Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde [Paperback]

Georgina Born (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 8, 1995

Anthropologist Georgina Born presents one of the first ethnographies of a powerful western cultural organization, the renowned Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) in Paris. As a year-long participant-observer, Born studied the social and cultural economy of an institution for research and production of avant-garde and computer music. She gives a unique portrait of IRCAM's composers, computer scientists, technicians, and secretaries, interrogating the effects of the cultural philosophy of the controversial avant-garde composer, Pierre Boulez, who directed the institute until 1992.
Born depicts a major artistic institution trying to maintain its status and legitimacy in an era increasingly dominated by market forces, and in a volatile political and cultural climate. She illuminates the erosion of the legitimacy of art and science in the face of growing commercial and political pressures. By tracing how IRCAM has tried to accomodate these pressures while preserving its autonomy, Born reveals the contradictory effects of institutionalizing an avant-garde.
Contrary to those who see postmodernism representing an accord between high and popular culture, Born stresses the continuities between modernism and postmodernism and how postmodernism itself embodies an implicit antagonism toward popular culture.

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

"Shows what can be learned from an in-depth study of a very remarkable cultural institution."--Paul Rabinow, author of Interpretive Social Science

"The finest application yet made of critical theory to contemporary music. . . . It would be hard to imagine a more important book."--Richard Taruskin, author of Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions

"This work, intrinsically fascinating as is the subject matter, is eminently worth consulting as a model for researchers and students of all varieties about how to produce ethnography within institutions, but on the most lively issues of culture theory."--George Marcus, coeditor of Writing Culture

From the Back Cover

"Shows what can be learned from an in-depth study of a very remarkable cultural institution." (Paul Rabinow, author of Interpretive Social Science)

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 392 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press (September 8, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520202163
• ISBN-13: 978-0520202160
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,104,735 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Informative but constantly deprecates contemporary music, July 2, 2006

By 

Christopher Culver - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde (Paperback)

RATIONALIZING CULTURE is Georgina Born's ethnographical presentation of the Institut de Recherce et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM), one of the world's foremost music research centres, located in Paris at the Centre George Pompidou. In 1984 Born, a musician-cum-ethnographer spent a year observing the institute, and this expanded version of her subsequent Ph.D thesis was published in 1995.

Fans of contemporary music--and I'm one--will be pleased to have the opportunity to learn something of the structure and day-to-day life of IRCAM. Born details the bureacratic hierarchy, the various types of employees, and the "squatters", composers entering after-hours to use the centre's equipment and hoping to be established workers there. She talks about typical visits by composers who come to be trained and to realise a piece at Ircam, and about the use of the fearsome 4X machine, IRCAM's early technological breakthrough. Born could not use real names in the preparation of her thesis, so instead people are referred to with random initials or with general attributes, but it's not particularly challenging to guess who is who. PL, the "black American composer" is Alvin Singleton, for example, and WOW is Jean-Baptiste Barriere. There are photos of IRCAM's hallways and offices, one containg a young Kaija Saariaho at work. Among the author's ethnographic themes are the phenomenon of the avant-garde (the "outsiders") becoming subsidized by the government ("the Establishment") and IRCAM's early shift from composer-scientist equality to scientists at the service of composers.

In spite of the book's informative presentative of IRCAM, it is fraught with problems. Born mixes what should be a dispassionate report about the sociology of IRCAM with her own opinions on contemporary music, which she seems to loathe immensely. Right from the beginning she writes that she left the conservatory to play in rock bands because she didn't like modern styles. In the chapter on music, while reporting the discussions of some composers on their inspirations, she even suggests that what they are doing isn't real music at all.

