15
QUESTIONS WITH KENNETH KIRSCHNER:
TOKAFI
by
Tobias Fischner
Interview in it's original form on Tokafi (click here)
A
couple of years ago, Kenneth Kirschner made one speech after
another, calling for the freedom of information to be applied
to the music industry. Back in those days, which he now refers
to as his "Cyber Punk" phase, he was still publishing
his music on tapes, encouraging everyone to copy it and spread
it at will. Since then, the parameters have changed dramatically
and a whole world of music has opened up, just waiting for listeners
to download to their pcs, laptops, ipods or other devices. Kirschner's
ideals have turned into a reality and unlike many other "revolutionaries",
he has actually stayed true to them: His entire oeuvre, virtually
hours and hours of music, is available at no cost from his website.
This includes his indeterminate compositions: Tracks influenced
by Cage'an concepts, consisting of several layers of music,
which are algorithmically put into a new order and new overlaps
with each listen. This may lead to some confusion and so might
his site (which solely consists of a string of time lines) and
the titles of his tracks (their date of conception or publication).
In the end, though, confusion is not Ken's business. Despite
its experimental character, there are simply too many good-old
fashioned moments of melodic appeal, spell-binding harmonic
progression and sheer beauty in his music. In theory and in
practise, this is indeed a whole new world of sound.
Hi! How are you? Where are you?
The answer to both questions: Block Island. (It’s a tiny,
beautiful island off the coast of New England; in other words,
I’m doing very well, thank you.)
What’s on your schedule right now?
I’ve just wrapped up the longest piece I’ve ever
written: March 16, 2006 (http://www.kennethkirschner.com/kirschner031606.mp3),
at 1 hour, 12 minutes and 37 seconds. The piece is a requiem
for my friend Jimmy Schwartz, the great neuroscientist, who
died recently. Next up is a short piece for a forthcoming DVD
by the Russian installation artists Dmitry Gelfand and Evelina
Domnitch, whose Camera Lucida brings together art and cutting-edge
physics via the mysterious phenomenon of sonoluminescence. After
that, I hope to focus on putting together a CD-ROM for 12k of
some of my recent indeterminate pieces. And somewhere in there
I’d like to do a little writing for myself too
.What or who was your biggest influence as an artist?
Do you see yourself as part of a certain tradition or as part
of a movement?
I usually cite my three biggest influences as Morton Feldman
(music), Thomas Pynchon (literature), and Gilles Deleuze &
Felix Guattari (philosophy). In terms of traditions, experimental
music has always been something of an anti-tradition, an anti-movement.
Thus you could say that I’m a loyal and devoted member
of a movement that rejects all movements.
What’s your view on the music scene at present?
Is there a crisis?
I hope so! Music proceeds by crises. In my own work, every time
I feel that I’ve finally figured it out, found the magic
formula, perfected the perfect method, discovered the right
way to write for the rest of my life – it means I’m
headed for stagnation and failure. So we have to seek out our
crises, in our own work as well as in music itself – it’s
the only way things move forward.
What does the term „new“ mean to you in
connection with music?
People talk a lot about “new music” as a genre,
but it’s a term that I’ve never really been able
to fully embrace – I feel like it’s one of those
concepts that’s so broad as to lose all meaning. I mean,
you could say Arvo Pärt is new music; you could also say
Peaches is. I’m a fan of both artists, but you have to
wonder about any single category that tries to unify the two.
How do you see the relationship between sound and composition?
I’ve always seen music as being composed of three fundamental
elements: pitch, rhythm, and timbre or sound. Like many composers
today, I’m very focused on sound; we get this from modern
technology, with its vast palette of possibilities, as well
as from sound-oriented predecessors like Feldman. But unlike
a lot of electronic artists today, I also have a serious interest
in harmony, in pitch, in drawing on these more traditional elements
of music and bringing them into the very sound-focused world
of digital music. So for me sound remains just one part of a
larger compositional whole.
How strictly do you separate improvising and composing?
Improvising is for me a key part of my whole composition process
– I usually compose in spontaneous and unpredictable bursts
of activity, improvising freely and using software to capture
those moments of inspiration that succeed, that are worth keeping.
But this improvisation is never an end in itself – it’s
a rich means of generating material, yes, but for me composition
is all about editing. It’s about the discipline of taking
all these great, fun, inspired moments and crafting them into
something that has a narrative, a necessity, a coherence –
a story.
What constitutes a good live performance in your opinion?
What’s your approach to performing on stage?
