The Centrality of Téchne for an

Aesthetic Approach on Electroacoustic Music

Agostino Di Scipio
published in Journal of New Music Research, 24(4), 1995, pp.369-383 (Swets & Zeitlinger, Lisse)

ABSTRACT

Electroacoustic music poses methodological problems to purely hermeneutic

and historical musicology, problems of epistemological nature betrayed by a
lack of ethnomusicological awareness (in a sense to be defined). What is
missing is a methodology capable to characterize the technical processes and
the design tools making up the compositional environment, the models,
representations and knowledge-level strategies understood as traces of
cognitive and aesthetic paradigms specific to the medium. It is also shown that
an analysis of such kind - drawing on the téchne of the making of music - is
indispensible in order to shed light on the renewed relation of sound materials
to musical form in electroacoustic music. Finally, the problem is discussed
whether the theoretical approach outlined here would lend itself to an outlook
of normative aesthetics in the context of the presumed a-normativity of post-
modern intellectual endeavors.

Keywords: composition-theory, electroacoustic and computer music, hermeneutic

musicology, musical aesthetics, technology and art.

PREMISE

In an article of recent publication, "New Technology, New Techniques and the

Aesthetics of Electronic Music in the 1950's", G.Borio (1993) points out two facts: that
composers and critics during the 50's argued pro and contra the utilization of
electronically generated sounds in music. And that the very first aesthetic debate rid of
preconceptions against electronic sound regarded the notion of "timbre". However, he
goes into issues of a much wider scope; the problem of the aesthetic acceptability of
electronic sounds, though central, ultimately is a pretext for a broader subject, namely
the relation between music and technique.
The article is interesting in many aspects, a representative example of the
currently growing interest for electroacoustic music among researchers in historical
musicology. Borio's analysis bears more on the reception of the phenomenon in
question rather than on the phenomenon itself. By his own admission, the author is
influenced in his methodological approach by the literary criticism known as theory of
reception (Jauss, 1972; 1982; see Borio & Garda, 1989). This hermeneutic method
consolidates into discourses concerning (the composers' and critics') discourses
concerning reconstructed creative processes (an extreme case of what Laske would
probably call "knowledge-engineering in reverse", 1992, p.8). In other words, this
approach only exists in the form of meta-meta-discourses.
Such methodology may have an important role in the reconstruction of facts
and cultural conditions which had a role in the emergence of electroacoustic music. It
can be of real import for an understanding of the public and private debates among
musicians, critics and designers who devoted their time and intellectual efforts to the
reaches, drawbacks and implications of electroacoustic technology. However, one
thing is to recognize the relevance of these efforts and one other is to deem them
capable to pierce through the phenomenon at a deep level of insight. My observations
in the following are intended to discuss whether this methodology can develop any
specific aesthetic perspective on electroacoustic music.

Modelling the listener and the historical sources

In hermeneutic approaches on musical phenomena, the musicological discourse is

primarily based on an ability in modelling the experience of listening and, secondly, on
an ability in modelling existing knowledge about the origin of the phenomena. It is
consistent with this approach to claim that the aesthetic quality of a musical work can
be discussed in terms of the relation between the composed structure and the
intelligible events available to the listener (Borio, 1993). Interestingly, recent proposals
in the analysis of electroacoustic works, seem to enrich and support this perspective
with the findings of psychoacoustics and cognitive psychology (Camilleri, 1993; Doati,
1991), in order to reinforce the interpretative discourse with notions and models drawn
from those disciplines (which themselves are of main interest for composers, too). In
passing, I note that in both purely hermeneutic musicology and in music analysis based
on cognitive models, the underlying epistemological position is that of an ideal
listener, and corresponds to the paradigm adopted in well-known research in music
cognition (e.g. Lerdahl & Jackendoff, 1983).
However, I doubt whether historical and hermeneutic approaches alone may
help us foreshadow an aesthetics of electroacoustic music1. Either based on reception-
theory or perceptual and cognitive models, these methodologies appear insufficient to
answer questions asked by the phenomenon of electroacoustic and, later, computer
music. In (Emmerson, 1986) it is noted that views of historical musicology have so far
grossly simplified even the seemingly obvious opposition between musique concrète
and elektronische Musik (p.39, p.219).
There are two main points to examine in order to develop a critique of these
methods and a renewed music-theoretical line of research. One refers to the unevadible
- but too often evaded - dyalectic between the conceptual and the perceptual in the
musical experience. This is actually an issue of theoretical cognitive musicology, with
repercussions in research work: to accept that music is not only a matter of perception
but also one of conceptual constructs, prompts the need for a relativisation of the "ideal
listener" as epistemic subject. Here I will not explicitly address this point. The other
point refers to the problem of téchne - τεχνη - i.e. the realm of techniques and
technology captured in the creative process of music composing. The following
discussion is addressed to this point.