Throughout Born writes in such a way as to make the reader think that IRCAM is a worthless institution on the verge of being shut down. Granted, IRCAM took a while to get off the ground, and if one goes only by Born's 1984 chronicle, one might get the impression that it's not a terribly productive place. However, in the years following, many wonderful pieces came out of IRCAM, by such composers as Saariaho, Lindberg, Benjamin, and Eotvos. In 1984 all of the technology--a couple of huge servers--seems to be constantly on the fritz and without sufficient processing power for all users, but within a couple of years the centre transitioned to PCs and work gets along fine. Born does dedicate a few pages in the last chapter to later events in IRCAM, but she still ends the book in a critical fashion, not acknowledging any of the great achievements of the centre. Hand-in-hand with this are snipes at Boulez, whom Born seems to think a tyrant who holds music back instead of a benevolent dictator who has done so much to advance the art. At least there's little outright sniping at him here--on a recent radio BBC programme she accused him of "stealing" French music funds instead of really deserving them--but there is nonetheless a serious lack of respect.

If you're curious about IRCAM, I'd recommend seeking the book out at your university library. It can be informative. However, Born's bias against great music, which permeates the whole book, is infuriating and I wouldn't recommend purchasing RATIONALIZING CULTURE.

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Not a serious work - a terrible mess, March 26, 2009

By 

Zarathustra "Stimmung" (Washington, DC USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde (Paperback)

Really rather a shame. Might have been quite an interesting work if it hadn't taken the by now utterly tired "it's an elitist institution of my god I hate it" track. Everyone knows that modernism is polemical and complex. This makes it extraordinarily interesting and exciting, but like every other form of modernism, its complexity opens it up to the rage of the slaves who scream the empty phrase "elitist" while failing to evaluate judicially the object under consideration (here a state funded institute for new music and musical research). One can only consider this work: a failure.

12 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars the 'Slamming' of the Avant Garde by the Next Regime, November 9, 2001

By 

S. C Rice - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde (Paperback)

I first read this book before I became aquatinted with the "New Musicology" of cultural criticism. I assumed it to be a sociological report, rather than a musicological one. I did think it odd that this ?sociologist? took such as consistently hostile viewpoint of the musicians within I.R.C.A.M. and thought that some of the scholarship was not very rigorous. I assumed that this was because it was a sociologist ?out of her element,? discussing issues, with which she was not familiar. I figured that she must have had a passing bad experience with the modernists and gone to study them, while complaining about them in revenge.
Later, in the course of studies in musicology, I came upon the strange camp of ?cultural criticism. There is a bit of solipsism in this viewpoint; all there is for anyone is a viewpoint constructed of a culturally specific semiotic code, that we can only understand the world through that code, and that we are therefore always biased to the point of being unable to really know anything. Therefore, in this viewpoint there is no knowledge, only a culturally situated set of biases, and any attempt to assert truth is looked upon as merely some sort of cultural power play.
Georgina Born seems friendly to this philosophy. Her scholarship is good compared to many examples of the "cultural critic" literature, many of which are purposefully obscure and jargonistic (taking after Derrida et al), merely to intimidate the reader with rhetoric. This is a trick that they ironically picked up from academia (who largely did that unintentionally). However, when there is no truth, why not try to assert yourself over the others with whatever means? When there is no truth, there are no lies. Postmodern thought has recently spawned individuals who regard systems of logic as merely culturally situated (and oppressive, biased) semiotic codes, with no relation to reality. Georgina Born makes good arguments by comparison, but it should be noted that this research was probably inspired by the work of those others that I have just mentioned. One of the things that is necessary to pave the way for such criticism is the clearing aside of those pesky scholars that still think that it is possible to know something "objective." Or at the least, to create a study that presents data in a straightforward manner rather than as pointed polemic
This book seems primarily motivated as a ?slam? (to use such as vulgar colloquialism) on the avant garde. Part of the doctrine of the avant garde was that they were supposed to be bringing the ?future? and destiny of a civilization back to it; they were prophets or ?cutting edge.? This of course implies that there was something to bring back; the idea of truth is implicit in the statement. The postmoderns have spent a good deal of their time trying to discredit the bulwarks of the avant garde and the study of music theory. In my opinion, book is part of that endeavour. It does contain some interesting titbits and some food for thought. This study could have been so much more interesting if it incorperated more points of view on the issues raised by ICRAM as an institution. Instead, we get an overdose of the rhetoric of the scholars of deconstructionism, cultural criticism, postmodernism, etc...