***
There are thus three equal unions between persons of corresponding dimensions, and there are six unequal unions, when the dimensions do not correspond, or nine in all, as the following table shows:”
|
EQUAL |
UNEQUAL |
||
|
MEN |
WOMEN |
MEN |
WOMEN |
|
Hare Bull Horse |
Deer Mare Elephant |
Hare Hare Bull Bull Horse Horse |
Mare Elephant Deer Elephant Deer Mare |
The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana, (1963, p. 37)
The Kama Sutra is not an auriferous catalogue for the vacuous venery of the varietist; nor the nostrum for uxorious passion in a relationship of irremediably abstemious ardour - the philtre for philopatric and heated suburban humping in houses painted in the tasteful Dulux offwhites of Vegan Palor and Caucasian Jaundice. Instead, its obsessive categorization and combinatoric thinking may be the first example of sexual composition in the experimodern mould23. It is a combinatoric sketch for the composition of reality, from the same cast as the Sefer Yetsirah, or Stockhausen's sketchbooks. It is here that sexuality had its first awkward fumbles with experimodernism; hands blunderingly scrumbling in scrumpled underwear, as if ham-fistedly searching for a coin down the back of a sofa...
Yet, although that great work of Vatsayayana has existed for thousands of years, it is only now that contemporary music has begun to embrace the composition of the sexual act itself24. Now a set of composers are taking Peter Ablinger's idea of “composition beyond music” to its logical extremes.
David Pocknee's25 Cotard Etude #5: Parameters VI: Codex [http://davidpocknee.ricercata.org/scores/david_pocknee_-_cotard_etudes.pdf] is the sixth in a series of works looking at the possibilities of recursive systems (The Parameters Series) and the fifth in a series of works looking at formalist constructions of sexuality and social engineering (The Cotard Etudes)26. The second of these series draw on a long-running pre-occupation with the formalization of the sexual act, going back to 2010's Killing Floor [http://davidpocknee.ricercata.org/scores/david_pocknee_-_killing_floor.pdf and http://vimeo.com/26511756 ], which notated the dry-humping of a clingfilm-coated electric guitar by a performer wearing sandpaper underwear27. Parameters VI is written for a String Quartet of two men and two women who sit in a small circle, “close enough that they can all reach each other's genitals” (Pocknee, 2012). The piece then consists of thirty seven sections, each one moving through all possible combinations of the participants masturbating one person whilst looking at another. An extract is given below. The entire piece can be found here: [http://davidpocknee.ricercata.org/scores/david_pocknee_-_cotard_etudes.pdf]
Cotard Etude #5:
Parameters VI: Codex
for String Quartet
Two men and two women sit in a small circle, close enough that they can all reach each other's genitals.
They sit in the (clockwise) order: man 1- woman 1 - woman 2 – man 2.
This piece consists of 36 movements and a Coda.
Movements with a line of asterisks between them should be performed with a small break (approximately the length of the exhalation of a lungful of air).
All other movements should be performed attacca.
The start of each movement is cued by one of the performers, indicated at the start of each movement. Their indication to start the movement, also cues the end of the previous movement, which can last as long as they decide.
If there is a gap between movements, the performer who cues the following movement should give a cue to both end the previous movement as well as a cue to end the pause between them.
Movement I or the Coda can be performed separately.
I
cue : woman 1
man 1 masturbates woman 1 whilst watching woman 1
woman 1 masturbates woman 2 whilst watching woman 2
woman 2 masturbates man 2 whilst watching man 2
man 2 masturbates man 1 whilst watching man 1
***
II
cue : man 2
man 1 masturbates woman 1 whilst watching woman 1
woman 1 masturbates woman 2 whilst watching man 2
woman 2 masturbates man 2 whilst watching man 1
man 2 masturbates man 1 whilst watching woman 2
***
III
cue : man 1
man 1 masturbates man 2 whilst watching woman 1
woman 1 masturbates man 1 whilst watching woman 2
woman 2 masturbates woman 1 whilst watching man 2
man 2 masturbates woman 2 whilst watching man 1
***
IV
cue : woman 2
man 1 masturbates woman 1 whilst watching woman 1
woman 1 masturbates man 2 whilst watching woman 2
woman 2 masturbates man 1 whilst watching man 2
man 2 masturbates woman 2 whilst watching man 1
V
cue : woman 1
man 1 masturbates woman 1 whilst watching woman 1
woman 1 masturbates man 2 whilst watching man 2
woman 2 masturbates man 1 whilst watching man 1
man 2 masturbates woman 2 whilst watching woman 2
***
VI
cue : woman 2
man 1 masturbates woman 2 whilst watching woman 1
woman 1 masturbates man 2 whilst watching woman 2
woman 2 masturbates woman 1 whilst watching man 2
man 2 masturbates man 1 whilst watching man 1
***
VII
cue : man 2
man 1 masturbates woman 1 whilst watching woman 2
woman 1 masturbates man 2 whilst watching man 2
woman 2 masturbates man 1 whilst watching woman 1
man 2 masturbates woman 2 whilst watching man 1
Jonathon Baxenkraft takes a multi-parametric approach to the construction of masturbatory activity in his Concerto Pour La Main Droite, a piece based upon Ravel's Concerto Pour La Main Gauche. In the work, a naked male performer sits at a piano, performing the piano part from the Ravel piece with their left hand and masturbating with their right – all according to Baxenkraft's fastidious multi-parametric notation, which notates not only finger pressure, spacing and movement along the shaft of the penis, but also the rotation of the fist around it:
The formalist system utilized in the piece allows the creation of a sexual experience otherwise unrealizable, and importantly, one in which the actual articulation of the stereotypical and gendered construction of male orgasm is prevented from functioning – re-routed through Baxenkraft's labyrinthine notation, which pays no heed to the gendered climax principle of musical construction, forsaking it, instead, for a non-gendered and ever-spooling string of random numbers which control the right hand's movement without aim or goal.
