Admitting interests

Abstract

Abstract The pioneers of musical indeterminacy—John Cage, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown, and Christian Wolff—emphasised how their innovations offered emancipation to performers, an emancipation achieved by leaving many aspects of the realisation of their compositions unfixed or ambiguous. At the same time, these composers’ interest in kinds of non-intentionality led to the elaboration of an ethic of performance that entailed significant constraint upon performers’ pursuit of their own inclinations. Claude Lefort’s philosophical writings on the indeterminacy of democracy offer a means to evaluate these conflicting tendencies within musical indeterminacy. Lefort’s proposition that democracy consists of both the essential ‘disincorporation’ of society, and individuals’ attempts to reincorporate it, leads to an account of the practice of musical indeterminacy that stresses not ascetic disinterest but rather the assembly of multiple competing interests, and a consequent ‘institutionalisation of conflict’.