tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16570242366710771142024-03-05T02:47:44.585-08:00musicopathymusic discourse dreaming of music without discoursederek.k.jeppsenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04666636081163461931noreply@blogger.comBlogger13125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1657024236671077114.post-54454517758208780672017-03-03T17:02:00.002-08:002017-03-03T17:02:29.020-08:00True Negativity and Immediacy<div dir="ltr">
I'm working on a little project now that requires a ton of Adorno.</div>
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The exhausting quality of Adorno's work is how, given the state of the world, Adorno reads very clearly in light of his tradition (Kant, Hegel, and Marx), but the criticism and thinking that he offers is maybe three or four steps beyond common knowledge and casual agreement. Each sentence that Adorno writes is worth about three of anyone else's (maybe besides Hegel). I could describe it as an increase in some kind of theoretical weight. There's an interesting dichotomy within this, because that is balanced with a little bit of unpredictability at the paragraph level, even if each sentence is burdened with many references and technicalities. There are formal tricks, in Adorno's writing, that only make sense musically, but I digress.</div>
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There's a level of competence that I've attained over the past few years that enables me to get about 80 percent of what he says--as content--when he's talking about modern philosophy. I'm still in a similar position when reading his strictly philosophical works, such as <i>Against Epistemology</i> and <i>Negative Dialectics</i>, to the one when I first read some of his essays on music as a nascent musicologist... I initially thought that "On the Social Situation of Music" was equal parts music criticism and some kind of Marxist poetry. After some formal training in social philosophy (that is, a thousand or so pages of Marx, Weber, Freud, and Horkheimer in a couple of months), the text blew up with me on the second reading. Instead of being some technical poetry with music as the subject, it was the elucidation of a theory of identity politics with which I had, as a student and practitioner of music, never been close to articulating.</div>
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That beautiful, asystematic, and scathing contemporary socio-psychological music criticism (my immediate impression) drew me into commitment to his work. That immediacy--I'd find, after years of working on thinking and knowing--was central to his conception of "how to be." (Scare quotes, here, are because of the lack of autonomy possible in identity thinking and with the division of labor's force against normative claims. This isn't really an ethical claim, nor the epistemic one that I framed it in.) The immediacy of returning to Adorno after sharpening my Marx, then after reading Hegel's <i>Phenomenology</i>, is a reproducible phenomenon, a structured way of finding wonder and immediacy in the relations of the tradition to itself. </div>
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Is it not telling, though, that I can justify all of the aesthetic arguments I struggled (and failed) to offer, from the age of 15 to 25, through this construct? "Why do I like this?" "Because it immediately offered me a beauty that did violence to my own expectations of what music could be." That's not a particularly good definition of "immediacy," if I have a philosopher's hat on, so: unmediated experience that doesn't involve rationalizing it out, explaining it in the world, or being expert/layperson or inside/outside (<i>alienated</i>) for reasons that are inescapable in the social world.</div>
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I now have to admit a transgression: I fell asleep for a few seconds in the concert hall a few nights ago while "seeing"* a performance of Elliott Carter's <i>Penthode</i>. I'm copping to to this because I <b>always</b> try to situate myself, in experiences of music and art and even leisure, as my 15 year old self and how mind-boggling those experiences would be to him. He would have berated me for being a lame, ungrateful fuck to not give utter attention to such a unique experience. (*Scare quotes, in this paragraph, are an analog to the conductor's instructions on how to listen to the piece--by tracking the motion through the ensemble--which were given over half an hour of talking that opened the concert, and likely contributed just as much to my trance-like state as the piece began.)</div>
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I frame myself that way (as an older version of who I was) because of how much the immediacy of experience dulls as time and knowledge and worry seem to accumulate. I don't mean to point out that getting old sucks... I mean to point out that knowing more of the social world makes unmediated experience less possible, and the world becomes more predictable. (And I don't mean to throw Elliott Carter under the bus, but, when my girlfriend told me a few days earlier that we would see the piece, I said "oh, yeah, that whole conversation/dialog thing where members of the ensemble are on teams." It's only one aspect of the piece, but it is the formal one, most apparent in the "structural listening" that we practice in music. The politics of the form, hilariously--in light of Adorno and of contemporary U.S. politics--are obvious in the piece as the shattered American ideal of a discourse that cannot hold in its secular form.) When I did put my expert hat on afterwards, I came to a moment of startle when I thought: "the piece taught me nothing about the ideals of discourse... they illustrated the falsity of the aspiration behind them."</div>
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The problem of immediacy (our lack of it) is something that I see everywhere. There seems to be little "left-field" of the kind that could have existed even 10 years ago... The longer "artists" (in the musical sense) stick around, the more they tend to co-opt the Pop after having come from diverse backgrounds. The only radical thing on television is the delightfully disruptive <i>Eric Andre Show</i> (and is probably the only recognizable heir to the tradition of <i>Monty Python</i><i>'s Flying Circus</i>, <i>That Mitchell and Webb Look</i>, <i>Wonder </i><i>Showzen</i>, and <i>Tim and Eric</i>). Cinema may have some contemporary examples (but the most talked about movie right now is the most ferociously terrible tribute to the lives of Angelenos themselves). </div>
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The problem is, difficultly, a semiotics of negativity that isn't yet theorized. History is crucial to the creation of the work of art, not as "paying dues," but as not retreading existing work and eliminating the sensation that your audience will have in the form "this is like x but <u>with</u> y" (the mathematicization of art that is simultaneous with with a genetic theory of influence, a literal proof that we can't think outside of what is already provided), or in the "I like what I'm familiar with." History in the mind of the audience builds this as a complement to history in the mind of the composer. The <i>trace</i> is what is literally happening, literally doable (if "faithfully" performed). The <i>trace </i>is the only thing that cannot be an abyss, because if it were, there would no longer be labor to create the object, and art would be nothing but nature or hallucination.</div>
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Knowing is positivity, a relation to the world as it is. It's an upvote, a story supporting your worldview, a theory that proves your empirical continuity, or a claim to novelty that's understandable somehow (which is <i>prima facie</i> contradictory). They should all be suspect on the grounds that the world gave them and they now, as Heidegger once said, "lie in the storerooms of the publishing house like potatoes in a cellar." A true negativity would be (and is, if even through reproduction) the thing that suspends history and society for a second or less. A true negativity would not just present what is possible, but something that isn't. That can happen at any scope and make the world into immediacy, which defeats the world and its social totality... but it, itself, is only possible with unknowing and the impossible, somewhere in a system.</div>
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Society, on the other hand, <i>could</i> be true negativity, unleashing art and other labor as immediate and unrecognizable, as we freely engage with it, and would lead to knowing history as nothing but the (already existing) scars of a mediated and alienating world.</div>
derek.k.jeppsenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04666636081163461931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1657024236671077114.post-46696063396278686442015-08-12T17:46:00.001-07:002015-08-12T18:12:29.492-07:00A Prelude to Artifice of Intelligence<p dir="ltr">I just disturbed myself greatly with this idea... In a longer post that will come soon, I'm doing a pickup philosophy game about Artificial Intelligence and stumbled into a new reading of Alan Turing's Imitation Game from "Computing Machinery and Intelligence."</p>
<p dir="ltr">The Game is constructed of an interrogator and two agents: a man (who is a computer) who must convince the interrogator (who is a human) that he is more of a woman than the female agent (a female woman who can only tell the truth). If a particular Male agent can succeed at being chosen as the Female agent more than 50% of the time, it has the appearance of intelligence (if not intelligence itself).</p>
<p dir="ltr">That's it. Almost any popular depiction of this Test is a lie... It confuses the process for a one on one conversation, or says that it's good enough to win the game once, or it ignores gender.</p>
<p dir="ltr">Of course, the gender thing is true irony... Knowing Turing's story, and not the one in<i> The Imitation Game </i>that accuses him of treason, makes gender anxiety into something that was felt deeply enough by Turing to take his own life. But we no longer gender the Test. This is in spite of our proclivity toward stories that show a "female" robot killing their maker because they were "born" into sexual slavery. I was going to write a chapter of my master's thesis on the generation of anxieties in the Turing Test, both deceptive and gendered. I didn't write that thesis...<br><br></p>
<p dir="ltr">Thinking about the Imitation Game as a social construct is more interesting than any fiction about robots... Our blueprint for designating intelligence when imbued in a made object is more terrifying than a killer "gynoid" emancipating "herself" from her owner or user...</p>
<p dir="ltr">The humans in the Test are themselves classed. The interrogator is responsible for identifying the semblance of intelligence, but the Female agent is responsible for truth and truth only. Deception is folded into the role of the newcomer, the Male, made intelligence. His ability to lie about his gender is what defines sufficient intelligence to be counted among humans. But paradoxically, the Female must give up the right to deceive, and stick to the world of things as their truth value (whatever that is).</p>
<p dir="ltr">It is because of this that the Test is dehumanizing in itself, and the Female is the automaton, but a human one. Parroting off truths is simultaneously not human, and the role for the Female who is only in the Test because she is essentially human. She is impinged upon by reality and forced to know nothing but what is, again, a source of dehumanization and a defeating of creativity.</p>
<p dir="ltr">The interrogator can be themselves and nothing else. They are not gendered, and consistently free to make judgements about the threshold of femaleness, be they from it or not. They are presumably critical and human (if those are different somehow). They will judge however they may, and the results will be about their sensibilities, their standard for intelligence. We must hope that they have a sound judgment, since they will be making the first call to the world that we can create in our image, and become our own myth (again).</p>
<p dir="ltr">Gender, for Turing, stands in for valuations about social life: female living is truthful, while male living is a deception. Intelligence is defined by the quality of deception, and deception is only performed by the made object that wants to be legitimized as intelligent. Intelligence is a deception... It is a social truth that builds success in an episteme that knows itself and itself alone. The interrogator sets the price of intelligence at what they would buy it at.</p>
derek.k.jeppsenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04666636081163461931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1657024236671077114.post-61343433382953916842015-06-19T14:08:00.000-07:002016-01-07T14:51:53.784-08:00Adorno, for Doug and Matthew<div dir="ltr">
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This week's episode of Zero Squared with Matthew Collin contains a very confused reading of Adorno, so I'll treat it like an essay prompt. First, I'll say that I've spent a lot of time with Adorno's work, but am not a certified "Adorno expert." Second, I had the opportunity to read Adorno first as a musicologist with a background in phenomenology, and later as I was being trained in Marxist social theory and critical theory. Through this process, I found that there is a lot in Adorno that only means something when you know <i>all </i>of his references; I'll simply never get there, and because of this, my interpretation of his work could be called "quite subjective." Third, the Frankfurt School has come up a lot recently on Zero Squared, and always seems to lack a voice in the discussion, because I don't think Doug (or C. Derick Varn) take them seriously as Marxists. I don't have an interest (today) in explaining the epistemological and historiographical problem of Marxist orthodoxy more deeply, but there may be some things here that are tangential to Doug and Derick's previous conversation about Jacoby's <i>Dialectic of Defeat</i>. Suffice it to say, for now, that I did not understand why the Frankfurt School is non-canonical Marxism. When Derick said recently that Adorno and Horkheimer are "too cultural," I had a little bit of an epistemic shock; I don't know what "too cultural" could even possibly mean, since culture is the realm of all <i>relevant </i>truth, everyday individual and mass action, and ideology formation. It did, recently and along with other problems, make me rethink the term "Marxism," and draw the Frankfurt School, and myself, as outside of that term for the first time. As I like to tell people in conversations about Adorno: "Marxists wait for the proletariat to wake up; Adorno says 'have you met these people?'"</div>
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<b>Adorno and Horkheimer's Critique of Structure Itself</b></div>
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The topic at hand is Adorno's dismissal of popular music, which is basically one of the two things that he is most known for in his musicological writing and methods. The context of all of his dismissals (popular music, Jazz, narrative film, and basically, everyone except Beethoven and Schönberg) is the totality of his overall project, and the projects of the Frankfurt School (at least Adorno and Horkheimer) more generally. </div>
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Adorno has a reputation in musical analysis that is at the level of infamy. His name, when it appears in the work of contemporary musicological study, invites a plethora of standardized and institutionally endorsed "fallacies," counterarguments that were forged just to delegitimize any of his viewpoints. In the same way Marx's labor theory of value is wrong because <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_0r5M_C5VE#t=22m17s" target="_blank">it doesn't account for the exploitation of the dead laborer, animals, and grants no human rights to corn</a>, those who would use Adorno's method for musicological inquiry are instantly creating "an authoritarian discourse, and an asocial one," as Richard Taruskin put it in the introduction to the Oxford History of Western Music. Adorno gets a whole paragraph of being called out, forty years past his death, for ruining musicological study, in today's most authoritative and canonical history of all of Western music. Taruskin carefully chose the two words that are the exact negation of Adorno's actual work, as a way of twisting the knife (Taruskin prefers the work of Howard S. Becker, that is, his aping and dishonest reproduction of Erving Goffman's work). This has led to a game that I like to play, where count how many sentences it takes an Adornian analyst to disavow him; it usually looks something like "I don't agree with everything he says, but..." The main criticism that leads to the disavowal is the one that Collin states on the podcast: he's an elitist; I will flesh this out below.</div>
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The reason for this is that musicologists rarely have enough of a background in the actual work of the Frankfurt School, and rarely understand the project of Adorno and Horkheimer, for lack of relevance to the more analytic (opposed to continental) subdiscipline of music theory, and the largely (auto-) biographical slant of historical musicology. Simply put, the social value of music is underrepresented in the musical academy because the truths are harsh and discouraging. Adorno's work is just too negative to tell people when they are in the process of specializing in music, and dreaming of being that one in fifty humanist who actually gets the job they dream of.</div>
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Musicologists who study Adorno are rarely aware of the totality and consistency of his entire project. This is because of the diversity of his interests, and the difficulty of his arguments. When he freely interchanges Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud's terminologies, usually only to extend or tear them apart, very few musicologists can keep up (I know I can't). When philosophers or social theorists read Adorno's musical work, I don't think they get anything out of it at all. This is because the implied urgency in reasoning out a musical ethics sounds arbitrary if you are not in the "business" of "classical music."</div>
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There are two points of Adorno and Horkheimer's project that I will focus on here: first, their relentless interrogation into how fascism could be the pinnacle of modernist capitalism, and the psychological and cultural implications of it; second, their general criticism of structure as a vehicle for authoritarianism, regardless of the quality of the contents of structures.</div>
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The personal cost of fascism for the scholars of the Frankfurt School almost never comes up in any treatment of their work, even when Walter Benjamin is mentioned. But the sheer amount of thought and work that Adorno and Horkheimer put into fascist ideology, as the capitalistic ideology with the most immediacy, evidences this personal cost. Having already processed the impossibility of Marx's proposed revolution, they moved on to studying authoritarianism in general. By studying the functions of propaganda, the structure of the fascist state as a giant familial unit, and the historical fallacies that need to be held by the proletariat to be susceptible to fascism, the foundations for a cerebral resistance to fascism were in place. What Adorno and Horkheimer didn't plan on was that their exile would make them all too familiar with the privatized fascism of American consumerism. It turned out that their program for investigating fascism and authority was true for market authoritarianism; American capitalism simply shifts the authoritarianism into the private sector, a political economy that I would describe as non-totalitarian authoritarianism.</div>
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Adorno's musicology is consistent with his general conception of social structure, one that he largely shares with Horkheimer. Their fundamental structure for critique is that social formation, production, and authority are all reproductions of each other, both conceptually and practically. For Adorno and Horkheimer, the base and superstructure are a feedback loop, but this is not necessarily a feature of capitalism particularly. This theory is based equally on Marx's material history, from <i>The German Ideology</i>, and Freud's conception of the superego as social structure reproduced in individual subjects, from <i>Civilization and its Discontents</i>. This view of a minor or non-existent divide between society and individual consciousness actually caused Freud to posit that society itself can develop neuroses, but that he wouldn't be the one to prescribe a course of treatment. In similar fashion, Adorno and Horkheimer tend to look at political problems as familial problems (Horkheimer's "Authority and the Family" in <i>Critical Theory</i>), and advertisement as the propaganda of a "monopolistic mass culture" (Adorno, "The Schema of Mass Culture" in <i>The Culture Industry</i>); for them, there is no distance between the individual superego and culture.</div>
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Because there is no distance, in late capitalism, between individual identity, consumption, and production, Adorno is looking for truth values in what the producers don't know about their connection to the means of production. The fungibility of meaning (that is, social meaning is political meaning is familial meaning) makes it so every human agent that could make something is either (to put it in Adorno's Hegelian way) inside the identity of capitalism or a nonidentity. (<i>Negative Dialectics</i>) Since the system of production is, indeed, the bourgeois structure in its totality, any work under industrial production changes the actual meaning of music, and the structural contradictions of capitalism are embedded in the cultural meaning of industrial art. Although there is no contradiction evident to the individual composer in their environment of production, their participation in a functional, non-revolutionary institution of musical production means that they are reproducing society <i>as </i>music, industry <i>as </i>culture.</div>
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Truth values that exist in the work (in the sense of Heidegger's "The Origin of the Work of Art," what is true in the world that the work imagines) can attach, for Adorno, to the truth values that exist in the real and social world. A good and simple example comes from Adorno's "How to Look at Television," in <i>The Culture Industry</i>. "Many television plays could be characterized by the soubrique 'a pretty girl can do no wrong.'" If a woman must be pretty to play the lead role (productive, consumptive truth), and convention dictates a happy ending (artistic truth), then it is merely syllogism that everything always works out for pretty girls. If the proletariat cannot identify their own chains, then what makes it likely that they'd reject such a ubiquitous but accidental truth? Why would the truth value of an advertisement for domestic normativity, the sitcom, be rejected by the proletariat, when the formal rule of sitcoms is "pseudo-realism." (ibid.) </div>
