Interview with Andrew Crossley, composer, cultural and critical theorist
Andrew Crossley (Mexico City, 1990) studied composition at the Royal College of Music, and is currently undertaking an MA in Cultural and Critical Studies at the University of Westminster. His current research and work concern hybrid forms of criticism, as well as nihilism and the Buddhist concept of emptiness as a starting point and a field for an artistic and philosophical praxis. He lives and works in London since 2011.
Wingel Pérez: A s a starting point for this interview, I would like to relate the essay you sent me to the piece I had the opportunity to listen to: “White Writing” (for 16 players and electronics). I say relate because it is something that is implicit, as both works (essay and piece) are the same thing… your same questioning. The subject that is in you listens and evolves. Why did you start questioning sound and where has it led?
Andrew Crossley: I think that in the same way as we can speak of both the piece and the essay as two sides of the same project and the same search, there is no way of speaking about the questioning of sound without speaking at the same time about the questioning of many other things. To speak of a “why” is equally difficult, given that I am unaware of it myself, as I’m sure many (if not all) artists are unaware of the origin of the creative drive. I think that a lot of us young composers tend to think about things in a primarily pragmatic way—more in terms of a “how” than of a “why.” It seems to me that such a mindset can often lead to doing things with the purpose of advancing one’s “career,” of achieving more success, more respect, etc. In other words, to end up thinking that one must follow the path that has already been set out as the one that young artists must follow: scholarships, grants, competitions, schemes, etc. It got to a point for me, a couple of years ago, in which I went into a very severe depression because of that feeling of having to follow a set path. It was during that time that I started practicing Buddhism. I only mention this because Buddhist practice is nothing more than a daily disciplined practice in which one contemplates and examines one’s own consciousness, perception, and thinking. Naturally, being a musician, examining the experience of sound perception became a very important and useful tool in that practice, and that opened the door to a way of thinking about sound and music that was much more open, more curious. That is something that I practice every day and that I feel must be developed continually.
W: Once you have found “the path to your answer,” so to speak (although sometimes the answer becomes less important than the experience acquired), how does it permeate your musical creativity? (And I’m referring not just to scores and notation, as this goes beyond that.)
A: Again, I agree with the way you pose the question. To speak only about scores and other technical matters is to merely graze the surface of a deep and immense ocean. It is to speak of the medium, not of the content. Broadly speaking, that is the attitude I seek to adopt in any artistic or theoretical project that I undertake: the medium never dictates the content, rather, the line of questioning that runs through everything I do and everything I experience leads organically to the necessary medium for its unfolding. For this reason, we are not necessarily speaking here about specific ways of working or creating, but about a general framework and mode of reflection and questioning. If we had to attempt to frame it in musical terms, I would say that it would manifest, perhaps, as a search for a non-discursive, democratic music. Or perhaps, to reference Laruelle and his non-philosophy, a “non-music”—using his own term, a “non-decisional” music. By this I mean a music that from the moment of its unfolding does not conceptualize or propose a discourse, a music that doesn’t distinguish itself ontologically as “music.” This could be a music that, not beginning from that first ontological decision, would not present itself as separate from that which it explores. It might be something like working with sound as it is in itself: a constant flux of physical impulses that can reflect in turn the constant flux of our physical universe. I think it is here that sound can work on us in internal time and to make evident that which we usually ignore—the impermanence[1] of all things, emptiness. Of course, I don’t claim to have achieved a music like the one I speak of, or even that such a music is achievable. I think, however, that in that process of questioning lies the work of both philosophy and art—not in finding a path to an answer, as you say, but in following a path that opens up to infinite other questions.
W: White Writing is based on the thinking of the American painter Mark Tobey (1890-1976)[1], who developed a technique[2] by the same name. Listening to your piece, it was precisely “that” (listening) which didn’t occur, but please correct me if I’m wrong. It is a piece to be lived, not listened to, and through being lived, it can also be meditated. How do you place yourself as a listener before the piece?
A: Although I agree that we can think of living and meditating music (not just this particular piece), I’m not sure this necessarily means “not listening.” I would say that what occurs can be described as a sort of “listening to the second power.” By this I mean a kind of listening that is conscious of itself, that examines not only the auditory content, but the phenomenology of its perception. At least, this is how I attempt to approach the act of listening.
W: The piece unfolds in observation, in flexible time. Events are controlled in non-conventional ways, not as they would be in a traditional score. As a listener, do you think there are different possibilities of perception in White Writing?
"[...], the point where the philosophical or conceptual
purpose of the work falls short of itself."
