Interview

Interviewer: you are a writer, thinker and sound engineer on radio. It makes you, from the Music point of view some kind of the outsider. Whether you consider that the nonspecialist in the moments of crisis can have a specific and important role? I do not know if it is correct, but it seems to me that at the moment of your arrival to music, about 1948, you were a nonspecialist...

Me: Yes. But only one case does not explain why the nonspecialist is getting involved in area unfamiliar to him. As to me I had circumstances of different kinds. First of all, I was not absolutely unfamiliar with music as I was born in family of musicians: my father was the violinist, and mother - the singer. I well studied on theories, a piano, violoncellos etc., so I had some education. Secondly, I was the engineer of electroacoustics, worked for French radio and therefor purposefully studied a sound and high fidelity in sound. Thirdly, after war, during the period from 1945 to 1948, we have got rid of the German invasion, but have not got rid of invasion of the Austrian music, twelve-tone music. We were freed politically, but music was still under foreign oppression - oppression of the [new-]Viennese school.
So there were three circumstances which have forced me to experiment: I have been involved in music, worked with disks for a player (later - with tape recorders) and I was terrified by modern twelve-tone music. I have told myself: «What if I can find something other?. And what if rescuing, releasing is possible?». We saw: nobody knows what further to do with do-re-mi, and, possibly, we need to search behind these limits... Unfortunately, I had to spend forty years to come to conclusion, that nothing is possible outside of do-re-mi... In other words, I have spent the life for nothing.

Interviewer: We really should return to this a little bit later. Now I woud like to ask you: how do you thing, whether there was an indissoluble communication between crisis of traditional music on the one hand and new technological possibilities, opening of new continents of sound from another? Sometimes it seems to me simply a happy occurence, and sometimes I think there should be a certain reason...

Me: I would answer, that it is the happy occurence that is misleading. First of all, I am not surprised that traditional music in the XX-th century has lived some kind of an exhaustion - it is impossible to forget that many musicians have started to fall outside the limits of traditional voice-frequency structures. Debussy has addressed to sixteen-tone scales, Burtoc used a modality; the tonality seemed exhausted. Impressionists - Debussy, Fore in France - have made some steps forward. Then, after impressionists, there has come the rigidity period, the barbarian period when attempts to restore something stronger were made. It was embodied in the Viennese school. During that moment the Viennese school also has been inspired by scientific ideas, rigorism, starting with discipline which was not music, but algebraic equation.
So it seems to me, that in high technologies period one thing may happen out of two: technology comes to the aid of art which is in a crash condition (it was my starting point: exact music with the tape recorder, now electronic music etc.), or ideas from technology, ideas from mathematics, ideas with scientific aura or the present scientific ideas in which some see nonexistent communication with the art searching for the discipline, the principles of the organisation out of itself, instead of stricting own limits. This coincidence: the exhausted, weak music and a blossoming, all-conquering science, - is what really characterises situation on this matter in the XX-th century.
What was I trying to do in this situation in 1948? As has told Bulez my case - some kind of bricolage - manufacturing of hand-made articles, homemade products by means of improvised means; inutile work). I take this definition not as something offensive, but as something very interesting. Eventually, how did music appear? Through bricolage, with pumpkins, with root fibres, as in Africa (I am familiar with the African instruments). Then people have made violin strings of the cat's guts. And, of course, tempering system is the compromise and also a bricolage. And this bricolage which forms music history, is the process directed by the person, human hearing, not machine, not mathematical system.

Interviewer: it seems to me, that there are some possible positions concerning the machine. There is something like Puritan tradition: machine represents a certain perfection which we ourselves cannot reach and consequently excludes the human. But there is other point of view at which the humanistic prospect remains and at times human qualities are transferred to the machine; such relation, anyway, is more difficult and less unequivocally... I could bring futurists as an example of this second point of view. When you look at history of exact music, sometimes it seems that here there is a symmetry: on the one hand - sound, and on another - the system, and exact music is on the sound's part. Would You agree that exact music embodies more like a humanistic position?

Me: Yes, certainly. You mention symmetry, and I would like to take advantage of this very successful concept. But what is symmetry? I think, that we speak about symmetry between the sound world and music world. The sound world is natural in the sense that it contains sounds made by instruments - exact sources: voice sounds, sounds of nature, a wind and a thunder, and similar things. And the human ear developed during millions of years, is well adapted for perception of all these sounds. The sound is a glossary of nature. When we hear a wind, the wind speaks: «I blow». When we hear water, water says: « I flow »... And so on. Noises always were considered vague, but it is not so. Noises are as clearly articulated as words in the dictionary. Contrary to this world of a sound there is a music world, the world of musical beings, that I name «musical objects». They arise, when sounds get musical value. We take a sound from any source: the sound of a violin, shout, the groan, a creaking door, - this symmetry will always be present in relation to sound basis which is difficult and has set of the characteristics shown in the course of comparison at perception. If you hear a scratch of a door and miaow of a cat, you can start to compare them on duration or height, or on a timbre. Thus, if we have got used to hear [usual] sounds in connection with their tool sources - звукопроизводящими bodies, - musical sounds we have got used to perceive that from the point of view of their musical value. We find the same properties at the sounds occurring from absolutely various sources. Thus, process of comparison of miaow of a cat and a door scratch differs from process of comparison of the note of a violin with the pipe note about which you could tell, that they have identical height and duration, but a various timbre. It also is symmetry between the world of a sound and the world of musical values.

Interviewer: What exactly for you is musical value?

Me: the Best analogy is language as we speak about musical languages. The people speaking in different languages, - French, Chinese or any other, - have the same vocal chords and make sounds which are identical as start with the same bodies - a throat and lungs in the basis. And it is the sound world. But identical sounds have also linguistic values, and it makes them different. Linguistic values depend on a role of sounds within system. In the same way musical value is inseparable from idea of system.
How is it al connected with a question on a machine role in our modern world? We can tell, that machine influenced our modern world in two rather various, even antagonistic ways. There is a romantic, Romance tendency which assumes car biology, - about what the Italian futurists spoke; it goes back to storms and wood rustles of romanticism, the pastoral symphony, the image in nature of music. Certainly, if machines have switched into the nature now also the music requires machines to represent this nature... But there is other, absolutely opposite tendency which sees machines not as smth. puprosed for creating just sound, but also an exact musical parametres. Many researchers, well understanding huge importance of these parametres, have addressed physicists. They now had interest for frequencies, decibels, harmonious spectra. By means of electronics they have received really exact and objective musical parametres. But then there is other symmetry, this time really disturbing. One business when you, like Italians, create quite harmless sound effects. But when, as today, you put generations of young musicians to synthesizers - I mean not those that are intended for commercial music but really exact which you can operate: one for frequencies, another for decibels, the third for a harmonious spectrum, - then you have really got yourself...

Interviewer: To what one shoud aspire, creating music?

Me: It is necessary to remind musicians that what Dante has written on Hell collars: «give up hope, everyone who enters here...»

Interviewer: And if not to enter?

Me: Then you will not have any music. If you enter, if you wish to create music you should give up hope. What hope? For creating new music.