pumping up the volume

Back in the groove…

2006-09-02T14:04:00.000-07:00

I have not so much as looked at this blog for the past four months. In that time I put my MA thesis to bed, had performances in Berlin, Dresden, and New York, created music and video for a dance company in Johannesburg and survived my first round of PhD class work in Saas Fee. Now I want to get back in the groove and try to write more regularly.

Future posts will likely become oddly more personal and yet more academic. Also I plan to broaden my topics. The focus will still be thinking about sound and music, but expect to find some more abstractly philosophical musings and the occasional despondent political rant.

So…

The Philadelphia Live Arts festival begins next weekend, and for the first time in 8 years or so I have absolutely no involvement with it. Because of my lack of funds coming off of four months of travel and replacing my laptop (stolen in Johannesburg) I will not be seeing many shows either. But whatever shows I do see I will try to write about here.

As if to make my point about the loss of status of music within the “art world,” the Live Arts Festival has only two curated music events this year. How the festival constructs its discourse around these shows is instructive of something I think. In the festival guide, each artistic discipline has its own section with some introductory commentary. For instance the dance section begins…

“Contemporary dance has seen an infusion of multimedia, text, abstraction and minimalism, inclusion of cultural dances, dramaturgy, innovative set design and technologies of all sorts. In this collection of work we present a remarkable range of performance. There is a fusion of tradition and innovation.”

And so forth. This is the start of the 14 pages of the guide outlining the dance programming. The “music” section of only 2 pages begins…

“Music based artists continue to defy boundaries. Rock/hip hop, ska/punk, the list of fusions go on. Though the music industry struggles to limit artists to single categories, artists and audiences want more.”

I would like to try and unpack these few sentences a bit before quoting more. The idea that “artists” “defy boundaries” through the “fusions” of “Rock/hip hop” and “ska/punk” does not seem very meaningful to me. Or rather it is only meaningful in a context in which the musical universe defined by the commodities of the music industry is the only musical universe that exists. Even accepting this context, these examples historically leave a lot to be desired as examples of “fusions.” Genres within popular music (and it should be clear that that is what we are talking about here) develop through selective appropriation and elaboration. “Hip hop” is such an elaboration within “rock.” “Ska” was clearly part of the cultural nexus out of which “punk” developed in England in the ‘70s.

But this hair splitting is to miss the point. The real issue here is that a festival that presents itself as a premiere venue for the cutting edge, the experimental in the performing arts in Philadelphia, when it comes to music, seems to only understand “music” as the realm of experience bounded by the commodity form of the popular song. That the “music industry” is commented on at all by an arts festival in this context demonstrates what a different set of problems in faced by music than by dance for instance. The “music industry” is a subset of the whole realm of pop-cultural media that Adorno wrote about as “The Culture Industry.” For the culture industry “dance” is what Gwen Stephani’s backup dancers do in music videos. But Dance for the Live Arts Festival exists in an autonomous realm determined by art history not by the culture industry. Why is this not the case for music?

One reason of course is that music has lost its status as an autonomous art separate from entertainment. In this sense the Festival can not really be faulted, it is merely going along with much larger cultural forces. But if for no other reason than that it is conceivable that this subsumption of autonomous art by corporate capitalism could happen to dance or theater some day as well, the Festival should give a little more thought to what dynamics are being played out in its music programming.

To continue with the next sentence from the festival guide…

“They escape boundaries and respond to a variety of influences, from European Classical music, American Jazz, Blues and Hip Hop and African and Caribbean rhythms, and everything in between.”

The first thing that strikes me here is the use of the word “European” in front of “Classical music.” I looked through the dance section of the guide to find a similar usage in front of “ballet.” There is mention of ballet and “classical ballet” but no mention of “European.”

The phrase “everything in between” suggests to me a kind of polar space. Is it “European Classical music” on one side and “American Jazz, Blues and Hip Hop and African and Caribbean rhythms” on the other, or “European Classical music, American Jazz, Blues and Hip Hop” on one side and “African and Caribbean rhythms” on the other. The first division one of presumed ethnicity, and the second division one of first and third world? Either way I have to wonder, what lies in this “in between?” Psychedelic jam bands? Canadian Gamelan Orchestras? What about the whole 100 year American experimental classical tradition from Ives through Cage to Reich to…?

The polar division I see as active here is an all too common one in postmodern musical discourse…that between “dead white European males” and the music of the African Diaspora. While one may wish that this discourse would have imploded after the culture wars of the 80’s, opening up a space for a thinking that was less simplistic and more productive, this does not seem to be the case.

Having said all this, I am glad that there is music of any kind still being presented at the Live Arts Festival, and look forward to seeing both shows. I will report my impressions of these shows sometime in future posts.

Gann and Adorno on strategies for musical survival…

2006-03-14T15:40:00.000-08:00

This past weekend I read Kyle Gann’s “Music Downtown,” a collection of his Village Voice music reviews just published this year in book form. In the introduction to the book Gann quotes Adorno from 1953 on the possibilities open to composers in the face of the crises in classical music brought on by the failure of musical modernism. The quote is as follows…

“Composers have the agonizing choice. They can play deaf and soldier on as if music were still music. Or they can purse the leveling on their own account, turn music into a normal condition and in the process hold out for quality, when possible. Or they can ultimately oppose the tendency by a turn to the extreme, with the prospect of…becoming desiccated as a specialty.”

Gann associates these three “strategies for musical survival” with the New York musical circles he calls Uptown, Midtown, and Downtown. Or as they line up with Adorno’s quote, Midtown, Uptown, and Downtown. Although none of these strategies are very satisfactory to either Adorno or Gann, Adorno prefers the “Uptown” and Gann the “Downtown.”

For those of us that have never accepted or given in to the hegemony of New York, to talk about these strategies in terms of the geography of that city is kind of annoying. I would like to look at these three strategies in this post and posts to come and so I will try to find some terminology that avoids New York. For now, for simplicities sake, I will just call them “strategies 1, 2, and 3” in the order that they are presented in the Adorno quote.

Strategy 1, the choice rejected by both Adorno and Gann represents the “mainstream” within the classical music world today. A simple way to think of it is as “Kitsch.” It also can be seen as simply going where the money and quick fame are. It is the strategy that leads to commissions from the traditionally formatted classical institutions.

Strategy 2, Gann’s “downtown.” Gann chooses to understand what Adorno calls “leveling” as “for Downtown composers a determination to reintegrate their music into the normal flow of daily life.” Gann rejects the “derogatory tone” with which Adorno uses the word “leveling.” Part of the difference between Gann and Adorno here is the question of what the proper relationship should be between contemporary, classical, art-music, (whatever) composition and the vernacular or pop. Simplistically, Adorno rejects this strategy as pandering to the masses, and Gann sees Adorno’s rejection as elitism.

Strategy 3, was reflected for a long time in Academia. A simple way to look at it is as plowing ahead with the agenda of high modernism despite the fact that it had been rejected by both the classical music establishment and the general public. This strategy has lost a lot of energy in recent years and it is no longer clear that alternative institutions within academia can hold out as bastions of modernist values.

One defining difference between the three strategies is their relationship to the ascendancy of pop. Strat. 1 generally pretends that pop has not become the dominant music today or uses stylistic elements from it opportunistically when the commissioning institutions wants a bit of a “hip” factor. Strat. 2 composers often have a deep and sincere engagement with pop at best, or at worst use a proximity to pop forms to cynically try and build an audience. Strat. 3 composers tend to reject pop outright.

Another difference between these strategies is their relationship to their potential audience. Strat. 1 composers pretend that they are still living under 19th century conditions and that they have a natural audience of erudite classical music listeners with whom they could have a relatively unproblematic musical communication with. Strat. 2 composers don’t see anything wrong with trying to craft their musical language specifically to capture new and different audiences. Strat. 3 composers accept that they don’t have a natural audience and are prepared to forgo an audience other than themselves until the public catches up with them. Of course these are gross generalizations…

The relationship to audience can also be summed up like this…

Strat 1 – pretends it has an audience.
Strat 2 – wants to change music to find a new audience
Strat 3 – wants to change its audience to like its music

For 20 years or so there has been a discursive war of sorts between strat. 2 and 3. Kyle Gann has been among the “war's” most vocal and partisan figures. The context of this war is the loss of status of classical music institutions as a whole. The fight essentially is over dwindling resources. If strat. 2 can be seen as the winner in its battle with strat. 3, the territory left to the winner has dwindled to virtually nothing. For the public at large these strategic differences are below the threshold of perception and the whole field is rejected as an irrelevant part of the cultural scene.

My own prognosis is that the whole contested territory will continue to lose significance in the culture at large. It could be that classical music institutions and their values will disappear. My concern, as I have stated throughout this blog, is not with the institutions but for the place for a sonic art in our culture, or something that provides the function that classical music once provided and no longer does. I tend to think that something will develop to take the place of this function but that it will probably come from outside classical music.

