Behind the Mirror
If at night I perceive a ghost before my bed, that ghost takes care not to expose me to too much information — for instance by cosily sitting down on the edge of the bed and starting a little chat about the weather. It knows better than that. Any self-respecting ghost keeps its distance and remains vague. — Dick Raaijmakers, Raster 19, 1981 — [pp. 16–17]
In recent weeks Samuel Vriezen has posted a considerable number of tracks online from his Fantasias for 31 voices, algorithmically composed with the aid of the programming language C++.
I have listened to several of them. It feels like a remarkable and grandiose project, yet I cannot immediately arrive at a clear and consistent judgement, above all because the medium in which it is written is almost entirely unfamiliar to me. How should one listen to this?
This text therefore cannot lead to an adequate description of the work, let alone to a definitive artistic judgement. Rather, it is an attempt to discover how such a judgement might be possible: what difficulties arise in the process? I will take as my point of departure the criteria I described in The Artistic Judgement, namely the different judgements of taste formulated by Immanuel Kant — the ‘personal’ and the ‘universal’ — together with the criteria developed within them: concept, consistency, and above all, in the present case, context.
When I listen to an unfamiliar work by Johann Sebastian Bach, without a score, my musical training nevertheless allows me to form a reasonably accurate mental image of that score. With the Fantasias this is not possible. I can form only a general idea of the ‘score’: a file written in computer language in which fixed and variable parameters are used. I imagine that the project contains an experimental element; while working on the different Fantasias, Vriezen will gradually have gained greater control over the musical processes. Yet the specific variables involved largely escape me. For that reason my judgement moves on thin ice.
The first track I listened to was Fantasia No. 24 — Lullaby, Adrift. It stood at the top of the list I received by email. What immediately strikes one is the sound: it is digital, and the acoustic space of live-performed music is absent. However ingeniously and finely constructed the sound may be, to my ear it has something tinny about it. The same applied to the other tracks I listened to. I find this problematic — although one might argue that such a judgement belongs to the realm of personal taste.
Another difficulty concerns the ending of a note, something that is especially noticeable in monophonic passages. A good example is Fantasia No. 1 — Noon (for Hannah), the second track I listened to. The opening of the track — a monophonic ‘theme’ — ends with several isolated notes that stop abruptly. The notes simply cease, without even the slightest trace of reverberation, as though a switch had been turned off.
I suspect this is a fundamental characteristic of synthetic — and electronic — sound. In a live-played note both the beginning and the ending receive special treatment; they are, as it were, celebrated. When an electronically produced note stops, by contrast, nothing follows. A gap remains. In acoustic music that gap is shaped and cared for; it forms part of the musical expression.
This raises the question whether the problem is related to the absence of acoustic space in electronic music. Once the music becomes polyphonic, the issue is partly masked. Both Fantasia No. 24 and Fantasia No. 1 also end with a fade-out. It sounds as though this is applied artificially, for instance by gradually lowering the master volume. Yet this too may well be part of the program that generates the music; I cannot judge that.
— § —
I was reminded of Dick Raaijmakers when, in 1981, in an interview by Elmer Schönberger and J. F. Vogelaar in the journal Raster [no. 19], he used the term ‘mirroring’ in connection with Karlheinz Stockhausen. The latter’s music, he said, is situated ‘behind the mirror’. Technologically constructed music has a problematic relationship with acoustic music. That is not in itself a value judgement, of course, but it is an artistic judgement: not in the sense of ‘good’ or ‘bad’, but in the sense of a quality or condition.
Vriezen writes the following about one of his tracks, namely Fantasia No. 30 — Intermezzo (To Brahms):
“The pure fifth is the single fixed harmonic element that I feed to my program; all the other intervals are built by the algorithm around that starting point. In this piece, the outcome is a theme of falling thirds, reminiscent of Brahms’s wonderful Intermezzo Op. 119, no. 1, and so I understand the program to have intended this one as a homage. […] Admittedly, Brahms is a vastly more subtle composer than my code is; which is both his strength and, perhaps, his limitation.”
