On Technics - Zorn's Wonderful Machines for Listening Anew..

Beginning in the late 1970s and extending into the 1990s, the avant-garde Jazz musician and composer John Zorn created a series of compositions called 'Game Pieces'. These compositions consist of a set of rules, gestures, and interactions that govern the expression and interactions of improvising musicians. The Game Pieces provide an interesting metonym for the dynamic interaction between affect and technics. Here I'll explore the compositions as 'technical ensembles' that operate on, and with, existing technics elements, individuals and ensembles to realise the possibility of new musical potential.

The rules, gestures and interactions of the game pieces deliberately interfere with the usual or assumed 'technics' of musical expression. By 'technics' I refer to both 'technique' and 'technology'. With respect to musical expression, 'technique' includes the set of practiced and embodied interactions between the instrument and musician. 'Technique' also includes the practiced and the habitual phrases that constitute the musician's musical language and style. These practiced and habitual phrasings have deep connections to the instruments, cultures, traditions, and society within which the musician and their craft developed. Technology on the other hand refers to the musical instrument with which this practice takes place. It too is specific to the cultures, traditions and society in which it evolved but also to the materials and geographies of which it evolved.

The instrument is as Stiegler would define technology as 'organised inorganic matter' [[Stiegler1998]]. The musical instrument is an organisation of inorganic matter in the service of an anticipating a return to the expressive potential realised between bodies and materials. This rather straightforward definition of technology as 'organised inorganic matter' is complicated (and the stakes raised) by Stiegler's framing of technics as 'the horizon of all possibility to come and of all possibility of a future' ([[Stiegler1998]], xi).1

Zorn's Game Pieces are an attempt to constantly realise new tones, juxtapositions, temporal/melodic progressions, and harmonies - new musical futures - by disrupting the repetition and replaying of already existing technics. The disruption of technics in Zorn's Game Pieces is not complete - it is a calculated disruption (determined) in order to realise new forms and juxtaposition in the very act of improvisation. For context, this approach differs from the near complete disruption of existing technics found in much of John Cage's work using chance as a compositional technics. Zorn's Game Pieces suspend and instrumentalise agency by degrees rather than aim at its complete subversion. They force the musician and the composer into an active listening for new sonic potential with which to improvise. They force the musician to re-occupy an unfolding present, no longer organised and potentialised as an already emerging (possible) future. The Tzadik (Zorn's record label) record sleeve blurb describes one of the earliest (and most difficult to listen to) Game Pieces, Hockey (1978) in these terms;

By limiting each improviser’s personal language to five sounds and carrying them through a complex structure of solos, duos and trios, Hockey forces its interpreters to focus on timing, economy and context.

[[Zorn2002]]

Hockey's 'limiting' also forces a very constrained instrumentation - mostly wind instruments reduced to their mouthpieces.

While Hockey is an interesting prototype for its formal interventions in instrumentation, palette, and temporal anticipation - the results make for difficult listening. In the later complex (and more musically interesting) Game Pieces, such as Cobra (1994), the role and agency of the composer as a kind of improvising 'referee' of the unfolding game becomes central to how the instance or performance of the piece unfolds. Cobra (1994) takes the form of an elaborate set of cards, gestures and rules wielded by the conductor/composer. These cards, gestures and rules invite specific styles of contribution and interaction. They allow for the capture and recall of emergent themes and interactions, and for their recombination and development. They also constantly subvert any pretence to anticipation, habit, or established phrasing by making the length of any contribution subject to immanent interruption.

Cobra also introduces themes and dynamics of contest and sport between musicians, who compete musically for control over the developing piece. These elements divest the composer themselves of control over the developing improvisation. Zorn is quite adamant that the only authorised version of a Game Piece is one that he himself conducts and Cobra was never officially published as a written piece (Indeed Zorn has railed against 'unauthorised' distribution and performance of Cobra). The principal artefacts of Cobra are the performances and recordings it produces (not the written forms, rules or cards). This might be read as an attempt not to delimit or reduce the piece to the cards and rules alone - to assert the act of improvisation itself, realised between musician and composer, as the act and primary site of composition.

The Game Pieces offer an interesting microcosm of the (human) technical dynamic. The Game Pieces deliberately inhibit the rehearsal of existing and generic structures and habits, while allowing the style (the difference) of individual musicians and their instruments to remain available to composition/conduction. Some of the Game Pieces disrupt the standard configuration of their instruments. Some of them restrict the palette of that instrument to preselected sounds that resist their practiced instrumentality. Some of them limit the tendencies realised between musician and instrument to establish or resolve to modal centres and structures. At the same time this is not necessarily microtonal or noise music which invents completely new instruments, scales and musics.

The Game Pieces evoke and interrupt, break and blend, technical phyla in the interest of realising novel and emergent continuities within and between exisiting phyla (as much as outside of them) 2. They do so by interrupting any rehearsed continuity in the service of realising new sonic and expressive potential between bodies and between bodies and instruments. In this sense they understand that new form, new technical potential, new sonic possibilities, require a determined and technical opening onto a previously unrealised potential between body and world.

The Game Pieces demonstrate an understanding that technical novelty requires a suspension of a technical continuity that as Stiegler describes constitute 'all possibility of a future'. New compositional and sonic futures necessarily require the realisation of new technical phyla (Stiegler's epiphylogenesis 3). Zorn as the composer and conductor of the Game Pieces builds a technical ensemble that places both he and his musicians back into the 'fold of experience', in the service of realising new affective and expressive possibilities ([[Massumi2022]]). As they realise these new possibilities, the game pieces also realise the potential for new sonic technics, new anticipations and assemblage of sounds, forms, genres and materials. New 'possibilities of a future'.

1 (Note to self: Stiegler is probably redrafting Heidegger from Being and Time who defines Dasein as the 'horizon of all possibility', Stiegler proposes the invention of technics as the horizon of all possibility/anticipation not first a Being in time but a relation that constitutes time - need to dig further into this though)

2 Phyla is the plural form of phylum - Stiegler (via Simondon) borrows these terms from biology as a means of describing the 'evolution' of technical affordances within technical systems. In musical terms the vibrating reed provides the evolution of particular class of instruments.

3 Stiegler is much concerned with 'epiphylogenesis' - the dynamic that propels the genesis of new technical phyla as a function of an anxiety regarding the autonomy of the subject realised between body and world.