A: Absolutely. Granted, I can only speak to my own experience with the piece, as its “creator,” but I see two different aspects of my perception of it. In the first place, and on a more superficial level, is the auditory perception, which concerns the piece as an unfolding of sound in time and space, and to which, perhaps, I would confine all purely technical thought. But there is another plane of perception, one that considers not only the unfolding of the sonic material, but the affective and philosophical context of the work as well. For this reason it receives another message, one that emerges from the point of impossibility at the heart of the work—namely, the point where the philosophical or conceptual purpose of the work falls short of itself. Tobey’s technique was attractive to me in the beginning because of its parallels with Japanese calligraphy, a discipline that is is often intimately tied with Zen philosophy. I supposed at the time that to attempt to explore that technique in musical terms could lead to an ego-free expression, or at least free from what Cage called “ego-noise.” With this in mind, I wrote the piece in a more open way, as you mentioned already, leaving spaces in the score for improvisation and for the unplanned synchronies that may occur due to the nature of the notation that might not be repeated in any future performances. And so, I finished the piece, satisfied with the attempt to reach that philosophical goal (I say satisfied because I believe that finishing any piece of work always involves a kind of satisfaction in face of what was initially proposed—a satisfaction that is blown open in the act of reflection that follows, which is what often drives consequent pieces of work). Now, when I listen to the piece, I can’t ignore that stated purpose and the way the piece falls so grotesquely short of it. It is a piece that, in spite of the flexibility of its notation and its intention, is rigorously controlled in almost every aspect: form, duration, instrumentation, etc. It is really quite perverse. But, far from seeing this as impacting negatively on the work, I think that this failure, this impossibility at the heart of the piece, can productively reveal something beyond itself, namely, that to bring the illusion of the ego into play as something to be overcome implies granting it an existence as something real (in a way, to buy into a delusion that passes itself off as enlightenment). As such, any attempt to overcome such a conception of the ego is destined to fail, to come up against the wall of impossibility. Perhaps the accusation could be levied that the kind of perception I’m describing has too little to do with sound itself, being dependent on so many other factors, but I think it is crucial always to position music in the totality of experience—both the author’s and the perceiver’s. It is there, I think, that music can reveal to us the magnitude of its signification.
W: Doubting until becoming oneself a great mass of doubt, from being ‘like a dead man’ to resurrection and beginning the cycle anew. I also had the opportunity to listen to Koan #2, a work with a completely different energy to White Writing, but that in my perception shares its DNA. Do you think that this “DNA” is the question you have been asking yourself, that of listening as a kind of cyclical questioning?
"[...] of both sound and the act of listening, and thus, giving them back their profound power."
A: Without a doubt, the same line of questioning flows through both pieces. I conceived the Koans[1] at a time in my creative life in which I had just finished two very large projects that had left me feeling incapable of even imagining the creative act as something possible, let alone desirable. I very much wanted to continue exploring that line of questioning, that questioning of “self”, as well as the (im)possibility of agency in the creative act, but I was very wary of falling into the same traps as with White Writing. I have always had an interest in the concept of ephemeral art, and the Koans started as just that—personal exercises that I used in my daily meditation practice. More than anything else, I think they are questions that can be distilled through action. The performer (and listener) is invited to actualize these questions in lived experience, to let the act of asking the question unfold in both time and affect in a way that we could call a “praxis of questioning.” As such, they make no attempt to dictate neither form nor content, rather seeking to begin from a wholly open and non-conceptual field. The fact that this can be done through sound is the reason I find myself always returning to it. In its abstract and non-verbal nature (and thus, at least in its physical unfolding, non-conceptual as well), sound still seems to me the best way to reflect in experience and create in affect what Buddhism calls "seeing things as they are." It is in that openness of reflection that I think we can come to cultivate those things that the world so badly needs: compassion, equanimity, and yes, love. In doing so, we would also be rediscovering the radical dimension at the heart of both sound and the act of listening, and thus, giving them back their profound power.
Interview made on 12.15.2016
(1) In Buddhism, the concept of Anicca or Anitya, commonly translated as impermanence, is an essential doctrine and a one of the Trilakshana, or three marks of existence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impermanence , April 26th, 2017
(2) http://www.mark-tobey.com/
(3) Tobey’s “white writing” can be described as ‘an overlay of white or light-colored calligraphic symbols on an abstract field which is often itself composed of thousands of small and interwoven brush strokes.’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Tobey , April 26th 2017
(4) In the Zen tradition, a kōan is a is ‘a story, dialogue, question, or statement’, given by a teacher ‘to provoke the "great doubt" and test a student's progress.’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kōan , April 26th 2017
Interview read by robots
Recording of "White Writing"