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Here's my own, current example of the same analytic method: Meghan Trainor's three recent singles, when taken together as socially true, create a complex of ugly truths. Song 1: I'm not skinny and that's okay. Song 2: All men lie to me. Song 3: "Dear Future Husband." Simply combining the songs' artistically true messages under one personality (the brand name "Meghan Trainor") I can deduce that fat girls get lied to so much that they can only dream of having a husband in the future. And all of that is to not even analyze its blatantly reactionary musical and visual tones from the 1950's American dream. This method was reintroduced to the musicological community by Susan McClary in the late 1980s, and is currently employed in media analysis by Carol Vernallis.</div>
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<b>Adorno as Elitist</b></div>
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Collin's identification of Adorno as an elitist is the obvious and most common attack leveled at him. But it is <i>superficially</i> true. There's actually an historical distortion here, because it is rarely understood why Adorno is so ardent a supporter of Arnold Schoenberg, and what we call Schoenberg's "emancipation of dissonance," and there are myriad misreadings of his disdain for jazz (itself, at the time, <i>the </i>popular music). An historically-minded, but lazy, criticism is based simply on his proximity to Schoenberg, and one can read his advocacy of Schoenberg's music as nothing more than sucking up to his teacher's teacher. But this is an oversimplification, one that serves to make a generalization where none is possible. For instance, it isn't actually Schoenberg that Adorno advocates, it is Schoenberg's pieces from 1908 to 1928. Additionally, I believe I have read that the two did not like each other personally, and didn't talk much to one another.</div>
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Second, Adorno's interest in atonal music (in which all harmonic references that were established as "correct" harmonic vocabulary from the 17th to the 19th century are avoided) is not monotonous. This is explained in his 1964 essay "Difficulties," and will become more clear with my next point. When writing about (on one hand) Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, and (on the other) John Cage, he criticizes what he sees as the main motivation of each composer: ego death in composition. Each sought a way of minimizing the role of the composer but still couldn't account for the arbitrary elements still present in their work (ego death, is, of course, death and inaction itself). Adorno saw this as the socially true powerlessness of the individual, a disregard of responsibility for the relationships of sound that the composer has always had actual freedom to choose. (To step away from Adorno for a second: Cage was clearly, explicitly interested in this distance, inspired in part by his studies of zen. It is, in my analysis, a fundamental contradiction of his work, under capitalist production, that he still put his name on his scores. Stockhausen fancied himself to be a theoretical physicist or mathematician dealing with experimental music as his field of physics, to be blunt. Boulez sounds a bit more like a structural linguist, interested in building grammars for the development of a new, expressive musical language. The later two are basically generational amplifications of the two sides of Schoenberg.)</div>
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Third, Adorno's musical analyses are more consistent within the frame of his general critique of structure. In "The Dialectical Composer" (1934), Adorno briefly explained the meaning of Schoenberg's work in a historical sense. For Adorno, Schoenberg had completely transformed musical consciousness by unleashing the contradiction of musical freedom upon musical form itself, instead of where it is normally found, the subjective will of the composer in the face of standardized modes of expression (like song form, instrumentation, decisions about the text, etc.). "Subject and object--compositional intention and compositional material--do not, in this case, indicate two rigidly separate modes of being, between which there is something that must be resolved." What Adorno is pointing to is the lack of all expectation, the creation of a musical action that is never subservient to the law of tonality (which was, itself, a standardization of the narrative expectations of the audience, and the bourgeois ideology of music). The form cannot be predicted, the conflicts embedded in the musical material are unknown, and the composer has put something into a musical language that has no grammar, but can still be spoken. A part of this observation is that there is no possibility, in free atonality, for a distinction between the ornamental and the structural; there is no necessity to satisfy anything other than the freedom of composition itself. "After Schoenberg," wrote Adorno, "the history of music will no longer be fate, but will be subject to human consciousness." By this, Adorno means "that in Schoenberg this dialectic has achieved its Hegelian 'self-consciousness,' or, better, its measureable and exact showplace: musical technology."</div>
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Two years prior, in "On the Social Situation of Music," Adorno explained that the musical language of Schoenberg's free atonality "annulled the expressive music of the private bourgeois individual, pursuing--as it were-- its own consequences, and put in its place a different music, into whose music no social function falls--indeed, which even severs the last communication with the listener." As an extension of the bourgeois musical language (tonality), Schoenberg was able to eradicate the lawfulness of structure, harmonic and temporal, from the work of music, making it impossible to conceive of in the traditional forms ("wow, that primary theme is really interesting, I wonder what will happen to it in the development section"). This is extremely technical, but, if music is a practice that can reflect other forms of human activity, this is the forging of a nonidentity, far outside of the identity supplied by the social totality. More on this point later.</div>
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Adorno's dismissal of popular music more generally is not based, as is commonly thought, on the richness of "high" music versus the vapidity of "low" music. Jazz is simply the inverse of the arguments <i>for </i>free atonality: jazz's structurality strives for a "perfection" of both tonal and formal structures, the complete domination of structure. The totality of a jazz leadsheet, as an immovable structure, is the invisibility of the total authority, with an offer for complete and utter freedom of the individual inside of it. Since Adorno often conceives of musical forms as the musical equivalent of social order, jazz is patently working toward bourgeois escapism in its pure form. "The improvisational immediacy which constitutes its partial success counts strictly among those attempts to break out of the fetishized commodity world which want to escape that world without ever changing it, thus moving ever deeper into its snare," Adorno wrote in his 1936 essay "On Jazz." There are other problems, such as jazz's friendliness to "sound film," its direct orientation toward the market and pleasure for the proletariat and bourgeois alike, and the development of its own, unique divisions of labor. In Adorno's view, jazz does not introduce new musical consciousness, it just gives illusions of difference through added ornamentation, both rhythmic and tonally. This is the music of the empowerment of the oppressed classes, those who don't even know that the authoritarian structure is offering them freedom (improvisation) because it cannot threaten that totalitarian structure.</div>
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Adorno's criticism and dismissal of popular music is more specifically about production. The logic behind this is that, if, for instance, the popular music industry is capable of producing sentimental or anti-status quo music, such as protest songs, it's probably a really bad sign that the message is even tolerated by the market. It is what we now recognize as a form of "ethical consumption," a market choice offered as a solution to the problem that the market created in the first place. I like to equate this to Hannah Arendt's essay "What is Freedom?" from <i>Between Past and Future</i>. For Arendt, the reason that the "human rights" were afforded to the subjects of bourgeois republics is because the quality of "freedom of speech" and "freedom of religion" cannot affect the structure of the republic in the first place. It is a seeming concession from the state, one that makes its subjects think that the structure of the state is there to protect them, but all of the rights it affords to its citizens are rights that never amount to a "freedom to action" in the <i>public sphere</i>. Republics, simply, cannot tolerate "freedom to action" because action may threaten the structure of governance, and may deconcentrate power from the ruling class, or transform bourgeois culture into something that opposes itself. Adorno recognizes that musical freedom operates in the same way. If the culture industry can produce anti-war rhetoric, itself not remotely close to action, then it is memorializing, and cashing in on, the real atrocity of war. If the market is ready for protest, we are probably worse off than we think, since it shows the ineptitude of that protest. Why, for instance, was there no marketable musical movement attacking the Iraq War in the mid 2000s? Because it was such a marginal social view that <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMShjrd8PvA" target="_blank">it could only attach itself to marginal musical vocabularies</a>.</div>
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Collin brings up a great point when discussing this, by questioning the dismissal of popular music when it <i>is </i>politically engaging (and I must add, I feel exactly the same way about Public Enemy as Doug and Matthew did). His example is James Brown's "Say It Loud--I'm Black and Proud," and he asks why this isn't a progressive step in culture, if it allows people to be more aware of racial identity. If I can speak for (or maybe update) Adorno, it's because even the positive fetishization of blackness, through musical reflection, doesn't do anything to change the system of oppression. Epistemologically, we cannot ensure that popular music consumers will ever know anything more about race and oppression than what James Brown or Hollywood can tell them. We should not expect that positive cultural representations have ever led to a less oppressive capitalism.</div>
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This points to a larger problem that is suffered by all subaltern forms of criticism and theory, particularly non-radical feminism. Engels traced female monogamy to the need for proper dispersion of accumulated wealth at the onset of capitalist patriarchy in <i>The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State</i>. Without a systematic rejection of private property, it is unlikely that capitalism will ever develop the slightest bit of gender equality. But a message of empowerment, promoting indefinite perseverance against this structure, authoritative and oppressive, solves no social ills. Shulamith Firestone takes this to its logical end in <i>The Dialectic of Sex</i>, showing that feminism is nothing without global socialism, global socialism nothing without radical feminism, and as long as biological difference exists, women are reproductive laborers that are classed into oppression. Of course, the quality of "radical" in that sentence is immense; her solution is the advancement of non-human birth technology, the eradication of the family, and a totally automated socialist society to eventually eliminate all labor (pardon the double entendre). Such radical structural change would assume no gender oppression to be possible.</div>
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<b>Adorno's Endgame</b></div>
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Adorno, when he speaks of Schoenberg's "revolution," is hopeful that music will continue to be revolutionized, despite its inability to create revolutionary force in the social world. Often, his essays open with a reminder that the social realm is a reach too far for music, and that music cannot create its own forces for the destruction of capitalism. So in this way, Doug's understanding of Adorno's view of music is half right. Adorno wants to see musical revolution and the entry of new forms of musical consciousness as a way of proving that there are new forms of social consciousness that are possible; since the proletariat is hopeless and all politics is authoritarian, escaping the psychological components of capitalism mandate a new paradigm for revolution, one that doesn't wait for impossible proletarian revolutions or involve a planned walk through material history into the magical future.</div>
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Adorno, when tendering his "Resignation" (<i>The Culture Industry</i>), basically conceived of revolution itself as nothing worthy of intelligent, conscientious people: "The objection raised against us can be stated approximately in these words; a person who in the present hour doubts the possibility of radical change in society and who for that reason neither takes part in nor recommends spectacular, violent action is guilty of resignation... Political acts of violence can also sink to the level of pseudo-activity, resulting in mere theatre." Adorno knew that action against the bourgeois structure is itself bourgeois action; it is playing the bourgeois game, just on the level larger than the current game. Although he sees no hope for eradicating structural deterrents to freedom, he does tend to leave his essays with a glimmer of hope (even though it is sometimes more like a dot of hope).</div>
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Whoever thinks is without anger in all criticism: thinking sublimates anger. Because the thinking person does not have to inflict anger upon himself, he furthermore has no desire to inflict it upon others. The happiness visible to the eye of a thinker is the happiness of mankind. The universal tendency toward suppression goes against thought as such. Such thought is happiness, even where unhappiness prevails; thought achieves happiness in the expression of unhappiness. Whoever refuses to permit this thought to be taken from him has not resigned.</div>
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derek.k.jeppsenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04666636081163461931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1657024236671077114.post-803820491216333702015-03-23T13:42:00.000-07:002015-03-24T11:21:02.096-07:00Music and Magic, Secularization and Spirit-Power<div dir="ltr">
My friend <a href="https://composerjude.wordpress.com/">Jude</a> recently posted a nice little meme on my Facebook wall the the prompt, "discuss:" The photo was of some generic, romantic looking score and said "music is the strongest form of magic." </div>
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As per my usual mode, I take this kind of sloganism too seriously, because it is, in effect, really easy to paint the world in very lazy abstractions and powerless metaphors, and so, people do. Were we to replace such trivialities with more depth, more creativity, we would simply have a better, more discursive, more democratic world. And of course, I already understand how silly it is to go after seven anonymous words in a systematic way, but I would hope that the discourse below would be helpful to those who find themselves in the position to confront these erroneous and terrible simplifications, especially when they are in dialog with music professionals who are trapped in these lazy modes of thought.</div>
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Commence bourgeois rationality and overly analytic argumentation: the statement makes two simultaneous direct claims, one ontological (that music is magic), and one evaluative (that it is the strongest magic). There is also a claim to be analyzed as an implicit suggestion arising from its image (that music is old scores in a bundle). The last one is preposterous enough, and a quick search of this blog for "Heidegger" will bring up my standard quote for arguments about the ontology of the score.</div>
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If we, for a moment, take the ontological claim as truth and focus on the evaluative claim, we see little more than Plato's hierarchy of the arts in <i>the Republic</i>. There, Plato develops his "art imitates life" aesthetics by judging the closeness of the reflection of life, as given through each category of art. Music is the highest form of art because it is the most representative of itself; it reflects life through what he thought was pure emotion, where architecture, for instance, doesn't so much reflect life, but is an ornamentation of a necessity for shelter (even if it is shelter for a deity). Further, in <a href="http://www.rowan.edu/open/philosop/clowney/Aesthetics/philos_artists_onart/plato.htm">Book</a><a href="http://www.rowan.edu/open/philosop/clowney/Aesthetics/philos_artists_onart/plato.htm"> </a><a href="http://www.rowan.edu/open/philosop/clowney/Aesthetics/philos_artists_onart/plato.htm">III</a><a href="http://www.rowan.edu/open/philosop/clowney/Aesthetics/philos_artists_onart/plato.htm"> </a><a href="http://www.rowan.edu/open/philosop/clowney/Aesthetics/philos_artists_onart/plato.htm">of</a><a href="http://www.rowan.edu/open/philosop/clowney/Aesthetics/philos_artists_onart/plato.htm"> </a><i><a href="http://www.rowan.edu/open/philosop/clowney/Aesthetics/philos_artists_onart/plato.htm">the</a><a href="http://www.rowan.edu/open/philosop/clowney/Aesthetics/philos_artists_onart/plato.htm"> </a><a href="http://www.rowan.edu/open/philosop/clowney/Aesthetics/philos_artists_onart/plato.htm">Republic</a></i>, Plato makes it well known that the affective work of music is dangerous, because it is so easy to translate affect into action. This leads to Socrates' idealistic ban on particular modes, scales, and instruments. This line of thought is still rampant in Western culture, but it is only as true as social fact can support it in a particular place and time.</div>
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A good way to test Plato (on the general and universal affective power of music) is to play songs on a jukebox in a bar that specifically repudiate the assumed identity of the bar and/or its patrons. If Plato's concerns are still valid, the music will transmit some overwhelming emotional power and reshape the individuals' character. Putting techno on in a country bar will be problematic, but not because the music is doing some emotional violence as music... It is about individuals taking over the physical space with sound waves and imposing their individual musical will on the other patrons who are not sympathetic to the music (for a handful of reasons that are ultimately social truths). Authoritarianism, for Socrates, is a generative force for control; the techno fan in the country bar is attempting the same coup, just without the power to do so.</div>
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Music is uniquely suited for such experiments not because of its universal qualities, but because of its universal portability. I am not necessarily interested in making this argument purely about mediums and materials, but it should be clear that the definitive ontological qualities of music, its relationship to the voice, and its ability to happen anywhere there is air, form the basis for music's specificity. Any claim that would evaluate music's "strength" against other forms of art or ritual or production would necessarily address the ontology of music, and work out to social truths at every level. The "capital t Truth" that Plato is looking for is an essentialist cage (befitting, as he could very well be called the inventor of essentialism). The universal essence of Beauty and Art, is, obviously, an illusion, since it is not capable accessing socially constructed truth. <a href="http://musicopathy.blogspot.com/2014/10/estranged-art-labor-ontology-of.html" target="_blank">If art defines itself locally and socially,</a> it is more likely that relative truth, from medium to medium, genre to genre, requires an interest in the emotions being reflected, the knowledge of the production process, &c. Without being able to see the larger picture of freedom of creation and freedom of interpretation, generalizations about the work of art become authoritarian and arbitrary, just as Plato's do. So goes analytic philosophy to this day, and so reads the meme. Strike one: music is nothing without relative social truths, so music cannot be evaluated against other art objects, at least not without a great deal of specificity.</div>
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The specificity that is offered by the image, does, however, suggest that Western music as noted in Western notation is the music which is magic. We need only note this, that the slogan is pointing toward the common practice period composers, because it suggests a disconnect with particular modes of production. That is to say, it attempts to make all composers into Mozarts, gifted prodigies with mystical powers for creating great art. And of course, such a model makes Beethoven look like he was ill-suited for being a composer, because his work was laborious, not magical.</div>
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And here is the fun part: the syllogistic truth that music is magic. Western languages, since Greek, have a marked distinction in the form, source, and direction of power, but the two do overlap, or at least may overlap (depending on how socially true it can be made). <i>Mousikos</i>, from which we get music, is the <i>techne </i>of the Muses, the art through which the muses can be brought into the world. The word <i>magikos</i>, on the other hand, is the art done by the learned man, the <i>magos</i>, the mage. In this sense, it is possible to envisage the overlap, as magic could be the embodiment of a Muse, performed by a mage.</div>
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It is unsurprising that the two would fit together in pre-modern European culture, not to mention all non-European cultures (which developed radically different local truths). Of course, due to the conflation of magic with illusion (which did not happen until the mid-19th century), magic is, ironically, weakened to the point of embarrassment. We must, in our defining and basic apprehension of this word, remember that today is indeed today, and that the meme suggests a possible conflation of music with illusion, as much as with ritual.<br />
