Program #140, April 3 2003: Experimental?

I had an odd conversation shortly before this program, in response to which I formulated a whole new playlist on the fly, delaying my originally planned playlist (more or less) till the next week.

Regarding that original playlist, I'd said something to the effect that I'd be playing a high number of "experimental" works that evening. The person I was talking with said that the term "experimental" didn't really make very much sense, because there was no control group, hypothesis testing, measurement of outcomes, etc. I thought this was a joke at first, but quickly discovered it wasn't -- this person's point was that "experimental" simply wasn't a good word to use because its central meaning, from science, doesn't really map to anything that tells you what to expect about the music. I argued that the word has a metaphorical extension from that meaning that renders it useful. We reached no conclusion other than to agree to disagree.

But after that interaction I kept thinking about what we'd discussed, and about the fact that the tagline for my program mentions "experimental soundscapes" as something my program specializes in. Is the word vacuous? Does it really not have a good, clear referent? Is the metaphorical extension of the scientific sense of "experiment" semantically unviable? Because I think it's important to keep re-considering and rethinking the received artistic wisdom, including my own, I decided to look for some works for which the term "experimental" might apply in different ways, then decide whether or not I should reevaluate my use of the word.

León's Batéy has an unusual dimension, in that it was a partially collaborative composition, like the Cage/Harrison collaboration I played a couple of weeks ago. The Bartley work attempts to convey the sense of a passage from Susan Griffin's Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her. Terenzi's sonic transductions of astronomical data began in part as scientific investigations, while Lamblin's works are all intertwined with his never-ending process of synthesizing new instruments. Polansky's xenharmonic explorations of just intonation tunings represent a departure from established musical vocabularies. Cage was a relentless explorer of new sonic frontiers, and the Beatles brought the thrust of his Rozart Mix to popular culture. Scott had one single piano plucked and strummed by a bevy of players simultaneously, while Boulez sought to explode the essence of a previous solo piano work by expanding it into a macrostructure requiring an array of instrumentalists.

True, none of these pieces explicitly fit the notion of "experiment" that my friend invoked. But all of them can be said to contain an implicit kind of hypothesis -- doing the piece in the way I have done it is something I think you will agree works artistically -- and all of them represent some sort of exploration, some pressing of the frontiers that conforms to the sense of "experiment" as in "In my youth I experimented with LSD". This is the sense of the word I think everyone understands pretty well, and so I think that metaphorical extension of the term "experimental" works quite well for much of the music I play, even if some other word (exploratory? adventurous?) might work better.