TÉCHNE AS AN OBJECT OF ANALYSIS

The (ethno-)musicological question

"Instruments are signs", annoted ethnomusicologist André Schaeffner as early as 1931;

they reflect "beliefs, habits, human needs (...) they are the very seat of actions, as well"
(1968; 1978, p.334; translation mine). Paradoxical as it may sound, hermeneutic and
historical approaches on electroacousic music show an ethnomusicological naïvetè.
What I mean is that too often the observer is not able to characterise the cultural values
specific to the very means of this art, thereby showing little or no awareness of the
meanings the particular musical community assigns to the actions exerted on and by
those means.
Already in the 1960s, some protagonists of had pointed out this fundamental
inadequacy. Pierre Schaeffer, for example, explicitly spoke of a threefold impasse de
la musicologie, caused by (1) a far-reaching reconsideration of what may be musical,
(2) the disappearing of the traditional production techniques, i.e. traditional
instruments and compositional processes, and (3) a too limited palette of analytic
concepts (1966, pp.18-20). I believe that the second point raises issues which have
never been analysed in depth as yet (except for endeavors in composition-theory). And
that such situation prevents not only musicology but the broader context of music-
theory from accepting the challenges of electroacoustic music.
Ever since the beginning of electroacoustic music, composers have perceived
compositional techniques and music technology as something more than mere means
(see, for example, Koenig, 1958; Schaeffer, 1966, pp.28-32 and passim). In order to
define the role of technology and many other oft-reputed extra-musicological areas of
concern, it is indispensible to draw our observation on the relational order between the
designer and his/her task environment. In general, "the representations [the artists]
works with mediate a flexible boundary between his/her inner and outer world" (Laske,
1991, p.266). A methodology not geared for the analysis of the very means of creative
actions cannot contribute to a deeper understanding of the results originated by those
actions. Could we abstract from the cultural, aesthetic, even ethical implications behind
the technical means adopted by the community of musicians whose art we pretend to
study? It is not hazardous to say that electroacoustic music poses problems of
anthropology to the musicologist.
In the past, a similarity had been already pointed out between the task of the
electroacoustic music analyst and that of the ethnomusicologist: in both cases the
observer cannot address the stable niveau neutre represented by symbolic notation
(Delalande, 1986). However, the problems related to the absence of the musical score
are just another aspect of a broader scenario. In general, the development of an
ethnomusicological awareness is simply necessary whenever we, as observers, deal
with musics of which we cannot claim to have a theory. It is not much surprising, then,
to see that the most interesting contributions regarding the (cognitive, aesthetic, socio-
cultural) potential of electroacoustic music have been so far proposed by active
composers, i.e. people well acquainted with, and aware of, the implications of the
technological mediation (examples are Schaeffer, 1966; Pousseur, 1970; Truax, 1984,
Chap.II; Wishart, 1985; Koenig, 1991; see also contributions in collective volumes
such as Emmerson, 1994 and Plasterk & Leman, 1992).
It is relatively surprising to see that the issue of téchne, although central in
Borio's discussion, is finally neglected when coming to matters of aesthetics, and to the
cartesian credo that "only the relation between composed structures and receptively
intelligible events can give information about the aesthetic quality of the work" (1993,
p.81). Certainly that relation is a most important issue, and its centrality - the centrality
of perception - has been very clearly recognized many times now2. But we cannot take
it as the only aspect that really counts in aesthetic theories. Though enriched and
renewed upon contact with either cognitive studies or literary crticism, traditional
methodologies seem to dodge round the obstacles put forth by electroacoustic music,
just like the final statement in Borio's article betrays: "The question whether or not a
specific approach on the aesthetics of electronic music is desirable or even necessary,
seems to have received a negative answer by the attitude of composers themselves after
1960" (1993, p.85). As a matter of fact, the composers' commitment towards aesthetic
issues has related - and relates - so closely to technical and sonological dimensions of
their work that we could hardly recognise it if we abstract from an observation of how
this music is done (by what conceptual mechanisms? under what technological
conditions and epistemological assumptions?).

