Krzysztof Penderecki and Form

Reflection on Krzysztof Penderecki's Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima and Polymorphia played by the AUKSO Orchestra:
The same questions about form arise here.
Penderecki pushes the boundaries of musical form as he explores the boundary between music and noise.
At what point does noise become music and music noise? What is musical form?
This You Tube video is a perfect illustration: a 5.33 minute clip of the 9.13 minute Polymorphia. The last 27 seconds are vital to this illustration - as indeed are the preceding 5.07 minutes.

What is also illustrated in this clip is the extent of the musicians' creativity, as well as the composer's.
Quote from Penderecki:
"The problem for all composers, not only for me, is that we have to use instruments which were built 300 years ago, or 200 years ago. In the century of the great discovery, landing on the moon and so on, we still have to write for very old instruments, museum instruments, really. It became really the problem in the second half of the 20th century, that there is not much progress because of the lack of the instruments."
Using these traditional, conventional instruments, Penderecki probes the expanse of creativity with scores that ask his orchestra to use their 'tools' in unconventional ways, to push their own creativity to the limit to the same extent as he probes his.

Supreme creativity brought about by the exploration of form; form brought about by the exploration of creativity (the latter being contemporary form, as in 'of its time').

Elaboration on 無作為 - 無我 / 空

A further comment from IW, responding to the previous post:

... the word 'unself-conscious' might well describe the process which Japanese pottery tries to achieve.

... I forgot to tell you about how we (Japanese people) are influenced by Buddhism thought in everyday life without knowing, but especially for pottery, it was developed from tea ceremony pots and tea ceremony itself is based on Zen Buddhism. 

So ... it's easier to describe the purpose of achieving 無作為 with the Buddhism word ’無我’which means 'no-self' or 'no-ego', or '空’ which means 'emptiness' or 'nothing'.  In Buddhism, it is said that when we reach this state, we can reach 'unity' or 'oneness' and this is the ultimate goal of this life. 

So, I might be able to say that what my pottery master was trying to achieve through his flower vase was this.

I think this is quite different from Western 'individuality' based achievement, so I always feel that it is difficult to explain this and to have a good understanding of it in England, but anyway, this is our deep basis of art or any other discipline form.

Further Comment from DH - in response to 作為 and 無作為

...  Interesting to see what someone said about Japanese pottery.
I was lent a book by Bernard Leach a while ago ... (The Unknown Craftsmen: Japanese Insight into Beauty) which is partly about Japanese pottery and the way the most highly valued tea ceremony pots are ones that have that quality of having come about through a process of suspending the intellect, achieved most masterfully by Korean potters so unself-conscious within their daily work that the hand produces it naturally.
I think it's the same point your contributor makes  -  how to intentionally achieve intuitive expressive naturalness. How to achieve seemingly effortless mastery.

In contrast to that, I read somewhere that Duchamp, known and subsequently misrepresented for using his freshly discovered language to try to annoy the pumped up industrialists as he put it, later on criticised various of the post-war American artists who had been busy trying to find ways forward for their post-European culture for having a language but not saying anything with it, as if they, like him should become more culturally intellectual. Which is one way to think about it. ...

He never produced very much after his intial outburst, and I wonder whether in the absence of suitable patronage the primary thing that maintains production is the pursuit of language, of furthering understanding of how it all works. Although considering the somewhat two-faced anti-capitalist attitude of many artists, maybe it's better to hide within such searches and pretend obscurity so as to avoid patronage, or at least to be able to be sneakily subversive at the same time. 

Perhaps the skill is to be able to say nothing and in so doing reveal everything.

Comment by JV

Comment from JV:

This question goes to the heart of not only art but communication and the psychological development of each individual.  In the world of art parameters have to be set.  Too much chaos and the Child (the observer) is frightened away and will not bond or try to understand the language that is set before them.  But if there seems to be a clear framework and against that an experiment is set in place where chance is allowed then the observer has a way in.
In two dimensional art there are several ways of setting these parameters.
The spectrum or number of colours used, the understood conventions of composition, the variety of materials used can be the framework.

The world of ancient Egyptian art had very definite parameters set and maintained by the priesthood and any contravention spelt trouble as Akenaten subsequently found when those parameters were broken.  Other civilisations also had stylistic languages that can be readily seen with the benefit of hindsight.  Styles will evolve usually slowly but in the world of art that occurred rapidly at the beginning of the 20th Century.

Many have blamed Freud for this but the demise of the Church as a political force, the growth of mass produced goods and above all the belief that the common man had a right to sort (or not sort) his own life saw an explosion in the numbers of languages that were then used by artists.  Art had become democratic.  It was no longer a highly skilled apprenticeship relying on the patronage of the church or state.  Backyards, garrets, scruffy studios became the focus of attention and pilgrimage as artists set about the business of how to communicate.  Wealthy patrons crossed the Atlantic or came out of Russia and somehow understood or wanted to understand these revolutionary ways of communicating.  The seer could be a painter, a dance choreographer, an architect, a designer or a composer.  Riots broke out in Paris after the Rite of Spring was first performed. The Fuaves (or Wild Beasts) were breaking through rules of the use of colour. Schoenberg was breaking the rules of the octave.

The resulting hammer blow that shattered the predictable world that had been run by church and state was to be taken over by a new kid on the block, the wealthy entrepreneur who could travel. Mass communication allowed the dissemination of images and art galleries have become the new temples.  Ordinary people try and work out how other ordinary people tick.

This may not be a conscious process. Images may haunt or remind at a subliminal level.  The beast in each one of us has been given licence to express. But to do that we have to come from a psychologically secure base; the boringly predictable parental framework and only then can we find the energy to rebel.  Too much chaos and insecurity and the Child will never feel free to explore and experiment.

That is the drama that is re-enacted every time there is an artistic hammer hitting the crystalline rock of predictability.  It happens with each individual and it happens to whole populations. That is the drama that is tapped into when we stand in front of Jackson Pollock and realise there is no Golden Section and I could be floating in space.  The genie is out of the bottle and can not be put back.

On 'Form' - What is Form?

To my question 'What is Form?' posted back in November 2011 - the very first question, which started this whole process of inquiry going - an insight, taken from 'What is Art? Conversation with Joseph Beuys' (what a discovery! It was like a coming-home):
"... Another exercise addressed the experience of form: from the forest we fetched arm-length sticks, perhaps forty of them, sat down - as the room itself necessitated - in an oval, and started to lay these sticks down, one after another, in the enclosed floor area created by our group. Each time another stick was added we tried to observe carefully whether anything changed in our feelings and experience, and what direction this change took. From time to time each person sat in a different place. This made it possible to see that the way in which this person perceived the detailed relationships between things was by no measn independent of his or her physical position. Rather, it was always connected with the way in which the emergent form related to each person, who, in turn, became a kind of axis of symmetry in relation to the plane in front of him/her. There arose a right-left relationship, a distant-close, or above-below relationship. The more precisely we observed, the more clearly we felt the strong and differentiated way in whch the developing composition affected us. Once almost all the sticks had ben used, and the composition came to its conclusion, we tried to see which of the sticks had most influence on the form or composition, and which could perhaps be dispensed with. We therefore continuted the exercise by continually trying out different things: taking one or other stick away whilst carefully noting whether the quality of the composition was reduced or even enhanced. This was a stimulating exercise, for much that had been positioned in the finished form perhaps somewhat unthinkingly and arbitrarily, and had only apparent importance, triggered a general sense of relief as it was withdrawn again. ...
... When is what we have created satisfactory, and for what reason?"