It’s a dangerous art, live electronic music. With nothing
more than a nerd with a computer up there on stage pushing buttons,
you could just be hitting play on a single pre-recorded sound
file and then checking email; I’ve in fact been tempted
to do this myself. And so I think it’s important to try
to achieve a real spontaneity, a real sense of interaction and
improvisation, which is something that the best laptop performances
do occasionally achieve. But I don’t feel that I myself
have really succeeded at this. I’ve tried many approaches
and many techniques in my solo shows, and I’ve never really
been satisfied with any of them. The truth is, I’m not
that interested in performing. I think the strength of my work
lies in editing, in the obsessive attention to detail that can
be brought to composition and recording. And so I really don’t
take my live shows that seriously; I do them because people
want me to, but my real love, my real focus, is composing.
A lot of people feel that some of the radical experiments
of modern compositions can no longer be qualified as “music”.
Would you draw a border – and if so, where?
I’ve played in punk bands, done covers of Cage’s
4’33”, built compositions out of dead television
channels and urban street noises. The whole debate about whether
something is or isn’t “music” has never really
been that interesting to me.
Are “serious” and “popular”
really two different types of music or just empty words without
a meaning?
When you hear the word “serious” applied to music,
it’s usually a code word for Western classical. My standard
joke on this subject is as follows: I’m a big fan of Western
classical music, up to and including Bach; then I feel like
it goes through a bit of a dry spell until you get to Feldman.
The point being that everyone chooses their own tastes, their
own aesthetic, their own sense of what is valuable or important,
and we shouldn’t get too hung up on pre-existing notions
of what does or doesn’t constitute “serious”
music. Let’s not forget that Duke Ellington wrote “popular”
music, and it’s hard to imagine a more serious composer.
Do you feel an artist has a certain duty towards anyone
but himself? Or to put it differently: Should art have a political/social
or any other aspect apart from a personal sensation?
The question here seems to be: can/should/must art be political?
I would say that great art can be political, but that there
is much great art that isn’t. To draw examples from the
visual arts, you could look at the Berlin Dadaists or of course
something like Guernica to see great art that’s inherently
political – but then you can also look to artists like
Cornell and Calder, two of my favourites, to see art whose connection
to any political reading is remote at best. In terms of my own
work, I generally think of its main political component as being
the way in which it’s distributed: freely, online, under
open licenses. But that said, I also do have some pieces that
are overtly political – just take a listen to March 20,
2003 (http://www.kennethkirschner.com/kirschner032003.mp3).
True or false: People need to be educated about music
before they can really appreciate it.
False.
Imagine a situation in which there’d be no such thing
as copyright and everybody were free to use musical material
as a basis for their own compositions – would that be
an improvement to the current situation?
I got to experience this very situation when I wrote June 8,
2003 (http://www.kennethkirschner.com/kirschner060803.mp3) for
the 12k anthology Two Point Two: I approached all the artists
on the CD, and received from them either sounds, or permission
to use some of their existing sounds. And let me tell you, it
was great fun. Of course, there are pros and cons, possibilities
and limitations, to working with others’ sounds rather
than your own – but it certainly can be very inspiring
and very enjoyable. And this is precisely what I aim for when
I encourage others to work freely with my own compositions,
to transform and build on them, to incorporate elements into
their own work – it’s about trying to encourage
and support exactly this kind of open collaboration. And when
I get a CD or an mp3 from someone who’s taken something
I’ve done and built something new out of it, it’s
just tremendously rewarding for me.
You are given the position of artistic director of a
festival. What would be on your program?
I think there remains a certain degree of mutual non-understanding
between the worlds of the 20th century “classical”
avant-garde and the contemporary experimental electronic scene.
Many electronic people, for example, call themselves “minimalists,”
yet have never heard Glass, Reich, Monk, etc. And many “classical”
people who know this work well just aren’t aware of how
these traditions are being expanded and extended in the current
electronic scene. And so what I’d want to do would be
a festival that brings together both of these worlds, that intersperses
classical minimalists with electronic minimalists, Feldman and
Cage with digital music, the acoustic experiments of the 20th
century with the electronic ones of the 21st. Because we’re
all really dealing with the same sets of problems here, the
same concerns and questions.
Many artists dream of a “magnum opus”. Do
you have a vision of what yours would sound like?
As I get older, I really feel that my ambition, more and more,
is to write pop music. I mean this semi-seriously, in the same
way that Deleuze & Guattari said they wrote A Thousand Plateaus
for teenagers. I’ve spent so many years now writing music
that tries to be challenging, that tries to be “new”
and formally experimental, that there’s this growing desire
to just write what I like, to write what I love. And that to
me is the definition of pop music. To write what you love. But
of course, by this point, what I love has been so warped by
so many years of experimentation that what comes out won’t
sound like pop music at all, or perhaps only the pop music of
a distant, alien world. But the instinct behind it should be
that same pop instinct of direct and honest expression, even
if no one would mistake the results for a Top 40 hit. All of
this is not to say that I don’t want to be Duran Duran,
because of course I do. It’s just that I don’t have
the hair for it.