Towards the end of the introduction to his book, Gann mentions the new significance of DJ culture and his ambivalence about it. “My own sense of obsolescence as a critic dawned on me the day DJ-ing was declared an art form.” I would suggest that this is an acknowledgment both of the potential importance of DJ culture and that it is not a subset of Strat. 2 composition, but coming from somewhere else entirely. On Djs Gann states, “Their apologists come with armloads of postmodern deconstructionist jargon whose content I am suspicious of.” For me this is symptomatic of the potential for DJ culture to grow into the place that classical music will eventually vacate. For better or worse, any future sonic art will have to be able to stand up to the critique of “postmodern deconstructionist jargon” and classical music has not been able to do that.

Although its roots are in the most “sub-altern” musical genre – disco, DJ culture is hardwired to be syncretic and in its best arguments for being a sonic art borrows freely from both Strat. 2 and 3 musical thinking.

Thinking about Attali’s schema…

2006-03-03T13:30:00.000-08:00

It has been some time since I actually read Jacques Attali’s “Political Economy of Music” and so the notes that follow will rely on a perhaps faulty memory.

Attali divides the history of the function of music in society into 3 eras that encompass the past and present and a hypothetical future era that is both Utopian and suggestive of an end to historical time that resolves the conflicts within society that drive evolution within music.

The first era, the era of “Sacrifice,” the function of music is to mediate the sacrificial violence that underlies the birth of civilization. In this era music can function as both an accompaniment to the societal violence and serve to ritualize it or sublimate the general violence into a sense of community. This is music of territorialization, the gathering of forces, and inseparable from the religious impulse. This music is discourse of the status quo that stands in for an earlier pure violence.

An alternative “popular” music exists as well in this era, and it is both a platform for possible subversion, and yet also a kind of mass forgetting of the societal violence.

The second era, the era of “Representation,” begins with the birth of capital and the rise of the bourgeois class over the church and the autocratic state. Although the great age of this era is the 19th century, this era begins for me with the birth of the Baroque that sets the stage for the “common practice period” in western classical music.

Popular and art musics begin to lose their specificity again as social roles become more in flux and all musics begin to be mediated by money as commodities of leisure.

The third era the era of “Repetition,” begins with the circulation of recordings as commodities and the creation of a private form of listening. Music itself will get increasingly repetitive in this period. Music sheds its function of encouraging participation in a collectivity and gains a new function of enforcing a silenced isolation.

Attali’s hypothetical fourth era, the era of “Composition,” arises when the breakdown of divisions in production, reproduction, and consumption of music as a commodity has been completed and listeners are co-creators in the musical experience solely for their own pleasure. Music itself loses the category of the work and becomes part of an undifferentiated flow. The theorists of DJ culture, for instance Paul Miller herald this new form of musical function.

I generally find a lot of merit in this schema. If the last era seemed some what far-fetched when the text was written in the 70’s, it now seems much less so when perusing the internet mediated world of mash-ups and “garageband” compositions.

I question though what this era of “Composition” really heralds …a positive supersession of the categories of work vs. leisure, the commodity vs. the work of art? Another way of looking at this is that the era of “Repetition” is analogous to Debord’s “Society of the Spectacle” and the era of “Composition” is analogous to Debord’s “Integrated Spectacle” where the subject no longer needs to be fed fascinated distraction, but produces it himself out of his own mediated life experience.

My notes now are going to get somewhat random and fragmentary…

To lose oneself in the infinite beat of digital repetition is to be held fascinated by the temporal structuring of the numinous.

The sublime returns after its brief absence as the totality of the technical functioning of our life world.

We stand in awe of the spectacle of our own disappearance into a machinic world that no longer needs us for it’s functioning.

What is left of art holds its own as either the celebration of this disappearance or the mediation of our residual anxiety in the face of it.

If elsewhere in this blog I have viewed the displacement of the “classical” by the “popular” as the most legitimate musicological object of study with some misgivings, I have to admit there are legitimate reasons for this, even if not the reasons most commonly given. The world of art and particularly that of art music resisted the move from the era of “representation” to that of “Repetition.” The visual arts were able to finally negotiate this change of era with Duchamp as the leading figure, and so maintain for the time being an autonomous space at least partly outside the realm of popular culture. Popular music, well suited in its form to the era of “Repetition,” came to displace art music as the form of music best suited to its function. Art music modernism fiercely resisted the move to its function under “Repetition” and in doing so acquiesced to its loss of function. Too little, too late, John Cage attempted to play the role of a musical Duchamp and wean art music from the assumptions of the era of “Representation.” More rejected by the art music institutional establishment than even the modernisms before it, Cage’s thinking failed to produce a rupture with “Representation,” although it did open the door for musical minimalism, one of art music’s minor successes in finding a place for itself in the era of “Repetition.”

If this outline varies considerably from what I have written here before about art music’s loss of function in the contemporary scene, it is because this loss of function is, as I have said before, “overdetermined.”

aberrant modernisms?

2006-02-24T09:20:00.000-08:00

I have been thinking a bit more about the differences in reception of modernism in music and in the other arts. I have been coming across a lot of discourse lately that portrays modernism in music as somehow aberrant or diseased. One concept is that the idea of both the European Avant-garde and the American Experimental tradition that one could depart from traditional forms of music making and find new sounds and new procedures was somehow an infantile fantasy of omnipotence. Some have even claimed that experimentation at all in music is a form of colonialism in that sets out into the unknown realm of possible sound to chart out new territory and bring back useful sonic products. A very common idea is that all music is inherently representational and always will be, and attempts to describe music as non-representational are ideological moves to hide the representations of power and privilege hidden in the music.

I find a lot of this thinking shallow and far-fetched, very bad applications of the post-structuralist, post-Marxist thinking space to music. Or another way of looking at it is that a traditional and reactionary concept of music and what it can be is presented as a deconstructionist critique.

Imagine the same kind of discourse applied to the visual arts…”Abstract expressionism is an infantile fantasy of omnipotence. Painting is inherently representational, there is nothing new that can be discovered by the artists.” Etc.. Well people still do engage in this kind of discourse, but not within the arts? Maybe I just have not read enough of the literature around contemporary visual art, but I have not come across many writers who will just say that any major form of 20th century visual art making was aberrant or a mistake, or that it turned its back on the timeless universals of beauty. I think we have moved far beyond that in thinking about the visual arts…why do very old-fashioned ideas keep coming up in music in one disguise or another.

There are a number of reasons. A few I have touched on in earlier posts. Music in its various functions is a highly contested site. “Pop” and its institutions and mechanisms has with ever greater force been contesting the “privileged” position of the remnants of the classical music world of providing the function of an art music. Classical music is losing this battle and it is no surprise to see theorists line up on the side they can see winning. Part of the reason for a very traditional and reductive definition of music, is that “Pop” can then be seen as the normative for the timeless and universal.

Another reason is that people are really emotional about their music. Perhaps it is much more difficult to think about it dispassionately. Or another way to say this is that music has become such a seemingly special part of the process of our being constituted as subjects that it is hard to detangle our love of certain musics from our very sense of self.

Music functions, "art," "universal," and "Pop"

2006-02-19T17:25:00.000-08:00

One common idea today is that popular music has simply taken over the role once played by classical music in the west. For instance for Camile Paglia, Mick Jagger is simply the legitimate heir to Mozart. I had Paglia as a teacher and respect her opinions on a lot of subjects, but thinking about music is not among her strengths. I suspect however that her view reflects a rather common and unexamined strain of thought among her generation.

When this kind of thinking is presented by someone who obviously IS a deep thinker about music, it must be examined more closely. Susan McClary states quite succinctly,

“The European classical tradition has ceased to occupy the mainstream...it no longer qualifies as the protagonist in the history of music – even in the west.”

This statement in itself is relatively value free. It simply states what she thinks happened without saying whether she thinks this is a positive or negative development. When she attempts to diagnose why this happened her own value system is somewhat revealed.

“…turn-of-the-century European Composers chose to depart radically from the conventions sustaining their customary relationship with audiences…[they] had their minds set on alienating their usual audience. Black popular music stepped in to fill the resulting vacuum…”

This doesn’t work so much for me as an explanation because turn-of-the-century European painters, writers, etc. also “chose to depart radically from the conventions sustaining their customary relationship with audiences” and yet those fields have been more successful at maintaining a cultural realm distinct from the “popular.” Perhaps there is something about how modernism played out within music or in the nature of music itself that has caused it to diverge in its historical trajectory from the other arts.

For Steve Reich it is the former. He has written that modernist composers turned their back not just on the expectations of their audience, but on the “universal” elements of music itself…even pulsation and clear tonal centers. I choose to reject this because of its massively reductive conception of what music can and should be. I tend instead to think that there is something in the nature of music itself or more precisely in the history of western thinking about the nature of music that has played a role in the development of the current situation.

The following will be a highly speculative and rather unsupported set of riffs on the historical development of music in the west…

One of the most common ideas about music is that it is a universal human activity in that even “primitive” hunter-gatherer societies with little or no visual art expression have some form of musical (extra-linguistic sonic) expression. Part of my conception on this blog is that “classical” or “art” music forms are distinct from this “universal” idea of music making. “Art” music traditions can be seen as emergent phenomena that occur when social organization reaches a certain level of complexity. This does not mean that an “art” music tradition occurs inevitably when societies reach a certain level of complexity, only that this social complexity is a pre-requisite for the emergence of “art” music forms.

