Article | Creativity and Ethics in Deconstruction in Music by Geraldine Finn and Marcel Cobussen

This com-position was originally written as a conversation between the two of us in response to Intermezzo and intended for oral presentation along with the music.¹ It should be emphasized that the music was the point of departure and remained the point of reference and return throughout, so it is not an optional extra—an auditory illustration or example—for an essentially discursive “argument” about “intermezzi.” Each section was written explicitly in response to, alongside, and in the spirit of the music selected and the text which immediately preceded it (as in a performance of Intermezzo itself). So the reader is encouraged to listen to the music when and as it is indicated—to read/hear it as part of the same performance. We have chosen to retain the format of the oral presentation as much as possible precisely in order to retain the tone and address of the original—the tonality and address of the “intermezzo” (undecidable between music and text) which motivated it.

Intermezzo (Vloeimans/Reijseger #17)

(Online Musical Example)

MC: Wat betekenen deze openingswoorden in het Nederlands voor u? Waarom deze waarschijnlijk vreemde taal voor u? Terwijl ik iets wil communiceren, iets wil delen, mede-delen. Wat voor ervaring kan een tekst in een taal die u niet verstaat teweeg brengen? Wat voor ervaring als de inhoud u grotendeels zal ontgaan? Wat kan ik delen of mede-delen wanneer het begrijpen op het spel komt te staan? Misschien is het juist dat; dat begrip tekort schiet; dat er geen grip mogelijk is. Misschien is het aandacht vragen voor de materialiteit van de taal, voor dat wat Derrida omschrijft als “non-discursieve sonoriteit.” Misschien heeft het iets te maken met muziek, met creativiteit, met ethiek. Misschien heeft het iets te maken met dat wat steeds ontsnapt wanneer we spreken over muziek, wanneer we muziek in woorden willen vatten.

2. “Intermezzo” GF: We decided to call our presentation “Intermezzo” after the music that inspired it and for which it was written as a kind of accompaniment or response. After the music. Reversing (or at least confusing) the more familiar order of events where music is written afterwards (after words) as (if) a supplement, accompaniment or response to words. Soliciting the logocentrism of the musical text (the text of music, the music of text) “in the sense that sollicitare, in old Latin, means to shake as a whole, to make tremble in entirety” (Derrida, “Différance” 21),² we are already engaging (engaged in) the play (the work) of creativity and ethics in deconstruction in music.

For the music you have just heard is from Intermezzo “composed” by Marcel and “performed” in this selection by two professional musicians Eric Vloeimans (trumpet) and Ernst Reijseger (cello). Later you will hear selections from a different recording of “the same” piece performed by students from the Rotterdam School of Music (SKVR).

What you have not heard however, and perhaps will not (cannot) hear, are the quotation marks with (in) which the words “composed,” “performed,” and “the same” are (always already) written in this “Intermezzo,” or the various punctuations and parentheses which organize its articulation on this page. Ma(r)king the distance (the difference, the différance) between what the words seem to affirm and what they are being called upon to (un)do here, in Intermezzo (with or without punctuation marks): the identity and difference of (the) (a) composition or performance of the same. (Re)marking, that is, the deconstruction always already at work in a work. In any work. In this work. In the space between words, meaning, sound, and sens. Between the saying and the said. Between the inverted (inverting) commas (and parentheses) which (re)mark the written (re)marks. Which makes sens(e).³ Intermezzo. In between.

How do we translate these written (re)marks, these punctuation marks, these quotation marks (around “composition,” “performance,” and “the same,” for example) into sound, into speech? How can we let them, and the deconstruction they at once designate and perform, be heard? How do we speak this space between the saying and the said? How do we let it resonate on/in its own terms, its own tones. This unstable suspension of sens(e) between the inverted (inverting) parentheses and commas of written (re)marks? This play of différance (of differentiation and deferral of sens) in the space between the parentheses and punctuation marks of writing? How can we let it be heard? And how do we respond to its call?⁴

Soliciting the logocentrism of the (a) musical (con)text (in the sense that sollicitare, in old Latin, means to shake as a whole, to make tremble in entirety) we are already engaged in (engaging) the work (the play) of creativity and ethics in deconstruction in music. In the space between words, meaning, sound and sens. Intermezzo. In between.