Baxenkraft followed this work with Duo in G in which a naked male and female performer masturbate each other at the piano according to a similarly complex and detailed score, whilst each deals with one hand of the piano part of Ravel's Piano Concerto in G, this time with an orchestra accompanying.
A multi-parametric approach is also in evidence in Ivan Babinchak Renqvist's Coitus Duo for two performers having sex, a work performed in a bunker in The Hague on 25th of May 2013.
As the composer explains, Coitus Duo is one in a series of pieces, each piece in the series dealing with two main ideas:
On the one hand the composing of the performers' levels of physical intensity (structure) and on the other how these levels might be mapped on to any event or material (content). In the case of Coitus Duo the event is sex, and coitus (penis, vagina) in particular.
The intensity measurement was done by summing parameters capable of effecting the effort level of the performer. In the case of Coitus Duo the parameters are three: the tension of the muscles, speed and size of the movement (in this case both movements and muscles are those belonging to the hip-leg region. Each parameter is reduced to 3 levels (-, middle and +). To be able to deal with a total intensity (total being the sum of all three parameters) an overall measurement scale is made where each combination is its own intensity degree. The total intensity measurement is here done by hierarchically comparing the parameters in accordance to the greater to lesser effect each parameter may have on the performers physical intensity level. In Coitus Duo this hierarchy is the following, from greater to lesser effect: tension of the muscles, speed of movement and size of movements.
Ivan Babinchak Renqvist (2014), correspondence with the author.
Yet, although it may at first seem rooted in performance art, at its conceptual core, Coitus Duo is about a musicalization of the sexual act:
Another element used in Coitus Duo, in particular, is the cadenza. It’s traditionally applied as improvised virtuosity masturbation in the style of the piece performed (played near the end of the piece). Here it’s used to give the performers the securer possibility to have their orgasm, after a time of ruled and restrained sex.
The performing of this piece does not directly enjoy better sex, especially not higher degrees of the same pleasures. It brings sex down to an unornamented reality. It conflicts with the common restrictions authored by the heavy presence of the sexual value system. The desire- and pleasure-sacredness is defeated by the openness of the bare and plain. It’s the sexual act committed in a post-orgasmic spirit. Hence, as all newness when successful, cracking or braking the crystallization of sex-pleasure, allowing one to open to the strangeness of being in the event of sex in all its complex concreteness. A position from which we, to an enlarged extent, can experiment the greater range and gamut of qualities, rather then dampen our selves around the corners of unchanging registers of idealized qualities.
Ivan Babinchak Renqvist (2014), correspondence with the author.
All of the above work presents approaches to constrain and manipulate the active aspects of sexuality (in the same way that Speculative Historiography attempts to with the construction of knowledge). They use formalist principles derived from experimodern practice as ways of creating a sexuality and sexual experience unthinkable without them. Here, our psychosexual nexus is re-routed in such ways that confound a generic modelling, instead embedding it in a proliferation of meanings and constraining it through a rigorous, yet simple, mathematical model.28 These compositional approaches are the closest we are to composing our sexuality, yet the gap between them and an ideal and truly revolutionary sexuality stings with the closeness, yet aching separation, of a distant lover's skypescreen.29
23 Earlier, and far more organized and systematic than Marquis de Sade's structurally weak 120 Days Of Sodom.
24 I'm not talking here about a simple attempt to impress a potential sexual partner (this is all art), nor even the creation of the piece with the intent of sexually molesting objects of your desire, as in W.F.E. Bach's Das Dreyblatt which “provides a male pianist with a fine pretext for embracing two female colleagues” (Smith, n.d.), but the composition of the sexual act itself.
25 “I am Horselover Fat, and I am telling this in the third person to gain much-needed objectivity.” - Philip K. Dick Valis (1991)
26 The pieces from both series combine together into a completed, but never performed, hour-long music-theatre work.
27 A work that formalized a certain type of sexuality by using computer-generated random walks to create the rhythms of the piece, in this case ironically mimicking the climax trope.
28 These works could perhaps be seen as manifestations of a post-Brechtian sexuality, one unconcerned with affect, a corollary to the post-Brechtian terrorism that Karen Eliot and Luther Blisset call for in 9/11, Horror And Modernism (Blisset, Eliot, 2011, p. 26-29) [http://issuu.com/a.s.i./docs/much-too-much-noise-issue-1_9-11]
29 Close in the same way that the closest cinematic corollary to Brian Ferneyhough's dense and hyper-complex music are the frenetic and unfathomable transformations of Optimus Prime amidst the overloaded back-, mid-, and fore-ground of the action sequences in Michael Bay's Transformers films.