Alma Dzehverovic

Masterarbeit Abschluss

MA Musiktheorie und Pädagogik
Musikakademie | Universität Sarajevo

„Neue Ontologie der Musik“: Musik in vier Dimensionen von Nam June Paik bis heute („Nova ontologija muzike“: Muzika u četiri dimenzije od Nam June Paika do danas)

Nam June Paik’s work has double significance in the place of art history: as an extremely progressive avant-garde practice in the field of contemporary media, but also as a theoretical position defined by his „new ontology of music“ that influenced the development of the new forms of contemporary art. The path of development of Paik’s artistic thought can be traced through the process of development and transition of music as a temporal, linear art, into the spatial and visual domain as a four-dimensional art, as Paik’s aesthetics recognizes it.
Around the second half of the twentieth century, music, or the sound art, found its place in galleries and exterior spaces, in the form of installations and sculptures. A key figure in the four-dimensional sound art setting was Varèse with his Poème électronique. In this project, the listener is at the very center of the sound source, perceiving sounds not only by the ears, but throughout the body, with the feeling that various sound sources are moving around them. The practice of sound art comes in close relationship with architecture, fine art, sculpture and performance with twentieth-century artists. From this position, Max Neuhaus first coined the term „sound installation“, a work of multimedia construction that transforms the space and time of a place, allowing the visitor to move around the set space and / or communicate with some of its elements, with his piece Drive-In Music (1967). Practicing sound art shifts its focus from creation to the reception of the work, in the wake of which Bernhard Leitner explores the „bodily listening“ [Körper-Hören], meaning, the auditory perception of the whole body, stating that each part of the body listens differently, while La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela go a step further with their Dream House (1963-) space, which grows into an artistic environment of light and sound frequencies as a meeting place for artists and collaborations in an improvisational performance. Attempts to incorporate synesthesia and visual elements originally emerged as accompaniment to music, from historical examples such as the creation of light organs, to visual artists such as Oscar Fischinger and Paul Klee, who came from the visual medium to show what music „looks“ like. All of this artistic practice has laid the foundation for the development of Paik’s multisensory four-dimensional art platform.
After moving from Korea to Germany, Paik’s encounter with Cage reverses his artistic practice. His interest in electronic music and musique concrète focuses on the performing practice in the style of Fluxus whose member he became in 1962. Paik’s performance takes a rebellious, often comically critical stance against a tradition of high culture and elitism.

Interactivity, improvisation, traditional instruments in new circumstances, the destruction of musical instruments and their preparation were the features of this middle period of Paik’s artistic practice. He places his artistic manifesto on the blueprint for a “New Ontology of Music“. In it, he describes the change of the being of music whereby in new circumstances it is reborn, unrelated to what it was before: art is born linearly from the present moment from which we look at history and not from history to today. That is why the use of avant-garde radical means is allowed because it is not grounded in the normative artistic practice, but in the needs of the times in which art emerges. In the accelerated technological development, Paik does not miss the opportunity to use technology for the needs of art when, in his first solo exhibition, Exposition of Music – Electronic Television (1963), he accomplished his initial tendencies to display music visually, placing the television for the first time in the gallery and transforming it into a new medium of art.
Traveling to New York and working with Charlotte Moorman he deals with the problem of performativity, using television and video to humanize the technology that has begun to invade every aspect of human life. This is especially evident in works such as TV Bra for Living Sculpture (1969), TV Cello (1971), TV Glasses, TV Bed (1972), and Robot K-456 (1964). Paik has put music and art at the pace of real time, that is, the development of technology and other aspects of human life, throwing it out of any limitations of institutions or formalities.
By creating the new form of video art, Paik directly influenced the development of multimedia arts. His practice of manipulating TVs or everyday life objects as new instruments, affected the creative DIY art practices outside the institution, where artists experiment and create the necessary means of art by themselves. By manipulating the electricity and the magnet in his artistic work, Paik created distortions and Glitch aesthetics that is widely used by contemporary artists such as Ryoji Ikeda or Carsten Nicolai. Paik’s ideas were innovative and laid much of the groundwork for contemporary installation artists and his heritage is noticable in the activities of a variety of contemporary artists willing to question the nature of the art in their works and to fundamentally redefine the means and concepts used to shape them, artists like Ryoji Ikeda, Carsten Nicolai, Christian Marclay, Haroon Mirza and Ryoichi Kurokawa. These artists do not write the music first and then add the visuals, the visual is already represented in the process of thinking while composing.
Following Paik’s path, contemporary artists do not fear the formal frames of institutionalized art, and creativity and openness in art have never been more powerful. Technology like VR, internet, vocaloids, video, light etc. is massively incorporated into the arts.

A common feature of many contemporary works of this type is that they are not created to send out a moral message or emotion, but rather to be an immersive, multisensory experience. Artists are freed from the need to perform, that is, the subjectivism of a human performer who is not an objective means of realizing the sound like technology is.
Paik views music as what it can be, not what „it is“, treating it as an art in four dimensions with a multisensory experience, in the belief that only such experience exists. He exceeds the cultural and traditional marks of art, starting from today, and from the question of what he needs, not what is needed or how to create art. His playful and open approach to art does not make this art less serious, but rather serious in a different way. Rejecting his art for shock or fun alone is the easiest way to discredit someone. Paik not only inspired the community of artists, but radically changed the contemporary art. His life and his work remind us of the importance of developing art at the pace of human development, not conditioned by one another, but rather inspiring and developing one another, in the course of the present and the coming times.