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As an adumbration to a point below: illusion fulfilled itself as a grand performance art in the 18th century, as secularized magical ritual in the wake of the enlightenment, which had caused the emancipation of culture from religion. This transformation corrupted "magic," alienating it from that which gave it its ritual power. Before magic became illusion, it may have been impossible to claim that music was mysterious in a dismissive way, but in modern parlance, conflating music and magic certainly strives toward trickiness and falsehood contained in music, the negation of illusion.</div>
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But is music still magic, or capable of being magical, in the classical sense? The historical development of music, magic, and social life is speculative, but important. To address such an issue, I'll refer to two musician/philosophers with different points of view on what is important about the separation of music and magic: Theodor Adorno and Dane Rudhyar.</div>
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Dane Rudhyar (1895--1985) is a scarcely known French-American musician, philosopher, composer, painter, poet, novelist, theosopher, and astrologer. I have recently been studying his text, which is often called <i>Art as a Release of Power </i>(1928--1930), a series of seven essays that describe an entire, unique philosophical system. Rudhyar's most important influences are Nietzsche and Oswald Spengler, author of <i>Decline of the West </i>(1918). Rudhyar's thought, like Adorno's, is an unspecialized series of interpretations making up a full model of the world, disrespectful of limits to the work that can be done in speculative thought. For Rudhyar, the only thing worth talking about, in the end, is the power for humans to build their metaphors and develop them into actions that support a "universal brotherhood." In a few shining moments in these essays, Rudhyar encapsulates the project of Marxist cultural speculation, while still being somewhat apart from that tradition.</div>
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<a href="http://www.khaldea.com/rudhyar/dissonantharmony.html" target="_blank">The beginning</a> of Rudhyar's book looks for the homologue between musical intervals and social organization, and explains that consonance and dissonance are, when mapped onto society, tribal and pluralistic, respectively. Working through this lens, and always being careful to make positive analogies that facilitate a better, more universal world, Rudhyar later works through an entire theory of history, a la Spengler, with "spirit-power" at its core. Spirit-power is the work of individuals, through sacrifice, to bring a new idea to the world, and for that idea to expand to its greatest possibility in a culture or civilization. Instantly distinguishable in Rudhyar's conversation is the role of theological thought, and the language of spirituality, which he scrupulously redefines in a way of reclaiming what was lost through the secularization of Western culture. Deniz Ertan, writer of <i>Dane Rudhyar: His Music, Thought, and Art</i>, is fully aware throughout her analysis, that Rudhyar's work is somewhat unbecoming of a modernist philosopher, which contributes greatly to the lack of scrutiny given to his philosophical work.<br />
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Rudhyar asks specifically, in his essay "Art as a Release of Power," "what is magic?" He feels the weight of illusion's commingling with magic: "The word has become the synonym of fraud and charlatanism; and this is most unfortunate, because it was an excellent word which expressed perfectly well etymologically and otherwise an idea which the world needs intensely today." He continues with his definition, stating that "magic is merely <i>the release of power through an efficient form by an act of will</i>. It is in fact life itself; but life in terms of human characteristics, destiny and will-power." (emphasis original) In Rudhyar's mind, the concept of magic was a way of bringing form to abstractions. Gods that never existed were made real, visible, and touchable by art; their constituent powers gave power in the minds of man.<br />
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An example he gives in subsequent pages is an Indonesian dagger where the handle is the image of a "weird and monstrous face," a god of war or hunting. "... is [the dagger maker] attempting to create 'beauty?' Indeed not. The word probably means nothing to him. What he wants is to conjure the elemental power whose cosmic function is to kill, to force this power <i>to incarnate into his sword</i>; why?... so that the sword may kill <i>better</i>." There is power, built of abstractions, that needs to be willed by humans to make it real. This fits perfectly with the Greek sense of magic, since the dagger maker is a learned man, making a practical art from his knowledge, bringing it into the world to do physical, actual work.<br />
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Rudhyar argues that the loss of the sense of magic turns Western art into impractical, needless prettiness (earlier, he stated that Western art is better at building ornate frames than it is at building paintings to go in them). He would rather art be filled with this power, spirit-power, created by individuals and for all who would join in with the artist to sustain power and gestures of meaningfulness. Of course, if we are capable of such powerful acts, we are responsible for using it in an ethical manner, to benefit civilization (the entirety of humanity) by releasing them from the limits placed on their social relations. Such a world starts with pluralism, the full acceptance of individual difference (dissonance, harmony), and not sameness (consonance, the womb).<br />
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The difference between this view of the world and Adorno's is fundamentally tied to their respective differences in the theory of history. Where Rudhyar would say that the spirit-power of individuals to transform the world is always possible (but often defeated by reactionary ideas), Adorno's negative dialectics show that not all historical ideas can form a synthesis with each other, and hence, progress and development can stop. He creates the negative dialectic of secularization in the opening essay of <i>Aesthetic Theory</i> (1961--1969 [1997]), "Art, Society, Aesthetics."<br />
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"The basic levels of experience that motivate art are related to those of the objective world from which they recoil... The act of repulsion must be constantly renewed."(AT, 6) The way Adorno sees art's role in society is a reflection of what <i>is not </i>in the world. It is then, the individual who creates their own world, with bits of the world (material: bricks, scores, frames). This means that art strives for autonomy from the entire world, repudiating the world as it exists for a world its own. In this, the realm of the sacred was an historical fact, and art sought freedom from the sacred by employing the profane. The synthesis of the profane with art allowed it to find new types of autonomy, clean of the lies of religious metaphysics. Adorno would be referencing, here, Beethoven and Schoenberg, more than anyone else.<br />
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Beethoven's profanity was his autonomy from the church, throughout his career, whereas Mozart only gained that autonomy in the latter third of his life. Without needing to serve a metaphysical lie, Beethoven's life was the repudiation of the economic and social world (freelancing fairly unsuccessfully), and so, his music was also the repudiation of the contemporary bondage of form. (See Rose Rosengard Subotnik, "Adorno's Diagnosis of Beethoven's Late Style.") Schoenberg, on the other hand, was repudiating the world of tonality, the bourgeois common sense of music, and creating its antithesis. By doing so, Schoenberg, for Adorno, was able to create a secularization <i>of music itself</i>, not against the sacredness of a religious metaphysic, but against music's accepted ruling language of consonance and dissonance in moderation.<br />
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"[The] realm of the sacred is objectified, effectively staked off, because its own element of untruth at once awaits secularization and through conjuration wards off the secular."(AT, 6) This, to bring back Rudhyar's Indonesian dagger, is the process of looking at the handle as if it was beautiful, that the handicraft of the maker was somehow valuable, regardless that the subject that adorns it never existed. In this way, the objects of the world, for Adorno, lose their power because they are no longer true or universal. I doubt that Rudhyar would disagree; Adorno's social criticism often lacks his own position, to a perilous extent, and it makes it hard to figure out what he is looking for in this process. Besides, Adorno had already tenured his "Resignation" in <i>The Culture Industry</i>, saying that there is no positive action that seems to matter in the field modern social thought.<br />
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In Adorno's "Theories on the Origin of Art," (AT, 331) the dialectic of enlightenment is brought in as his overarching historical force:<br />
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... strict positivism crosses over into the feeblemindedness of the artistically insensible, the successfully castrated. The narrowminded wisdom that sorts out feeling from knowing and rubs its hands together when it finds the two balanced is--as trivialities sometimes are--the caricature of a situation that over the centuries of the division of labor has inscribed this division in subjectivity. Yet feeling and understanding are not absolutely different in the human disposition and remain dependent even in their dividedness. The forms of reaction that are subsumed under the concept of feeling become futile enclaves of sentimentality as soon as they seal themselves off from their relation to thought and turn a blind eye toward truth; thought, however, approaches tautology when it drinks from the sublimation of the mimetic comportment.</blockquote>
Thus, we can see Adorno conflicted about the dialectical nature of enlightenment, which sought to free the West from religious lies and supplant it with empirical harshness, because it may have ripped away the possibility of feeling and emotion along with it. In this sense, the conception of music losing its magical process, having been secularized into <i>l'art pour l'art</i>, possibly cut itself off from a considerable amount of feeling itself, and ironically, perfected itself in a scientific manner. The irony here, is supplied by Adorno's interest in Hegel's "end of art," that art may have only been possible at a particular moment in history. Great art, says Adorno, was a feature of a secular society, because it was able to detach from the lies.<br />
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Again, the difference between Adorno and Rudhyar comes to a historiographical difference: where Adorno believes that art freed itself from lies and developed itself as a great form during this period, Rudhyar sees music and art as the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_Prodigal_Son" target="_blank">Prodigal Son</a>, who has wandered away and felt the harshness of the world, and would presumably be better off reunited with his source of power. I think a shorthand for explaining the differences of the two philosophers can be given by how seriously they take Niezsche's Madman, which I will reproduce below for those who have not read it in full. Rudhyar is interested in reestablishing what made us spiritual, but doing it now, on our terms, without an unobservable metaphysic controlling us. Since we are in control of the character of our society, if we were all to act in a universal manner, one which promotes difference and cooperation, society would change. It is now only a "seed-idea," one that needs to develop to its fullest possibilities, one that art could channel into action in the world.<br />
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Adorno's focus is more detailed and directed to what he calls the "dual character" of art, that its only options in modern life are to either be a commodity or cultural authority:<br />
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For a society in which art no longer has a place and which is pathological in all its reactions to it, art fragments on one hand into a reified, hardened cultural possession and on the other into a source of pleasure that the customer pockets and that for the most part has little to do with the object itself.</blockquote>
In this sense, the work of society, its irrational relations and structure, make art ineffective as a transmission of power. Because of this ineffectiveness, the superstructure and base <i>both </i>need to change to enable art to have a revolutionary character, one that has been stifled by the negative dialectics offered by the enlightenment. That is to say, under the current conditions, the ideas of the ruling class are too difficult to defeat. Rudhyar's point would be that there just has not been enough power invested in defeating them.<br />
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So, I suppose, if I must create an answer here, I must say that the two of these philosophers (whose viewpoints are companionate, that is, work dialogically and never break the ability for their ideas to be discussed together) assume that the time for good ideas is just historically not now. With more and more force to secularize and lose individual power in art, Rudhyar placed his thoughts in the world to reinvigorate "the new man" (a direct resynthesis of Nietzsche's <i>ubermench</i>), of whom there are few. Adorno worked to make better terms of social analysis in the popular consciousness, of which, a few have stuck; ultimately, the forces of the ruling class are not seeming shaky, and we have changed little in the past 150 years.<br />
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Is music magic? The problem is that people want it to be, for the wrong reasons. There are still pedagogs in the academy that believe and transmit this to their students, so that they can perpetuate a sense of doubt, one that is usually conflated with pluralism. The reason for this doubt is to keep people from committing to music, or justice, or revolution, or anything. When people are not committed to their ideals, they are easily controlled by others. Those others are sometimes Lacan's Big Other, sometimes "bourgeois stinking life" (as Rick Roderick called it), or worse, they are individual authoritarians basking in their dualities.<br />
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Epilogue, Nietzsche's Parable of the Madman:<br />
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<span class="H_body_text" style="line-height: 16px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!"---As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated?---Thus they yelled and laughed</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. <i>We have killed him</i>---you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.</span></div>
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<span class="H_body_text" style="line-height: 16px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us---for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto."</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. "I have come too early," he said then; "my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars---<i>and yet they have done it themselves</i>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his <i>requiem aeternam deo</i>. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: "What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?"</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Source: Friedrich Nietzsche, <i>The Gay Science</i> (1882, 1887) para. 125; Walter Kaufmann ed. (New York: Vintage, 1974), pp.181-82.]</span></div>
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derek.k.jeppsenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04666636081163461931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1657024236671077114.post-68506830643065602802014-12-07T16:19:00.000-08:002014-12-07T16:19:36.580-08:00Estranged Art Labor, the Ontology of Interpretation, and the Ethics of Musical Consumption<div dir="ltr">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Aesthetics, that branch of analytic philosophy that tries to tease out the formal logic of art, has often boxed itself into a model of the art object that can be essentialized, eternal, and logical. The primary mode of determining the essence of a class of objects is perpetually strained by the need to unseat art from the world and find unworldly, transcendent truth, and requires the deletion of the human subject as viewing the art object.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Because of this complication, the art object usually needs to be found in the object itself, divorced from its social situation in the real world, as well as divorced from the art laborers, who presumably would provide some answers about the "logic" of art. In Arthur C. Danto's article "The End of Art: A Philosophical Defense," the philosopher gives a compelling case that aesthetics is no longer capable of dealing with art. The argument stems from his interpretation of art in the 1960s, where art was perfectly capable of defining itself without the aid of formal logic (this 6'×6'×6' block of chocolate is indeed, just chocolate; this 6'×6'×6' block of chocolate is art because it resides in a gallery). The frame, as sociologist Erving Goffman would point out, is what gives a social structure to the object and the presentation in a way that defines its function and the identities and roles of the actors. Since social frames are, indeed, explicitly social, formal logic and essences have little to contribute to understanding the difference between art objects and any other. It is the personal meanings of objects, and how actors bring them to interpret the objects that define art, it's influence, and even its existence.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">It will suffice, presently, to mostly leave the realm of the difference regarding objects and art objects. I will mention Heidegger's conception just to clarify that such distinctions are easily understandable in ontologically oriented discourse. In "The Origin of the Work of Art," Heidegger works toward an art object as having both material and nonmaterial existence, with the material being nothing more than a means (equipment) for the work of art to build that nonmaterial component, itself the artistic component of the art. A score of Beethoven's String Quartets, as he says, "lie in the publisher's storeroom like potatoes in a cellar." It is the immaterial constitution of the pieces, our imagination of them as an entity, their performance, their historical significance, the theory of their construction etc., that make them art.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">One way that Beethoven's art objects share in the 6' by 6' by 6' cube of chocolate is the labor in creating the piece, labor in performing it, labor in hosting the performance, etc. ad nauseum. The labor characteristic of objects is a universal in both art objects and mundane equipment. Just because it is a universal, however, does not mean that we are talking about an essentializable character... It is historically and culturally particular in all instances. Unraveling the material history of any artwork, or better yet, social structures for work in the arts, will guarantee a solid foundation for understanding the art object, the people who make them, and how interpretation for the subject arises and proceeds. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Terry Eagleton, with his materialist aesthetics and literary criticism in <i>Criticism and Ideology</i>, figured that any piece could be understood most fully in these terms, by tracking ideologies that are embedded (he would say produced) in literary works by the productive realities around them. Vulgar as it may seem in reference to his project, or better yet, to Marx's project on which I will rely heavily, our task here will be to pinpoint the ontology of art through leveling of all laborious production. Fundamental characteristics of labor do matter in particular, but also in general, as a structure of objects leading to their social identity, <i>use-value</i>, and interpretation more broadly. I will work toward this end despite the ability for the conversation to fall into banality. The connections here (the relationship between the art laborer and their production, the interpretation of their work, and its valuation) may be obvious, and may have just spent the last 160 years being subtext to all works on artistic ontology. Since these points are not identifiable as "common sense," I will proceed as if I have something valuable to say.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Estranged Art Labor:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The product of labor is labor which has been embodied in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labor. Labor’s realization is its objectification. Under these economic conditions this realization of labor appears as loss of realization for the workers; objectification as loss of the object and bondage to it; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation.</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Karl Marx, <i>Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844</i>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">When Marx proceeded through the logic of production and what it means to the laborer, he assumed the position that labor is wage labor and that the means of production made the producers alienated from their work. Of course, the majority of labor (at least, the majority of the Western economy) does fall into this category, and has, unrelentingly, since Marx's time. What Marx may have missed was that estrangement is systemic in non-wage labor, that is, contracted, project-based, artistic, and free production, as well. The reason for this blind spot is the ubiquity of objectification in all forms of production, and Marx's criticism is largely about a lack in capitalist economy's ability to logically establish the valuation of an inescapable feature of human life: objectification itself.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">There remains an unclear boundary in Marx's work, one which he would probably simultaneously reject and endorse. On the positive side: his analysis is about how political economy treats the objectification of labor, or more pessimistically, has no ethical system for valuation. The structures that exist in production all seem to set up a "war amongst the greedy -- competition." Social/political/economic structures, as in the case of all structures, have the capacity for a establishing an ethical judgment inside of them, but in our historical moment, never develop one; Adorno's project of watching late capitalism become valorized beyond the point of redress becomes the guide for how the development of equitable systems and fair judgments has become impossible over the past century. But Marx's consideration of political economy as a greedy war shows a conception of monopolistic capitalism, not anarchistic or early or reformist capitalism. The social structure, as his optimism and rationality still holds, could tolerate a certain amount of equitable, humane treatment of labor (or else he would have never been politically active, just as Adorno was "resigned" from activism; see "Resignation" from <i>The Culture Industry</i>). It did not develop to do so because of capitalist ideology, which has no drive toward fair or logical behavior.