By Daniel Barbiero

Nel 1968 un autorevole saggio del critico d'arte Jack Burnham suggerì che l'arte avanzata del tempo potrebbe essere intesa come l'espressione di un'estetica dei sistemi.
L'estetica dei sistemi, ossia quell'estetica in cui l'opera è concepita come un organizzazione di elementi correlati che interagiscono tra loro e che partendo da specifiche condizioni iniziali producono combinazioni non prevedibili, è un importante e fiorente parte del suono contemporaneo.
Treetrunk e Vuzh, due etichette specializzate in musica elettronica e sound art contemporaneo, sono esempi notevoli di pubblicazione di opere basate su sistemi di composizione con diversi approcci.
Looking at new work in the visual arts in the late 1960s, art critic Jack Burnham suggested in an influential essay that advanced artworks of the time could be understood as embodying an aesthetic based on the emulation or representation of systems. Although Burnham’s essay is a product of its time—it makes, among other things, a case against Greenbergian formalism, vestiges of which were still of some importance then to critical thought—it remains useful for suggesting some of the essential characteristics of an aesthetics drawing on the properties and behaviors of systems. And while it’s no longer obvious that some of the Minimalist and early Conceptualist work he described as examples of the systems aesthetic were in fact systemic in any rigorous sense, it’s also true that the systems aesthetic is important and flourishing—albeit in a form appropriate to our own time and technologies—in contemporary sound art.
As Burnham outlined it, the systems aesthetic rejected the
principled separation of art from non-art; was not predicated on restricting
the artwork to a fixed, autonomous object; understood the artwork to be a
totality in which individual components have value only to the extent that they
are part of the whole; and deemed the processes involved as being of equal
importance to the resulting work or situation. More generally, a systems
aesthetic can be defined as:
An aesthetic in which a work is
conceived of as a set of regularly interacting or related elements in which the
initial conditions or inputs and the combinatorial rules or operations
performed on them are defined, but the final output is not. Additionally, a
minimal amount of discretion is left to the composer or performer once inputs
are chosen and the process is put into motion.
The systems aesthetic is thus a variety of process aesthetic
in which the process is deliberately made as autonomous as possible in regard
to moment-by-moment decision-making or activity on the part of the artist.
Art embodying systems thinking has a long history—think of
tiling patterns and other geometrical ornamentation on early pottery, for
instance—and was of particular importance to the avant garde of the last
century. The postwar period alone saw the use of serial organization of
geometric figures in painting, iterative modular structures in sculpture, and
the emergence of graphic art produced by computer algorithms. Music was if
anything at the forefront of integrating a systems aesthetic into its
procedures. The integral serialism of postwar composers such as Pierre Boulez,
Milton Babbit, Luigi Nono and Karlheinz Stockhausen subjected not only pitches,
but dynamics, rhythms and other parameters to regular combinatorial operations.
Taking an apparently opposite view of the desirability of having the composer
exert control over musical materials, Cage systematically used chance
operations to produce work. Developments in electronic music also were amenable
to systems approaches, as shown by the algorithmic computer compositions of
Lejaren Hiller and Iannis Xenakis.
Of most immediate relevance to the music discussed here is Brian
Eno’s use of generative systems in work such as Discreet Music and Music for
Airports, the processes for which were inspired by Steve Reich’s
incommensurably phased loop piece It’s Gonna Rain. Eno refers to Music for
Airports and similar work as “generative”—in his words, “a system or a set of
rules which once set in motion will create music for you.” (Use of the term
“generative” to describe autonomous systems art goes back to the 1960s. But Eno
has certainly done much to bring the idea to a broader public.) Like the
algorithmic computer music that preceded it, much ambient music—both Eno’s and
others’--is generative, that is, music generated from dynamic, autonomous
systems.

Treetrunk, which issued its first release in 2005, was
founded by Thomas Park. The label’s original focus was on ambient and
generative music. Around the time of the label’s founding Park, who puts out
electronic work under the name Mystified, was creating generative music from
the quasi-fractal composition program QMuse and the fractal Gingerbread, as well as from
mathematical tables and formulae. Both systems take numerical inputs, or seeds,
and feed them in to recursive or other operations. Park’s compositional concept
was grounded in the intuition that nature is fractally structured and that its
mathematically described raw data could be converted into music via generative
compositional systems.

Over the years, Treetrunk has embraced experimental music of
many kinds and has sponsored the well-regarded Complex Silence series of
ambient music releases curated by Phil Wilkerson. Park himself has recently
moved away from fractal work, although Fractal Techno, his EP-length release
from summer 2013, finds him turning once again to mathematical tables as seed
material—this time for danceable, beat-driven electronica.

Other Vuzh artists have composed systems works using
different types of processes. On RIM, Caroline Park takes simple inputs—on the
first track, a brief sample of a viola, on the other track several pitch sets
produced by sine wave oscillators—and puts them through Max/MSP for recursive
processing with delay feedback loops or other combinatorial operations. The
outputs are complex, multilayered accumulations of sound that are notable for
their sensuous surfaces, emergent harmonies, and fluctuating dynamics. MiquelParera’s MUME Selections release contains four pieces taken from hi
participation in the June 2013 Music Metacreation Weekend, an international
workshop at the University of Sydney’s Design Lab for artists working with
music generating computer programs. The tracks were created by the software
neix_2013a, which takes random selections from algorithmic sound generators and
processes them into relatively short compositions.

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