Technology, music and knowledge

But why should we consider the characterizazion of téchne so central to a possible

aesthetic approach to electroacoustic music? In which sense here technology is more
than mere "means to an end"?
I would like to notice that electroacoustic music has emerged in a time in
which computer science and the then newborn discipline of artificial intelligence were
themselves fostering a reconsideration of the technical mediation in any human
endeavor. At that time, Martin Heidegger used to assign a major position to the domain
of modern technology in the paradigmatic process he described as the vanishing of
philosophical reasoning. Not by chance he suggested, in a 1962 lecture entitled Zur
Frage nach der Bestimmung der Sache des Denkens (1984), that the vanishing of
philosophy turns into the emergence of diverse scientifical domains whose shared
foundational assumptions are the subject matter of cybernetics (former name for
computational sciences, or the sciences of control and communication, Regelung und
Nachrichtübertragung, in Norbert Wiener's words).
At that time, the notion of "feedback-control" was a pervasive metaphor
utilized in human sciences as well. Thus cybernetics (from Greek κυβερνητησ,
helmsman) was seen as a systematic meta-discipline concerned with the foundations of
all scientifical undertakings, in terms of Heidegger's Steuerung, the governed
relationship of the human being to the world. It posed questions of anthropology as
well as epistemology, being ultimately a lens through which one can study the
characterizing features of the human: the power to create and to know.
For a composer, to gain control over the materials and forms of his/her art is
to develop suitable generative and manipulative techniques (praxis) as well to reason
about the pertinence and coherence of those techniques (theory). The technical process
in his/her design is ultimately a process of capturing knowledge into workable tools
and strategies. It entails a careful consideration of one's own working environment and
its technical processes and technological instruments which reflect knowledge-level
creative strategies. Electroacoustic music - in both its two historical derivations,
musique concrète and elektronische Musik - has (re-)focussed the musicians' attention
towards the role of technique, an issue which never was a minor one in modern
theories of art. By addressing the artist's attention to the very process of mediation
lying at the core of his/her creative endeavor, it required a reconsideration of the
domain of téchne, otherwise too often maintained as purely functional, in fact
"instrumental", wrongly reputed neutral with regard to the musical object they help
originating.
Very correctly, Luigi Rognoni observed, in 1956, that "trying to anwer the
questions posed by electronic (sic) music, we implicitly address the question of the
technique of musical language" (1978, p.30; translation mine). It is my opinion that
acceptance of such perspective demands a interpretational methodology well grounded
on an analysis of tools and actions by which composers model their knowledge of
sound and music. Indeed, as a form of art, electroacoustic music emphasizes that the
artist's work includes the making of the object as well as the invention of the
techniques suitable for its making. If a hermeneutic approach is to interpret the
phenomena originated by an artist, then it cannot abstract from an understanding of the
technological (and cognitive) susbtratum and the actions which made the phenomena
possible. This in turn would also open to a closer observation of the link between the
constructive and the receptive processes of music, between the poietic and esthesic
dimension of musical experience3. Here the aim would be to explore the interface
between the conceptual and the perceptual, the artifact and the percept. It would mean
to scrutinize the continual, inescapable conflict between the work as a produced
phenomenon and the work as an experienced phenomenon (in Adorno's terms, see
discussion in Zuidervaart, 1991, p.89).
In electroacoustic music the making of the work is, to some extent, captured
and documented in the technical tools adopted or specially designed by the composer.
The composer's relationship to the materials and the forms of his/her art (which, to me,
is the very object of any analytic view) are mediated by those design tools - tools of
work and thought. They cannot be considered foreign to an aesthetic approach, for they
do reflect, to some extent to be studied, the artist's knowledge and his/her conception
of sound and music. The technological tools embody the theory of music behind a
composer's attitude and work (knowledge of the field) and objectify the cognitive
strategies involved in using the theory (action-knowledge). As human sciences, music-
theory and musicology deal with human artifacts called "musical". Herbert Simon
observed that "the products of musical intelligence belong to the sciences of the
artificial (...) they are not meant to rival, but only to shed light, on the phenomenal
world" (quoted in Laske, 1993, p.274). M.J.Rosenberg, in his Cybernetics of Art, adds
that "one of the difficulties of defining what is meant by art is simply an aspect of the
wider problem of deciding what qualities characterize intelligence" (1983, p.4). Could
the sciences of music neglect looking after the very traits which make music a humanly
devised artifact?