Intermezzo (Vloeimans/Reijseger #2)

(Online Musical Example)

Intermezzo

MC: Intermezzo. 8 different motifs inspired by a certain jazz tradition. Eight motifs and a verbal elucidation. First, the composed musical fragments are proposed to the musicians. The motifs can be played in any desired order. The choice and order of the fragments, as well as any possible repetition of them, are left to the discretion of the musicians themselves. It is not compulsory to play all the motifs in one version of Intermezzo. The motifs can be played either after or on top of each other. This is possible because all the phrases (except one) share the one harmony. Improvisation can or may enter the work and seduce it into new directions.

These instructions can have one or more of the following effects. (a) Principal, sub-, and accompanying themes are not determined beforehand and can change, even within one version of Intermezzo. (b) The binary opposition and hierarchical relationship between solo instruments and accompanying instruments becomes less clear.⁵ More so than in a lot of other jazz music, their position can change within one performance.⁶ (c) Beginning and ending are arbitrary to a great extent. There is no apparent opening theme that is repeated near the end in order to close the circle, as is the case in jazz standards. In theory, the composition can be expanded infinitely. (d) The use of only one chord or harmony avoids the compelling linearity of the classical II–V–I progression found in so much jazz music. Viewed in this way, Intermezzo knows no development.

Intermezzo (SKVR #4)

(Online Musical Example)

Différance

Différance is neither (a) word nor (a) concept (Derrida, “Différance” 3, 7, 11, passim). But a movement of differentiation and deferral (of spacing and temporization) between concepts and words which make sens(e). Which produces events of meaning that do not find their cause, their origin or their end, in a(n) (intending) subject or a (determining determinate) substance. Events of meaning do not originate as such or end. Undecided between the active and the passive, recalling something like the middle voice, différance belongs neither to the sensible nor the intelligible order, neither to speech nor writing in the usual sense, but to the undecidable space-between “beyond the tranquil familiarity which links us to one and the other occasionally reassuring us in our illusion that they are two” (Derrida, “Différance” 5). Intermezzo.

Between speech and writing. Music engages (enjoins and enjoys) the otherwise silent play of différance and turns it into sound. At once invention and intervention. Music (re)presents the play of différance as experience and event; as something we apprehend through our senses as sens(e); something we feel and hear; something which resonates with (as) our bodies our selves.⁷

Undecidable between the sensible and the intelligible (Derrida, “Différance” 5, passim). Recalling something like the middle voice. Neither simply active nor simply passive (Derrida, “Différance” 9, passim). Intermezzo. Event (experience) to which we cannot not respond, assume an attitude, a relationship, a de-cision: of solicitation, surrender, resistance, consent, submission, embrace, refusal, mastery, control. Creativity. Ethics. In the space between. Creativity as ethics.⁸ Intermezzo. In deconstruction. In music.

Between speech and writing music comes and goes. In the middle of what leaves and what arrives. Between what absents itself and what presents itself.⁹ Music comes to pass. Music comes as always already past (passed). Giving place to the trace of the other in its articulation of the play of différance in the space between concept and word, silence and sound, signification and sens(e). Which is, I believe, the ethical space, that cannot not solicit a response. Intermezzo. A response-ability in (from) those who hear, who are called to for by the order of the disorder (of the sens(e)) produced within it. “I mean that deconstruction is, in itself, a positive response to an alterity which necessarily calls, summons or motivates it. Deconstruction is therefore vocation—a response to a call” (Derrida qtd. in Kearney 18).

Intermezzo. A response to a call. Always already at work in a work. In this work. A positive response to a call. A vocation. Invocation. I mean that music is, in itself, a positive response to an alterity which necessarily calls or motivates it.¹⁰ Music is therefore vocation. Invocation. A response. To a call. Creativity. Ethics. In deconstruction. In music. Intermezzo.

“Intermezzo” (Vloeimans/Reijseger #11)

(Online Musical Example)

Intermezzo

MC: Is Intermezzo an intermezzo? Is Intermezzo an “intermissio,” a break in a continuity, a temporal or spatial cessation, a pause? Is it an interruption of the main story? An ornamentation? A hors d’oeuvre? A parergon? A supplement which is added to an already complete whole?

Or is Intermezzo not an intermezzo? Not an intermezzo in the sense stated above. Perhaps we are not talking about music. Perhaps we want to talk beside music, or better yet, with music. Perhaps we even try to talk musically. Perhaps that is part of our responsibility, part of our response to an alterity, part of our invitation to that alterity. To talk musically with music, trying to avoid too much appropriation, too much denoting, fixing, framing. Perhaps this is our response to a call. To the call of the other that is not just an intermezzo. Why is Intermezzo an intermezzo? Why is it called Intermezzo? Let’s investigate two possibilities, two directions.