If all cultures have a musical expression, all cultures do not have an “art” music expression. As I have expressed elsewhere on this blog, this is not about value judgment. A culture with an “art” music tradition is not necessarily better or worse than one without, it is just organized differently. Furthermore, an emergent art music expression rarely displaces a more “universal” form of music making, but lives alongside and is often highly dependant on the more “universal” form for its continued meaning.

It is also possible that a highly complexly organized society my reject the need for a separate “art” music form. This may be what we see playing out in the west now.

What really separates more “universal” forms of music making from “art” traditions is function. The “universal” function of music is to integrate the individual into the collectivity or tribe. There seems to be a broad agreement that music is well suited to do this, whether in a traditional hunter-gatherer society or subcultural “tribes” in modern western societies. When society attains a certain level of complexity, it has likely differentiated into some form of social strata. Music at this point can begin to not just express a cultural unity against outsiders but can be called upon to express and legitimate the social hierarchies of this new social organization.

This is a reason why the tendency to claim that “art” music traditions are elitist will never go away. History seems to show that “art” music traditions only emerge when there has been a hierarchical and inequitable stratification of social structure. It is too simple to say that an emergent “art” music “mirrors” the social organization, rather there is a dialectical relationship between the societal evolution and the internal differentiation of musical materials. This goes someway to explain why some thinkers, for instance Jacques Attali, see in music not just a societal mirror but a herald of future change. It also goes someway to explain why the rejection of “art” music traditions in favor of the more “universal” function of music can be seen (falsely in my opinion) as an act of resistance against an inequitable social stratification.

The situation today is more complex than this schema allows for. The dominant music in the west, and increasingly globally, is the American song form that developed in this century through the powerful synergy of traditional European popular song and African American musical traditions. With the advent of recording technology, and the circulation of recorded song as commodities, this new musical form was in a unique historical position to function in ways that music had never functioned before. The separation of music from its performance allowed forms of consumption that were unprecedented in history.

This new musical object, the recorded popular song, functions in our society in a way that is distinct from the earlier “universal” or “art” forms of music, but partakes of elements of both. Because of this, it also has the potential to subsume both the “universal” and “art” music functions. Through the increasingly unified space of the global media it has the potential to do this not just in “our” culture, but in any culture it comes into contact with.

If a large part of what would traditionally have been an “art” music audience in the west turned to this musical form, it is not just because they were alienated by musical modernism, it was also because of the unique characteristics of this new musical object. If in earlier posts it appeared that I was laying the blame for the “crises” of classical music in the west squarely on the shoulders of conservative musical institutions, consider this as a first step to correct that impression. The “crisis” of classical music is as some post-structuralists might say, overdetermined.

From now on in this blog, for simplicities sake, I am going to call this new musical object and its function “Pop.” If there is a new “protagonist in the history of music” I am willing to concede that “Pop” is it. When Paglia says that Mick Jagger is the new Mozart, I think she is saying that “Pop” has taken over the function of previous “art” music. She is also trying to legitimate “Pop” (her music of choice) in the old culture wars of high art/low art debate. Well Mick Jagger does not need that kind of legitimation. The stones just played for an audience of over one million people yesterday in Brazil. Could Mozart ever have done that?

In future posts I hope to explore what the function of “pop” is in our culture and how that function is different from but overlaps the traditional functions of “universal” and “art” music forms.

Everything you have read about the “crises of classical music” is wrong. (part 2)

2006-02-17T12:48:00.000-08:00

Elsewhere in his blog, Greg Sandow explains what he thinks would be lost if classical music where to die…

“We'd lose a large and deep part of our western heritage, along with the notion, almost forgotten among people who don't know classical music, that a piece of music can change and grow over long spans of time, the way a movie does, or a novel, or a play.”

Ignoring the bit about “western heritage,” which I find problematic, I find myself in agreement, or at least “resonance” with this statement. For me a prime importance of maintaining a place for a sonic art in western culture is that sound happens in time. Or rather time or more specifically rates of change over time is the medium of sound. Another important fact, and one that for the most part distinguishes music from movies, novels, and plays is that music is non-narrative. Of course words can be set to music, and music can illustrate a story in some way, but music does not need words.

What I am concerned with then is for maintaining a place in our culture for an abstract, non-narrative, time-based art. There are of course many forms of cinema, literature and theater that go some way to filling these criteria, and I would add to this contemporary dance, that is perhaps the closest to what a sonic art can give us. But none of these forms can give us exactly what music can.

It is not enough to just have music that “can change and grow over long spans of time.” The problem with western classical music is that it does not “change and grow” the way our contemporary movies, novels or plays do. For whatever reasons, which are in any case outside the scope of this post, western classical music remains wedded to antiquated notions of how change and growth happen. This is not just true of historical classical music, but of almost all “new” or “contemporary” music that receives institutional legitimation from the classical music establishment. The “style” might change but the forms remain 19th century.

What this music can’t seem to divorce itself from are deeply hierarchical structures and a linear teleology that serves to normalize those structures. For instance, in the functional harmony of the common practice period each scale degree and the chords built on them have a hierarchical relationship with the tonic. The telos of this music involves the move away from and back to the tonic reasserting the legitimacy of its hierarchical dominance. Another hierarchical structure is the division of the musical material into foreground and background, melody and accompaniment. Also, regardless of the nature of the musical material, there is a an arch like structure of beginning, middle, and end as exposition, development, and recapitulation, that exists not just in Sonata form, but throughout the classical music of the last several hundred years at all time scales of the musical material. This is so normalized in classical music that music without these structures feels formless to the classically trained listener.

So what is the problem with this? The problem is that these structures may reflect how we thought about ourselves and the world in the 18th and 19th century, they do not reflect how we think about things now. Where in these structures are non-linearities, sudden bifurcations, unresolved multiplicities…things we have come to expect from our contemporary literature and film, theater and dance. What has not happened in institutionally legitimated classical music that has happened in all the other arts is a deconstruction of the implied metaphysics involved in them.

And so the “crises” of classical music is first and foremost a “crises” of thinking, and no new marketing strategies, or educational “appreciation” efforts are going to solve it.

Everything you have read about the “crises of classical music” is wrong. (part 1)

2006-02-14T07:33:00.000-08:00

Well, actually, if you have read anything about the “crises of classical music” you are in an extreme minority in any case. But I am assuming that if you find yourself at this little ghetto of cyberspace, the idea of the crises is at least of passing familiarity to you.

Although personally deeply concerned with this “crises” I find myself hopelessly out of step with the dominant logic around what this “crises” means and what can be done about it. To try and demonstrate my “out of stepness” I will compare my thinking on the issue to that of someone who seems to me to represent the discursive mainstream.

Greg Sandow writes a blog “Greg Sandow on the future of classical music.” He also teaches a class at Julliard “Classical Music in an Age of Pop.” This is obviously somewhat related to my own subject “possibilities for sound as Art in the age of global entertainment,” although I doubt I will get an audience at Julliard anytime soon.

The first of my many differences with Mr. Sandow has to do with what the nature of the “crises” is. Sandow is concerned primarily with the future of classical music institutions, I am concerned with the future of a sonic art…with music remaining a category of art making in a globalized future. For Sandow the disappearance of all orchestras, opera companies, and conservatories into debt-ridden oblivion is the apocalypse. For me that eventuality could actually be part of the solution to the problem.

Sandow has outlined in 16 points his conception of the crises in a document entitled “Dimensions of the Crises.” While I agree with his facts, to me they represent not the crises itself, but symptoms of a much broader and more serious crises about the nature of music as a creative activity in western culture, and through globalization, any culture we are likely to find ourselves in in the future.

Sandow, like the classical world generally, repeatedly come up with the same answers as to why classical music has had such a drop in popularity…bad marketing strategies, lack of music classes in schools, stuffy presentation, etc. The syllabus for Sandow’s Julliard class cites an article by Henry Fogel from the Nov. 2003 issue of “Symphony” magazine. The basic argument is one that is repeated endlessly…if people were exposed to classical music they would like it. However, Sandow’s own statistics already refute this. As he points out, there is much less classical music on the radio these days, because when it is played people change the station.

As to why anyone should care about the survival of classical music, Fogel says, “the music that we present truly is a universal language.”

That statements like that above are made so uncritically in the world of classical music says more to me about the real cause of classical music’s crises then any of Sandow’s statistics. It comes down to this…the worldview presented by the classical music establishment is so extraordinarily reactionary and is so deeply entwined with the music that an intelligent person can hear it and immediately know that it has little to say to modern life.

Umberto Eco wrote in an Essay “The Poetics of the Open Work” from 1958 that,

“In every century the way that artistic forms are structured reflects the way in which science or contemporary culture views reality.”