Is Vriezen here also referring to the sound as such — the absence of acoustic space? In that respect, Raaijmakers formulated the matter as follows forty-five years ago in the interview in Raster:
“The sounds of a computer emerging from loudspeakers are to a high degree source-less; that is why all computer compositions, without exception, sound the same. When a computer tape is started, what comes from the loudspeakers resembles the unwanted release of radioactive radiation in a reactor centre. It simply does not do — one feels that a computer ought not to inform listeners but computers. In the now somewhat old-fashioned tape music — including the Cologne and the Parisian — the sound is intended for the human ear: it is literally directed towards it. With computer music the ear is more or less forced to listen through a sort of composer’s stethoscope. Such a medical posture does not belong in a concert hall — but rather in the closed circuit of a computer studio. There, on an academic level, the production of sounds and of compositional constructions is refined. The only danger is that these activities are so strongly fed back into themselves that the presentation of the results can take place only in the context of conferences — only then does one listen to them. Performances of computer music thus become something like delivering lectures about what one has discovered in the studio.” [pp. 25–26]
And further on:
“If you materialise music in the direction of the scientific, the technical, you leave living music behind you — whether you intend to or not — stone by stone, and inevitably you arrive at that single remaining element, that single tone, and that tone is the disembodied sine tone. That tone is pure result, in which no musical action has needed to take place.” [p. 44]
Starting from the ‘source-less’ sine tone, which requires no musical action, two options remain for Raaijmakers. The first possibility is that one takes a further step and allows that tone to disappear into a black hole, unreachable for our ears. One then remains stuck there.
“The other possibility is that you decide to break through it: straight through that sine tone. What then begins to take place — and this is comparable to the image of the Aleph in Jorge Luis Borges — is that the whole thing is constructed again, but in mirrored form. A kind of reconstruction of a mirrored musical world populated by performers, scores, spaces, improvisation, counterpoint, melodies — the whole paraphernalia. A kind of dream image of a gravity-free, truly spatial music, in which the notion of space surpasses our acoustic space. A space that is in the first place composed, and made audible by organising the musical material in such a way that it can revolve both in the notation and in space like planets around the sun.” [p. 44]
Is the solution to the problems I have identified to be found here, in this space? If so, this would mean that the perspective of context must be examined.
— § —
One of Dick Raaijmakers’s key concepts is what he calls formation [slagorde], a term that belongs to the domain of context.
“[…] formation is a framework, a model that maps the division of tasks involved in thinking about music, producing music, reading scores, the copyright circuit, concert halls, audiences, programme notes, the sound of instruments, and so forth. Within this model one can travel from bottom to top or the other way round. One can take side roads, literally place oneself aside — as I have often done — or conceive of it as a constellation: a machinery that produces and consumes art.” [p. 30]
In order to evaluate the context of Vriezen’s Fantasias, this mirrored landscape described by Raaijmakers must be examined more closely. Writing in 1981 — which should not be forgotten — he attempts to cast a glance into the future.
“If one wishes to summarise it roughly, the nineteen-sixties were characterised, in my view, by interactions, and the seventies by a collective sense of values that must be earned and carefully maintained — values that have nothing to do with virtuously produced music but everything with the care of the once-generated music during performances in halls in the presence of an audience prepared and attuned to such care. In other words, the years of the environmentally critical attitude. The years, too, that prepare the return of the well-constructed message, which will take shape in the eighties: years of a new classical music, complete with opera. One then waits for a new Wagner; perhaps we shall just live to see him. The new Schönberg is for our children. Xenakis plays no role in all this; he is the Carel Briels of modern music, the director of mass spectacles, who unfortunately remains one storey too low with his organisations of sound and light and will not escape from there, however pleadingly Jan Vriend may call him upwards to the floor of musical language. No, we shall have to wait for a new Schönberg — there is simply no helping it.” [p. 41]
One resemblance with our own time lies in that ‘collective sense of values that must be earned and carefully maintained’ of the nineteen-seventies. This is the subject of the present moment, with the neoliberal dismantling by governments of systems of care, of cultural policy, and with the climate crisis as a painful witness. Perhaps the Intermezzo by Johannes Brahms to which Vriezen refers points toward Raaijmakers’s ‘new Schönberg’. Fantasia No. 30 was the third track I listened to, and I found it phenomenal — a leap forward compared with the other tracks. Is that because Vriezen ‘borrowed’ material from Brahms in some way that for the moment remains unclear to me? Has something from the original source of the mirrored landscape quietly slipped in here?
