What would a distinction between montage and collage look like today?
The ever-growing emergence of fast forms in the musical world (by “fast forms” we may mean that which is quickly made, quickly structured, quickly consumed, and quickly forgotten) presents us, under the guise of a continuous flow, with an apologia for collage as a synthesis of the guiding movements of 20th-century art. Collage, as such, becomes a vehicle for uniting audiences and genres, under the imagined (and probably imaginary) blessing of the greatest references: Cage, Artaud, Godard, Stravinsky...
Through electronics, DJs’ fingers mix, unmix, corrupt, and fracture just about anything, offering us a supposedly “new” vision of complex notions like polyphony and rhythm, all with a startling adaptability to space! One can read a recent interview with DJ Spooky, where he concludes: no, he won’t play the same way in a club as in a concert hall. For him, music, in its seductive function (let’s talk about money—that way we don’t have to pretend to believe in it), must change its skin, its outfit. He even compares his new activity as a fashion designer to that of Xenakis, the architect of music!
For not only are DJs like Spooky sometimes painfully omnipresent, but some elevate them to the highest level of creation, presenting them as the heirs of the electronic movements of the '50s and '60s (Henry, Schaeffer, Stockhausen).
What’s magical about collage is that with the right glue, it sticks—it clings and dares to reinvent history. One only has to stick a piece of the Eiffel Tower, St. Peter’s Basilica, and the Altamira caves together to declare oneself a cyber-architect of the 21st century. Invention would be reduced to this: grabbing bits of material from here and there, endlessly churning them into a kind of babble that ultimately leads nowhere. From poster-paster to sound-paster, it’s only a step—one sound can easily drown out another, with no awareness of what remains immutable in what we call musical spaces: time.
And so, with endless mixing and manipulation—praised in endlessly sophisticated terms by ever-inventive commentators (let us here praise Ikeda’s sine waves, whose main function seems to have been to deafen their creator and occasionally his audience—before marveling at the fact that this now-deaf man is writing for string orchestra; surely this will be hailed as the renewal of electronic music thought... the height of absurdity! Soon, these new glue-sticks will invade the instrumental field...)—we’ll soon be blissfully swimming in a soup that is endlessly seasoned with the same old tricks (just in case…): a beat. Simple but effective.
Let me be clear—I am not here to take potshots at the entire world of electronic music. That would be both pretentious and obscurantist. No, what I want to question—not deny, but relativize—is the overflow, the increasingly ridiculous preciousness surrounding this music, while elsewhere—and that’s the problem—another kind of music is dying. It's victim to every accusation thrown at it: it's not profitable, it's outdated, performed by "uncool" musicians, it has lost its audience—in short, it's going extinct. And so, in bursts that are often tempting but generally pathetic, we see lifelines thrown (many contemporary music festivals are attempting to integrate electronic musicians into their programming), in the name of some supposed necessary freshness—when in reality, it often means one thing: music is vanishing (and trying to “seduce” the audience won’t solve that).
Thus, today’s art of collage stands in contrast to its original plastic arts definition: where once scattered elements could form, like a puzzle, the realization of an idea, a space, a vision, collage now fills our ears with an increasingly diluted liquid, as if disembodied...
Montage (Editing) is something else entirely. "To edit"—a term born in cinema but which, even etymologically (montage from Latin montare), denotes upward movement: to go up. And there we are, at the heart of it—the idea that art is perhaps the struggle to rise, to surpass oneself, to go beyond—oneself first and foremost, and only rarely others. And let’s stop saying that the divide between popular and "art" music no longer exists. If the effort to rise to the occasion at every moment—uncompromisingly, radically, with one’s entire being focused on this upward drive—means we’re labeled as “academic,” then so be it. The divide is real—it’s not a value judgment on individuals, but on systems. Those who advocate for flattening that distinction (like DJ Spooky) do so with total ignorance of what underpins their production: money. That’s it.
Systems don’t make exceptions (just look at how contemporary philosophers perceive the disappearance of myths and the coming void). Unless we no longer care—about History, about the labor of thought that liberates both speaker and listener...
Montage also has its place in music. To “mount (edit)” sounds, phrases, gestures—not just placing them end to end (even if the '50s tape splicing suggested that), but to entrust them with the profound responsibility of making meaning in every possible perspective, as long as that perspective tries for something more than just seduction.
Montage can give rise to numerous paradigms. Rhythm, in my opinion, is a major one. It’s already central in Eisenstein, who sees in his conflicting sequences (see Theory of Attractions) the opportunity to structure time. To rhythm time at multiple scales (Stockhausen’s concept of moment form) cannot result from cut-and-paste manipulation! With Eisenstein, whether in the service of propaganda or another ideal, time organization is the result of meticulous care, driven by attractions: constant dynamism.
Music, too, is a complex operation—a coalition of vectors that can, from the abstract to the concrete, construct meaning and/or feeling. And if we add the concept of development to montage, we undercut many of the mostly hollow attempts to appropriate musical knowledge. If montage refers to modernity, development is one of the most enduring musical essences—and rightly so. What Ars Nova expressed in 14th-century Western Europe, Gagaku, Raga, and oral traditions also carry: music is an art of time, and probably, through development, one of the most powerful means to transform its measure.
For when music becomes magical, it’s through a temporal deviation—it bends our minds, which surrender (this is also a form of participation) to invented divisions, a new chrono-logical cartography. Incorporating montage principles—borrowed from cinema, made didactic through the image—into musical development spaces is a marvelous opportunity to weave new temporal layers into memory, which can illuminate or contradict one another—proposing dialectical stakes.
This terminological conflict between collage and montage—here used as a pretext for a necessary rebellion—also stands as a metaphor for our social relationship to listening, to awakening the ear as a “tool of formidable precision” (Schaeffer). The supposedly personal playlist, the burned CD collection made at the expense of any deontology or even basic thought, the downloading—legal or not—guided by nothing more than a vague intuition... all these are raw, dripping, impermanent forms of collage.
If the act of listening mirrors the act of creating, then we’re facing an obvious poverty, whose main trait is its fleeting nature.
What if instead we tried to “mount” our memory? To offer it dynamic sequences, returns, junctions that might construct a story, whether collective or individual? To Eisenstein’s principle of montage of attractions, I would gladly add a principle of montage of sensations—where, in an ideal world, at a certain level of knowledge, we might be able to organize our sensations into forces that constantly challenge us—whether we are creators or not.
— Free Writings on Music - Pierre JODLOWSKI, 2004/2005