In every other art form this could be taken as self-evident. Classical music considers itself timeless however…if our symphony halls are dominated by mid 19th century work that is because these “timeless” “classics” have more to say to “our” “universal” condition than any other music. It is this thinking that is leading “classical” music and with it much possibility for a sonic art into oblivion. For classical music it is as if 150 years of intellectual ferment and critique simply did not happen.

This is not to say that historical classical music has no value, but that its value is not in its timeless universality, but specifically in being a reflection of the time and place in which it was created. The visual art world obviously understands this…a Pollock is not expected to be a Rubens, nor a Koons a Pollock. It is exactly the change in thinking and values that keeps visual art relevant and gives it (for now at least) a relatively safe realm outside the domain of popular commercial culture.

It is not that classical music and its institutions were not subject to critique both from within and without, it is that the critique was resolutely resisted. By resisting reform it has allowed itself to become a museum culture, a window into 19th century values while continuing to pretend it has a logical place in contemporary life. At the same time it has occupied the place of a potential alternative sonic art and had a stranglehold on musical creativity through the conservatism of its institutions for 100 years now. I cannot ascribe full blame to a clueless public or the popular “culture industry”…yes classical music is dying…of a disease spread everywhere in its institutions.

homogenization

2006-02-11T14:49:00.000-08:00

Western music theory for most of its history claimed a universality supposedly based on the physics of sound. Western musicians are only recently becoming aware that there is no real material basis for this belief. Ironically, at the same time, through the globalization of the media and western musical technology, western conceptions of music are becoming a de facto universal. This is leading to a rapid homogenization of musical possibilities globally. Indigenous tuning systems and rhythmic structures are being replaced by the equal tempered 12 note scale and ubiquitous 4/4 meter.

This seems counterintuitive to many people. The increased exposure to the musics of other cultures through recordings in the west gives us the idea that globalization leads to a proliferation of musical possibilities, but this is a case of mistaking style for substance. It is only because our conceptions of music are so reductive and unexamined that the process of homogenization feels to us to be a process of increasing multiculturalism.

Dissenters to this idea will be able to find many local examples of contradiction, but in the bigger picture let’s face it, globalization is pretty much a one way street. I doubt there is a country on earth where I can’t hear Britney Spears.

As the primary beneficiaries of the process of globalization, the west, and Americans in particular have a hard time seeing what the problem is with this homogenization. We expect to be able to travel anywhere in the world and hear the same basic music in the disco. And if we don’t we see it as a sign of cultural backwardness or even political repression.

Within the dominant culture of the west we are experiencing a perhaps related process of homogenization as the popular song form continues to push all other possible forms of music out of any shared cultural space. We like to think that our technologies have given us greater access to a variety of forms of cultural experience. And theoretically that is true, but in practice more people are listening to the same very narrow kind of music then ever before. Even within the dominant popular song form there has been a process of homogenization. If you don’t believe this, do this little experiment…reference the billboard charts and then find and listen to the top ten (or 40 or 100) songs from last year, then the year before, etc., until you agree or disagree with me.

Now this could just be the voice of conservatism, “they don’t make music like they used too”…but that is not my point. I would rather listen to the popular music of 2004 then that of 1994, I find it sonically more compelling…my point is not about the quality of music per se but the increasing homogenization of style.

So why should I care? As the possible meaning of music to people becomes ever narrower, it is less and less likely that music can remain a realm of abstract creative expression. And the possibilities for sound as art in the age of globalized entertainment become ever dimmer.

The “Remix” as criticism and praxis…

2006-02-09T12:06:00.000-08:00

Post-modern musicology has generally rejected the idea of a universalizing music theory that can be used to understand diverse musics. For instance the knowledge that a death metal tune revolves around Eb, Ab, and Bb in a 4/4 meter at a moderate tempo does not lead to much understanding of “death metal” as a phenomenon. And to this point I agree with this “new musicology.” Where I am less enthralled is with the idea that it is primarily questions of sociological reception that have anything to teach us about a given musical object.

Throughout this blog I have tried to promote the idea that there is a realm of immanent sonic materiality that does have qualities of the universal. The division of the frequency space into particular tuning systems, or the division of time into characteristic rhythms is historically bounded and can safely be rejected from claims of the universal as a platform for understanding, but I am not about to say the same for the categories of frequency or time themselves. To do so is not just to reject the reality of sound, but of the material world as well.

My interest in sound (and “music” as a subset) is not firstly as a listening subject, and certainly not as a musicologist, but as someone who uses sound as the material of their personal creative exploration. In fact I would like to see myself as a composer. This term, however, is very much in flux these days as to it’s meaning, and may in fact have to be rejected as not useful.

Lately I have been interested in the whole range of activity that lies between passive listening and traditional compositional activity. Partly this is because this range of activity has become very problematized in our culture. Consider the DJ. What does it mean when someone is listening to a DJ mix CD and says, “I really like DJ Soandso’s music.” Is this just a symptom of a culture that has lost all ability to distinguish between production, re-production, and consumption of commodities? Perhaps, but I don’t think this is the most interesting way to parse the phenomenon. Even if a DJ is doing nothing other than string other people’s songs together without any obvious “trainwrecks” it could be that the whole is a distinct and unified work that is more than the sum of its parts. If the DJ is taking advantage of the modular construction of much “dance” music to overlay and make unexpected connections, even more may be going on. In general I am trying to give the DJ the benefit of the doubt.

At what point in the mix process can you say the DJ becomes the “author” of a new work…becomes “composer?” Or is this just a misguided question? Consider DJ DangerMouse’s “The Grey Album.” For me this work is a kind of limit case for these questions. Not so much because it is the best example of creative remixing, but because it was a reasonably good example that was also wildly popular with a “general” audience. One of the things I get from listening to “The Grey Album” is a completely new insight into the original sources. My listening experience of the Beatles’ “White Album” is forever altered. This process seems analogous to me to what musical analysis used to give a serious listener of traditional western classical music. One way to look at remix activity then is a kind of “doing” music theory in a time where there are no theoretical universals to rely on. If this process is orientated around demonstrating some kind of point about the original source then remix activity becomes a kind of criticism.

An example of this in my own recent work…One of the things I was interested in in remixing Mozart was the question of the teleological nature of western functional harmony. We are taught that classical music is always “going somewhere” and that this is part of its greatness or even superiority over other forms of music. Traditional musical analysis “proves” this “going somewhere” in a very tautological way. We can analyze all the chords as they appear and inscribe numbers and other symbols to represent the chords under them. Then if these numbers and symbols fall into patterns we have been taught to expect, we feel we have “proven” the directional logic of the music. We may even get a sense of directional inevitability from this patterning and we may call this a sign of “genius.” Now, what’s funny about this is that on one level all we have done is transcribe one visual symbolic code into another. What we are really demonstrating is our fluency with the various codes and the depth of our acculturation.

The last section of my Mozart remix is based on the fugal material from the second half of the Overture to “The Magic Flute.” Inspired by the fact that the harmonic motion in this passage seemed on average to be in half bar units, I broke out a large number of “loops” of mostly two beats each. I then randomized the file names of these units and started reassembling them in alphabetical order. The question then becomes, does the resultant music still feel like it is “going somewhere?” Does it still have the feeling of the style of Mozart? Likely the answers to these questions will be different from listener to listener. But the point is that in this case a “remix” process is helping me to ask a question about the source material while avoiding the tautological logic of traditional musical analysis.

For a “deviant” listening…

2006-02-08T14:20:00.000-08:00

In Ola Stockfelt’s “Adequate Modes of Listening,” reprinted as ch. 16 of
“Audio Cultures, Readings in Modern Music” the argument is made that every genre of music has a number of “genre-normative” modes of listening associated with it, and that these modes, and only these modes are “adequate” to understanding a particular musical object. In editors Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner’s introduction to this essay they state,

“Stockfelt challenges Theodore Adorno’s notion…that only a focused and expert listening is an adequate and properly critical one.”

In Stockfelt’s essay I see a circular reasoning that serves to simply valorize the normative and derail the possibility of critique. If any understanding of a musical object is only possible “when one listens to music according to the exigencies of a given social situation and according to the predominant sociocultural conventions of the subculture to which the music belongs” then no criticism is possible that is not already inscribed within some “predominant socicultural convention.”

I don’t think that Stockfelt is really challenging Aodorno’s conception of a “properly critical listening” but actually is denying the possibility of a critical listening of any kind. I think I understand the broader currents within post-modern thinking that bring us to this way of looking at things, but I also think I just disagree. If I buy Stockfelt’s argument, then any listening that does not conform to “predominant sociocultural conventions” is transgressive to those conventions and any “critical” listening becomes “deviant.”

In fact it is the conception of the “deviant” that if added to Stockfelt’s schema would give it some possible value. For instance, I don’t see in Stockfelt’s essay any conception of a historical development of genres and the “genre-normative” modes of listening associated with them. How do genres or “socicultural conventions” come to be and how do they change over time? By selective misappropriation, by exactly what Stockfelt would see as inadequate listening…by willful perverse critique.