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Of course, Adorno finds fault in the production itself, as nothing more than the extension of the greedy market: </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">What philosophy once called life, has turned into the sphere of the private and then merely of consumption, which is dragged along as an addendum of the material production-process, without autonomy and without its own substance. Whoever wishes to experience the truth of immediate life, must investigate its alienated form, the objective powers, which determine the individual existence into its innermost recesses... But the relationship of life and production, which the latter degrades in reality into an ephemeral appearance of the former, is completely absurd... The reduced and degraded essence bristles tenaciously against its ensorcelment in the façade. The change of the relations of production itself depends more than ever on what befalls the 'sphere of consumption,' the mere reflection-form of production and the caricature of true life: in the consciousness and unconsciousness of individuals. Only by virtue of opposition to production, as something still not totally encompassed by the social order, could human beings introduce a more humane one.</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, "Dedication."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Adorno perceives the structure and the outcome as inseparable, and tracks the social change toward consumption and away from production as an outcome of capitalist ideology. This added value to the conversation is not lost here in my critique, but it is still impractical to follow through every step. In this essay, I will grant a certain amount of autonomy to individuals, that is, the freedom to make choices about their own consumption, and believe that it is possible and important for individuals to at least make basic ethical decisions. I also recognize the fault in my assumption.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Further, contemplating estrangement and alienation is <b>not</b> a search for essential truth, it is only the search for that quality of an object, a commodity, in capitalism. Marx's clear interest is in the qualitative value of the objects created by laborers, but sold by the owner of the factory. The unreconcilable inequity of wage labor is at the core of Marx's critique.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">...Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham. Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity, say of labour-power, are constrained only by their own free will. They contract as free agents, and the agreement they come to, is but the form in which they give legal expression to their common will. Equality, because each enters into relation with the other, as with a simple owner of commodities, and they exchange equivalent for equivalent. Property, because each disposes only of what is his own. And Bentham, because each looks only to himself. The only force that brings them together and puts them in relation with each other, is the selfishness, the gain and the private interests of each... On leaving this sphere of simple circulation or of exchange of commodities, which furnishes the “Free-trader Vulgaris” with his views and ideas, and with the standard by which he judges a society based on capital and wages, we think we can perceive a change in the physiognomy of our dramatis personae. He, who before was the money-owner, now strides in front as capitalist; the possessor of labour-power follows as his labourer. The one with an air of importance, smirking, intent on business; the other, timid and holding back, like one who is bringing his own hide to market and has nothing to expect but — a hiding.</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Karl Marx, <i>Capital</i><i> </i><i>vol</i><i>. </i><i>I</i>, chapter 6.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">This ultimately defines the necessity to look to the objects of labor: political economy masquerades as the freedom and inalienable rights of both parties to build objects <i>together</i>. The objects, as well as the actors, must be understood in dialog with one another, but there is undeniably an illicit question to pose to capitalist ideology regarding the quality of these relationships. In fact, the inalienable rights of the laborer and the owner are instantly challenged by the alien nature of the produced object. It is owned by the owner throughout the process: they own the material to build, the labor that builds it, and the material that is built.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I've been thinking about this, in part, because of an episode of Douglas Lain's podcast <i>Diet Soap</i>, On <a href="http://dietsoap.podomatic.com/entry/2014-09-01T18_42_01-07_00">Episode #220, "Marx's Reluctant Idealism,"</a> Douglas and his guest Andy Marshall work through Marx's critique of Hegel, and the theory of alienation seems to be a sticking-point for the two of them. Marshall's reaction to the concept was extraordinarily similar to my own reaction the first time I read through the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. It almost seems as though Marx is being a little touchy about the work of the laborer. It feels like Marx is saying that wage labor sentimentally detaches man from his production, which makes him spiritually bankrupt, whether or not he is making enough to escape monetary bankruptcy. Alienation from the world of objects, while capitalist production (as a social system) is continuously only concerned with such activities and their (random) outcomes, makes the laborer fundamentally detached from his own inner-life and creativity, and treats him as equipment to be sold, a commodity on a market, and leaves him to fend for himself in when it comes to the authority of the capitalist who bought him.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">If man produces for a capitalist, as Marx points out, then he is not producing for himself in any way other than collecting the wages agreed upon in his contract. The more productivity that he introduces into the system, the less valuable his work is and the lower the quality of his contracted labor. Technology accelerates the process for the capitalist; with more robotic-type functions in the labor market, pushing one button may trigger the labor of what would have been hundreds of man-hours just a few decades ago. The unchanging ownership of the objects, the machinery to create them, and the drive to expedite this process is the fundamental concern of Marx throughout the beginning of <i>Capital Vol. I</i>. This is the key aspect that leads the creation of wealth in the capitalist political-economy (also known as the labor theory of capital).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">But what is the difference between a laborer who does own their material and this laborer who must contract their labor explicitly? And specifically, what of the laborious manufacture of art? Since Mozart's arrival in Vienna in 1781, the role of the musician has been primarily as a freelancer. This socio-productive aspect has largely held for these past two centuries, and artists have been largely responsible for their own materials. There is a clear complication in the institutional support of academic artists, one that we will not delve into here. The objects of artistic creation still share fundamental identities related to the labor of producing art, which itself, does not greatly change under the contemporary conditions of academic patronage.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The Semiotic Model of Interpretation and the Necessity of Alienation:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">At the core of the art object is the same process of alienation as in any other labor: work is objectified, and in some ways, can no longer belong to the artist. This process is inherent in the work simply by being "a work," a product already produced. In Marx's treatment of this process, every attempt is made to not go back to a primordial state of man to try to find the "nature" of production, since production, ethics, and economy are all historically and culturally specific. The production of music, just as any other object, creates the ability to transcode historical and cultural information with the work of the composer. This is often placed under the heading of "style," the things in the music which give a sense of an author, a period, the cultural function of music, the ideologies behind it, etc. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">In the musical semiotics model of Jean Jacques Nattiez (see <i>Music and Discourse</i>), this feature of the work is called the <i>poietic level</i> of the work. Streams of information that relate the author to their work build relationships between socio-historical facts and the identity of that particular work; knowing that Mozart was no longer working for the church, but was working for individual commissions, changes the information about how the music was written, what inspired it, and how the work must have unfolded. Musical elements can be tracked throughout the oeuvre<i> </i>of an a composer, an historical moment, or any other identifiable class of seemingly similar works. This process looks like a fuller conception of Eagleton's materialist criticism, because it would also take into account any non-material (that is, isolated philosophical and biographical) concerns, as more particularity about (dialectical) relationships formed by the art object, the viewer, the artist, and ideology. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">In the semiotic model, we can see that the author's world is imprinted into the object, but that alienation gives the ability for the object to be interpreted. The art object, in other words, is only one third of the equation, the thing that builds a relationship between the viewer of the art object and the author. Nattiez calls this the <i>trace</i>, the thing that is objectified labor, waiting for its birth as an object of discourse and relationship-building. The objectification process, in other words, is the process of becoming a part of the objective world (the world of things) by ceasing to represent only the author, and their situation. Objectification leads to valuation.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Certain aspects of Western music culture, however, point to a more marked and specific type of objectification than just an ephemeral or transcendent relationship: the score. Music literacy (which is taught in the academy under the title "music") places the primary function of musical expression on the interpretation of a performer, since the artist has already created the work. It is finished and objectified, except for the interpretational layers that are waiting for the performer to enable them. An interesting problem arises in performative interpretation, because it highlights a theoretically inherent ambiguity in all music and assumes that the performer is necessary not to simply convey what the artist has fixed into an object, but instead, resolve the ambiguity that is inherent in the notational system. In this sense, where composition would be what Husserl would call "pure music," the extension of a representational system of what can happen in music, the performer could achieve a state of "pure music performance," where they could possibly extend the meaning of the performative representation without violating the musical instructions. I've written at length on that subject <a href="http://musicopathy.blogspot.com/2014/08/pure-music-analysis-short-essay-on.html" target="_blank">on this blog</a> before.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The locus of musical literacy and historical knowledge is a necessity for the "correct" interpretation to be deciphered by the performer and executed, which is itself a particularization of the work that becomes yet another laborious object. Estrangement, in other words, is happening twice in the performance of the Western canon: first, for the composer, who imbues an object with the artistic information that they can, and second, for the performer, who must imbue a performance with their interpretation of the composer's instructions. Beethoven has no control over how his work is performed today... he is dead. Experts and scholars can take a number of historical and social approaches to building systems of performative ethics, which tease out musical elements and streams of information into a hierarchy of importance and "correctness" of playing. These systems vary according to a number of metanarratives that govern all socio-historical ethics, and I base them on William G. Perry's theory of ethical development, with a great deal of conjecture added based on my observations of musical culture. (A companion set of observations for the music listener will be found at the conclusion of this post)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">1) The dualist ethic: historiographical concerns in the dualistic mode move toward an historically accurate performance, such that the performance attempts to re-create the piece as it would have been premiered (often an impossibility because of historical distance); if it does not employ all characteristics of the historicity of the piece, it is incorrect. This is often the level of academics, having heard at some point what the correct way of playing was at a particular time, and they accepted it as the main outcome of a performer.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">2) The multiplicitous ethic, marked by virtuocity, where the performer centers performance on their own prowess and bringing attention to their physical appearance, individual concern for the craft of producing music, and often, a drive toward the continuation of (often outdated) social practices; the multiplicitist knows that anyone could play music, but they must, themselves, do it better than anyone else to establish their own gratification (often as sublimated sexual desires) and authority; they defend their own authority over their work, since there seem to be so many options for how to play the piece but they do it for themselves, but will quickly submit to authority greater than their own (again, creating symbioses with sublimated sexual drives).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">3) The relativist ethic, which is based on the understanding that there are indeed historical movements and styles that are options for any performance, but that any could be utilized. Relativist ethics are extraordinary open to different compositional and performative situations, but lack a decisive valuation of material. This ethical stage is correlative to a performer who will play because of difference or newness, and is attracted to those qualities in the work, because the performative experience offers another viewpoint that may be new. Often, however, such situations lead to reductive playing (just the pitches and rhythms), since the situation is different but not specifically attached to distinctive historical or contextual cues for successful performance. Successful performance is usually, in the relativist ethic, based on extramusical factors, such as communicating a "radical" message, or performing something to make people think that it is esoteric or "weird."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">4) The committed ethic, characterized by a reliance on the freedom of interpretation and the application of a "presentist" mentality, where the performer socially and historically centers performance on contemporary philosophies and social structures in an attempt to reproduce the piece with a greater sense of relevance. This performer understands the labor of performance and composition as a cooperative relationship between people (composer, performer, and audience) in which meaning is freely established.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The existence of different modes of interpretation highlight the alienation of the composer and the distance between their will, as embodied in the musical object, and the will of those who would reproduce the works. At its core, the development of different performative ethics is only possible with alienating the composer from their work, because even a staunchly "composer intent" ethic assumes that the musical object cannot be repurposed or transfigured into other meanings. Were this the case, the score would not have any ambiguity in it, and the musical representation system (notation) would have probably developed to eliminate ambiguities if they were somehow a problem to the greater structure of musical performance and literacy.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Nattiez also refers to the <i>esthesic level,</i> the streams of information that arise from the interpretation of those works. The estrangement of the composer, who provided the initial labor and hence, the original intentions of the piece, are now met by the ambiguities of the object, and require the streams of information given by interpretation to decipher these ambiguities. The ethical situation of that interpretation is itself historical and social. The ethical interpretation of music can be fleshed out from any particular musical culture, individual choices, and style ideologies. These categories are, from my observations, the existent Western classical performative ethics (itself historical and cultural in name and content). As ethnomusicologist Thomas Turino has pointed out in <i>Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation</i>, Western music culture is closely correlated to the capitalist mode of production: the function of music tends to be presentational, in a concert hall, because of the capitalist ideology of specialization; virtuosity is played up in capitalist cultures because of the ideology of the individual agent competing against the market; etc. Each facet of the social world that impacts the mode of production has musical consequences, and implies certain ethical systems that maintain music as a social institution, which explicitly socializes participants into an homologous structure that is just a subset of wider socio-cultural norms, as well as the contributing pedagogical necessity that leads to prolonging those norms.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Private Art Property:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Because of the homologous social nature of musical work as labor, cultures have had property rights built into the musical object in every tradition, even when a lack of property rights is what is encoded in musical objects. Anonymous composition is more indicative of traditional cultures, where communal property and collaborative production are more common modes of production. One tradition that falls into this category, and that I am familiar with is, the Central Javanese classical tradition, where composers basically never signed their name to a composed piece before the mid-twentieth century, since the music is culturally, communally, owned, as a portrayal of their social history and religions. This trend has changed, however, as Westerners have done a great deal of archival research and transcription, wanting to know a bit more about the </span>genealogy<span style="font-family: inherit;"> of pieces for the historical record, and master musicians find themselves in teaching positions in the United States and the United Kingdom.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">"Intellectual property," on the other hand, is an indicator of private property rights, and restriction of performance on the grounds of social institutions such as the market, labor, and ownership of the means of production. Even in Western culture, the musical work as property was markedly different for a composer who worked under patronage of the church, since the music would become communal property of the church for the edification of the congregation or the glorification of God. The historical move from feudalism to capitalist accumulation is mirrored (albeit much later, in historical terms) by Beethoven's lack of church patronage and individualistic move toward his own musical desires and goals. Without being able to mass-publish his works, his desire to write for an audience that may not exist for fifty years after his death points directly to the newfound emphasis on private property in European culture, and specifically the "liberal period." These attitudes simply hadn't existed in previous centuries, since the branding of working for posterity was condemned</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> by the Catholic Church as immoral (see Max Weber's <i>The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism</i>).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The conception of ownership for Beethoven was spiritual in nature, about the authority and prestige of the individual composer, and this conception has had serious longevity in Western culture. As this concept of intellectual property has moved from an entirely spiritual and artistic (transcendent realm), into a legal and monetary realm, we see the ability for the commercialization of art that happened in the early twentieth century. The ownership function in music has dictated social function, use cases, and technological development in musical labor. The radio transmission of music prompted the public to buy records of their favorite tunes, reforming the social work of musical performance into a new venture, with capital at its core. This fundamentally undermined the previous commodity of music: sheet music. Of course, this material change has a distinct </span>repercussion, which changes the music listener into a passive conduit, instead of a participating laborer in the creation of music (even if it is just playing and singing in the parlor).<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">On the industrial side, however, ownership is ever in the favor in the owner of the means of production. Even though the record industry utilized technology that lead to a greater freedom of "reproducing" (in Benjamin's sense of the word) performances by placing an object on the record player, the social formation of musical work in creating those objects developed to devalue the work of <i>most </i>musicians. Throughout the first 70 years of commercial music making, there are horror stories of the undervaluation of musical labor, stemming from the conception of what it means to "write" a copyrighted song: the owners of musical property are generally the persons who wrote the vocal melody and the words; studio musicians, musicians who play instruments on recordings (often without billing or recognition) were regularly given a flat fee for their services, which often involved writing a novel part for their own instrument. Despite being a presumably equal member of the group (their contribution to the recording is musically equivalent to the writer of the vocal melody), studio musicians rarely, if ever, were able to collect royalties on their work. They had no protection under the law because they did not own the means of producing the musical commodity, and received the contracted amount of money, with no say in how their musical labor manifested once it was controlled and distributed by the culture industry. Thus, the musicians who fell into this category became classed as "studio musicians," a type of musician whose function was not stardom or branding, but exploitation through music production technology, which sought increase the speed by which music was created and drive down the wages of performing musicians.</span></div>