(1) During the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the intermezzi underwent a change in position. Intermezzi became independent compositions.¹¹ has likewise movements which are sportive, folatres, and even grotesque, for the sake of variety; but they are only the entre-mets, or rather intermezzi, between the serious business of his other movements” (Brown 490). Robert Schumann calls the middle section of the scherzo in his Piano Sonata, Op. 11, an intermezzo with the addition “alla burla ma pomposo,” to be played in a burlesque manner. And in the operatic scores and theater music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, intermezzi may simply function as points of relaxation within a score with which they often have no musical or dramatic connection. Although less serious, less prominent, the supplement or parergon has entered the work as a more or less inextricable part of it. More important is the change of position the intermezzi held throughout history. The eighteenth–century practice of separating completely the subject matter and dramatis personae of the opera seria and those of the intermezzo, so as to permit the latter’s performance with a variety of serious works, made independent intermezzi possible. In the nineteenth century, Schumann and Brahms composed numerous independent intermezzi.] An independent intermezzo. What does that mean? A piece of music that is situated in-between, a time-span or space coming between (inter-medium, inter meaning “between,” medius meaning “in the middle”). But between what? The serious parts, the main parts, the parts around which everything revolves, the works themselves have disappeared. What remains is the supplement, the addition, the non-necessary addition. The supplement has substituted for the main work. The supplement has become the main work. The parergon has become the ergon. The intermezzo deconstructs the intermezzo, deconstructs itself. In music history. In music. Deconstruction. Always already at work in the work, in the work that wasn’t a work.

(2) Strange word, intermezzo. “Inter” means “between.” But “mezzo” also signifies “between;” for example, in “mezzosoprano,” the voice between the soprano and the alto, the voice halfway (mezzo) between the soprano and the alto. What about this Intermezzo? Let’s say it is between composed and improvised music, between (post)modern jazz and (post)modern chamber music, between free and conventional jazz. Between, however, is by no means an average here. It does not mean going from one thing to the other and back again. It is a transversal movement in which the two ends are never touched; the music never coincides with either one of the two poles (Deleuze and Guattari 25). I am talking here about an unfathomable interval or space-between that refuses definite demarcations and conceptual analyses (see note 8): “meanwhile,” “in the meantime,” “in between,” and not “symbiosis,” “integration,” or “coherent whole.” This “inter” designates neither median nor average but rather a movement between all positions. It is not a genre that can be fixed; it is not subject(ifiable) to the law of genre. However, although the “inter” doesn’t exceed nor coincide with a medium, it cannot do without a medium in order to be perceived. Perhaps one could say that it is itself a medium as it (in)forms medial reflections.

To put it differently, Intermezzo is like a hymen: it is a fusion that bridges differences but also the membrane that keeps them apart (Derrida, “The Double Session” 212–215). Regarded this way, Intermezzo deconstructs or displaces former binary oppositions. It is an undecidable.

Intermezzo (SKVR #2)

(Online Musical Example)

Intermezzo—Creativity—Ethics

MC: Intermezzo is not a linear composition, but rather an associative network, a rhizomatic composing and performing that opens up several directions, an infinite web of possible routes. I could call it unstable music. Where stable music is aimed at laying down, certainty, and permanence (for example, in musical notation), unstable music is transient, fleeting, intangible, and playful.¹² The result is impossible to predict. Intermezzo is in a constant state of evolution, a constant becoming, never solidified, never definitely fixed. This means that every version is a premiere, a voyage with an unknown destination. For the musician, this means that it is primarily the process of exploration, the constant exploration of musical space, and not the product, that is important. I would like to emphasize the process of creation over the finished art object. Intermezzo is meant to set out on a voyage of exploration that has no end, and thus, no goal. The musician might not know where s/he is going until s/he gets there. The outline of the project only emerges with any clarity as s/he progresses with it.

There has to be a decision.

(Creativity and ethics in the space between).¹³

GF: So where do I go from here? Not knowing where I’m going until I get there. In this Intermezzo which is not one (See Irigaray). Following the detour, the materiality, of the sign. The deconstruction always already at work in a work. The in(ter)vention of the other (See Derrida Psyché). The (in)vocation of his call. The order of the disorder produced there (Derrida, “Différance” 4).

There?

Where?