Rejecting things, fucking things up is also a way of understanding things, and to reject that is to reject the entire field of the political, and ultimately the entire premise of artistic creativity.

Thinking the history of western music as a process of crises and simplification…some random notes.

2006-02-06T15:59:00.000-08:00

If the history of western art music spans roughly 1000 years, the latter half of that span can be seen as a continual period of crises and an attempt to solve the crises through a simplification of musical materials.

This process of simplification can be seen in several historical moments: the counter-reformation attempt to simplify and codify polyphony, the birth of baroque with monody, and the geometrical simplification of the classical era. It would seem that western art music enters another period of increasing complexity from romanticism through the high modernism of the mid 20th century, although I’m not even sure that this is true. Much of the increase in complexity in the romantic era was a change in productive forces that mirrored the industrial revolution and the move towards technicity. Many movements of simplification continued, for instance the move toward the equal tempered system which begins in the baroque and is not really completed until the first part of the 20th century. I would even view the birth of the 12 tone system to be another moment of simplification, rejecting the whole system of functional harmony as too complex and seeking a rational simplification of material. The total serialism of high modernism is seen on one level to have resulted in the most complex western art music after the 16th century can alternately be seen as an attempt to extend a rational simplification to all the traditional parameters of western music.

Cage’s move can be seen as an attempt at a radical simplification of musical phenomenology, rejecting outright the traditional parameters of western music for a union of “musical” and “non-musical” listening.

The most successful post-Cagean art music “style” the minimalism that begins in the 60’s and remains dominant, is clearly a simplification with its focus on the most basic facts of western music theory and rejection of the legitimacy of any kind of complexity.

Within minimalism I read the evolution of the styles of the primary composers as being a further process of simplification. Look at Philip Glass for instance. The early poly-metricism that was a result of additive processes has been replaced by a solid 4/4 and the structural logic of the binary that rules both our computers and our popular culture: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 etc. Or Steve Reich…the radical phenomenological complexity of the early tape pieces is gradually rationalized into the most conservative thinking about traditional western musical processes.

The most extreme example of this process of simplification in western music of course is the disappearance of any kind of relevance of art music traditions and the complete rise to supremacy of popular music forms. The very definition of music itself has been narrowed to the verse/chorus song form and three chord (at most) quasi-functional harmony. That interesting music is still created under these restrictions is the exception that proves the rule, and I don’t need another erudite paper about false dominants in the music of Radiohead by Columbia grad students to explain this to me.

The saving grace of this historical situation for me is that within popular music forms there has been an increase of sonic complexity that is mostly the result of the technological sophistication of this music’s production. Despite this increase in sonic complexity, on the level of musical materials traditionally understood there has been a radical process of simplification within popular music. The influence of hip-hop has begun to separate the concept of the song from the verse/chorus structure and promote a post-tonal avoidance of any kind of harmonic movement. I can’t say I see this as a bad thing…sonic complexity, or what in popular music is seen as the realm of “production” takes center stage and popular music moves closer to the dreams of the historical avant-garde in its rejection of musical teleology and hierarchical structures in favor of immanent sonic materiality.

Remixing Mozart’s 250th

2006-02-03T09:12:00.000-08:00

Just under a week ago, the project that has consumed me completely for the past few months was performed at the Kimmel center here in Philadelphia. Now that it is finally done, I feel I can reflect on what I was trying to do.

The piece “The Magic Flute: An Unveiling” was a dance, music, video collaboration between myself and Manfred Fishbeck, artistic director of Group Motion Dance Company. It was presented as part of a celebration of the 250th anniversary of the birth of Mozart, entitled “Mozart Reloaded,” curated by composer Andrea Clearfield. I consider the piece to be an audio-visual/conceptual remix of the Mozart Opera.

Musically I had two source materials…the overture of the opera (about 90% of the source material), and the 2nd act Queen of the Night Aria (the other 10% of source material). In creating the sound I did not use any additional instruments or any synthesis that was not derived directly from the original source…so this was a completely appropriationist piece.

Some things I was investigating…

The range of activity between listening and composing, or rather the nature of the “remix.” The received idea of Mozart is that his music is the model of perfect necessity..”just as many notes as I required, no more, no less.” In this sense to remix Mozart is just a simple act of sacrilege. But that is the Mozart of the “essence” of music…all I am really doing is manipulating data from a CD. So this project is closely related to my thinking these days about the virtual objects of music vs. immanent sonic materiality.

Also, as this is a “remix” of an Opera, and that it is a work for the stage, there is a tension between my purely musical motivations and the requirements of the drama. Essentially what I have done with my collaborator is create a “ballet” in the sense of the interplay between music, dance and story.

So there are a few levels here…my musical motivations, telling a story (which is not the story of the Opera after all), and then the video. What am I doing there?

In the video there is a tension between at least 3 motivations…moving along the story, (or elucidating the characters), explicating my opinions on the symbolism of the original Opera, and investigating the territory between filmmaking and the visual remix or “VJ” activity.

Also, like my most recent previous video collaboration with Manfred Fischbeck and Group Motion Company, the projection surface is scrim that divides the stage into two distinct spaces. This allows the video to play several roles…as story (cinema), as background or set, as coloration on the bodies of the dancers, and as immersive space (when the dancers are illuminated behind the scrim). The interplay of these dimensions becomes a structural device in its own right.

I did not begin to work on the video in earnest until the music and the dance were almost fully in place. Firstly because the video needs to be cut to that music and secondly so that the video can make clear connections with the dance both in terms of the story and the actual material of bodies in space.

The video was also appropriationist, although not as purely so as the music. I did have a shoot with each of the dancers and that material was the primary source for about a third of the video timeline. The other sources were (of most importance) Ingmar Bergman’s film “The Magic Flute,” a few shots from a techno music video, and a documentary about Masonry. Much of the effect of the video came from complex layering/compositing, and music-synchronized, fast rhythmic editing.

So, although the primary concern of the piece was exploring the symbolism of the Opera, the subtext was very much about appropriation and the concept of the “remix.” Although I have explored appropriation to a small degree in my musical output over the years, this was my first use of appropriated source material in my video work. I discussed the issues surrounding this way of working with a few friends and colleagues and the questions and feedback I received suggested to me that I should try and explain in a quasi-public forum my thoughts on the subject.

Some thoughts on appropriation…

Artists should be free to manipulate any material they choose in any way without prior restraint. And of course they are…our machines give us the technical facility to do certain things, and so we can do them. Prior restraint however does exist hardcoded in many technologies…my DV camera will not let me record from commercial DVDs for instance, but these schemes are easily surmounted one way or another.

The recent strengthening of copyright law actually makes things easier for me ethically. Essentially, the concept of “fair use” has been all but eliminated from copyright law over the past decade. To my way of thinking, the prohibition of everything makes the law an irrelevance.

Where I am more on the fence is with the use of material from other artists alive or dead that I respect. The only answer I have come up with for this ethical conundrum is to be very honest about exactly what I am doing and the nature of my motivations. What has always bothered me about “DJ culture” and now “VJ culture” is the tendency to not take this ethical step.

The most egregious example of this is the manipulation of a source for no other reason than to hide where it is taken from. I have two ethical problems with this…Firstly, it is a kind of acknowledgment of crime and the attempt to cover one’s tracks, and secondly it is ignoring the artist’s responsibility to her material. Without getting too old school here…the relationship between an artist and her material is a dialectical one…The material summons a manipulative response from the artist… which creates a new material…which summons a new response, etc. My feeling is that this interplay should remain completely free from questions of legality and more importantly from the false subjectivity of presenting someone else’s formed material as one’s own.

A primary model for me is the work of John Oswald, who meticulously documents his sources and his compositional motivations.

An additional thought on the project that does not fit anywhere else…

To engage with Opera is to engage with a 400 year old discourse on the relationship of drama to music. What music does for drama is modulate the relationship of unfolding time to unfolding story. The effect from the very beginning was a psychological one. Opera, like cinema after it functions as a kind of psychoanalysis in reverse. I don’t find it surprising that the demise of Opera as a cultural force was roughly coincident with the birth of both psychoanalysis and cinema.

Adorno and my iPod

2005-12-22T11:36:00.000-08:00

It seems typical these days to completely dismiss Adorno as being way too “old school” to be relevant to discussions around music and sonic culture. The basic argument is that Adorno is representative of a Euro-centric, moribund, death oriented modernism…a failed Marxist ideology…and just generally that he ain’t got the funk. This causes me to question why I get a kick out of reading him. Is it my moribund, Marxist, lack of funk? Or is it that Adorno is much more frequently derided than actually read.

Sure I have my own problems with him: I have always been fond of Stravinsky. But I tend to miss evidence in his writings for some of the worst charges against him…that he is hopelessly racist for instance. It is true that to use Adorno to think about music today is to have to think in terms of “high culture”/”low culture” or the autonomous realm of art vs. the culture industry. In the U.S. this is problematized by a tendency to view many sociological issues through the prism of race regardless of whether or not that is the best model. I don’t feel prepared at this point to even begin to address that issue, but I hope to in future posts.

