“I began with the desire to speak with the dead” (Stephen Greenblatt 1988: 1). To commune with Elizabethans, Tsars, Samurai, bronze-clad charioteers is one thing. But our stone-age forbears, whose cultures survive only in the barest traces? How would one begin such a communication-backwards in time across unimaginable millennia?
Alain Badiou’s (2013b) Logics of Worlds argues for the eternal, invariant nature of truths which re-surface at various points in history-even when altogether lost. The philosopher (16-20) uses a comparison between the art of the Chauvet Cave and Picasso to propose a transhistorical truth regarding representation. The eternal nature of such a truth-and, crucially, the non-causal relations between its participants- permit us to invert temporal direction: to move, for instance, from what Badiou terms the “Schoenberg event” (83) back to a speculative appearance of the truth of this manifested in our long-buried past.
This, then, allows for composition as a method for unearthing the music of the Upper Palaeolithic: a speculative archaeoacoustics. It may be understood both as an act of theory fiction in the tradition of Cyclonopedia (Reza Negarestani 2009) and the CCRU (2017); and a work of science fiction, as proposed by novels such as Always Coming Home (Ursula K. Le Guin 1985) and Speaker for The Dead (Orson Scott Card 1986), that is, a fiction of sciences such as anthropology and archaeology. Its methodology is built upon the insights of David Graeber and David Wengrow (2021), and expanded through principles extracted from the work of Steven Mithen (2005) and a critique of existing approaches in both theory and practice.
COMPOSITION ONE demonstrates the potential of speculative archaeoacoustics in its procedure for recovering a lost classic. By breathing new life into its forgotten master, this work attempts communication across the ages: to “speak for the dead”-and forge a dialogue between modern audiences and the delights and imaginations of their ancestors.
The composer-a musician grappling with the internalisation of music: from the group to the individual; from the external to the internal world.
The world-a culture of arbitrary language and symbolic intent, complete with an art of religious significance where an object can stand for something else. The composer’s lost enactment of the truth of paradox is to draw music within these domains, from the domain of a group practice to that of individual contemplation; or, in another language, from the domain of the hymn to the domain of the relic.
The technical realisation of these-the truth of the Symbolic as a means of overcoming the limits of the individual. While for Schoenberg this takes place via a score-text, for our Upper Palaeolithic composer it concerns the creation of an internal landscape which functions as a multidimensional world of information. The presence of nature is not imitated, but-as in the art of the Chauvet Cave, Picasso, Balla, Schoenberg, the musicians of the African Pygmies and the Inuit-its transformation within the Symbolic is necessary for an intervention into that same world. Nature-not as object to be imitated-but as a speaking Subject. This sees the landscape-not as a collection of sounds, but of Symbols-as a rich heritage of Ideas-a text-as the dwellers of the Chauvet Cave once understood how a horse may become a Horse.
This will be supported through external apparatuses: prose-as-score-a novel, even, why not?-which members of the ensemble are to read while separately exploring a landscape-each committing to memory the impression of the combination of these-to be interpreted and performed according to the process set out below. It is deliberately multi-dimensional: containing impossible, irreconcilable demands-containing technical (and imaginative) paradoxes-contingent dialectics.
In this, the landscape will be used to hold and organise conflicting impulses and so reconcile them. Crucially, distance and perspective that arise from moving through the landscape change the text as opposed to the reader’s relationship to it. That is, the landscape is a world to be explored, but the exploration of this becomes data rather than the interpretation of data. This implies a rich polyphony of material realised upon each individual instrument-like an individual artist appropriating the art of the group-realised separately; then combined in the plurality of an ensemble; only to become again singular in the fulfilment of the artwork-and which in these oppositions may affirm an invariant truth of music: the paradox between the individual and the group-which is, in turn, an invariant truth of the human: the contradiction between freedom and organisation, between the individual and society, between you and I-one that today, as Graeber and Wengrow affirm, is as pressing and relevant as ever.