<div dir="ltr">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div dir="ltr">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The estrangement of the art object allows this treatment in the same way all estranged labor makes it impossible for the laborer to own their product, to continue gaining from their own labor and its formation of commodities in the market. The law (in America, the whole of corporate interest enshrined by the ruling class while masquerading as empirical judgement by the proletariat) developed to protect intellectual property, including musical commodities, in the same way the owner of factories are recognized to have both the liability and the right to profit on the produced commodity. This right involves the use of the commodity in a way determined by a corporate entity or owner, to be exhibited only under completely restricted conditions, set by the owner.</span></div>
<div dir="ltr">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div dir="ltr">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">And it is in this way that the estranged object finds itself presented for explicitly capitalist functions: licensing for use in other conglomerate works (film and television), use in advertising for lending meaning to another product (in the tradition of fascist propaganda), and the rights to distribution in physical or digital media. In regards to this last item, the consumer is limited in the ways that they may use the work, and, as we have seen develop in the past two decades of American law, are only purchasing a license that entails private contemplation of the object, and not a physical copy of the musical work. </span></div>
<div dir="ltr">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div dir="ltr">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">On the other hand, the law, as we have also seen, has been powerless to combat the privatization of the musical object, once it became portable through digital technology. Intellectual property, in other words, was designed for objectified labor alone, presuming that a physical medium was necessary to convey the musical object. Protecting the property rights of individual artists, unknowingly, was only feasible when the labor was physically objectified into a <i>unique </i>medium, a physical medium, not a digitally encoded one.</span></div>
<div dir="ltr">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The Ethics of Having:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Intellectual property rights are clearly backed by legal ethics, which seek to make sure that labor is valued properly (that is, by the market) and that piracy does not make freely available that which should cost the end-user directly. It is a fundamental pillar of the rule of law in Western society. This is because of the valuation of success and deserved compensation are only measured in monetary forms throughout capitalist ideology. How, indeed, would you know your musical work is successful without a trade group like Billboard counting how many <i>legal </i>copies of your music were sold by <i>legitimate </i>retailers? For academic composers, if you are not being paid commissions for your new works, how well could you really be doing at your job? This viewpoint, however traditional and accepted it may be, has not been the focus of the music consumers since the inception of peer to peer file sharing in the late 1990s.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">From the opposite direction, ethical consumption was never the goal of music fans, and as soon as technology allowed the consumption of all recorded musical objects without monetary consideration, listeners jumped at the chance. Rarely is it considered that the music listening public may have actually benefited from this in the educational and recreational aspects of musical consumption. Simply put, there is no reason to think that we have a more enlightened and musically literate population because of access to music. One would think that having a public with unfettered access to all recorded musical works would have an impact on overall musical education; an apt simile may lie in the fantasy that we suddenly recovered all of the documents lost at the Library at Alexandria. It seems, however, that the estranged labor of musicians continued in the <i>use-value</i> of musical objects; the privatization of musical experience into music-consumption plus subjective mystery, the lack of technical language in the average listener, and the unrelenting belief that music is irrational and disconnected from personal identities continued, and were all valorized beyond reproach. The average listener did not consume for broadening their own horizons, but instead, for re-presenting, on-demand, the music they already identified with that was already offered them by the culture industry.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">This facet of music consumption illustrates the </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">structural </i><span style="font-family: inherit;">nature of estrangement: the ideology of ownership of the means of production, support of private property and private listening, and the lack of freedom by means of a lack of critical listening. The structure of distribution is not the content of the experience, nor does it mandate any particular viewpoint or ethics be upheld in the process of music apprehension. Even when the structure of the music distribution system was shattered, and replaced by a newfound social convention that looked more like an "open-source" and "fair-use" culture, the hegemony of popular culture circumscribed a ground-up advance in musical literacy (at least, one is not yet </span>noticeable<span style="font-family: inherit;">). Just as the nature of labor is regulated only by the culture that gives us estranged labor as nature, music listening is given as private and subjective, awash in personal identities without a critical analysis or understanding of identity formation with musical objects.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Where estranged labor can be circumvented by designing other structures for work environments (co-ops, communes, entrepreneurism, non-profit, and pay-what-you-will are all viable models that modify wage labor and work toward craft and collaborative ownership), it is still entirely the valuation process inside of that structure that determines the individual outcomes of artistic labor. It is still improbable that independent musicians and artists can survive in a culture that has privatized all musical action into a personal, subjective, and isolated experience. This is the world in which it is no longer possible to value any musical labor because it has been sold as a transcendent and invaluable object, as far as the capitalist ideology cares, since the market can no longer set any value for it, and so, sets zero for music's value.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The Ethics of Listener Use:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">At its core, the estranged musical object does have something transcendent about it as a generalized form of identity building, but this relies on the relationship of the listener to both the musical object and their entire experience of life. The listener, in a very real and social sense, should feel obligated to understand the music that they "like" as much as they understand their daily motivations. In response to estranged musical labor, there remains, for those who are free to think and learn, a necessity to understand the grounds on which the object is created, its function, and the streams of information relevant to understanding this musical object. A dynamic model could be created that unravels personal identities and social knowledge of the world into a musical ethics that is unearthed from the possibility of being trapped in a single historical or evaluative model; this model, again, resembles William Perry's stages of ethical development.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">1. Dualism</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">This initial stage holds that there is truth, correctness, falseness, and lies. In listening applications, a dualistic thinker says that there are many examples where someone seems to be laboring on "music" but that the product is so far outside of their context of what music means that such works are actually not music. In American culture, our two-party political system is the greatest example of dualistic thinking, leading people to believe that the correctness of one particular party over the other is the greatest chance at solving problems. This stage of development is associated strongly with authoritarian thinking, and can be seen in listeners who "like what they like" but only because they perceive it as the correct thing to like. Often, people who subscribe to a dualistic ethic develop affinities for things that are clearly offered in their family life, or by an industry that would rather people know exactly what they will buy before it is even made (or just buy reissues of the same albums over and over). The dualistic listener is overly critical of any music for which they do not think they have enough information to understand, because it appears to be a waste of time or resources.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">2. Multiplicity</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The second stage offers the first glimpse of relativism, where correctness and truth do not seem to lead to every answer to every question one could have about the social world. In Western culture, "hard sciences" promote the viewpoint that there is some relativity in the world, but that there are only things that we know to be true, and things that are not yet understood. In this stage of development, a subject moves toward an understanding that authority is not centralized, because asking a line of reasonable questions may end up in the answer "we don't know yet" (with the blind-spot being of no worth). This type of thinking, applied musically, is the listener who begins to realize that there is no grand authority governing their or anyone's musical tastes, and samples all types of music to find what their own subjective preferences are, and who they are. Characteristically, this would be the person who recognizes that "everyone is entitled to their own taste," and consider the end-game of musical consumption to be an act of freedom of speech. While this listener is an open-minded individual who does not reject or dismiss others because of musical listening, they do not have any ethical attachment to the work of those who do not make music that is appealing to their own subjective viewpoint. They are possibly critical of the music industry, but only if their primary selection for musical consumption is itself marginalized by the industry, or not understood by a segment of the population, while they believe that "their music" should be more popular than it is. This is the stage of ethical listening with the most privatization of taste; multiplicitists tend to not even talk about music as to guard their personal authority from attack.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">3. Relativism</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">In the third stage, the subject becomes aware that context determines the ability to understand what relevance any fact or data may mean for any individual situation. Here, the subject is ready to listen, equitably, to any explanation of the context in which any problem resides. There may be a better or worse way of addressing the matter, and this subject will usually defer to an authority who has <i>distinction </i>(in Bourdieu's terms) in the field that the problem arises. Having already collected a great deal of knowledge about the different styles of music that actually exist, a relativistic point of view implies at least a basic layout of the musical world, and how musicians work toward different goals, make music that serve different functions, and pursue different aesthetic goals. No longer chiefly concerned with their own subjective tastes, a relativistic listener can now understand that musical work is indeed labor, and that the labor of a musician creates musical work (it is not just something that speaks to them, but something that exists in the social world). The relativistic listener understands that styles and productive methods have changed throughout the history of musical work, and know some of the ways that this has developed over the course of humanity. They can place themselves in any musical situation and gather enough streams of information to be able to get an idea of how this music fits in the world, and what it may say about the identities of those who are in that musical situation, and maybe even understand the appeal of a wide range of aesthetic goals. They are critical of musicians who seem to not understand the musical culture that they, themselves, are pursuing, but generally supportive of those who are in the process of learning how to be a part of that musical culture. This stage is somewhat liminal, and is more of a process than the others, as long as a sense of value and historical significance continue to gain influence inside of the listener's development.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">4. Commitment</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The final stage, commitment, is the ethical position that synthesizes the recognition of the relativist world with an ethical attachment to particular goals and meanings. The commitment stage is where ambiguity stops interfering with meanings in the subject's identity, and ambiguity does not debase any of the knowledge that the subject has. In musical commitment, a recognition of all forms of musical labor as a fully integrated notion of culture, and as a legitimate form of labor, lead the committed listener to support music which furthers a broader understanding of cultural life, historical development, and balancing the author's intended meanings with the listener's freedom to interpretation. In this scheme, the committed listener is cognisant of the state of music in the world, the necessity to support musical labor (as long as it is done in an honest, creative, and equitable way), and the advocation of musical understanding as a tool for understanding all other aspects of human life. Ethical development to this point creates a drive to collaborate and express the connections of musical work to human work more generally (pedagogy), strives toward dialog with others and education about disparate types of music, and works to support all those who participate in cultural, philosophical, and pedagogical fields who share this project. Commitment strives toward making the world better, implies a Sociological Imagination (from C. Wright Mills, where the actor looks to real world problems to propose solutions at any hierarchical level, and gives attention to making the world better instead of suspending bias to appear relativist), and collaboration instead of competition. Committed listeners are critical of views that discount human ingenuity and its ability to reform the world's structures in positive ways, and critical of industries who stand to profit from music in inequitable or predatory ways. They are also critical of music and musical education which furthers traditional or ideological concepts that lock listeners into lower forms of listening ethics. It would be necessary for a committed listener to be fully capable of understanding the streams of information presented in a majority of the world's music, a scholar of both music and culture in the most general ways.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">It should also be pointed out that commitment is a critical pursuit: there is little chance that a committed listener will be content with the general ideology or a mode of production which does not create the conditions for furthering human life, creativity, and freedom (for both individuals and groups), or an ideology that the social world is in a constant state of natural harmony, i.e. the market.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The estranged labor of any musical object, in a world where all labor is objectified and brought to market, begs the question of value, one that can only be posed in a conversation that does not instantly conflate market forces and successful labor. The economic truth hiding inside of this question is that without support in the grander scheme of capitalism, music could, indeed, die an economic death. The music industry has claimed its own death since the turn of the century. Hegel, Adorno, and Danto have all worked on "the death of art," but never really thought that people would stop playing instruments or painting, just that the objects that art produced (and their localized mode of production) would change so radically through history that it no longer appears connected to itself. </span></div>
<div dir="ltr">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div dir="ltr">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">There is a real, existential threat to music, because it is systematically undervalued in market institutions, resulting in a class of laborers with their own distinct identity in political economy, and a systematic drive away from ethical valuation in the transcendent, meaning based realm (affective and epistemic alike). The death of art attacks both individuals and institutions. The threat is to lose musical institutions, the personal practice of music by individuals, and musical modes of thinking: the understanding of the cognitive, social, economic, aesthetic, philosophical, political, historical, technological, literary, and performative aspects of music, themselves equal parts of not only the constitution of human meaning, but the process of life, and our strategies that link the two.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">A more equitable world would imply a broader understanding of the work of musical laborers, as well as other classes of laborers. The valuation of human experience, production, quality of life, creativity, and justice is left to the randomizer of the market system, and trusted to the mechanism of wage labor and its "fairness," despite being a consequence of the random interaction of an entire market system. We cannot leave it to market opportunists, finding exploitative patterns and holes in the system, to determine the musical life of the entire world. Since musical labor is objectified and the musician alienated from their work, it is the responsibility of listeners to provide ethical valuation and understanding to the labor of music. We must, in the words of Zlavoj Zizek, take the ideology more seriously than it takes itself. We must meet the ideology with the criticism that objectified labor presents the human element of musical objects, the identity of its producer as they march toward death, and give us their labor to show us who we are.</span><br />
<br /></div>
derek.k.jeppsenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04666636081163461931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1657024236671077114.post-11714645942294625012014-08-29T02:37:00.000-07:002015-06-17T15:19:37.886-07:00Phenomenological Aesthetics and Vulgar Aesthetics: Janet Wolff’s Aesthetics and the Sociology of Art<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
Some time ago, I ran
across my personal idiom of “sardonic synopses,” moments where I crassly
collapse a work of art into its most general and absurd form by erasing all
traces of aesthetic value from the work.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: .5in;">
Stravinsky’s
<i>The Firebird</i>. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
Act 1:
Dude tries to fuck a bird made of fire.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
Act 2: Dance fighting (literally, people
gesturing ferociously near each other).<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
Act 3: Everyone
dies, the world is no different.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
This practice of mine
is usually met with resistance by anyone in need of defending the particular
work or genre that I am adressing (on grounds of the work’s aesthetic value and my lack of
knowledge or interest in the genre, for instance). But it is worth noting that it
is a great (if overly deconstructive) way to get an aesthetically oriented response from
someone who has highly aesthetically valued that art object that you defile. I once delivered this version of <i>The Firebird</i> to a professor of mine who reacted
by redirecting me to the medium of ballet itself, stating that I had missed the
value added to narrativity by telling the story through dance instead of
natural language. He also invoked a phrase I will never ever use in my writing because of its ability to function as a self-fulfilling, value defeating
statement: “the <span style="background: black; mso-highlight: black;">medium</span>
is the <span style="background: black; mso-highlight: black;">message</span>.” <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
I had, in reality,
during the production of the <i>The Firebird</i>,
pushed myself to understand that ballet must have its own idioms and styles, meaning
in its own culture (of which I am not a part) and I was looking for these idioms throughout.
But the idioms of ballet (dancing) are hard to break into without a hand to
hold, so I have never flourished as a connoisseur of ballet. If this changes, I
will make friends with those who know the idioms (of dance) and
have them talk me through the process of engaging with the aesthetic values
established in that discipline, a discipline so often referred to as one of the pinnacles of
Western art. I would do so knowing that I can only get a certain amount of perspective
from one person or source, and that to go down this road sufficiently would end
in me being able to say that ballet “is mine,” that I am a part of that
cultural practice enough to know it (and knowing that my knowledge will still
only constitute a certain perspective).</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
This process
constitutes what I would like to call “aesthetics.” It is not to be confused
with the terrifically complicated bourgeois analytic philosophy. The reason
I mark this word, presently, is that gaining knowledge about artistic production and the aesthetic realm (and aesthetic attitude with which I
will engage below) is not a transcendental or mystical problem; it is
a process through which one may process human work. It is a process of
establishing meaning personal or social (that is, contingent), real or imagined, for a
created object. It is not the logicing out of words about art, it is the
process of direct engagement with art objects.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
The reason why I am
able write, today, about this process, is that I have been reading Janet Wolff’s
<i>Aesthetics and the Sociology of Art</i>.