So what do I find useful in Adorno? I feel like his general response to the commercial commodity form of music has only become more relevant with the passage of time. When Adorno says something like

“Man in the age of the omnipresent radio and jukebox has forgotten the experience of music altogether.”

Then he might be of use to think about this new world of the iPod and the 99 cent “song.” The musical omnipresence of Adorno’s time appears quaint by today’s standards. Its too simple to just say that Adorno had no understanding of popular music and that was the source of his disdain for an ever more musically mediated culture. Adorno spoke with great precision about different forms of listening and how various musical environments summon these forms of listening in us.

For me listening is a form of thought, and so this ability of the sonic environment to cause us to listen in a particular way borders on a form of ambient thought control. I tend to think about the ubiquity of popular culture in terms of mental ecology. I find it very difficult to come to popular culture from a critical place however because of the tautological defense of popular culture in the form of “you can’t understand popular culture unless you like it.” This seems to me like the old defense of religion against critique, “you can’t understand religion except from a place of belief.” The question then becomes how much do you have to “like” popular culture to be qualified to speak about it. Is it enough that I feel like I can understand what is appealing about Britney Spears to her fans, or do I have to have a poster of her over my bed before I’ve got it.

It is of course too easy to just make a neat analogy of popular culture to religion in the form of old Karl Marx’s “religion is the opiate of the people,” but there is a critique to be made about the huge role popular music plays in the construction of our subjectivities.

Aside from this issue is the question of what the whole productive infrastructure of popular music does for the possibility of other forms of musical expression.

“The standards of consumer goods are the basis upon which the right to existence of the work of art is determined: this standard is regarded as the absolute criterion of social truth.”

This also is much more true now than when Adorno wrote it. In a society where nothing has meaning or value unless it can assume a commodity form, “Right to existence” can be seen as ability to play any kind of role in the market of cultural goods. As 99% of the music anyone comes in contact with today is technologically mediated, the technological infrastructure of dissemination becomes a filtering device for what can and cannot be consumed. These structures form our ability to even conceive what music is or can be.

I was an early adopter of the iPod. I am not a luddite. But if it is hard to talk about the role of culture in the construction of our subjectivities it is even harder to talk about the role of technology in the same. Part of this difficulty comes from the common misunderstanding of technology as “tools” for our use. To think this way about technology is to miss the meaning of technology as an event. This too will have to wait for another post, but the old saying “when you’ve got a hammer all the world looks like a nail,” is perhaps to the point here.

The iPod, and particularly its assemblage with a computer and the iTunes software service, structures the very definition of music for its users. Firstly, it trains us into the idea that the functional unit of all music is the “song.” “the new iPod, 15,000 songs.” This brings up complicated issues for me of the relationship between technological capabilities, marketing strategies, and possible cultural forms. I could of course have no “songs” on my iPod. I could in fact have only one month long composition on it if I could find such a piece of music. These are technological capabilities. But the use of the hardware of the iPod is going to be determined for most people by the available software.

The iTunes software functions on the unit of the “song.” What ever musical or musicological definition of the song as a unit there may have been in the past, the meaning for iTunes is simple…a song is what costs 99 cents. Some years back to refer to a movement of a Beethovan symphony as a “song” was just a sign of ignorance. Now it is an enforced cultural norm. Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” is sold on iTunes as 14 “songs” despite there being no real breaks in the music. I don’t need to spell out what this means for the ability to comprehend broad musical structures. As a listening experience what does it mean to hear 20 seconds of “Rite of Spring” (part 1 – VII “The Adoration of the Earth”) sandwiched between Jay Z and The White Stripes on my iPod in “shuffle mode.”

Adorno long ago said that the market tends to collapse any qualitative distinctions into quantitative ones. This for me is the first meaning of the event of the iPod.

organizing principles

2005-12-15T17:31:00.000-08:00

What then is music? I am going to argue in a rambling and improvisational style for now, that music is a particular way of organizing sound. The main point I would like to make is that the “materials” of music are “virtual objects,” that is that they are forms of meta-organization that do not have any “reality” in the immanent realm of sound.

Example: what is a note? To perceive a note is to perceive a certain waveform of a certain frequency for a certain duration. A note is not in any way like a material object. A note is the perception of a kind of organization. Any waveform perceived as a note must meet a number of criteria. It firstly must be sufficiently periodic for our ears to perceive a more or less stable pitch. Its frequency must obviously be within the human range of hearing 20 to 20,000 cycles per second. If its duration is too short it will not register as an event for the listener…if too long it will not either. The outer limits or perceptual thresholds of these parameters are not universal, but defined by cultural or technological expectations.

The tendency in western musical pedagogy has always been to deny the “virtual” quality of our musical materials and to assume them to be both “real” and universal. As an example, part 1 of Joseph Machlis’ “The Enjoyment of Music,” entitled “the Materials of Music,” begins with a quote from Hindemith, “There are only twelve tones. You must treat them carefully.” From the viewpoint of the materiality of sound, this statement is meaningless. Or rather it only makes sense in a regime of truth where the conventions of western music are assumed to have both “reality” and universality.

A “note” is an organizing principle. A scale of notes is a higher level organizing principle. The same is true for the temporal organization of “notes” into rhythms. I tend not to believe that our western “organizing principles” have an inherent justification in the materiality of sound itself. I don’t at this point want to argue with those who do…so I am not going to get into discussions of the overtone series, various tuning systems, etc. I just wanted to make the point that the materials of music are various organizing principles. Music in this sense is an organization of organizing principles. In the west, at this time, among these important principles are pitch, melody, harmony, rhythm, timbre, etc. For another culture, for instance in Carnatic classical music, different organizing principles are the “materials of music” like “Raga” and “Tala.”

Organizing principles scale up. “Raga” is a higher level organization of pitch than the western idea of scale, and “tala” is a higher level organization of rhythm than the units we usually think of in the west…but so is the concept of a “breakbeat” in DJ culture. It should go without saying that “higher level” does not imply a scale of value, but rather a degree of differentiation or abstraction. In this sense I’m using the term in the same way computer programmers do when they talk about higher levels of programming languages. C++ is a higher level language than assembler languages.

For both computer programming and producing “music” these levels of organization serve the same purpose…they let us create more organization with less effort. In computer programming, arbitrary languages are used to create objects and functions that can be manipulated symbolically. This symbolic manipulation of virtual objects is usually to some end in computer programming…to provide a user with a word processing application for instance. In music this symbolic manipulation of virtual objects is music itself. A computer programmer is unlikely to mistake a virtual object of some kind, say a function like sRandom() for something that has any kind of natural immanent materiality, but quite a few western music composers make this mistake when thinking about a Cmaj7 chord.

One common explanation for the loss of relevance of “classical” music traditions in the west, is the supposed turning away from “natural” forms of melodic and harmonic organization by musical modernists…there is a harmony to the world and for some reason this harmony was best expressed by the musical practices of 17th to 19th century Europe. In any other field this kind of thinking would be laughable, but it still constitutes a largely unexamined norm among western classical musicians.

Some sound definitions

2005-12-08T10:59:00.000-08:00

In my last post I attempted to define the term “Art Music” in the way I will be using it in the future on this site. This definition can be seen as still flawed in more than a few ways. Firstly, it is flawed in that it refers to the “materiality” of sound without explaining what that may be. I hope to address this issue in this post. Secondly, it already assumes a working definition of music. To define the realm of “music” is perhaps much more difficult than defining a subset of that realm. I will not try and create a working definition of “music,” in this post but I will look at various existing definitions in their socio-historical contexts to try and narrow the field by rejecting those definitions that fall down for me.

The materiality of sound…

If sound seems the least material object of our sensorium this may be because we most commonly think of materiality in terms of “extensive qualities,” length, height, volume, etc. Sound on the other hand is the experience of the change of an “intensive quality,” air pressure, over time. So sound is doubly removed from what we normally would think of as a material object: firstly as a product of an intensive property of a substance, and secondly as a product not just of an intensive quality of a substance but as the product of the change in value of that intensive quality.

So to hear sound is always to hear difference over time. To hear sound is always to experience change. Furthermore, to recognize two sounds in succession as different is to experience a change in the rate of change or a difference in difference. This basic fact about the materiality of sound defines for me what is so valuable about thinking seriously about sound. Sound can help us think about time, difference, and change.

Although I am not going to try and make a case for it as of yet, I would like to suggest that working with sound, manipulating its material, “composing” it into patterns, is a way of “thinking” about sound, and by extension, thinking about time, difference, and change. I am going to call this way of thinking about sound by manipulating its material, “sonic craftsmanship.” I am going to keep this category as broad as possible. So for instance it will include all speech and other human vocalizations, all music (of anyone’s definition), dance or other body movement intended to have a sonic result (think tap, flamenco, much African dance, etc.). All intentional animal sounds…not just the songs of birds or whales, but the sounds of crickets and locusts, the squeak of a mouse, the roar of a lion, etc. This category will not include any sound generated without behavioral intention.