Yet the immediate question is whether this does not also have something improper about it. The ending appears, as I argued earlier, like that of Fantasia No. 24, to have been constructed with an imposed fade-out. If my proposition is correct — that tones in digitally produced music do not possess an articulated beginning or ending in the way tones in acoustic music do — then such a fade-out is contrived. A pastiche, and therefore inauthentic. It would then not be ‘earned’.
— § —
Let me first examine this notion of formation (slagorde) more closely, to see whether it yields further insights. A fundamental issue within this formation is the role of technology in art. Dick Raaijmakers begins by observing that industry — and, by extension, technology — is relatively insignificant. The technical supply available to music, particularly in instrument building during the first half of the twentieth century, is largely anecdotal and based on “vague ghostly images”. Only with the appearance of magnetic audio tape did technology emerge with which composers could actually work. The formation shifted. Serial composers such as Herbert Eimert, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Karel Goeyvaerts were able to develop with it an entirely new musical praxis, one without precedent.
“With these new techniques the composer could withdraw into a laboratory atmosphere in order to begin composing TIME and SOUND. With the magnetic tape he virtually stops time: he can literally take time. On the basis of numerical series determined by compositional procedures he can stack sine tones just as a child stacks blocks. He can materialise these accumulations on tape, whereby that materiality stands in a direct interaction with composing as an action, as a deed. In this way the composer works and listens in his laboratory within a time that is entirely different from the time in which the final result will ultimately be heard. The most important point is that the composer has been able to show the instrument maker — and above all the performing interpreter with metronome and baton and all — the door. For the first time in centuries of music history he is completely alone with a music that he himself has brought into sound.” [p. 18]
The problem that nevertheless arose here was that, with the focus on sound, composing “descends several storeys” in order to arrive at that sound.
“[The composer] has left his floor of language and descended to the realm of sounding speech — also an interesting component of music, but of a lower order. Mastery of language is, evolutionarily speaking, on a higher level than mastery of sound: the former encompasses the latter, not the other way round. A composer who decides to concern himself with sound therefore lowers his status and develops regressively. He has leapt over the performer, eliminated him, and becomes a kind of caveman forging his own tools.” [p. 30]
The next tracks I listened to were the longest and the shortest: Fantasia No. 130 — Frost, the highest number in the list and also the longest in duration, just over twenty minutes; and Fantasia No. 61 — Multiball!!!, lasting a little over four minutes.
In Frost the harmonic subject is dissonance. What I do not hear, however, is its harmonic meaning. In harmony two elements are at play: the ‘vertical’ sonority as such, and the succession of different sonorities. The first I hear, but the significance of the second escapes me. Perhaps because I myself am too ‘frozen’ within the framework of classical harmony and the acoustic musical practice?
In Multiball!!! I hear — certainly in comparison with Frost — a greater number of notes sounding within a short span of time. Yet this has little to do with ‘speed’. In my ears I seldom, if ever, hear speed in electronic music, because this music seems to freeze time. Even electronic music based on a rapid beat remains slow in my perception. Speed is not the same as tempo.
— § —
The following questions now present themselves:
- Do Vriezen’s Fantasias exist behind the mirror?
- Does the medium of playback run via the headphones of one’s computer at home? Or does a performance in a concert hall also belong among the possibilities?