In it, Wolff synthesizes the then current literature on the topic of the
social nature of aesthetics; sometimes she means aesthetics, but mostly, she
means Aesthetics, the established and institutionally supported philosophers who take up that dastardly question “what is
art?” While the book is great at establishing a body of literature, mostly from
the 1970s, about the history of the discipline of aesthetics, it fails to answer
all but one question: what is the best way forward in developing an aesthetic
theory suitable to scholarly discourse and real understanding?</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
The book, however, is not intended to do much more than trace the discourse of aesthetics. In the concluding four pages, it is explicitly
stated that Wolff is not working toward making the situation better but instead
giving what amount to three possible theories that could develop into the new
sociology of art, which would somehow have access to aesthetic values. The
first is the “discursive model,” the next, “the philosophical anthropology of
art,” and lastly, “psychoanalytic theories of art.” The former is the most
viable in Wolff’s viewpoint, as it is the only of the three that can explain
why art works between an artist and a subject (the viewer) in any meaningful
way. This model is given by Foucault in <i>The
Archaeology of Knowledge</i>, and is for investigating what we could know about the
artist and their historical moment by engaging the artistic object itself, including any relevant worldly knowledge. Understanding could be a process of, for instance, having
and applying knowledge of space and geometry that would inherently impinge on
the visual artist’s conception of the medium of painting; knowledge of synthesis techniques and digital computers inherently reflects what the electronic
composer knows about the world into electronic music.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
The sticking-point,
here, is about the autonomy of a work of art. In chapter five, “The
Specificity of Art,” Wolff highlights these theories for how they contribute to
looking for the artistic quality of “specificity,” or, how are art objects
different from any other kind of object? Why are art objects so different from
other objects (Lukács classified cultural objects as practical, magico-religious,
or aesthetic)? <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
One idea could be that
art objects are in museums. Wolff refers to this as the “institutional theory
of art,” where the canonization of an artwork defines its difference from
practical objects. I would, however, say that museums and concert halls are somewhere in between aesthetic objects and
magico-religious ones, since it is virtually impossible to delimit ritual
behavior involving Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and attending to the musical performance as an art object. The very idea of playing Beethoven’s, or anyone’s, Symphonies
from start to finish with an American ensemble comprised of full-time,
professional musicians was born of the transfiguration of capital to cultural
capital (as shown in Lawrence Levine’s <i>Highbrow-Lowbrow</i>).
Besides, a (economically) contemporary equivalent of this practice would be to dismiss any
music that does not make the Billboard charts as something less than music, an obviously
untenable position. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
The most interesting
point about the institutional theory of art is that it can be deeply,
fundamentally contradictory because institutions can assume any
applicable aesthetic theory into their purpose. For instance, the absolutist
aesthetic of nineteenth century Germany can be perpetuated by American musical
institutions. In this situation, canonized works become “playable,” a part of the identity of the institution. But this canonization into the concert hall, its own contingient social sphere, is an intrusion against the work’s theorized
autonomy from reality and social life. Most of the time this deep contradiction
goes unnoticed, and “great art” marches forward on its tide of cultural capital
(until it stops having support from that culture, i.e. becomes culturally
bankrupt; see “The Death of Cultural Institutions” on this blog).<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
A counter to this
position is the phenomenological viewpoint of artistic value. Although this
theory does not receive a catchy title from Wolff, it should instantly point to
the idea that listener reception and interactions with art objects create (at
least the potential for) aesthetic value judgments. As with all (Husserlian)
phenomenological accounts of the world, there remains one blind-spot: at its
core, phenomenology is investigating what is essential to experience, but can
never really grasp what the word experience means. While this remains a
rhetorical problem throughout the last century of philosophy, it would be
absurd to say that there is a single English speaker in the world who does not
have "experiences" or cannot engage in "experience." Here we are in trouble of needing to "logic out" something that we do not have any problems performing on the order of
hundreds of times a day. Again, a theory of experience as process, not a
defined, empirical object to be studied and shared, would help de-philosophize
the conversation and avoid the serpentine fray of language that promiscuously
complicates everyday praxis.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
Now, to return to my then adumbrative example, Stravinsky’s <i>The
Firebird</i>: the process through which I engaged the performance is not
difficult to trace out; and there are maybe six areas of focus that I can
explicate here, even years after the particular experience.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
Focus 1) Technical musical interest, because of my
instrumental training<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: 1.0in; mso-add-space: auto; text-align: justify;">
As a “trained” pianist, singer, string, woodwind, and
percussion player, I have a number of interests in the instrumental technique
and the process of “playing together,” including the role of the conductor, and
an admiration for musicians who can perform individually and technically to create cooperative structures.
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: 1.0in; mso-add-space: auto; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
Focus 2) Creative musical interest, because of my
compositional training<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="margin-left: 1.0in; mso-add-space: auto; text-align: justify;">
Having studied the compositional strategies and individual and general styles of many composers
(and Stravinsky in a specific and intimate way), I have an interest in trying to decode what the
narrative and the music have to do with each other, as well as trying to
identify any changes in style between this particular ballet and Stravinsky’s
overall style (historically situated, of course). Besides this, the reason for
composing music is for it to be valued aesthetically by the audience, a
question that I generally leave for symbolic interactionalism (about which I
will write on this blog sooner or later). <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Focus 3) Historical interest in reconciling or
reconsidering my knowledge of early twentieth century music <o:p></o:p></div>
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As a student of music history I am interested in revisiting
what I think I know about historical music from time to time, not to validate
the knowledge that I have about music history, but to see if it is becoming
developed or refined in any way. There are details to be found in any piece
that “I think I know,” which refute or challenge any understanding I already
have about music, as well as changes in my life that refocus my aesthetic
valuations. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Focus 4) Interest in the construction of ballet dancing,
both general and particular (as a non-dancer)<o:p></o:p></div>
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As noted above, my process was largely about trying to find
what the idioms meant to the process of telling the story. This was a process
of attempting to fathom what choices the choreographer made for the production,
as well as imagining other choices, or trying to assess which parts of the
choreography would be essential to the portrayal of <i>The Firebird</i>. (Also as noted above, I largely failed at this
due to lack of region-specific knowledge).<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Focus 5)
Interest in narrative<o:p></o:p></div>
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This may even be a default, a cop-out of some kind, or a
product of Western culture and tradition that I continue to have a section of
my consciousness roped off for. Because of the seeming triviality of these
causes, it seems the easiest way to deconstruct the aesthetic values of the
piece based on these ones, since they are given, automatic. In other words, my tearse deconstruction has more to do with ease than anything else, and deconstructing the narrative, instead of more aesthetically and productive reasons, builds the most absurd version of the work that misses the majority of what is happening in the art objects that constitute the performance.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Focus 6) Interest in the particularity of this performance,
being privy to the technical background knowledge of producing events, and knowing a great number of the performing musicians in the orchestra</div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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This is my direct link to the social world of the performing musician,
and the great impetus for my viewing of the art object. How important is it to
knowing<i> The Firebird</i>? Probably
little, but it does show a bit about who I am, what my biases may be, and the
fluidity between this mode of aesthetic valuation and any of the other levels. If I hear a flubbed note in the brass section, I can theorize why that note was a mistake on a psychological level of the player or ensemble.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Each of these were
options for me to analyze, attitudes for me to assume, and variably have to do
with the specificity of the experience as they do the social constraints
surrounding them. I have not, necessarily, marked out each as an aesthetic valuation process (it is buried and deferred in Focus 2). However, each of
these items would form a symbiosis, my “total aesthetic evaluation” of the
performance, something that is not necessarily the aesthetic evaluation of each
item, nor the sum of them. I am, as of yet, still free to make my own course of
judgment and valuation throughout these foci and create and destroy them as I
please. Beyond that, I am not distinguishing the aesthetic valuation of Stravinsky's work from the choreographer's from the conductors. Structure here is brutish, inattentive to the individual values and production.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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This haphazard and subjective routine is exactly what would be thought of (by a vulgar philosopher) as
solipsistic, devoid of objective information about valuing the art object in an
aesthetic way. This would, of course, be true, since I have not supplied the
content of my valuations, just the structures of them. The structural reading
of my aesthetic process is already cumbersome enough, and I will not go into an
actual aesthetic valuations they enable for that reason.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
But, let us say, these
structures may actually exist for every individual in the world, and this may
be <i>the</i> structure for apprehending art
objects. This would then constitute what Wolff calls the “aesthetic attitude,”
derived from Husserl’s “eidetic attitude,” which is the way of engaging objects
as art objects. Just as the eidetic attitude can be applied (in any moment and
by any consciousness which contains the metaphorical tool) to try to establish
what is essential about an object, i.e. what the object’s pure attributes are
that make it into that object, so can the aesthetic attitude be applied to any
human work to “find the art in it,” (see my previous post on Pure Music Analysis). My process of multiple foci running through
different regions of my own knowledge is my own structure of the aesthetic
attitude, the structure through which I identify how I will assign aesthetic value.
<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
I would side with
Bourdieu, whom Wolff quotes, when he claims that any attempt to
essentialize the process of aesthetic valuation will fail. Any essentialization
(including that of aesthetic valuation) moves toward the erasure of the individual
and their freedom to engage the world on their own terms. If I were to say that
this process is everyone’s process, I would simply be wrong (just as the Aesthetician
Roger Scruton is wrong in saying that art is about beauty, which is disproven
by the art I make, unless he wants to jump into the metaphorical bed with
Adorno and Hegel and declare that we need a different word to mark art in the
twentieth century). My process is my own, but I can, at least, understand that
I do have a process working to build these values, even if anyone else would
have a different process.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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One question that I
cannot get past, here, is the question of “what happens when a conscious person
does not actually have a model for processing art objects?” I will address this
from both base level and superstructure level:<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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As I have outlined my
structure of aesthetic valuation in one particular instance (a live performance
of <i>The Firebird</i>, complete with
staging and choreography), I must also confess that I doubt any such process
happens in (the majority of) Americans’ consciousness. I have, in the past year
or so, tried to conduct a number of conversations with non-artists and
non-musicians about aesthetic values (concealing that term or the goals of my
questions throughout the conversation). The results are usually simplistic,
mystical, and repetitive. The artistic lives of non-artistic people generally
boils down to a) finding entertainment, not art; b) superficial engagement with
art objects; and c) desire to be, above all else, affirmed by art.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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This may sound non-empirical and pessimistic, and, not ironically, Adorno and the Frankfurt
Institute for Social Research had already conducted such an experiment. While I
was dealing with the simple content of lyrics or story in my personal
conversations, their experiment dealt with a royal wedding, that of Princess
Beatrix of Holland and a German Diplomat, Claus von Amsberg. When asked why the
story was of interest, the respondents would almost always return an answer
about spectacle or the nice story; when asked to critically engage with the
event on a (politically) meaningful level, each respondent was able to turn to
an attitude in which they stated that it could have real political
consequences, and thusly proposed a political analysis of the event, instead of
chatter about the event's details as reported in the media.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Although this experiment seems to have been one of those rare things that could make Adorno
sound optimistic (“that would concur with the social prediction that a society,
whose inherent contradictions persist undiminished, cannot be totally
integrated even in consciousness”), it is possible that there is not
an aesthetic structure in each individual’s consciousness, an attitude by which
to judge art, and music most specifically. Without knowing that there even is a
world surrounding art, how would one go about apprehending its objects?<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
It is safe to say that
the philosophical Aesthetics that pervade <i>Aesthetics
and the Sociology of Art </i>could be interpreted as a conversation that
illuminates a culture that no longer even knows what art is! A lack, <i>en masse</i>, of individual processes calls
out the need for as complicated a structure as is possible to mark art as an
impossible dilemma. In this case, vulgar Aestheticians seem to contribute problems
(not insight) to the art world, problems that we all seem to be able to process
and resolve with relative ease at a subjective level. What truly is difficult
is making a generalization about aesthetic attitude, and what constitutes it
for individuals.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
It is this problem,
along with Wolff’s interesting conflation of materialist aesthetics with
biological essentialisms, which paints the New Left as absurd in the latter
half of <i>Aesthetics and the Sociology of
Art</i>. Terry Eagleton, in <i>Criticism and
Ideology</i>, does not do himself any favors in his essentializing program of
literary criticism, even if it does produce interesting analyses and
interpretations. The major problem with materialist aesthetics is that no phenomenologist would ever escape material history in a factual
assessment of aesthetic values; aesthetics (processes for assembling the necessary information and structures about art) are local, available to individuals as well as social
groups called "genres," which are undoubtedly "subsumed under," or established against, Modes
of Production. The phenomenologist would be in no position to disavow “vulgar
materialists” (as I am wont to call revolutionary materialist aesthetics) in
the same way that Eagleton dismisses phenomenology as a vulgar philosophical
routine. At the very least, Eagleton can admit, in the formation of his
“science of materialist criticism,” that what is at stake for materialist
aesthetics is keeping track of those institutions which become reified and get
to <i>educate</i> (that is, reproduce ruling
ideology) to the masses, what the ruling ideology says that art is, or what artistic practice is (presently, little more than useless garbage assembled by petty-bourgeois twentysomethings to be enjoyed after your 50 hour work week while inebriated).<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: justify;">
The complications of
aesthetics are uninteresting to someone who tries to explore their own process
of assigning aesthetic value; this is the most universal generalization to be
had in the realm of aesthetics. Someone with zero technical knowledge about aesthetics (which philosophy
has convolved beyond recognition, garnering this result for Western culture <i>in toto</i>) may or may not have an aesthetic attitude
with which they can access art objects. Wolff’s conclusion is that art should
be seen (for now, 1983) as inaccessible to sociology, since sociology (proper)
requires a solid theoretical basis from which to work. And thus, aesthetics and
the entirety of the humanities seem to be in the same place that Engels found historical
materialism in an 1894 letter: “The further the particular sphere which we are
investigating is removed from the economic sphere and approaches that of pure
abstract ideology, the more shall we find it exhibiting accidents in its
development, the more will its curve run zigzag.”<o:p></o:p></div>
derek.k.jeppsenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04666636081163461931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1657024236671077114.post-8755027630041037712014-03-22T13:19:00.000-07:002014-03-23T12:30:02.627-07:00The Death of Cultural InstitutionsThe death of the San Diego Opera has got me thinking. I'd like take the opportunity to enter a constructive conversation about wider problems than one particular locale losing one particular institution. The conception that this is a loss of culture itself is faulty, while the real loss of work (not aspirations for work, but real work) is actual and important. I'm not going to deal with the latter, because less employment is irrevocably negative for any system at any level. The former, however, is an ideological problem stemming from faulty philosophy, class warfare, and the fetishization of culture.<br />
<br />
Losing just another "cultural institution," in my view, is working toward a greater goal of destroying museums. For those who haven't spent much time contemplating our musical institutions, the idea here is that there's a group of people (a board of executives) who know what "great art" is, and they will preserve it for and/or bring it to the public; this is despite and in spite of the poor public who just eat up all of those bits of art that are not great, mostly because they don't know how great this thing is that the institutions have. The people who support the institution's perpetuation seem as though they are culturally important, and bring an otherwise unattainable experience to those in the public who are able to buy a ticket.<br />
<br />
It's times like these that I remember why I keep Lawrence W. Levine's <i>Highbrow/Lowbrow</i> at the top of the book pile on my desk at all times. The story here is the same story as every publicly performing ensemble in America; they have artistic authority and do not need relevance in any larger way, they need only relevance to their shareholders and backers. In no way does their "perfect art" regard human connection: knowing, care, or other positive relationships. Selection is under the guise of the mystification of "perfect art," not even a direct contradiction, but a contradiction wrapped in a mystification. It is the authority of culture, of knowing what is best for us, that is portrayed in all cultural institutions, governmental institutions, religions, etc. We must, of course, submit to this authority, because really, how else will we be able to individually grapple with such a mystical force as music or expression or life or freedom?<br />
<br />
The death of another institution delights me for the reason that it will gradually increase the ability for musicians to be in the larger world, instead of in a concert hall apart from it. The authoritative musical experience is usually equated with having something to come to, partake in, and be a part of. These terms, however, are a great illusion of experience. They reflect little about who we really are, they depict situations that we are no longer in and values we no longer share, works we no longer have attachment to unless we build that attachment through the authority.<br />
<br />
None of this is to say that an opera-goer's experiences are invalid or falsified, but the motivations behind the experience's creation are themselves tenuous. The work of institutions of all types are indifferent to their onlookers: self-perpetuation of the institution is the reason for constructing a performance. The only reason that the experience has been constructed, which may have been life-changing, meaningful, and ecstatic to the individual patron, is for the institution to do its work of keeping itself. You were a bystander. While the motivations for bringing art to the public could be less cynical in practice than I've described, either way, the institution does what it does for itself and allows you to watch. It is not there for you.<br />
<br />
The problem is structural, not financial, not moralistic. The world as we know it, is organized by individuals and superstructures into blind competition, and it cares not for the winners and losers of the competitions that are set up. This puts individuals and institutions into a battle with the world to survive, and while they compete, they largely <i>reproduce</i>, building the same system in new forms, instead of producing with freedom and ethic. Life for a large institution (musical, political, social, or otherwise) is to do what it does perpetually, in hopes that the world recognizes its work.<br />
<br />