Part of my reason for defining things this way is that I would like to eliminate one of the most common definitions of “music:” “music is organized sound.” To buy this definition and to think that it excludes all intentionally organized animal sounds is just to be anthropocentric. To exclude speech is also untenable…what is speech if not organized sound?

I want to go a step further however and argue that there is no such category as “unorganized sound.” To say that sound is the result of differences in air pressure over time is to say that molecules of air have been organized into patterns. This organization is always the trace of a material process. So here is a definition of sound that may be of use: the trace, as an organization of molecules of air into patterns, of some material process. What I am trying to do here is move towards an ontology of sound that would be resolutely materialist. It is my contention that thinking about sound and music in western culture has been complicated by an idealist bias that goes all the way back to Pythagoras, and that we may have to rebuild the foundations of our understanding of sound to get to a place where we can think more fruitfully about music and its various functions in our culture.

In a future post I intend to re-examine John Cage and how his ideas are commonly understood in light of my attempt here to categorize kinds of sound production. The basic idea might be…John Cage accepts the definition of music as “organized sound” AND accepts that all sound “is the trace, as an organization of molecules of air into patterns, of some material process.” So for Cage all sound is music. Pretty simple logic and not that hard to get your head around. Looked at this way John Cage is a “process realist” in the sense of Manual DeLanda’s thinking on Deleuze.

the name game...

2005-12-02T10:09:00.000-08:00

The name game…

A reader recently took me to task for my vague and indiscriminate use of the term “art music.”

Searching for “art music” on wikipedia (at least on 12/02/05) brings up an initial “disambiguation page” with three terms. In this post I will take a ride through wikipedia’s entries on the subject and hopefully provide some disambiguation of my own for my readers. I do not wish to take a position on the overall usefulness of the information presented by the wikipedia project, but specifically because of its “bottom up” open source methodology and its lack of institutional legitimation it may provide useful insight into how these terms are used by a self selecting subset of the “general public.”

The three listed terms on this initial page are “Classical Music,” “Electronic Art Music,” and “Art Rock.” I will browse them in reverse order.

Art Rock…

“Art rock is a sub-genre of rock music that is characterized by ambitious lyrical themes and melodic or rhythmic experimentation, often extending beyond standard pop song forms and toward influences in jazz, classical, or the avant-garde.”

I will not quote from the rest of this entry because this first sentence is enough to explore one set of meanings given to appending “art” and “music”… that is the aspiration to complexity within genre expectations. “Art Rock” could be supplemented with “Art Disco,” “Art Bluegrass,” etc. That the first term has common currency and that my made up terms do not says more about the institutional role of “Rock” in our culture than to Rock’s monopoly on intra-genre creativity. This common currency often leads to some funny nominations. For instance Bjork is often mentioned in discussions of “Art Rock,” although it’s not at all clear to me what her music has to do with Rock. Perhaps “Art Disco” would be more to the point. But as “Disco” still acts for many as a term for the nadir of musical sophistication and creativity (quite unfairly in my opinion), it is unlikely that any of the Fans of Bjork’s admittedly complex and interesting music would use the word.

In my writing I will not be using “Art Music” in this way. One of the ideas I would like to propose is that if a music is bound by genre conventions of popular musical forms then it is not really aspiring to the condition of what I would like to call an “Art Music.”

Note that this is not a judgment on the value or worth of any form of music in our culture. I do not wish to form hierarchies as much as differentiations. I would like to separate the idea of connoisseurship from elitism. Differentiation is after all the multiplication of difference. The personal ascription of value to a musical object should not in itself be seen as either a populist or elitist act. I won’t fault you for finding musical interest in Britney Spears if you won’t fault me for finding musical interest in Stockhausen.

However I would like to forcefully reject the leveling relativist traps of postmodernism here. The absolutely most useless aesthetic judgment is also the most common, reflected in the comment “there are only two kinds of music: good and bad.”

It is only with increasingly fine differentiations of genre expectations that one can even begin to speak about qualitative issues. If there are no differentiations of genre expectations being made then there is absolutely no basis to make any qualitative statement besides “I liked it…I hated it.”

This is a very complicated issue and I am not claiming that I am equipped to sort it out…only that it is important to my project to try. Even to use the term “genre expectations” is fraught with difficulty. My experience has been that some “genre expectations” can be differentiated “objectively” within the musical object, and others are almost purely a product of discourse.

Although the following will be a digression at this point I think it is worth stating if nothing else then as an introduction to future posts on the subject…

Deleuze is useful here for me in sorting through these issues. In the Deleuzian schema there is a differentiation between what he calls the “plane of transcendent organization” and the “plane of immanence.” Music dependant for its meaning by its relationship to genre expectations is bound to the “plane of transcendent organization.” I would like to suggest that any music aspiring to the condition of art attempts to generate meaning through internal differentiation of its sonically immanent materiality.

If you are thinking “what the fuck?” right now…well hopefully I will be able to explicate this somewhat in future posts…but for now I am just going to drop it and get back to my “wiki” tour.

Electronic Art Music…

“Electronic "art" music is a term for the formal - and primarily academic - branch of electronic music that is focused on extending musical capabilities through technology. Electronic art music suffers from naming difficulties due to ambiguities similar to those associated with the terms "contemporary music" (music that is being produced right now) and "modern classical music" (modern music composed in the traditions of classical music.)”

In discussing this entry I will have to use “as is” a number of terms that are themselves in need of further “disambiguation,” but to avoid an endless linguistic regress I am just going to say “fuck it” and plow ahead.

The early history of the use of electronic instruments was almost entirely contained within the world of experimental or avant-garde western classical music. While this was the case, the term “electronic music” could safely refer only to the products of this world. When after the 1960’s, popular music forms began to use electronic instruments not just for some exotic color, but as the very basis of their style, there arose the need to be able to differentiate this new popular music from the historical use of the term. And so the definition above…

In my writing I am going to use the terms slightly differently. For me “Electronic Music” will refer to all forms of music productively bound to electronic or digital sound technology in the generation of its sonic material, regardless of whether it is seen by its producers or its receivers as belonging to the world of classical music or popular music. I will use the term “Electronic Art Music” to refer to all forms of music productively bound to electronic or digital sound technology in the generation of its sonic material, regardless of whether it is seen by its producers or its receivers as belonging to the world of classical music or popular music AND attempts to generate meaning through internal differentiation of its sonically immanent materiality.

With these definitions I am trying to find a way to think about electronic music without falling into the traps of high culture/low culture debate or questions of differentiation by institutional legitimation. I want to try and think about music by what it does…how it functions within itself.

Moving on to the perhaps most complexly ambiguous entry…

Classical Music…

Clicking on this entry from the “Art Music” “disambiguation” page brings you to another “disambiguation” page that begins as follows…

“This article disambiguates several traditions of music called "classical music". For the most common uses in English, please see European classical music and Classical music era.”

And

“In the English language, the term "classical music" is a homophoric reference to European classical music, such as Beethoven's symphonies, and its derivative styles, and rarely used to refer to traditional musical styles of other regions. Others prefer a more narrow use to refer to music of the classical music era, roughly between 1740 and 1830 and characterized by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Josef Haydn.”

And!

“Classical music may be used variously to refer to:
_ Andalusian classical music
_ Arab classical music
_ Bengali classical music
_ Burmese classical music
_ Carnatic music
_ Central Asian classical music
_ Chinese classical music
_ Charya or Nepalese classical music
_ Classical Jazz
_ Classical music era
_ Classical rock
_ European classical music, classical music of Western cultures
_ Experimental music, a movement within 20th century classical music
_ Gagaku or Japanese classical music
_ Gamelan or Indonesian classical music
_ Greek classical music
_ Hindustani classical music
_ Indian classical music
_ Klasik or Afghan classical music
_ Korean court music
_ Laotian classical music
_ Mugam or Azerbaijani classical music
_ Music of Orissa
_ musiqi-e assil or Iranian classical music
_ Nangma or Tibetan classical music
_ Orthodox Byzantine music
_ Ottoman classical music
_ Philippine classical music
_ Pinpeat or Cambodian classical music
_ Sufiana Kalam or Kashmiri classical music
_ Thai court music
_ Vietnamese classical music”

Oh boy!

Can I come up with a use of the term “Art Music” that would be inclusive of all of this and of “Electronic Art Music.” Modifying my use of the Deleuzian schema, here is what I propose…

“Art Music” is music that although possibly bound to the plane of transcendent organization through its use of pre-existing forms received by traditional dissemination within a specific cultural context, attempts to generate meaning through internal differentiation of its sonically immanent materiality.

Have you been “disambiguated?”

Deleuzian Music? (part 1)

2005-11-30T07:22:00.000-08:00

It seems it has become very fashionable to use the Philosophy Of Gilles Deleuze to think about and write about music.

A case in point…a few days ago I received a mass email from Paul Miller (a.k.a. DJ Spooky) on the subject.

In this instance I will be following fashion. I think a very compelling case can be made as to the centrality of the work of Deleuze to thinking about sound in the 21st century. I will not try and make that case in this post, but will save it for a time when my thoughts are more organized.