The relation between techniques and technology, and its significance.

The relation of the composed work to the techniques of its production, and the relation
of these latter to technology in general represent two strictly connected points of
discussion. Perhaps they may be treated separately, but we cannot exempt ourselves
from characterising how one relates to the other. Together, they consolidate in the
artist's téchne, understood as the realm of the artist's design tools (including conceptual
tools, as would be, for example, graphical notations). Especially in electroacoustic and
computer music, production techniques are not conceivable except in conjunction with
a (given or specially prepared) technological substratum.
At a closer look, the straightforward distinction between techniques and
technology, i.e. between human craftmanship vs. machine technology, can be seen as
an implicit argument in the discourses of those who, at the outset of electroacoustic
music, considered such music nothing but a corruption of an earlier human spontaneity
(see Adorno, 1970; 1984, p.88) and denigrated electronic composing as a
"dehumanization of music" (Borio, 1993, p.77). Yet, in a sense those denigrators may
have felt, perhaps even better than the apologists, that a revolutionary cultural
paradigm shift lay behind the new sonic art: by fostering a reconsideration of the
artist's téchne, electroacoustic art shows that the realm of the artificial is the realm of
the humanly devised: ideally, the composer of electroacoustic music becomes fully
responsible for the conventions, representations, structural possibilities and constraints
in the working environment.
Those detractors, bearers of a conservative cultural ideology, may have also
felt that technology could lend itself to the systematic critique peculiar to the process
of the art: the creative process is one that either questions or transforms and enriches
knowledge and theories established by and captured in the existing, available téchne.
This is very well reflected by the fact that composers of technologically-based music
sometimes become designers of the conceptual and practical tools suitable for the tasks
prompted by their imagination. They become, at least in part, authors of their own task
environment. In so doing, they implicitly attribute to téchne the role of exploratory
means of knowledge. Electroacoustic music emphasizes, as intimated above, that the
work of art is always created by creating the technique of its making. A process which
virtually takes place in the composition of every single musical work. A process which
questions previously established music-theory (personal or shared by many), and
requires (from the composer as well as from the analyst and the listener) a continual
revision of musical concepts, the leaving of all presumed ontological foundations of
music.
There are two contrasting, though often overlapping, implications within such
view. Indeed, it reflects pretty well a very basic, general character proper to
technological achievements, namely the fact that technology, as Heidegger observed,
always implies the manifestation of the human Will of Power, or, perhaps better, a Will
of Will - the will of man's own thorough self-determination (Heidegger, 1984).
At the same time, however, a non-negligible social character of
technologically-based arts comes also to the fore: the creative endeavor makes téchne
less a means to re-state the known than one to put it in question. The artist's work
becomes a metaphor for a cultural view in which technology is less a powerful
instrument to actualize dreamed-of visions than something to excite new, autonomous
visions. It is less to answer than to challenge, in sharp contrast with the advertised
technological industrial products presumed to augment the consumer's comfort by
empowering his/her well consolidated, habitual actions, by satisfying his/her needs.

