This piece was first left as a review on the website RateYourMusic.com. I was reviewing A Sunday Morning Meditation, which is sort of like a single by Ambientkitty, except Ambientkitty is actually a cat sitting on a MIDI controller. It's one of the only RateYourMusic archival pieces that's I've republished here that really leans heavily into the specifics of its own medium as an internet review, intended for a specific audience of internet users familiar with the setup of that particular website. Part of the premise of the piece is that RYM page it appears on, like all RYM pages for music, has user generated genre tags. The tags are split up in primary, which are the main genres of a work (for instance, Abbey Road is tagged with Pop Rock as a primary) and secondary genres, which refer to influences and undertones that are less predominant (Abbey Road has Progressive Pop, Psychedelic Pop, and Art Pop). A Sunday Morning Meditation was tagged with Indeterminacy as a secondary genre, which is a kind of modern classical music that employs chance operations in some way. Unfortunately, users have now spotted that it is incorrect to tag a one minute ambient piece as Indeterminacy and have voted that genre tag off, but at the time I wrote this it was there and it was excellent.
Crucial to understanding the interesting aspect of this piece is the video of its “performance”. On this site, the genre tags for A Sunday Morning Meditation include 'Indeterminacy', which presents us with an interesting problem for how we use levels of agency to classify what constitutes a performance involving improvisation or what is consigned to the higher arbiter of disconnected chance.
I need to make some assumptions about the Philosophy of Mind and Psychology of cats now, since those fields are rather undeveloped even compared to the state of confusion in the human counterparts of the fields. I am very dubious about the extent to which cats can make plans. They certainly do things in order that they may later go on to do other things, like burying things for later use for instance. But, I have a feeling this is something that they do out of biological habit rather than something which is deliberated in the way that we mean when we use the word “plan”. Premeditative planning by an agent would involve something no less complex than that agent imagining a set of abstract future world states, determining which is the most desirable state according to a (probably equally abstract) standard of judgement, and then using its intelligence to decide what actions in the present are most likely to bring about that future world state. A cat might be necessarily incapable of doing this since it appears to lack the ability to form an abstract projection of its own self that it can displace into imagined future world states. Such an ability appears to be human exclusive (for now) and arises as a product of the way we model interpersonal relationships.
The definition of a plan I used above is rather rigorous and formal, it's the one used to describe an “agent” in artificial intelligence study. The reason I used it is that I'm talking about agency, and this formal intellectual kind of planning seems to preclude the vast majority of improvisation as it appears in art. It would seem silly to suggest for instance that when Albert Ayler plays he is planning out a future world state and making rational decisions for how to get there. Agency in art, especially in “free” improvisation, appears very different. The tension suggests that the artistic agent must necessarily avoid any kind of projection of the self into the future, and instead keep the self firmly clamped to the action without abstraction—actions which are performed not in order that they achieve some desirable effect but for their own sake. It would be intractable to consider how any given musical note would change the future state of the world (which we can take to mean the performance as a whole in this case) during such an improvisation, and it probably would not even be aesthetically desirable in any case.
Then, should this be a kind of improvisatory recording? Perhaps it is, and the indeterminacy tag, secondary as it is behind the primary tag of “ambient”, doesn’t suggest that the cat had no agency. The final consideration I have is in how the performers are credited here. Ambientkitty appears to be the cat herself, which means that this recording is different to Indeterminacy/a> as performed by John Cage and David Tudor. There is obviously a great deal of intention and agency in what Cage and Tudor do as individuals on that recording, but the whole is indeterminate because the recording itself is the product of both men and so in its final form the interplay is left according to chance. Perhaps if QRTR (the cat's owner) had been the joint artist on this piece, as she did obviously have some creative input, then this piece could be indeterminacy as a primary genre? In that case though, I wonder if it wouldn’t be appropriate for posthumous productions like Mac Miller's Circles or Michael Jackson's XSCAPE to be a kind of indeterminacy as well, because in those cases the artist as credited is robbed of his agency in how others have used their extant vocal recordings to assemble a piece of art that they ultimately couldn’t predict.