ECOLOGY WITHOUT NATURE: Pierrot Lunaire as Object-Oriented Music

Saturday, October 30, 2010

Pierrot Lunaire as Object-Oriented Music

I'm listening to one of the several versions of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire I have on iTunes. The sparseness of the instrumentation emphasizes each musical object starkly. The music has that menacing yet ridiculous, menacingly ridiculous quality of really good clowns. Menacing intimacy. It's like sitting in a very small theater, right up close to the performers. (There's something about Lucy Shelton's version that's razor sharp in this respect, by the way.)

What are we listening to when we listen to Expressionist music like this or look at Expressionist art? It's on the edge of beauty and the grotesque constantly. It's the most mysterious music I've ever heard in my life.

It's not really just conveying a human inner state, is it? In some sense that human state has been reduced to a menacing caricature, as in the paintings of Otto Dix. We're also hearing the clarinet as clown, the piano as high wire artist.

I think it might be object-oriented music. Music from the carnival of things.

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Timothy Morton

Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. They have collaborated with Laurie Anderson, Björk, Jennifer Walshe, Hrafnhildur Arnadottir, Sabrina Scott, Adam McKay, Jeff Bridges, Justin Guariglia, Olafur Eliasson, and Pharrell Williams. Morton co-wrote and appears in Living in the Future’s Past, a 2018 film about global warming with Jeff Bridges. They are the author of the libretto for the opera Time Time Time by Jennifer Walshe. Morton has written All Art Is Ecological (Penguin, 2021), Spacecraft (Bloomsbury, 2021), Being Ecological (Penguin, 2018), Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (Verso, 2017), Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (Columbia, 2016), Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (Chicago, 2015), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minnesota, 2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Open Humanities, 2013), The Ecological Thought (Harvard, 2010), Ecology without Nature (Harvard, 2007), 8 other books and 250 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture, design and food. Morton’s work has been translated into 10 languages. In 2014 they gave the Wellek Lectures in Theory.

“Outstanding.”
—Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes

“Dark ecology has the potential to be the punk rock or experimental pop of ecological thinking.”
—Kasino A4

“It isn’t [nature] itself that needs trashing — we’re doing a fine job of that already; it’s our way of thinking about it that needs to be structurally realigned ... it's an important book that, in a scant 205 pages of main text ... frames a debate that no doubt will be carried on for years to come.”
—Vince Carducci, Pop Matters

“He practices what he theorizes: nothing is wasted in his argumentation.”
—Emmanouil Aretoulakis, Synthesis

“Picking up where his most obvious predecessors, Gregory Bateson and Felix Guattari, left off, Morton understands mental ecology as the ground zero of ecological thinking, as that which must be redressed before anything else and above all. Morton goes beyond both his forebears, however, in repairing the rift between science and the humanities, which the Enlightenment opened up and against which Romanticism reacted. Perhaps most pleasantly surprising, given its erudition, is that in its stylistic elegance The Ecological Thought is as satisfying to read as it is necessary to ponder.”
—Vince Carducci

ECOLOGY WITHOUT NATURE

Saturday, October 30, 2010

Pierrot Lunaire as Object-Oriented Music

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