on writing (about) music
Unless writing music proceeds from knowing that you don’t know anything, it adopts an opinionated register as it tends to fall back on whatever is available in the ideas-closet. Writing music is a matter of tone more than content, and tone can only ever be unpredictable, haphazard, immediate en probing (backwards and forwards). The moment writing music is about content, it becomes writing on something else. So I don’t know if I agree with what Boulez is saying (transposed to writing music). Once music becomes part of history, it is severed from experience anyway. The issue of memory is an issue of curatorship, not performance. And language and music in the present can only ever be engaged in guess work and fore-play - but then it can’t be driven by theory, which immediately consumates the relationship.
stephanus muller
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