At every instant, seeing reason to believe as much, and not being able to satisfy himself of the contrary, he should conceive himself to be so.

At every instant, seeing reason to believe as much, and not being able to satisfy himself of the contrary, he should conceive himself to be so.
concert intervention for wind quartet (fl,bcl,lp,bsn) + CCTV Camera(s) & microphones and quartet (vn,vc,hp,pno) + video & electronics

2022 - 2023

(image: Joël Cormier)

First part:

During the moments leading up to a concert, the audience's behavior is recorded by a video surveillance system and four wind instruments in which small microphones have been inserted. The captured sounds are naturally filtered by the instruments, making their respective resonating frequencies appear. These can be changed by silently fingering different notes on the instruments. By means of this method, the musicians play a strict musical time code for the video recording in which every minute is marked by a unison.

Second part:

A quartet of string instruments accompanies a publicly presented timelapse of the first stage's audio and video recording. What is heard by the audience is listened to by the performers via headphones, thereby isolating them from each other. Unable to synchronise, they present in real time the harmonic structure of the timecode according to their internal time consciousness.

My ambition is here is to think the nature of the public concert and its historical transformations through a musical piece. I consider the concert as an "apparatus", that is, a situation determining and orienting public behaviors in order to enable as well as regulate a certain type of private musical experience through different procedures and rituals.

Public concerts such as the one including this piece usually involve a complex situation in which the attention of all participants is cast in various directions. During musical performances, members of the audience not only pay attention the musical actions performed on stage, but also everything else that constitutes the performers’ behaviour, who are in turn watching themselves in order to conform it to the situation. Conversely, the audience watches itself as individuals and as a group to avoid revealing their presence.

The complex of attention is reconfigured during the non-performance parts. The musicians watch themselves in order to withdraw from the center of focus and the observers in turn manifest themselves by enacting audience specific behaviours like applauding, exchanging or criticizing, which involves other kinds of attention.

Such a clear distinction between the social time of the audience and the musical time of the performance was not always the case and is therefore the product of a historical differentiation. More particularly, the idea of the public concert originates in the ideals of the Enlightenment and its emphasis on the individual. Music tends to no longer be just a part of institutional ceremonies under patronage, but also a transfer of meanings to a group of anonymous people, each one being considered equally capable of individual listening and interpretation.

From this comes that the musical rituals are progressively consolidated and that music manifests itself as autonomous "works" whose increasingly complex content requires a high degree of virtuosity for the performers and of attentiveness from the audience. This then leads to the rituals of the concert being consolidated to avoid the disturbance that everyday behaviours impose on a so-called "pure" inner experience of the music. From this comes that the structuring principle of the modern concert ritual is a form of constant self-monitoring by all parties involved, which is very strongly felt by any outsider visiting a "classical" music concert

This idea of self-monitoring is in fact the operating principle of any kind of surveillance procedure. Indeed, it is not so much to observe at all times and in all places those who are surveilled, but rather that they believe themselves to be potentially surveilled, regardless of whether this is actually the case or not, leading them to oversee themselves independently for an undefined other. This principle, which can be considered fundamental to any kind of performance is what is expressed in the title of this work. It is taken from the first of the much-quoted though rarely read "Panopticon Letters" by British philosopher Jeremy Bentham :

"It is obvious that, in all these instances, the more constantly the persons to be inspected are under the eyes of the persons who should inspect them, the more perfectly will the purpose of the establishment have been attained. Ideal perfection, if that were the object, would require that each person should actually be in that predicament, during every instant of time. This being impossible, the next thing to be wished for is, that, at every instant, seeing reason to believe as much, and not being able to satisfy himself to the contrary, he should conceive himself to be so."

More concretely, the primary aim of this work is to create a model of this operating principle as well as its dual outcome, that is, the private experience of the music within the public experience of the concert. To do this, the common technical surveillance system of our times is used as a metaphor.

The visual aspect of the concert and by extension the totalizing and not only auditory character of its experience is thus emphasized. In addition, the surveillance images also have the particularity of having an embedded timecode, enabling temporal orientation for the viewer. This idea, converted from the visual to the sonic, is used in the work as a support for two different temporalities. On the one hand, public and therefore conventionally objective temporality is recorded by the wind instruments which capture and give musical form to the audience's behavioural surplus in a chronometric way.

Subsequently, the resulting recording, as a document of the regulated and regulating social temporality of the concert, is used in such a way as to reveal it as a condition of possibility of the musical work which at the same time distorts and "colors" it. Indeed, the piece (and possibly all others) exists only by virtue of the non-musical dimension of the situation that complements it.

The consequent piece for quartet of string instruments attempts to effectively realise a model of this interplay. In it, the documented public temporality of the concert provides the means for the performers’ necessary isolation. It therefore literally allows for the sharing of multiple subjective experiences of musical time. These are made audible by the playing of a score in which the performers act as 'subjective chronometers'. They therefore constitute a second, musical mirror of the concert audience on stage in that they are individual listeners whose activity only makes sense as a group.

The musical result of the contact of external-public and internal-private temporalities is composed in view of the phenomenological characteristics of the experience of things in time. The represented past period, according to the effects of "temporal perspective", is contracted, while the present experience is lived as unity, even though it is in gradual flux at every instant.

performances:
25.04.2023 / Dampfzentrale, Bern
26.05.2023 / Gare du Nord, Basel

Ensemble Proton Bern

flute: Bettina Berger
lupophone: Martin Bliggenstorfer
clarinet: Mariella Bachmann
bassoon: Elise Jacoberger
harp: Vera Schnider
piano: Coco Schwarz
violin: Maximilian Haft
cello: Jan-Filip Ťupa

score

upcoming : March 2026 / new piece for percussion with Zacarias Maia / Basel, Geneva, Krakow