Institutions are virtually unable to practice real freedom, that is, to paraphrase political theorist Hanna Arendt, the right to make a decision and see its consequences through. Following an institutional charter, reproducing the culture of the institution, or perpetually fitting itself into reality (that is, conforming to the real and social world) are all activities that undermine freedom itself. Setting up codes or standards for what an institution's purpose is, its specialization, makes it impossible to contradict itself and develop values; while planning every bit of how to work in the world, an institution makes itself unable to heed its own possible directions, and instead, locks it into mere conformance with the world around it, working for its own right to continue to enter into competition with the rest of the world. Founding values, themselves, can seal a structure into a place of failure by creating its own contradiction between those values and the necessity for competition with the rest of the world.<br />
<br />
Content and intent of the work does matter, but only in the way that the competition does; if the individuals around the institution do not value the content, they will likely not support the institution, even if they support the values behind the content. Opera companies and symphony orchestras, have, in America, always transcended competition in the marketplace for competition in cultural authority. The system of handouts for cultural authority seems to be drying up, and this site of competition will start lobbing off the losers, those who can no longer convince the elites that cultural authority is worth the money it takes to produce the work of the institution. This applies to cultural institutions, as well as universities, religions, political structures, etc. Without knowing it, the cultural institutions have bought into a meta-narrative that places them in the perpetual role of irrelevancy, and they support the decline of their own perpetuation because of an inability to define the real terms of the larger competition.<br />
<br />
In this country, the valuation of work skews largely toward the patently and singularly competitive. This includes a strong favoring of the "hard sciences," because they supposedly create technology that allows those who are most competitive, the already oligarchic and duopolistic, to increase their efficiency, and thus, create wealth by undervaluing productivity itself. This effects the humanities at large, because the hard sciences (I use the term sarcastically because of articles like <a href="http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21588057-scientists-think-science-self-correcting-alarming-degree-it-not-trouble">this one</a>) also tends to promote a view that they are the only tangible and useful thing in the world. Most humanitarians even agree strongly with them that they are far more important than the arts; it has commonly been the tactic of "objective" fields to make sure the public knows that music and art are continually being told that they are subjective, unimportant, and fleeting. Even when the humanities surpasses science at its own aims, it cannot recognize such gains: a "science of consciousness" does not even remotely exist, partly because the hard sciences will not recognize that it already does, and is known as the humanities. However, the competition between the sciences and the humanities has long resumed, with domination of the "objective" over the "subjective," turning them from what was originally an equal pursuit of knowledge about the world into frames for validity and usefulness. The myth that music is subjective, itself, has arisen from competition in the realm of ideas, and has continued to erode the faculties of both the individual and society in matters of valuation. In a world where music has been sold as an abstraction alone, without its attached meaning or value, it will continue to depreciate.<br />
<br />
But what, if institutions and meta-narratives themselves are the problem, are we supposed to do? What is the antidote to the world's preference for competition of ideas, which spites the development of ideas? There are two suggestions that I can think of, both of which are highly idealistic. The first has to do with validating musical work at large as a worthy pursuit, an understanding of the truths of the previous paragraph. The second is about self-criticism in music, materially and emotionally supporting others who do good musical work, and skewing reality toward ideals by having a wider solidarity within our discipline through re-initiating an equitable aesthetic discourse.<br />
<br />
A fundamental problem exists in how the world views our work as musicians: expressive, mystical, arbitrary, abstract, useless, unrealistic, etc. Hence, we are given little to nothing for our years of hard work, experience that is infused into every instance of our work. This is so rampant a view that in our everyday lives "musician" and "unsuccessful" have become tautological in our everyday speech; I heard this rationale on a nationally syndicated radio show just this morning, in a barely lighthearted way. The language surrounding our very mode of production have become quaint fallacies, ones that we reinforce by allowing people to talk about musical work as "entirely subjective," "mystical," and "unscientific." While this would be a hard enough problem if only the rest of the world thought this, but a great deal of musicians do as well, and don't protest in the least when their work is framed this way.<br />
<br />
Starting with musicians, then, we need to progress in our thinking about what we produce (something that some of our sub-disciplines have already excelled at). It is not enough to simply allow predominating ideology dictate to us that we are unsuccessful, and this begins with understanding that this is a problem. We need to refocus our discipline in terms of what our work's relationship with the world is. We should be seen as the leading critics of a broken world, putting good experiences into the world for the purpose of sharing with others, developing the individual musician, and bringing the astonishingly developed sphere of musical work to its rightful place in the world. This begins with pedagogy, and it ends in action, action that shows the world how valuable the knowledge contained and illuminated by musical thought is.<br />
<br />
Valuation of our own work, as musicians, is the key to unlocking the possibility of bringing the world to our art, and having a place in reality for the performance of it. The loss of aesthetic discourse has occurred over the past century, and is due to the last viable aesthetic discourses that were possible. The end of the German romantic/expressionist aesthetic, and the shambles in which is was left by Arnold Schoenberg, exposed the fallacies and contradictions in the valuations of music for the century before it: great men make great art, and that art is so great that one can simply intuit its greatness. It was an era of the unqualified judgement of greatness; the work of musicians in this tradition were tasked with reproduction, e.g. "Beethoven was a great composer, now let me prove how," either by playing his works or reproducing his style in their own compositions. While musical development did not cease in composition, they were not criticisms of Beethoven, but developments and amplifications of individual features to support the overall myth. The loss of discourse came from the challenges regarding who the rightful heir to the tradition was, and the accompanying move toward objectively proving who it was (as in Schoenberg's textual discourse with Heinrich Schenker, and Schoenberg's musical discourse with Stravinsky). Already, objectivity began to arise as the currency through which music could be legitimized, because it, for some reason, had already lost its legitimacy. It has clearly not been reclaimed through the twentieth century.<br />
<br />
Since then, it has been widely adopted that valuation is itself an elitist's domain, and this is somewhat true, but works in both directions. Undeserving elitists do make arbitrary valuations to justify their already ill-gotten capital. In the same way, as long as valuation is only associated with an <i>ex post facto </i>justification of how this mysterious symbolic capital is meaningful, we can no longer form aesthetic claims without appearing to be vying for that symbolic capital. This attitude moves toward the ultimate relativism, an underdeveloped intellect and ethic, and those who espouse it attempt to keep themselves free of the judgement of those who would unmask them as charlatans.<br />
<br />
Aesthetics, however, matter in the real world, and often have social implications tied to them. The lack of an aesthetic discourse amounts to Jacques Derrida's conception of <i>hauntology</i>, and the absence of aesthetic discourse in the modern world should point to the necessity for the discourse of aesthetics. Without an aesthetic discourse, music is trapped in the relativistic stage of the psychologist William G. Perry's stages of intellectual and ethical development; with no authority, all work must be equally valued, and hence, there is no "bad art." With this as one of the predominating conceptions of musicians, there is no wonder how good music has such a hard time coming into existence: it is inconceivable that such a thing even is possible in a relativistic world. A further development of the collective psychology of musicians is a necessity in bringing aesthetic value back to the discussion. This would be done by further individualizing the process of music making to allow it to commingle with individual freedoms, and providing the tools to reach the end of relativism: commitment. Commitment, Perry's final stage of development, is the recognition of the relativist world as many options for engaging with a single construct, while being ethically attached to good work and bringing it into the real and social world, by exercising the real freedom of doing something to change the social world for the better, and seeing it through for better or worse. Grouping people together into self-perpetuating institutions and allowing the institution to dictate the work of the individuals (while stifling their ability to critically engage with their own work) will consistently create an ivory tower in which work does not need to do good in the world.<br />
<br />
The necessity for self-judgement in the praxis of musical work is necessary in transitioning to widespread commitment. For instance, the social good that is often done by musico-cultural institutions is to inspire people to become musicians in the first place. But, in reality, it does little more than inspire people to want to participate in the perpetuation of the institution itself. Rarely does this experience seem to amount to wanting to improve the situation of the institution, its standing in the world, or to translate that work into something that would be more actively able to change the social situations surrounding it. Institutions inspire individuals to conform to them, not to transcend them; in the same way, the world of competition inspires people to successfully compete, not to eradicate the system of competition. Commitment, on the other hand, tends to make inspiration into an ethic that spreads inspiration without locking the aims of the next generation into what their inspiration should mean exactly.<br />
<br />
Were individuals to understand these mechanisms better, it would be a step toward enacting individual musical development as part of a necessity for a better (at least, less broken) world. Teaching musicians how to value, and how to devalue, needs to be at the forefront of the legitimization of musical work, as it would advance their ability to correct inequitable and unjust conditions by their particular good works (even simply making music); teaching non-musicians how to value and devalue would help correct the same situations by supporting good work for the sake of good work, and admonishing bad work.<br />
<br />
Secretly, as far as "trained" musicians are concerned, this less-broken world already exists in musical subcultures who are based on individualistic freedoms and social performance of those freedoms. Musicians are in clubs and basements everywhere, making music that is important to them because of their knowledge and attachment to socio-musical constructs (like genres and scenes). Their commitment is to freedom in musical construction and development in itself, not the sameness and reproduction of an institution's abstract relationships. They are making music to share an experience with people, not to fulfill an end toward perpetuation of an institution. They experience risk on a personal basis, not as a collective risk that can end with "dignity and grace" as Ian Campbell said of his operatic institution.<br />
<br />
The first step to be taken by musicians everywhere is to stop supporting the museums of music for the sake of doing so. They are not the site of music in the real world, they are apart from it, sheltered by the language of cultural authority instead of the action of musical development, both technical and social. Further, supporting artists who can be valued for their personal investment and personal development of style and musical function must become the norm, instead of suffering through worn out, abstract musical tropes; as a friend of my recently said to me "if I payed twenty dollars for a ticket and met the twenty dollar drink minimum, don't play a ballad that I could hear a better recording of on the freeway on the way to work." Our valuation of musical work as it exists in the real and social world needs refinement as a whole, and a reconsideration of the value particular music in particular settings needs to transpire. This will only happen at the individual level resulting in a wider change; we cannot expect the world to change tomorrow, especially not if we continually look toward the models of the past to save us.<br />
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Save for these changes, there's nothing stopping anyone from replacing the institutions as they duly fail, except, seemingly, recognition of the truth in the criticisms that the world levels at such institutions by not supporting them. It should be a sign that people need to change, that we need to individually and collectively make better decisions about how to organize our world and show support and value. Better yet, it should show that individuals who have the initiative to bring good work to the world should be more comfortable with letting reality have its bias against them, and do good work as an affront to our broken systems, not an appeasement to it. Nothing is stopping you or anyone else from starting small collectives and co-ops of people who want to do good work without relenting to the world of competition and being bestowed its greatest prizes: mindless self-perpetuation, conformity, and developmental stasis.derek.k.jeppsenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04666636081163461931noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1657024236671077114.post-73688136735377404422013-11-20T16:55:00.000-08:002013-12-01T21:22:10.566-08:00On the Dismissal of MusicIt is simply not true that I need music every day. This is despite the fact that I have self-identified my place in the world of specialized labor as <i>mostly</i> associated with music, and have devoted a great deal of my psychic energy to it. In addition to my musical needs, because of my self-identification as mostly concerned with music, I have plenty of concerns about how to live, and how to continue to place myself in the world and keep my life. Of course, that isn't simple... I feel like I had a four month stretch where I conclusively disproved Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs with actions such as celebrating my ability to eat in between academic obligations by actually eating, sleeping on the floor of my office, building very little dependence on others, etc. In this period, private music listening time, my second or third most important musical activity, came to a near standstill (my first, composing electronic music, did come to a total standstill). The only time that I was really able to appropriate for music listening was semi-private, when I was overseeing a computer lab with few visitors, and this shaped my listening habits. In this environment I had to choose music that wouldn't interfere with anyone working in the lab, that is, something that wasn't overtly vulgar or aggressive, and something that I thought was worth hearing. If someone overhearing from the hallway were to engage, as I so often fantasize and only occasionally happens, I would be on point to offer an explanation as to what they were hearing, and why it should be valued, or, at least, not dismissed. I, at the lowest point being able to define my musical self, needed to be ready to defend the last thread of that identity. This situation illuminated for me a way that personal musical understanding spirals outward into a greater social context.<br />
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The two things that garnered the most attention from passersby and captive audiences were Brian Ferneyhough's opera <i>Shadowtime </i>and Burial's self-titled album. Each of these, of course, grabs different people for different reasons. Burial is a mystery to people who are both in and out of the Electronic Dance Music community; the album is brilliant in its understated, brooding moodiness and rhythmic peculiarities, unfolding a unique continuum of melancholy and implied human motion. Since it mostly describes a small range of emotional possibility, is fairly consistent in its construction, and appeals to bodily movement, it is not impossible to understand immediately, although it carries with it a plethora of details that rejuvenate its intrigue on subsequent listenings.<br />
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Ferneyhough's music, on the other hand, needed to be defended to a veteran jazz educator as "not that bullshit that you think it is." Even the most cursory survey of his work confronts the listener with difficulties in deciphering methodology (or worse, appears to be method that presents itself as something that it isn't), and inside of that style and method, determining the authenticity of the composition in place where people continue to put difficulty of performance and composer intent into a duality or continuum, where they would more easily work as independent variables. Since the professor was self-selecting that he would hear music for a moment, stopping to engage in a short chat about the compositional authority of "elite" academic composition and (to his thinking) its facades and internal vapidity, it is likely that there was little offense taken upon hearing the music. Our quick little exchange was moderate in nature, speaking in the particulars of <i>Shadowtime</i> versus the generalities of historical and contemporary compositional practices. I had to identify myself as someone who knew a bit about the historical situation of this music and offer particulars about that situation as a way of assuring that dismissal of this music was not going to look graceful or grant authority, because authority, in this conversation, relied with not hearing the music, but with knowing it beyond just its aural configuration. The music clearly affected me in my self, somewhere, and drove me to know it better. Besides, saying that "this music sounds stupid" is simply less charming than, for example, hypothesizing what Walter Benjamin may have thought of this work that attempts to depict him. My guess is that <a href="http://www.militantesthetix.co.uk/actions/antishaim/antishad.htm">these people</a> have it wrong.<br />
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This simple example of musical choice and relationship of listeners is one that I (and each of us) live with day in and day out, and constitutes the struggle of politics in music. Aligning one's self with a particular movement, particular artist, particular curator, particular <i>ideology</i> <i>of music</i>, is what's at stake in our habits, what happens as the <i>real</i> of music, and makes us into a being-in-music. While phenomenological accounts of being-in-music tend toward performativity (see Jeff Todd Titon's "Knowing Fieldwork" in <i>Shadows in the Field</i> and Thomas Turino's <i>Music as Social Life: the Politics of Participation</i>) there is clearly a being-in-music that has more to do with (Pierre Bourdieu's conception of) cultural capital and has less to do with the creation of music than it does the consumption. All of us participate in music consumption, DJs and critics do it professionally. It is a simple observation that it takes a personality, that is, a subjectivity to engage with music on an aesthetic level. If nothing else, our engagement of music on the personal level needs to be in (or work towards being in) totality with our self, something that shows and elucidates our self and how we engage in the world. In the professional contexts, this is building of a brand, for the DJ with their aesthetic preferences and ability to know their audience, for the critic with their prowess of analysis and the web of relevance that they tie their analysis to. Outside of the professional sphere, in this process music consumption is initially a social act, an exchange of musical work, which then needs to be processed in self-identification, or at the very least recognition of some content and applying the known world of the individual to that musical content, expressed by that self-identification.<br />
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The Current Musical Cultural Institution<br />
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By observing this process continually, I understand that music offers different things to different people, despite, in my experience, being able to map this onto class and social capital, and more specifically, with the lower classes and those with less social capital having better relationships with their musical choices. I see this process in the terms of a social institution that shapes musical interactions and ideologies based on our economic and material situation, a symbiosis between our education and conditions that tell us how music is to be used. Max Horkheimer suggested that social institutions are the form of social exchange that continuously and repetitiously present the ideology of our material relationships, and the authority (or power to which we can defer action) which shows us a more or less effective way to operate in our society; essentially, this process shapes the <i>realm of necessity </i>into the ruling ideology's ideals. We can see this invisible cultural institution as a disorganized mass of authority that mimics the haphazard organization of our "economy." There are, within this cultural institution that governs and dictates how we interact with music as individuals, a number of forms of engagement, in which we can use our "freedom" to choose which music we engage with and which we do not. It is also important to note (although it will not be thoroughly discussed here) that this governing authority of music consumption is itself the generative system for music as well.<br />
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Before looking at the implications of this system for the individual, let us scrutinize this overarching institution on this scale. The musical marketplace exists, as does each marketplace, as a collection of harshly random transactions beyond us. The fact is that the entirety of the music word is based on these transactions that touch on every social aspect of life: production, education, scientific inquiry, socialization, and every other element of social life. Whole musical genres are built, currently, around particular manufactured pieces of equipment (violins or Roland's TB-303) in the same way they are around particular musical techniques (singer/songwriters or serialism) and in the same way they can be linked to particular spaces in the world (rock and roll, Sundanese jaipongan, or the scene at your local bar). Each of these types of music commingle with every cultural situation they live in, born of ideals or traditions and modified by their consumers or participants based on the reality in which they exist. This dialectic is played out in an ambiguous cognitive dialog: great synthesis of musical/cultural knowledge exist in the same form that great travesties of musical misappropriation do. The transactions of the former are, in my view, made of understanding ideals of the constituent musics, and the latter, of ignorance. The exchanges do happen regardless, and their validity is based solely on the authority we ascribe to these exchanges; they are a reflection of our current situation, not inherently generalized or fully understandable at any given time.<br />