Here.

Where?

Hear.

In this work. Which is not a work. But a network. Full of (w)holes. A net work: free from deduction. Remaining after necessary deductions. Undecidable. Unstable. Unpredictable. Without destination, development or end.

At this very moment. In this (net) work. (Full of holes). Here. Hear. I am. Intermezzo. Between. What absents itself and what presents itself. Undecidable. Between. Speech and writing. Work and play. Improvisation and composition. Beyond the tranquil familiarity which links us to one and the other occasionally reassuring us in our illusion that they (that we) are two.

So, where do I (we) go from here? Not knowing where I’m (we’re) going until I (we) get there?

Here

There

Where

We’re

Going

Not-knowing

A de-cision—a cut through (off) this network of possibilities and (w)holes—cannot not be made and response-ability assumed. (For what I am not responsible for.) For what is to come. For what comes to pass. For what is present(ed) and (as) past (passed). In this Intermezzo. This space. Between. Music and words. Sens(e) and sound. Necessity and chance. Neither simply active nor simply passive. Undecidable.

Not knowing. I’m going.

But where?

There has to be decision. A cut. A passage through. A response to the solicitation, the (in)vocation, the in(ter)vention of the other. Hear. Here. At this very moment. In this work. Which is not a work. This Intermezzo. Which is not one. Undecidable. There has to be de-cision. Response-ability. Both. Creativity and ethics. Neither simply one nor the other. Creativity as ethics. Ethics as/and creativity. Undecidable.

There has to be decision. Not knowing where. I’m going. To give place to the other in the space between the saying and the said. Intermezzo. “A space that is not given in advance but that opens as ECHO: a music-centered journal one advances” (Derrida, “There is No One Narcissism” 207). Undecidable. In deconstruction. In music.

Where do I (we) go from here? Not knowing. We’re (I’m) going.

Creativity in the space between

MC: Where do we go from here? There has to be a decision. “A space that is not given in advance but that opens as one advances.”

Let’s say that Intermezzo is a space-between where certitudes must be abandoned and creativity and change are possible. In addition, working with phrases that can be played in random order after each other or in random quantity on top of each other demands more attention to the contribution and performance of the other(s). Freedom and “unfreedom” at the same time. Each player is free to choose the motif s/he wants to play, but in accepting responsibility towards the other(s), s/he is unfree at the same time: what is demanded by the other(s) is a radical generosity, a constant interrogation of oneself, an unremitting orientation towards the uncanny. However, there is a freedom in this unfreedom as well. The other makes me free because s/he confronts me with a possibility that I could not have chosen without her/him.¹⁴

I teach. I teach jazz music. Combo lessons. At a music school in Rotterdam (SKVR), the Netherlands. And I use Intermezzo as teaching material.

What does this mean for my students? I hope it is a plea for creativity or invention. Not without concepts, but by going each time beyond the concept (jazz, composition, form, structure, theme), without any guarantee or certainty. It is about risks; that is, it both traces and invokes risks—where things do not go according to a preconceived plan.

Invention. A shift of emphasis from reproduction to that of translation or transformation. This is not necessarily a matter of a student’s “genius” or originality, but of searching through the places or topoi to find materials for one’s own text/music/improvisation/contribution (Ulmer 177 ff.).

GF: What does using Intermezzo as teaching material mean for the teacher? Working with this piece of music, the teacher cannot control ECHO: a music-centered journal or master the outcomes. S/he cannot foresee the results. Thus, s/he cannot rely on what s/he already knows. The mastery that other forms of teaching and learning might incorporate is jeopardized as the position of the teacher is destabilized in the process. The result of this is that the position of the teacher is itself the position of the one who learns. The teacher becomes a student. Perhaps s/he teaches nothing other than the way in which s/he her/himself learns. Both s/he and the student are learning something about the music, but also learning something from it. Music is not a simple object of teaching; it is its subject. Music is the purveyor of the act of teaching. Perhaps thinking about the role of the teacher has to start with the question: “How can what music teaches us be taught?” (Lacan 439, Felman 75).

Misschien zouden we moeten eindigen met de vraag: “hoe kan dat wat muziek ons leert worden (aan)geleerd?”

Intermezzo (Vloeimans/Reijseger #21)

(Online Musical Example)

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—. “To Speculate—On Music—And/as the Sound of Différance.” Tijdschrift voor Muziektheorie / Journal of Music Theory 7.3 (November 2002): 189–195.

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