Conducting Problems and Graphic Issues as Reasons for Revising a Composition

Abstract

similarly self-fashioned authorial subjects, now becomes harder to extricate from the empirical subject (‘the real person’), as a forest of links and hyperlinks causes the mingling of that selfconsciously crafted creative persona with news and reportage. Thematerialist deconstruction of art’s ‘transcendence’ comes home to roost, and Henze’s holde Kunst becomes just another branch of current affairs, its expansive temporality now forced to coexist with (and pressurized to conform to) the rapid cycles of media consumption. With the dignified distance between work and non-work increasingly effaced, the former becomes gathered up in the ceaseless flow of the composer’s ‘production’ – and indeed of ‘production’ generally, as sidebars encourage the effortless surfing from one work and one composer to another. At one level, nothing could seem more fitting for Henze’s Gesamtkunstwerk-in-progress, in which musical others – the composers he arranged, the arrangers who arranged him, or those (Hindemith, Stravinsky,Mahler, Berg)whoprovide themusic’s undercurrent of stylistic allusion– coexist in a single stream. Yet even today composers work in a system (of royalties and copyright inter alia) to which traditional notions of authorship remain fundamental and the composer’s exercise of control over correctness or incorrectness (even on a level as mundane as proof correction) is not just a right but a duty. Where authorized meanings are concerned, these are less easily reined in by trilingual commentaries in a work catalogue – commentaries which, quite rightly, should provide the beginning rather than the end point of critical interpretation. But the algorithms of the internet do not interpret; they simply expose. Search rankings throwup repetitive gobbets of information, reducing meaning to (often literally) anonymous soundbites. As Groys suggests, the ‘gaze of others’ under which the internet places us ‘is experienced by us as an evil eye’ not because it is all-seeing – it isn’t, quite – but because it ‘reduces us to what it sees and registers’.90 Henze’s attempt to ensure the longevity of his output by making of it a cloth-bound physical memorial may, from this vantage point, seem an antiquated and somewhat futile gesture, a mode of authorial control exercised in its very death throes. And yet perhaps he was prescient too in realizing that such longevity may depend on his works’ ability to forget their origins from time to time and forge new paths into the future: a future not of instantaneous transparency but of ongoing hermeneutic endeavour, the constant creation and recreation of meaning; a future not left to the inertia of impersonal repositories of information, but shaped humanly, intentionally, subjectively, as a willed ‘compositional’ and communicative act.