- Is the decision to base the procedure of Fantasia No. 30 on Johannes Brahms an attempt to break back through the mirror?
- Is that the reason why this track appeals to me so strongly?
Ad 1. I do indeed believe that the Fantasias are situated behind the mirror, and I am convinced that Raaijmakers would have thought so as well. But is such a view still regarded as relevant today? I have my doubts. The neoliberal adage anything goes seems to have planted its nihilistic effect quite effectively in the world. My view will probably be regarded by many as merely ‘personal’; the ‘universal validity’ of the judgement of taste proposed by Kant is widely rejected.
Yet such an attitude is problematic. When the artistic context of musical conception and production no longer matters, a fundamental element disappears from the artistic act. Fundamental criticism is replaced by the mere having of an opinion. What makes this indifference all the more remarkable is that the political context is still taken very seriously. Criteria concerning gender, inclusion, diversity, cultural governance, and entrepreneurship are — at least among policymakers — held in high esteem. But how can one detach a political context from an artistic one? Artists who legitimise such an attitude by participating in it, thereby implicitly enabling these policies, fail to take themselves seriously.
Ad 2. The computer at home or the concert hall? To quote Allan Kaprow: “There is no essential difference between a Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin painting hung in a museum and a Frank Stella painting hung in a museum. Similarly, there is no essential difference between the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in a concert hall and the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen in a concert hall.” It is a choice, between what Kaprow calls artlike art and lifelike art in the text The Real Experiment. But that choice is not, as far as I am concerned, a neutral one.
Ad 3 & 4. Breaking back through the mirror — that is what I myself would do. And with that, question four is also answered, namely in the affirmative. That might label me a conservative nostalgist, but that would be an all too comfortable error of thought. I am not attempting to project the listening conventions I have learned onto these Fantasias. I am genuinely curious to discover other ways of listening.
It is far too early to arrive at an adequate artistic judgement of Vriezen’s Fantasias, but that I regard it — as already indicated — as a remarkable and grandiose project is beyond doubt. The most important issue we must bring to bear in our capacity for judgement is the question of what we might lose behind the mirror.
“Perhaps true art is art precisely because it shows what a person does not lose when someone paints him or when someone makes music. When four people play a string quartet nothing is stolen; rather, an immaterial quality is added — a quality at which understanding falters. And that added element, that quality, is not a commodity. It becomes a commodity only when one makes gramophone records of it.” [pp. 56–57]
— § —
This brings me to the following Faustian anecdote, originating with Dick Raaijmakers, though I know it second-hand; Paul Koek told it to me, many years ago now. In my paraphrase:
“One day the Devil comes to us — to Man — and asks whether we are satisfied with the state of technology. Yes, we are very satisfied: tape recorders, television, computers, speakers, toasters — all splendid. ‘But,’ says the Devil, ‘it could be so much better. What would you say to spaces in which music can sound without speakers, the space itself functioning as the speaker? And the flat image of television screens could be replaced by three-dimensional projections in space, indistinguishable from reality. Would you like that?’ Man asks anxiously: ‘What would that cost? I surely cannot afford it.’ The Devil replies that it can indeed be done; the price is high, but it can be paid. ‘How?’ asks Man. ‘You give me everything you possess,’ answers the Devil. So it is done. Man’s life becomes infinitely more comfortable with all this new technology. A year later the Devil visits Man again and asks whether he is satisfied. Yes, replies Man, it is wonderful. ‘Good,’ says the Devil, ‘but what you now have is nothing; it could be unimaginably better. The most exquisite dishes delivered directly onto your plate by computer. The three-dimensional projections accompanied by scents. Medical treatments and medication applied online in your home.’ ‘But what would that cost?’ Man asks in despair. ‘After all, I have already given you everything I possessed.’ The Devil then says: ‘The price is that you will never again be able to have it back in your possession.’ — ‘That day,’ says Raaijmakers, ‘I would give anything to live to see it.’”
— Cornelis de Bondt, 6 maart 2026