Maximilian Marcoll created the word amproprification by blending “appropriation” and “amplification”. Irish audiences will be able to find out exactly what that sounds like when the German composer’s work is performed at the Music Current festival this month – but, given that his work Amproprification VI includes a complete, unaltered live performance of one of the glories of Renaissance choral music, Palestrina’s Missa Papae Marcelli, you can see where he’s going.
Marcoll, who was born in Lübeck, on the Baltic coast of northern Germany, is an overtly politically engaged composer. Among the issues he has addressed in his work are social imbalances and music as a tool of torture for prisoners. In 2017 the outdoor Berlin premiere of his Adhan: Tripartite Appropriation, which was due to be performed on the Whitsun weekend, was cancelled. Marcoll wanted “to symbolically interweave three religions in one gesture: on an originally Jewish holiday, the adhan – the muezzin’s call to prayer – sounds from a tower", accompanied by a carillon of bells.
The cancellation was for fear of an attack by Islamists. In response Marcoll issued a handout in which he said: “My frustration about the cancelled premiere is great, but it is less a personal and artistic disappointment than a social defeat. In my opinion, the self-censorship now being implemented here is premature obedience, a cowardly ducking of a controversial topic, and, unfortunately, a clear victory for the opponents of pluralism.”
The political engagement started at the end of his time at Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen. He had the “unfair” thought that he and his friends “were all bloody cowards, in the sense that there were things happening outside our window, and what we were doing had nothing to do whatsoever with what was going on around us. I found this so extremely cowardly that I had to find ways to change that, for myself at least. I guess that was the beginning of my engagement with politics in artistic contexts.”
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The idea for his Amproprifications works, he explains, “came from thoughts about intellectual property, the whole idea of invention, and things like that. I really like the idea of being a composer writing pieces which don’t just sound on their own. In the Amproprifications there’s literally not a single sound – we don’t even need to use the term invention here – that comes out of my pen. There’s literally 100 per cent sounds by other composers. I take a step back and am only present in creating — another arguable term — this kind of filtration grid, whatever you might call it, that is kind of superimposed on the original.”
The performers of the Palestrina, the Irish vocal ensemble Tonnta, live in a separate universe from the electronic manipulations he will apply to their singing, “from almost inaudibly slow fadings to extremely fast and brutal chopping”.
All of this, he says, was “maybe just a consequential step leading on from thoughts about intellectual property and the role of electronics. And also about thinking about archives and how we deal with them –ways of reviving pieces that are already there and using them as material. The notion of ‘material’ implies that it’s something unfinished or something that has to be prepared, like in cuisine, in cooking – a carrot can never be a meal on its own; it has to be prepared.
“The idea is to take an entire piece as material, and not change it in any way. This is something that really turned me on: material not as something unfinished or something that has to be created first. If you think about wood, wood is not just there. It needs to be created by cutting down trees and chopping them up. Material is something that is unfinished but cultivated. And then going a step further and saying, ‘No, I’ll take an entire piece, and this is my material.’ Something that is already art in its entirety.”
Outside of the Amproprifications, “it’s a completely different story. I like writing series of pieces. In one series, called Compounds, the material was recordings of my everyday life. In the Nut/Lac series, one of which is going to be premiered at the festival, it’s very, very slow pulses.”
What does Marcoll think of artificial intelligence? He quotes the title of a short article he wrote for a German music magazine, “Insights after the end of a creative relationship”.
“So, yes, I have used it in a piece. And maybe this will change in the future: never say never, right? But at the moment I’m really not interested. Because it’s not hackable. I finally found out why I don’t like to work with it.”
What he particularly enjoys is “taking very, very, very simple applications and trying to twist them and create something unexpected out of them. From a technological point of view, what I do in the Amproprifications is one of the simplest things you can possibly do using electronics. It’s just amplitude modulation. You push up the fader and you turn it back down. Such a simple thing. It could have been done in the 1950s, even earlier. I like things that are outdated and using them to show that we actually haven’t understood what this stuff can do. I’m sceptical and suspicious about the newest hype when it comes to technology.
“The weird thing with AI is that what happens inside of it is and will always remain a black box. There’s no way that we can go inside and change things in a way that we can understand. Even the programmers who create these models, they themselves cannot go in there, because that’s the idea of it. The idea is that it is a self-organising network that is trained with data and behaves in a certain way. But we cannot go into the circuits and change things in a way that we know what’s going to happen afterwards. You cannot read it and you cannot manipulate it in any meaningful way. It’s a complete black box, and for me this makes it completely uninteresting.
“I can use AI tools. I have nothing against occasional help from a capable assistant. But from a creative point of view, for me at the moment, I’m not interested. I did one piece for big band and small orchestra where we fed the machine with jazz-trio arrangements from the 1960s. I got out lots of really sick jazzy kind of things. I like to play with it and create the broken cliche-of-cliches kind of things. And for that piece it kind of worked. But at the moment I don’t feel an intrinsic interest in dealing with this entity that is completely closed and opaque.”
Marcoll makes an analogy with genetics. “The eureka moment was when humans decoded DNA for the first time. If you want to know which gene is responsible for what function or what part of our body, it’s like a trial-and-error procedure, and it takes forever to understand what is responsible for what.
“Imagine doing that with a DNA that is changing every second. Because that’s the idea of the AI. You have a network that is learning and is completely different in each instance. Every time I teach it something new this network is going to be completely different.
“Hacking in this sense would mean you go in there and decipher all the genes in this vast sequence and decipher which parameter in the liminal space is responsible for what function. This is not human readable code any more, where you can identify that this number here should be something else.”
Does he worry about AI in relation to creative activity? “I don’t feel threatened. On the contrary, in a way I feel liberated. This is going to sound mean, but from my aesthetic standpoint a composer can only feel threatened by AI if they haven’t really been creative in the first place. You know what I mean?
“The same is true for any art, I think. If the understanding of the artistic self is limited to rearranging formulas or established means of expression in tiny little bits – call it musical material, call it composition of images or whatever – then this can be automated by AI and we don’t actually need those composers to produce this stuff any more.
“The one thing that AI cannot do is think outside of the box – literally, because it’s trapped in it. It is its own prison. And the way I understand my job is to break as many bars of these kind of prisons as I possibly can. Meaning my job is to think about what music can be apart from what it already is. Not reproducing ways of what we know music is and music has already been. That’s not my job. That is boring. What excites me is to think of what other paths of musical experience can we create.”
Music Current contemporary music festival runs from Tuesday, April 22nd, to Saturday, April 26th, at Project Arts Centre and other venues in Temple Bar, Dublin. Maximilian Marcoll’s works are played by the Pony Says Trio on Thursday, April 24th, and by Tonnta on Friday, April 25th; Marcoll is giving an afternoon talk on Thursday, April 24th
