‘Not Necessarily Mahler’: Remix, Samples and Borrowing in the Age of Wiki

^†The title of this article is taken from the CD collection of UK experimental music from 1960 to 1977, curated by Toop (2001). In his introduction to the CD, editor of Leonardo Music Journal, Nicolas Collins, writes:

The British experimental music that emerged in the mid-1960s owed as much to … Pop sensibility as to the dominant European modernist style … Composers got on stage to play, rejecting the classical distinction between creator and interpreter; they drew on musical material and ideas outside the high-art canon, including Pop and ‘World’ music. (Collins, 2001, p. 1)

Abstract

This article examines philosophical and creative aspects of digital musical culture in the context of the Berlin Philharmonic's 2011 open competition to create remixes of Mahler's First Symphony. Issues of social mediation, hybridity, history, textuality, sampling and borrowing raised by the submitted entries are investigated with reference to theories of Bourriaud, Deleuze, Genette and Goodman.

Keywords:

• Mahler
• Bourriaud
• Goodman
• Sampling
• Remix
• Borrowing

Notes

^† The title of this article is taken from the CD collection of UK experimental music from 1960 to 1977, curated by Toop (2001). In his introduction to the CD, editor of Leonardo Music Journal, Nicolas Collins, writes:

The British experimental music that emerged in the mid-1960s owed as much to … Pop sensibility as to the dominant European modernist style … Composers got on stage to play, rejecting the classical distinction between creator and interpreter; they drew on musical material and ideas outside the high-art canon, including Pop and ‘World’ music. (Collins, 2001, p. 1)

[1] Full details retrieved May 14, 2013, from http://www.berliner-philharmoniker.de/education/remix-contest/.

[2] See ‘Tracks Sampling 20th Century Classical Music’, retrieved May 14, 2013, from http://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?boardid=41&threadid=21643.

[3] In reality, degrees of unregulated openness vary as Wikis operate differing levels of security, monitoring and editorial intervention, in order to protect themselves from virtual vandalism.

[4] See the discussion of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales's philosophy of ‘truth’. Retrieved May 14, 2103, from http://www.maxgladwell.com/2008/06/the-wiki-philosophy-jimmy-wales/.

[5] I am grateful to Christophe Franke of the Berlin Philharmonic Digital Concert Hall for providing me with this information.

[6] The remixes were retrieved May 14, 2013, from http://soundcloud.com/groups/remix-contest_berliner-philharmoniker/tracks?page=1.

[7] Information retrieved May 14, 2013, from http://www.berliner-philharmoniker.de/en/education/young-talents/remix-contest/.

[8] This remix has been removed from the site presumably for copyright reasons: an example of the continuing hierarchical power of corporations since the Fauxharmonic Orchestra is a commercial enterprise offering, among other things, digitized performances of notated music.

[9] I am very grateful to Lauren Redhead for bringing the work of Nicolas Bourriaud to my attention.

[10] A word that became obsolete in the early twentieth century, which means ‘passing by, through or across’.

[11] See also http://www2.tate.org.uk/altermodern/explore.shtm and http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/altermodern/altermodern-explain-altermodern.

[12] Digital remixes of the First and Second Symphonies were retrieved on May 12, 2013, from the following links:

http://www.mixcloud.com/track/shameboy/mahler-resurrection-shameboy-remix

https://soundcloud.com/subclub-soundsystem/subclub-soundsystem-dub2dubstep-mixtape

http://soundcloud.com/danstuckey/gustav-mahler-symphony-no-2-resurrection-dubstep-remix

http://elizabethveldon.bandcamp.com/track/gustav-mahler-1st-symphony-remix-1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP-YmCx-w5

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXnQI6xgN78

http://www.archive.org/details/Mahler2-The10HourRemix

http://theinspirationroom.com/daily/2011/gustav-mahler-visualised-and-remixed/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP-YmCx-w5A

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyXsvWg-XMc&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiYxExcK4-I.

A remix of the Adagietto from the Fifth Symphony were retrieved on May 12, 2013, from the following link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nepCky88-0&feature=related.

The remix ‘spirit redux’ was specially created from a variety of Mahler samples by Matthew Sansom for the Mahler Centenary conference, ‘Mahler: Contemporary of the Past?’ held at the University of Surrey, July 2011. Designed for continual playback, an extract was retrieved on May 12, 2013, from the following link: http://matthewsansom.com/2011/03/25/spirit-redux-2011/.

[13] Some examples of dubstep last for several hours.

[14] See my forthcoming publication Rethinking Mahler (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

[15] See my forthcoming publication Rethinking Mahler for a varied discussion of this neglected aspect of Mahler historiography.

[16] See also Barham (2011) for further application of these ideas in a study of the appropriation of Mahler's music by audiovisual media.

[17] Some of the Mahler remixes do seem, at least to these ears, to have comic elements (intentionally or otherwise); and, despite the latter-day pejorative meaning attached to the term ‘travesty’, given that the root of the word is a combination of the Latin ‘trans’ and ‘vestire’ (and that in French and Italian it can still mean to disguise by presenting in different clothing), there seems to be a potentially significant generic similarity at play here.

[18] See, for example, Oswald's expanded album version of Plunderphonics from 1989, which was forced ‘underground’ for a time through copyright litigation, and his ‘work’ Plexure (1993), which reputedly contains about 1000 popular music samples and for which he coined the term ‘megaplundermorphonemiclonic’.

[19] For example, turntablist and experimental music practitioner Christian Marclay created the live, 62-minute sound collage ‘Paix, amour’ incorporating found material (released in 2000 on the album Fuck Shit Up).

[20] Those that engage more fully in sophisticated recompositional processes (e.g. Silvio Palmieri's ‘Mahler-Palmieri’ and Marcus Leadley's ‘Mahler–12 Tone remix’) fall between two referential stools because at the level of sample and remix they exemplify properties of neither popular-music-related remix language nor Mahler's musical works and language. A different context would have to be established for them to exemplify meaningfully, according to Goodman's system.

[21] I am grateful to Mark Textor for sharing these further thoughts on the question of samples, in email correspondence conducted during July 2012. Textor ‘samples’ the phrase ‘imaginary puissance’ from Shakespeare's Henry V, Act 1 (Prologue).