THE QUESTION OF THE MATERIALS

Dematerialization of materials. The musical work as τεχνημα

The concept that téchne is "exploratory means of knowledge" is mirrored by the

internal structure of electroacoustic music, especially as far as the notion of materials
is concerned. Upon contact with electronic technology, music has taken a larger step
towards the ever increasing idealisation and de-materialization of its materials, thus
following a process that Adorno recognized as peculiar to most of the 20th century
historical avant-gardes (1970, passim; for an analysis of the notion of material in
computer music, see Duchez, 1991).
The sound materials of electroacoustic and computer music are available only
through specially designed processes aimed at the production of them. They are, at
first, immaterial and purely potential, the object of the composer's deliberate choices
and design strategies. This is an art of possible sound materials (Di Scipio, 1995a). It
radically emphasizes that the category of material is something historically and socially
conditioned. Against pseudo-ontological beliefs, electroacoustic music claims that the
materials of music are determined by the cultural process, so much so that they are the
outcome of one's own invention rather than a pre-existing, natural acoustic
phenomenon (the materials of musique concrète are no exception).
Such notion of material almost embodies a definition found in Gyorgy
Lukács, for whom the material of art is the still-to-be-reached, the not-yet of the artist's
knowledge (1971, chap.I). It is purely virtual, inexistent before the definition and the
instantiation of an operating model. The whole structure of the musical work, at many
scales of time, becomes thoroughly artifact - in fact τεχνημα - fully and peculiarly
human, entirely cultural, rid of traits as yet independent of an individual's acts of
intent. As early as 1955, Henri Pousseur wrote: "At this point we may conceive of
musical structures which no longer abstain from all the variegated riches of the
sounding world, but which replace natural sound with the decisiveness of the
consciously devised" (1958, p.34; emphasis mine).

Traces of a renewed relational order between materials and form.

An important consequence of this renewed notion of material, a dyalectic is established

which is unique to the aesthetic potential of electroacoustic music. For, though
something invented ab nihilo and deliberately formed, the sound material is usually
given, then, a functional role within the structure of the work of art, it is again
reconducted in the realm of the pre-exixtent, as if it were the surrogate representant of
Nature as opposed to form, the representant of Culture. We have here a contrast which
no more can be described as the traditional dyalectic of Culture and Nature, spirit and
matter. Instead, it is an "entirely artificial dyalectic", so to say, whose contrasting terms
both stem from Culture, being both consciously devised, carefully and intentionally
shaped.
A composer's conception of sound and the way s/he relates sound to the
overall musical structure can be analysed in his/her téchne. There one finds traces of
the way in which a composer explores, extends and models his/her own experience.
Ultimately, models and representations in one's working environment reflect the way
in which a composer explores him/herself and affirms a personal view of the actual
world (while raising visions of a different, possible world). Clearly, then, for an
aesthetic perspective on technologically-based music, these models and representations
are at least as relevant as the receptively intelligible events which eventually emerge
from the composed structure. Not only they are signs of aesthetic assumptions and
stands; I would also say they are traces of "ethical" positions. Since it is evident, at this
level, that the designing of particular tools involves making decisions about the use of
technology qua instrument for the control and domination of Nature, qua manifestation
of the formerly mentioned Will of Power.
However, because the category of material is dependent on cultural
determination, here "domination of Nature" would not be substantially different from
"domination of Culture". Decisions made about the materials are, then, themselves
signs of the artist's attitude towards technology as an instrument social power, too. In
his analysis of Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, Lambert Zuidervaart writes that "by
struggling with the material, an artist struggles with society" (1991, p.97).
A critique which renounces to accept this network of relations between the
generation and processinf of the materials (technique of production) and technology in
general (technology as instrument of power vs. technology as exploratory means of
knowledge) must needs renounce to pierce through the many-levelled implications
underlying any technologically-based creative endeavor.

