ACOF 2003 Participant - David Chisholm

David Chisholm

David Chisholm's The Illusion of the End was a composition written for ACOF 2003.

 

 

...Such efforts to 'legitimise' popular music onto the concert platform misrepresent each respective musical environments and objectives, and the results are almost always kitsch failures...

Composition Diary - April 2003

I should begin by proclaiming - not confessing, for there is no repentance here- that I have not written a single note of music on this project thus far. And as what I write here constitutes the commencement of a process diary on the development of a new orchestral work, the absence of any music may appear at first a little alarming or at least mildly confusing. Be assured however that the process is well commenced. Thought is a highly underrated activity. And as this diary constitutes the act of writing on the subject of composing, let me state that it is no accident that my work will be a piece that composes on the writing of the subject. The text is Jean Baudrillard's l'illusion de la fin (The Illusion of the End).

My work since 1999 has been almost entirely been built around the deliberate appropriation of stylistic or ideological methods of other composers. Increasingly, these works have tended to fuse said influences with devices, forms and gestures I have collected through ongoing exposure to house music, techno, breaks and a myriad of other electronica ( I have deal with the extraordinary DJ Liz Millar that involves continual information sharing). I have never believed however that any of these proliferating idioms require a translation. Such efforts to 'legitimise' popular music onto the concert platform misrepresent each respective musical environments and objectives, and the results are almost always kitsch failures. I say this as a child of the Hooked-on-Classics generation. It is the only the devices of one that I seek to transfer into the gestures and sonorities of the other and vice versa.

Thus I have sampled concert music from Debussy to Boulez into my electronic dance tracks, and in the tradition of free trade I have encouraged the migration of sampling, looping, outro, breakdown and backbuild devices into orchestra land. The resulting works have always acknoweledged the points of transfer - weill thoughts, doctor couteau, revival, pierre boulez a la dsicothéque, varéserhead, olviier messiaen is dead and buried, koto - the titles each suggest their own mutable counterpoint of style and device, idea and gesture. Each proclaims an intentional fracturing of the context in which the works are most likely to be experienced.

In the preparation for the ACOF work, my initial struggle was with the brevity of the assigned duration of the work. My pieces generally range from ten minutes up to 120. And the forces I written for, with the exception of two untested orchestral works, have been entirely chamber. My instant desire was to explore every possible colour combination of the assembled forces of the Tasmanian Symphony. Which of course, is a revolting first thought to have for a five minute work.

In all of my other writings, I have tended to compose in a rather meandering linear way from sub structure to sub structure. This time, I thought I would start at the end and work backwards, and this is largely due to my current preoccupation with the idea of the end - cadence, for want of a cleaner term. For I find of late, that I do not believe in finality at all. One work pretty much becomes another, and one idea generally gives way to several others. Even when one idea leads back to the proximity of another, even if it is an almost exact restatement of a previous idea of my own or even an appropriation of another composers ideas, the context into which that idea reappears instantly transforms it.

So musing on the idea of the end lead me rather directly to Jean Baudrilard's l'illusion de la fin and his theories of the reversal of historical narrative, the fantasy of a linear history that relies on a constantly shifting temporal endpoint.

My friend and colleague the writer and educator Karen Burns deems Baudrillard as "one of those French male hysterics" and she is quite right. I just happen to have a strong identification with French male hysterics. And so the idea came to me of creating a five minute work that begins with the promise of an end, but an end which is constantly deferred. And by deferral I don't simple refer to the fate of all linear structures, musical and non, in which one is constantly progressing to a deferred cadence and wherein the efficacy of the author is judged by their aptitude at suspending the inevitable. Baudrillard assesses the collapse of Eastern European communist systems as a "progression, of chain reaction, of superconductivity of events…like the form of the joke, like all that eludes the rational laws of communication"1. His focus on this "viral" event is to further underpin his earlier theories of simulation and simulacra and the reversal (and obliteration) of the linear history narrative in the West. His ideas are like philosophical strange attractors - literary fractals - that spiral deliciously in the delirium of their paradox.

Baudrillard's obvious Euro-centrism is both the strength and the weakness of his writing, and it is with a hefty wink of post-colonial attitude that I have decided to consume his writing in order to create my much less anxious, pretty and discontinuous musical spirals. For where technology and media are positioned as the anxious instruments of systematic homogeneity to Baudrillard and the over-policed overwrought European backyard, they are the weapons of liberation and subversion to the post-colonial artist. They are the Hills Hoist I choose to swing on.

Angela Carter wrote of dandyism and irony being the calling cards of the true victim. It is possible then to hear Baudrillard's alarm at the systematic erasure of knowledge and history, of the murder of the real by the virtual as the cry of the false victim. For is not this signalled symptomatic systemic collapse that Baudrillard postures, merely the whining cry of a colonial power? - in the way an old man with dementia reverts to the behaviour patterns of a cranky two year old. Is it not just the panic of the voice unaccustomed to the message of assimilation being fed back along the cultural cable they themselves laid? The colonial babysitter discovering the menacing phone call has been made from within the house. In fact plainly, his hysteria is fuelled by the fear of imprisonment in a cultural fold of his own making, in immortality, in a system without end. An expanding force is shocked when it hits the mirrored wall of its own advance. A culture hitting light speed only to meet at full force the return of it's invasion face staring back at it. Some of us have lived under the force of others light speed for so long that we have become rather proficient at dealing with such fury, such intensity, such sheer totality. And some of us flourish.

I digress.

I can compose around seven minutes of music a week at top speed but I have until August to complete my tasks. Wishing to be Tortoise not Hare, I shall have to complicate my path. My parameters are clear: five minutes of orchestral music. The concept is clear too: a series of false endings arrived at through referencing other composers and the utilisation of technology in process but not performance. But how? Well that is what process is all about. This, after all, cannot be an end in itself, but merely and illusion of a beginning. A simulated first diary entry.

1. Jean Baudrillard, The illusion of the end, Trans. Chris Turner Stanford Univeristy Press, 1994 p.37