Instead I want to look briefly at one of the rather silly misapplications of Deleuze to music… “Jazz” as “nomadic science” vs., “classical” as “royal science.” For me this idea is simplistic and boring. Philosophy gets tedious when it is inevitably mistranslated into moral imperatives…

Improvisation – good
Composition – bad

There are no moral imperatives in Deleuze. There is an ethics however – Spinoza’s ethics.

For Spinoza the “good,” if there were such a concept, is simply the increase of joy…joy being the experience of “what a body can do”…the opening of possibilities of action and experience.

It is simple minded, in my opinion, to suggest that “the opening of possibilities of action and experience” is inherently the domain of improvisation in music. This ignores the tendency of improvisation to lock us into the already known in the expression of our subjectivities.

To make this ethical devaluation of composition, this line of argument focuses on the productive position of the performing musician. Yes, it is clear that the improvising musician has more subjective agency than the interpretive classical musician. But this is a kind of bait and switch operation. If the ethical critique of the composer is that she does not allow the expressive agency of the musicians, one possible solution is clear…use machines….disclaimer: no musicians were harmed in the creation of this music.

The comparison should really be between the improvising musician and the “composing musician.” I would argue that in particular post-Cagian compositional strategies help to free the composing musician from the strictures of interpellated subjectivities.

I say this as someone with an ongoing improvisational practice. My improvisational practice informs my compositional practice and vice versa. Postulating a value of one over the other is to miss the point of 21st century musical creation, and perhaps also of Deleuze.

Some thoughts toward the idea of the function of “art” music…

2005-11-28T23:15:00.000-08:00

The difficulties in merely trying to find the right words to define the territory…”art music,” “classical music,” “sound art,” etc, already seems symptomatic to me.

The visual art world seems to have much less difficulty in distinguishing itself from the rest of visual culture, although their success in doing this might also be coming to an end.

In his recent collection of essays “The Conspiracy of Art,” Jean Baudrillard suggests that..

“The Art market is not really a Mafia, but something that formed according to the rules of its own game, and whose disappearance would go unnoticed”

I would argue that the same could be said for the world of “art music,” or more forcefully that it has already disappeared and its disappearance did go unnoticed…most particularly by those most involved in its world: composers, “new music” ensembles and their generally masochistic clientele.

To say such a thing instantly opens me up to all sorts of ways of being misunderstood. And that is fine. With time I hope to sort through the potential misunderstandings. But for now…as a place to begin…I find it useful to consider the idea that the history of Western Art Music is over. I will not try at this point to pinpoint the year of death on the tombstone…that is a fool’s game, but the concept of an already existing closure, even if just imaginary, frees me to think of possibilities for the future that perhaps I would not be able to think otherwise.

I want eventually to be able to define a “function” for sound as art that would be able to include the canonic history of western art music but also include a future music of radical alterity that could arise in an age of cultural and technological globalization.

I say all this as someone deeply committed to the idea of a sound based art. But where I disagree with most commentators on the “crises of classical music” is that I do not think it is possible or desirable to maintain the traditional structures of western musical “art.” The problem is not one of marketing or of education. Western art music long ago lost its relevance to the broader culture.

To say this this way I could be read as a reactionary blaming musical modernism for turning its back on traditional western musical values. Ironically this viewpoint is most commonly expressed these days by pseudo-avant gardist baby boomers who blame modernism’s aberrant turn from western tonality and simple body based rhythms for classical music’s lose of relevance to the culture at large. I tend to disagree. I think perhaps this critique is symptomatic of music’s inability to come to terms with modernism. This inability itself seems to me to have much more to do with the crises than any particular musical details of modernism.

And yet I tend to think that the “culture at large” does somehow recognize the emptiness of the space that art music once filled and is looking for something to fill that space. This is for me the “good news” so to speak. The idea that this space can at least be held open for a bit longer, and something might grow into this space. So the task of thinking about a potential “sound as art” is to try and locate the boundaries of this space and identify sonic tendencies that could grow into this space if we manage to keep it open.

I tend to think almost anything could be the seed…some strange assemblage of digital gamelan and Korean death metal…circuit bending and Tibetan chant.

Forms in art are strange attractors, and we will have to have a little faith in morphogenetic processes to hold this space open. But to do so we have to turn our backs to what has already long ago failed.

"Mashups" and Mozart

2005-11-26T12:37:00.000-08:00

Manipulation of appropriated sonic material has always played a role in my creative activity. As a kid, particularly around age ten, I used to fuck around with records and record the results on one of those radio shack top loading cassette recorders. I still have some of the tapes. Some years later I was able to use the great manual pause button on my mothers Technics cassette deck to create pretty precise edits of material from records and radio.

In my teenage years my younger brother moved way ahead of me on the tech front, getting a rather professional 4 track cassette deck and a Sequential Circuits digital drum machine when he was 14 or so. My own gear affliction didn’t start in earnest until I was around 20 and had acquired an 8 track reel-to-reel, a yamaha DX7, and the venerable Esoniq Mirage 8 bit sampler.

In the almost 20 years of writing music since I have only rarely publicly presented pieces that included appropriation. Part of the reticence to do so was simply the result of going through a traditional conservatory compositional training, and part of it was ethical…the idea that appropriation without significant creative working of the material was a form of false representation. Interestingly enough I was never interested in or concerned with the copyright issues that have formed the center of the discourse around appropriation in the past few decades. I was never a respecter of legality and so that whole side of it was a non-issue for me.

I think the first piece I presented publicly that involved appropriation used bits of Led Zeppelin, courtesy of the Mirage, with pseudo Middle Eastern noodling over it. I don’t know that I would claim it as my own as this point and there really isn’t much more to say about it.

The first piece involving appropriation that I would still claim used bits of Art of Noise and Laurie Anderson. I had purchased my first cd player in 1983 and almost right away got interested in manipulating the rewind button to do a kind of proto-granular time stretching (at least this is how it sounds in 20/20 hindsight). I used this technique on the piece in question along with the sample trigger function of a Yamaha SPX90. This was probably 1986. This composition was presented as a sophomore composition project and just about ended my “career” as a composition student. Interestingly, the appropriation involved was not the source of the displeasure of the composition faculty…I don’t think they understood what I was doing technically…they thought, I think, that the result sonically displayed a kind of lack of seriousness.

My first entirely appropriationist piece was constructed around the same time. It was a tape collage of cd manipulation of a Miles Davis track. My composition teacher dissuaded me from presenting it at school and I have since lost it.

All of this is sort of background to my current thoughts about appropriation as a compositional technique and its ascendancy in remix culture. This is relevant both to the paper I am writing and to my current musical projects.

As to the paper, I intend to look at appropriation strategies in the popular form of “mashups” and in the more artisinal form of John Oswald and the like.

In my music making appropriation has recently taken center stage. A recent piece “the Fold” appropriated bits of Baroque music as source material. The piece I am currently working on uses the Overture to “The Magic Flute” as its only source material. “The Fold,” is a dance, music, video collaboration and received its premiere at The National Arts Festival of South Africa. The current piece (also a dance, music, video collaboration) is a commission for the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth and will premiere in January at The Kimmel Center in Philadelphia.

My basic feeling is that “mashups” are of limited compositional interest, and function more on the level of their sociological reception…relying on the “frisson” of unexpected genre combinations. The musical objects chosen are functioning in a rich semiotic field in which the purely sonic takes back seat to the complex of signs that constitute the popular artist. I don’t want to belabor this point here, nor am I interested in delimiting hierarchies of cultural value. I have no interest in valorizing “compositional interest” over other forms of meaning, musical or otherwise. This is not because I am a populist or believe that hierarchies can not/should not be constructed, but simply because that is not, in my opinion, the most interesting way to parse the phenomenon.

Musically, “mashups” rely on the fact that popular music is already a modular, combinative form. The basic rhythmic and harmonic profile of a verse or chorus of a popular song can be matched with hundreds of others. The success of a “mashup” musically has more to do with the sophisticated combination of “style,” itself a complicated and slippery concept. To manipulate a source musically to the point where it is not instantly recognizable to a casual listener would be to defeat the purpose. In short “mashups” have a built in limit point against manipulative sonic creativity.

The kind of work I am doing with my “Mozart” piece does not function this way in its expected reception. I would hope that a deep knowledge of the source, in this case the Overture to “The Magic Flute,” would add to the listening experience, but it should not be necessary to constructing a meaning for the listener.

Pumping Up the Volume

2005-11-26T09:55:00.000-08:00

The purpose of this blog is two-fold. Firstly to try out ideas and receive feedback on material related to a paper I am writing... "Pumping Up the Volume: The Possibilities for Sound as Art in the Age of Global Entertainment" and secondly to be a place to just generally comment on the state and development of "sonic culture."

It is my hope that this will encourage me to get my ass in gear and enable interested individuals to encourage me and or brutally savage me for my incohearance.

Initial topics of investigation will include:

The "function" of sound as art

The history of electronic and experimental music

The function and history of sound as popular entertainment

DJs VJs and "remix culture"

Computation as the "New Muse" and the field of "information art" [in particular data sonification]