by Johannes Voit

During the course of the 20th century the context-dependent nature of art as well as its interaction with an audience increasingly drew the attention of artists.  Marcel Duchamp’s “Bottle Rack” (1914) and Andy Warhol’s “Brillo Boxes” (1964), for example, achieved the status of artwork primarily due to being placed in a new context.  This communicative aspect of art has increased in significance since the 1970s, becoming evermore widely recognised and is examined in Umberto Eco’s book “Opera aperta” (1962). The same artwork can produce different responses depending on the situation and location in which it appears as well as the observers’ susceptibility and educational background.  Thus reception of an artwork is seen as a creative rather than passive process.  In this context Duchamp spoke about the completion of an artwork by the observer (cf. la Motte-Haber, p 35).

The concept of the open work has also been applied to music whereby different aspects of the piece are revealed in different contexts.  Busoni noted this when he remarked that a piece sounds different each time it is performed and subsequently has a different effect.  He emphasised the active role of the listener when maintaining “for an artwork to be received, half of the work on it needs to be carried out by the recipient” (Busoni, p 22).  The composer Wolfgang Rihm also knows that “music reveals something different about itself in each moment”.  Something extra is needed in order that notes become music: “a fortunate point in time, the moment when it happens.  Often we experience music played very well in concert but it vanishes because the auditorium doesn’t perceive or actively listen to it” (Rihm, p 232).  If music, therefore, is only completed in dialogue with the listener this means the success of the communication depends not only on the artwork but relies to a significant extent on active participation from the audience as well.  This insight reveals a big responsibility on the part of the listener who is forced to establish a relationship to the music.  Due to each listener’s individual life and listening experience and therefore having different ways of connecting to a particular piece, preconceived explanations and interpretations from others aren’t able to be utilised and individual listeners are left to their own resources.  In the case of new music the demands on recipients are much higher.  Whereby with older music there are clues which can help the listener classify what is heard (e.g. recognisable forms, clear harmonic and metric systems, traditional performance practice) all this is missing in the case of contemporary compositions.  The listener has nothing other than subjective perceptions with which to establish a relationship to a new piece.  This becomes particularly apparent in the case of electronic music performances.  Karlheinz Stockhausen, for example, darkens the hall almost completely remarking that there is nothing to see in any case.  In this situation the audience, sitting in darkness, unable to see one another or the sound sources, have to rely on their hearing alone.  Therefore it isn’t surprising, when confronted with a personal responsibility for listening, some feel that too much is being expected of them.


References

Busoni, Ferruccio: Entwurf einer neuen Ästhetik der Tonkunst. Wiesbaden 1954.

Eco, Umberto: Das offene Kunstwerk. Transl. by Günter Memmert. Frankfurt a. M. 1977.

La Motte-Haber, Helga de: Der einkomponierte Hörer. In: Helga de la Motte-Haber / Reinhard Kopiez (ed.): Der Hörer als Interpret. Frankfurt a. M. 1995, p. 35-41.

Rihm, Wolfgang: Kunst entsteht aus Zweifel. Gespräch mit Bas van Putten (1995). In: Wolfgang Rihm: Ausgesprochen. Schriften und Gespräche (2 volumes). Ed. by Ulrich Mosch. Winterthur 1997. Vol. 2, p. 232-248.


This article and all quotes were translated from German by Simon Barber.

Last Update 2007-09-09 | Copyright© Johannes Voit 2006 | |