Bachelorarbeit Abschluss

BA Musiktheorie und Pädagogik
Musikakademie | Universität Sarajevo

„Zwischen Ästhetik und Klangökologie: R. Murray Schafers Soundscape-Komposition“ (Između estetike i ekologije zvuka: Soundscape composition R. Murraya Schafera)

R. Murray Schafer is a Canadian composer, acoustic ecologist, music educator, and writer. He is best known for his projects and research in the field of the soundscape, a term he coined and defined as “any collection of sounds, just as a picture is a collection of visual attractions” (Schafer 2009), as well as for his foundational work in acoustic ecology. The soundscape characterizes a community, emerging from both external and internal forces within social relations. It reflects the ecological condition of a given acoustic environment and is underpinned by natural, personal, cultural, and anthropological determinants. Consequently, the soundscape encompasses not only sound itself, but also the awareness and understanding of sound. In an increasingly visual culture, sound, imperceptible to the eye, tends to lose significance, and attempts to approach sound ecologically may appear absurd. This, however, doesn’t stop Schafer who, motivated by the need to identify strategies and solutions for establishing an ecologically balanced sonic environment, initiated systematic research and founded the international World Soundscape Project in the late 1960s. This initiative led to the development of the disciplines of acoustic ecology and acoustic design. Acoustic ecology examines the sonic relationship between humans and their environment with the aim of creating an ecologically balanced soundscape, a condition that serves as the foundation for acoustic design. Acoustic design, in turn, is grounded in the conception of the world’s soundscape as a vast musical composition in which humans simultaneously occupy the roles of audience, performers, and composers (Schafer 1977; 1994: 205).

Schafer articulated his theoretical positions, research findings, and pedagogical insights in several influential publications, most notably The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World, The Book of Noise, and Ear Cleaning: Notes for an Experimental Music Course. These works address the properties of sound and its effects on human perception, outline the conceptual framework of the soundscape, present findings from the World Soundscape Project, and draw attention to problems of the sonic environment – particularly noise pollution, while proposing solutions through both everyday listening practices and music education.

Schafer’s compositional output reflects a wide spectrum of his artistic interests, encompassing chamber music, orchestral works, compositions for choir, soloists and orchestra, vocal music, and stage works in the art of Gesamtkunstwerk. His most extensive and significant work is the cycle of music dramas Patria, which represents a critical point of reference in the evolution of contemporary music and musical thought by transcending conventional boundaries of artistic expression. This expansion is evident in the relocation of performance sites into environments of nature, the incorporation of sensory dimensions such as smell and touch, the camping of participants in forest settings, rituals such as the planting of flowers, and performances staged at unconventional times, including dawn, sunset, and midnight. Schafer’s inspiration is drawn from diverse natural and cultural contexts and is closely tied to his ideal of a natural hi-fi soundscape, which got increasingly endangered in the twentieth century and which he urgently sought to preserve.

According to Schafer, responsibility for the ecological treatment of the soundscape should lie primarily with composers and musicians, and subsequently with individuals more broadly. The principles and practices of soundscape studies, acoustic ecology, and acoustic design should be integrated into schools and educational institutions in order to cultivate generations attentive to the well-being of their sonic environment, alongside ethical, emotional, religious, scientific, economic, political, and social dimensions of environmental stewardship. These would be generations capable of listening and responding, of valuing, preserving, and transforming their sonic surroundings. Just as the parents and schools teach the avoidance of littering and environment pollution, they should likewise refrain from introducing disruptive and harmful sounds into the acoustic environment.

In Schafer’s conception, soundscape composition is fundamentally grounded in an understanding of the world as an all-encompassing, global composition of sounds. To perceive the oikos, the world as a shared home, as a network of relationships rather than a collection of discrete objects. Soundscape composition also constitutes a comprehensive program encompassing the „cleansing of the ear“ and the cultivation of attentive listening, the activation and focusing of auditory perception, the evaluation and preservation of the soundscape in a hi-fi condition, and, once these prerequisites are met, the compositional shaping of the sounds of this global work. The soundscape composer is obliged to preserve the authenticity, accuracy, and meaning of a given environment and only then has the freedom to introduce aesthetic elements. It seems that in Schafer’s work, those aesthetic elements are conditioned by ecological concerns.

Wissenschaftliche Arbeit ABSTRACT

VMI – Vienna Music Institute
Conservatory of Contemporary Music

Produce like a woman – The missing signal of the music industry

Abstract
The aim of this thesis was to look into the cause of such significant lack of women in
the music production and sound engineering field, observe prospective ways of
supporting women in the industry, as well as get an insight into personal experiences
of a few young female producers and sound engineers. Although there has been some
awareness and literature about this issue, it is still quite underresearched and a fairly
new topic of discussion. To find the cause, I have looked into the history and
development of the music studio environment, which was almost entirely male-
dominated and almost unapproachable to any woman. I have also discovered that the
women’s earliest activity in this area were in the field recording, leading back to 1895
and the sound engineering of classical music. As the technology got more affordable,
more and more smaller studios were forming where the big corporate restrictions
mattered less and less and eventually in the 2000s reached the levels of affordable
home studios. This allowed women to avoid the male-dominated environment of a
music studio and create in the comfort and freedom of their own home. As more
awareness was being brought to the lack of diversity in the industry, a lot of
organizations and programs formed to help support, teach and promote women and
other minorities within the field of music production. It is apparent that women
nowadays have a much easier access and support systems to break into the industry,
but the numbers are still too low to showcase a significant change of diversity and
make an impact on how the music is presented to the public.