Questioning the opposition of empiricism and formalism

From the above observations, two consideration can follow: (1) the empiricistic claim
that technology in the process of art is "means to an end" is unacceptable and
simplistic; (2) unacceptable is, as well, the formalistic claim that the substance of the
work is shaped as the mere result of techniques. Things seem to be more complex than
that.
Understood as an object of analysis and critique, téchne can show that the
composed work is the result of productive processes but that these latter are themselves
facts having aesthetic significance. A novel analytic category becomes available: the
consistency binding the final artifact to the compositional téchne, the problem being
whether the particular production techniques and the knowledge they express are
bearers of the same meaning and visions ascribed to the work perceived. This would be
the basis for a hermeneutic approach reconsidered, in which an interpretation of
phenomena leans on reliable analyses of the process of art, rather than meta-discourses.
It is a "reconsidered" hermeneutic view in that it allows one to undertake research
work in systematic music analysis without leaving aside the connections between
analysed structure and the theory concretely caught in the factual creative process4.
Accordingly, the observer is enabled to sketch elements of the visions and the utopia
which are put forth by the artist and tentatively communicated.
The technical mediation can illustrate, better than other dimensions, the
composer's knowledge-level strategies by which the sound and the dynamical
morphology of the musical structure are originated. Therefore, it is an aptest terrain for
the critical discourse about music works whose materials have lost the pseudo-
ontological status of something given, and have become something deliberately and
carefully formed. Every sound object of this music, as eventually perceived, is the
result of design. It is presented as such to the listener's appreciation and apprehension,
not only as a partial component of the overall construction. It is determinant to develop
methodological efforts capable to recognise that electroacoustic music can weaken, if
not withdraw, the classical form/material dualism (Di Scipio, 1994a; 1994b; 1995a).
If any utopian vision has been raised by the emergence of electracoustic
music, it can be thought of in terms of this potential merging of empiricistic and
formalistic attitudes of human invention. It contributes to the blurring of the neat
distinction between Taste and Reason (Kant), between "things perceived, appreciated"
- αιεσθητα - and "things known, understood" - νοητα.

FROM AESTHETIC A-NORMATIVITY TO COMPLEX NORMATIVITY5

Two sides of the same coin

Admittedly, a contradiction hides somewhere within the overall picture so far

described, one which leads us to on different level of discussion. The two
constradicting terms can be described as follows:
On the one hand, the impact of electronic technologies in music has open
undreamed-of territories of expression, a vast cognitive solution-space (Di Scipio,
1995a). This cultural situation destroys the possibility of positing aesthetic norms as
valid ones. As a form of art appeared during the transition from the modern to the post-
modern, electroacoustic and computer music reflects the "extreme splintering of
individuals in their relationships to the world" (Richard, 1995, p.28). In the post-
modern era, hardly can aesthetic theories be developed farther, at least in the sense in
which they existed from Baumgarten to Adorno. "Where the formal possibilities have
become infinite, not only authentic creation but also its scholarly analysis become
correspondingly difficult" (Bürger, 1980; 1984, p.87).
On the other hand, both the fact that electroacoustic music fundamentally
involves a critical perspective on former musical approaches and music-theoretical
views, and the unveiling of its specific utopian vision (the blurring of the distinction
between sound and form, Nature and Culture, Outer and Inner) seem to witness for the
establishing of aesthetic norms and an idealistic view.
Though contradictory, these two points appear (to me) both very real and, in a
sense, hardly separable. In claiming that an aesthetic approach on electroacoustic
music is feasible, I am especially interested in the question "at what conditions it may
be taken?" (my proposed answer, in the above, was: at the condition of extending the
domain of musicological observation to the téchne of this art); I am less interested in
the question "to what ends it could be taken" (which would imply the positing of a
teleological approach, with relative norms).
Moreover, as long as any artistic endeavor entails a critique of art, the positing
of norms reveals unavoidable. Every time an ars nova has emerged, it entailed a (more
or less severe) critique of a contrasted ars antiqua. It's the particular process of art
which resolves into norms by which it specifies its particularity within the context of
other forms of art. This is true even in the post-modern era, the main difference being
that today no music genre would disappear and become an ars antiqua, due to the
cultural industry's interest to keep many different musical markets alive.
Connecting the aesthetic significance of an artistic phenomena to its
underlying utopia does not result, strictly speaking, into a normative approach. Utopia
always puts normative claims in question and still contributes to the positing of norms
of its own. Electroacoustic art makes no exception to this circular relationship which
circumscribes the process of art.

