Radical Experiments in Music Producing: Theory, Philosophy, Practice

(4 Credits)

Many modern music legends achieved their level of singular greatness by instinctively or intuitively making radical, left-curve artistic decisions. Think of James Brown staying on the "One"; John Cage closing the piano lid and sitting still for 4'33"; David Bowie creating lyrics through a random text generator. Miles Davis committing jazz heresy with cut-n-paste post-production techniques. In some cases, these creative decisions were so galvanizing that they irrevocably shifted entire worlds of music-making and they altered the very possibilities of artistic discourse. Many achieved this not merely by breaking convention or habit, but by some alternative philosophical stance and strategy (often called radical thinking): reimagining creative approaches and musical concepts; avoiding rules by creating new ones; embracing mistakes and inviting happenchance. This hybrid course blends writing/history/emergent media studies and production studies. The dual purpose is to serve as an introduction to a liberating creative strategy based on a philosophical stance, and an invitation to apply that philosophy to actual music-making. The course will familiarize students with a wide stylistic range of music-makers who employed radical-thinking approaches as a means to creating music, engaging with disruptive theories and/or experimenting with technologies and ideologies, from Oliver Messiaen, John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis, Archie Shepp, The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Yoko Ono, Anthony Braxton, Henry Threadgill, Brian Eno, Sun Ra, Laurie Anderson, Meshell Ndegeocello, Oneohtrix Point Never, Blood Orange, and Kanye West. Students delve into diverse histories of artistic improvisation, chance, intuition, free expression, stream of consciousness, and other approaches. Students will read work on musical freedom and risk by writers like David Borgo, David Toop, and others, as well as investigating anti-normative movements like Dadaism and Fluxus, as well as artistic practices like oblique strategies, generative music, free jazz, and the habitorium. Then—with direct guidance from the production co-instructor, a radical music creator in their own right—students will divide into teams, and the co-instructor will interact with the student teams for 3 or 4 weeks, guiding and helping to develop specific project ideas. Furthering upper-level studies in REMU classes like Experiments in the Future of Performing and Experiments in the Future of Producing, students will be encouraged to explore risky, alternative, and radically experimental avenues of artistic creation. By the end of the course, each team will have produced two or three projects—recordings, multimedia presentations, and/or performances—incorporating ideas and strategies that reflect the historical and cultural avant-garde principles they have been studying. Students will discover a vocabulary and establish a foundational understanding of the concepts and history of the topic. The final week may include a class presentation of the top project from each team, with musicians and/or industry guests commenting on each. The ultimate course goal is for students to break out of routine and create outside the box through exposure to new frameworks, through the shattering of norms and habits, and through an embrace of the unconventional, weird, the out-there.