A sign of "complex normativity"?

Despite the innumerable technical possibilities and the splintering and fragmenting of
individual views, electroacoustic art can hardly be said to feature the character shared
by the historical avant-gardes, namely their presumed, pervasive a-normativity.
Perhaps, what technologically-based arts ask for is a more complex normativity. By
"complex normativity" Zuidervaart means "a network of norms, no one of which has
preminence" (1991, p.246). A partial list of such norms would include technical
excellence, formal depth, expressiveness, social scope, political effectiveness, and
many others. Could an aesthetic approach on electroacoustic music abstain from
relating the domain of its téchne to this complex of equally relevant aspects?
The point is that electroacoustic music seems to reflect a more general need,
the need for an applied epistemology of the arts. If it suggests any normative outlook,
then this certainly requires that phenomena be observed from more than one
paradigmatic position alone (e.g. the ideal listener, the "pure appreciator" behind many
musicological efforts). It suggests the determination of music-theoretical efforts
capable to coordinate (and eventually trascend) the several particular contributions - an
interdiscipline, as intimated by Schaeffer (1966). In the above, my aim was to
emphasize the centrality of téchne as a dimension of interest for truly interdisciplinary
music-theoretical perspectives.

SUMMARY

In this paper, I addressed the drawbacks of studying electroacoustic music by

abstracting from an analysis of the particular techniques and technologies. I stressed
that an aesthetic approach on this music ultimately must needs undertake a critique of
the technical processes of composing and a characterization of the technological
working environment. This assumption, then, brought about three correlated levels of
analysis6:
At one level the téchne of electroacoustic music, the irreducible realm of
technical invention and technological processes, is a dimension where one can grasp
features of the cognitive and aesthetic potential specific to the medium. Moreover, the
composer's own relationship to the productive process reveals many levels of
significance, in that s/he can either passively accept the existing tools (thus accepting
the theory of music captured by them) or be the author and designer of the working
environment (thus actively focussing on the theoretical reaches in his/her music).
At another level, we are led to a redefinition of the notion of material, as well
as to a redefinition of the relationship of material to form. The lively tension in serious
efforts of electroacoustic and computer music composition is one which contrasts the
cognitive dualism of sound and structure, material and form, Nature and Culture - one
which mantains that the work of art is thouroughly artificium.
At still another level, a contradiction has been pointed out: electroacoustic
music fully partecipates in a socio-cultural process which denies the possibility of
aesthetic norms, but it still posits the norms by which it distances itself from other
forms of music. The pertinence of a "complex normativity" has been discussed, as
opposed to the presumed a-normativity of post-modernist discourses about the arts.

NOTES

1. To avoid possible misunderstandings, I should observe that in this paper the notion of
αισθησισ is used as different from "sensual perception"; I refer, rather, to the object
of a broader "theory of knowledge" which, as Laske (1993) reminds us, since
Baumgarten has been called "aesthetics".
2
. The centrality of perception for the development of contemporary musical idioms, has
been emphasized many times, starting with Stockhausen's ...wie die Zeit vergecht
(1963) through Risset's work (1985) and Smalley's spectromorphological approach
(1986), to name only few. Already in 1955, H.H.Stuckenshmidt laid stress on the
 perceptual and even the synaesthetic aspects of electronically generated music
(Stuckenshmidt, 1958). Schaeffer himself described the electronic studio as
l'instrument de nostre expérimentation des perceptions musicales (the instrument of
our experimenting of musical perceptions, 1966, p.404).
3
. This is, in too short terms, the research program discussed in (Laske, 1977).
4
. Some experiences of music analysis following this approach are in (Di Scipio, 1988;
1995b).
5
. After reviewing a preliminary version of the present paper, the Editors of Journal of
New Music Research suggested that I justify and elaborate on my presumed position
of normative aesthetics. This last section follows such suggestion.
6
. By "correlated levels of analysis" I mean that there is a circular, rather than
hierarchical, relationship binding the three major points addressed here.

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