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On one hand, if music can reside inside of this exchange between its ideal form and realized form, it still says very little of the system that allows us to judge it, because, on the other hand, a great ability of this exchange is to make it look as though we are free to make that judgment for ourselves and put to work our own form of musical reason. Sadly, based on how we produce music and how we consume it, this is merely an illusion. We have no freedom, as consumers of music, to choose something that isn't economically viable, unless the music itself was made out of that freedom in the first place (the freedom from necessity). It is simply improbable, because of the abstract communication that happens in musical work, that we could decipher the actualities of its creation. Because the relationships that we make with mass-produced music are actually relationships with the organizations that create it, we have an impersonal relationship with it, not detailed but conglomerated. Even more, the way that we have musical relationships makes it so that musical elements, for the average listener, appear as (I assume) blurry constructions that can only exist as qualitative features. The average listener, I think it is fair to say, has little ability to parse out instruments, conceive of the music as carefully constructed, and instead lay great importance on the text of the lyrics because the ease at which they are engaged. None of these generalizations are scientific, but they are what I can see from asking people about musical their own engagement with music.<br />
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I recently asked someone with no musical training about a particularly nefarious song that is currently high on the Billboard charts. I was wondering why someone would want to listen to four minutes of two pop superstars complaining about being famous, exemplified by an allusion it contains, which purports that choosing a life of fame is on par with committing suicide. The answer I received was about the metric/tempo component of the song, when rhythmic density increases during the verses (my informant had not engaged at all with the lyrics of the song). The metric/tempo construction of the song is the most common construction in music today: backbeat at ~60 BPM. Since the significance of this derivative and homogeneous construction is lost on many listeners, they may simply not understand that there was very little thought or care put into the construction of the elements that they most identify with. What I think is happening in my informant's analysis is described by Walter Benjamin, in <i>Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction</i>, as the distracted masses ability absorb art, but only as entertainment and not as critic. It is unclear, in this case, how much education would defeat this fogginess, since the problem of the lyrics and message would still exist. (Hopefully this dismissal is substantive enough to show that I am not merely dismissing this music out of elitist compulsion).<br />
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The lack of understanding musical elements works for the cultural institution of music as a mystification process, that is, what happens in the backstage of music, as Erving Goffman would put it. Since there is vagueness, something that the audience is not privy to about how music is created, and since they are unable to completely reverse engineer musical constructions, we are not able to immediately figure how much authority to afford the musician. Of course, the back area is built just as much of the author's understanding of what they are doing, their real connections to the productive forces of music, their historical situations, their understanding of their consumers, and even, their ignorance of the world they live in and the world we share with them when we come into dialogic consumption of their product. Further, this back area is what affords creators to re-conceptualize and present their work in whatever way they please, with whatever degree of honesty they wish, but also in a sphere which lies not necessarily under the scrutiny of a scholar or in a place where further justification for actions are necessary. The ability for artists to employ a backstage of consciousness is a simple way to reinstate the Romantic myth of genius, the occulted creative process, the disregard for the need to fit their work into the world at large, or worse, to seek to not change the conditions in which music is made and distributed for the better, but to tacitly and uncritically continue within failing or unsatisfying modes of production.<br />
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Where we lack freedom, then, arises from this back area. Here is music, built of conditions that are not expressly communicated by its medium, although this is on a continuum itself. Mystification and occult motivation serve both as the creation of the listener's interpretive function and as the creation of authority to subvert the listener, allowing one the ability to submit to hidden authority in ways both musical/ideological and economic/material. This authority can be seen as docile or nefarious, relevant or not, on an individual basis, but only because of the lack of freedom to choose music to self-identify with. The freedom that we <i>do</i> have is to not be forced to engage with music on someone else's terms. This, however, does not guarantee the fact that we will have music to engage with on our own terms. As long as music needs to be created inside of fortuitous (enough) economic circumstances, we run the risk of having music only created in a system that is intent on forcing us to process whatever ideology that the industry wants us to.<br />
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(Here, I must point out, that nothing that I've said so far about the macro-structure of music as part of the bourgeois culture industry has not or could not have been said by Theodor Adorno, besides my thinly veiled dismissal of Jay-Z.)<br />
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Of course, there are plenty of independent musicians in the world, and plenty of alternative sources of music for us to consume. There would be, in a more just world, a far wider variety of people making music, and a far greater amount of musical diversity and progressive thought in musical elements and construction, were musicians (and everyone) more able to follow their intuitions toward freedom of expression, instead of attempting to homogenize to whatever the industrial standard currently is. Again, there is plenty of music created independent of the capitalist musical mode of production, but there are two reasons why this is not good enough.<br />
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First, the lack of support for independent musicians means the lack of distribution, and requires personal research to even know that it exists in order to consume it. The devaluation of work is a simple result for the independent musician: the world of listeners is not able to spend a proper amount of time finding music that really suits them for expressing their identity, opening worlds unknown, and creating healthy discursive relationships between listeners and artists. There are, as ever, great musicians doing phenomenal work that lack the economic and cultural support, cyclically stopping them from making their music, doing more work, because they are not already successful. For these artists, the <i>realm of necessity</i> gets in the way of their expression, making them lose their footing in the <i>realm of freedom</i> in which real musical work is done.<br />
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Second, the success of something which comes from the mass-produced musical world is based on a system that does nothing but uphold its own status quo, and purveys a strong message of bourgeois ideology. Since these songs are far more accessible (and by that, I mean, are shoved in the face of the average American), they are more likely to help formulate ideas in a wide portion of the public. As with my example above, with no understanding of the technicality of music, with no ability to identify what is even pleasurable about music, and with no critical engagement involved in the self-identification process of consuming music, the world of listeners stands to accept, uncritically, messaging and ideology simply because they do not see the harm in it. Just as Horkheimer believes that the structure of the bourgeois family is more important in training a child to submit to authority, so does the structure of bourgeois music creation and distribution condition the listener to submit to cultural authority. Tacitly, the reproduction of this system simply happens through the same method: as long as we think we are free to choose the music we self-identify with, we will have plenty of music to submit to. Or will we?<br />
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These two perils of the musical cultural institution highlight a disastrous question: is there actually any <i>realm of freedom </i>to be found in musical consumption that is analogous to the <i>realm of freedom </i>that arises in musical creation? Despite the enticing nature of this question, it is immense and must be addressed at later date. What we do know is that musical self-identification can happen for a number of reasons, but self-acknowledgement of what an individual attaches themselves to is the crucial element of understanding music and creating musical meaning. Blind submission to musical commodities, in other words, is not actually expressive of the listener's character, besides the lack of character that it shows.<br />
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Much like the authority that operates on the large scale as a distribution system for commodities backed with authority, interpersonal exchange of musical thought has a micro-economy of personal authority that works separated from the large-scale structure. Personal exchange (that is, exchanges that we are directly or closely related to) shape our view of music, act as curation, and make a small scale distribution channel with attached personal values. This could be in the form of a trusted critical source, a more or less personal exchange of aesthetic information in varying degrees of formality. It could be a neighbor, friend, relative, stranger with a blog, etc. Inside of these discourses, level of technical knowledge of music, personal preference and self-identification with particular modes of music making, and the totality of basic interpersonal dialogic concerns (trust, manipulation, style of dialog, any other determinant of the two parties' relationships) become a part of the musical discourse. This means that, on this small-scale, the psychological-social element is key to the musical dialog, not only between artist and listener, but between any intercourse of musical knowledge.<br />
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What this means for us is that musical engagement becomes both the outlet for and a cause of musical self-identification. If it has been unclear to this point, this musical self-identification can be seen as musical preference at any level, that is, what you like to listen to, what music concerns you, or what music instills passion in you. The level of self-identification resides on a continuum (or possibly, depending on personal preferences, on a Mobius strip of metanarratives and quality inversions, such as dadaist art or appreciation for failure), which more or less represents a level on which the music is enjoyable, i.e. whether the music performs its work for a given individual. This gives us a wide range of individual musical engagement, supported by dialog and availability, knowledge of music's existence, and the limits of the discourse that proves that any of these things exist in a given situation. In the ideal musical dialog, that is, the fully functional one, the two participants in the conversation will have a shared language or, at least, the ability to form one in the course of the dialog and with this common parlance of aesthetic and historical meaning are able to create meaning through exchange and relations. The free dialog on equal footing would result in knowing the <i>real</i> tastes of a person, the <i>real </i>course of their musical thought, and would allow each party to form a relationship that is meaningful because of it. This differs from a conversation without that freedom, or one where authoritative jockeying and power imbalances are formed. Further, this mode of dialog can exist as an actual exchange of music (group listening and conversation, in real time or not). These two types of exchange (free exchange and unfree exchange), again, can vary to whatever degree the situation calls for. But knowing someone for their <i>real </i>tastes and self-identification, and any other personal knowledge that attaches itself to the discourse, may not necessarily mean to know the person holistically. This, of course, would depend on the level to which the participants are able to critically identify their choices. These choices probably cannot, because of the <i>différance </i>that exists in linearly time-progressive signals like music and language (even in repeated listenings, music is not consistent), be fully communicated, and because it would take the expression of the totality of our consciousness to create an identical listening of a musical work for our dialogic partner(s). Despite the incomplete nature of these conversations, or side-by-side occurrence of both the intuitive and rational in their substance, outcomes for the engagement in this dialog still fall into a number of possible categories or forms.<br />
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Of these resultant forms of engagement, I find the most difficult to be, first, the tacit acceptance of music (of which I spoke briefly above), and second, the dismissal of music.<br />
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Dismissal of Musical Work<br />
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It takes virtually nothing to dismiss music. "Too aggressive," "too docile," "too sad," "not sad enough," "too happy," "too much improvisation," "too much control," "too eccentric," "too formulaic," etc. are so readily available in the vocabularies of any listener. Even more concerning is the "I respect it, I just don't like it" response, which doesn't carry a dichotomy, an excess or lack, success or failure, but a marked inability to describe the listener's own internal engagement with music. I must point out that this last answer can always be modified to clarify that critical engagement exists, by evoking what there is of interest in the musical work, and how it doesn't surmount its shortcomings, i.e. "that part/aspect is interesting, but doesn't redeem the whole work because of these shortcomings or even, ''this is bad music because...''<br />
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So much personal authority is able to come, as a consumer of musical work, by dismissing a mode of music making, that is, wholesale dismissal of music at some generalized level. This could manifest as "hip-hop isn't even music," or "[some country] has no worthwhile music," or "serialist technique is not music, it is math." It is, at its core, our own sensibility, our own place in the music-world, that can determine how musical work being done is utterly useless to us as listener, and something that, hence, is useless as music, and even extends this judgment to others by casting their musical taste as useless or misguided. It is important to keep in mind that this works fluidly in discourse, and takes the constant appraisal of the dialog and its dynamics to work. This, nonetheless is conversation, and requires the totality of the relationship. If non-musical power structures exist in the dialog, they are easily transposed into musical authority.<br />
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However, we can also see authority applied from the personal sphere to the production process, and there are a number of ways that music can be dismissed in this way. The excessives mentioned above illustrate this. If we hear something that is not congruent with our conception of music, identification processes in music, ethics of music, or aesthetics of music (which must be based on our own experiences, expectations, and conceived functions of music) then we can just dismiss it as not counting as musical work. This illuminates the fact that we are able to dismiss the work of people who create things that lie outside of our frame of reference, our understanding of music. If, as we can now say, there is a fundamental flaw in the construction of the music, a faulty impetus, a foreign agent proposed for our consumption, then we can, because of its coherent nature as a musical gestalt (comprising of its history, musical elements, lyrical content, method of distribution) treat it with wholesale dismissal as music. As it has undergone creation and still, ultimately, strikes no accord with us, we may dismiss it as a letter put in the wrong mailbox, conceding that not only would we have no understanding of the context behind why it was sent, but we cannot use it for our own gain; it is entirely foreign to us, despite its own existence as music to be experienced. Music is a discrete object in the form a performance, recording, or concept, presents itself as particular, not a generalization. If the wrongly delivered envelope is filled with a generalized currency (money), then we could certainly appropriate it for ourselves, but this relies on our own personal credos, or better, our rationalizations thereof. In fact, we may even feel resentment that it does exist as a sign of the way our society is mishandling its productive forces and personally subjecting us to mistreatment through malfeasance by delivering us the wrong goods.<br />
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We have a tendency to treat all interactions in the same way that our mode of production treats interactions: in this generalized way. By treating all music as it is a generalized product, as though it has the same use, and is valuable in a homogeneous, generalized way, we ignore all relational value, context, and understanding of music as freely produced music. Our dealings with generalized currency throughout our lives promote this viewpoint and defeat the social aspect of purpose in the same way generalized currency defeats our relationships by obfuscating them. Clearly, if we are delivered something that is not generalizable, but needs particular understanding and intention, it may or may not be for us, may not be fortuitous for us to receive it, and may not have use-value for us. Because of this, we have a dualism that is reinforced on the consumption side, immediately defeating intention. It is our standard mode of operation to generalize success as qualitative judgment ("how else would we know that music is good beside the fact that people like it?"), simply because the industrial concern is so intoxicated with this aspect of commercial appeal. Retrospectively, we can view commercially successful music as basic, that is, fulfilling the most needs for the most people, the most generalizable musical content possible. Real use-value of music is not in antithesis of this generalizable value; real use-value and generalizable (marketable) value of music are separate functions, and musical work can be both musically valid and economically valuable in uncorrelated ways.<br />
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The dismissive listener's judgment is that ultimate credibility lies within our self as if we are authoritative as to what music can and cannot do for people, what music can and cannot exist in the world, or with certain elements of musical validity and economic viability added as elements of the suspect musical experience. We rely on our judgment because we are, in fact, individuals with different experiences, different products of both nature and nurture, and because we can only see the world that is constructed by these inherent determinants of our consciousness. A thorough understanding, then, of musical creation, is a dire prospect that can rarely emerge. The unending scrutiny of Common Practice Period music still unfolds new conceptions of pieces composed hundreds of years ago, simply because this fact exists. Since no living person has experienced any of this music in its original context means that even playing it comes with a great responsibility of criticism. This is not to say that formalist/structuralist theoretical analysis is going to necessarily uncover any "correct" performance technique, but at the very least, I think, a performer should understand music at a level where they can articulate a good reason for its performance (either in formal language or in musical language). As much as I would like to dismiss much of the music of this era as lacking current relevance, that's simply not true in every cultural circumstance, and far too broad a generalization anyway.<br />
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In contemporary music, this question of the authoritative listener falls again to the question of the front presentational space and the back creational space. Cognitive spaces for both conception and performance are separate spaces with ambiguous limits and have a lack of necessity for explication. The back area of cognition is virtually inaccessible to those who are not individuals who create music, and dismissal of the work that exists there is always done without a full knowledge of the process (again, it would take the transmission of the creator's total consciousness to meet this requirement). The world of the composer, in other words, is the initial world of the work, inaccessible <i>in toto</i> in the way the human mind is inaccessible and unwilling to easily give of its secrets and motives since these are possibly not even important to the composer. To know musical work in its totality is to know it in each way it is knowable, including the situation of the composer. History, however, is always incomplete and perpetually tenuous and liminal, useful only in as much as we can make it so to reform our own human works and build understanding of the world around us. This, again, is manifest as the cognitive <i>back area</i>, remaining mystified as long as the conditions are left uncovered. Our incomplete knowledge of all transmitted signals (because of the impossibility of intention) inherently makes listeners into interpreters. In perfect signals, knowing is exacted and called "copying," something that we can easily see is not the reality of the listening process because it would homogenize results. Those who purport full understanding of a musical signal are likely giving themselves a status of copyist, not analyst, en route to referring to themselves as extender, the role of the heroic trailblazer inside of their uncritical knowledge and ultimately the perpetuation of their own slavery to other work deemed heroic and beyond reproach.<br />
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Wholesale dismissal, then, becomes problematic because of the interpretive quality of music (or language, or transmission of any kind when the sender is not the receiver in ideal conditions, hence, where there is no distortion possible). The dismissal of music can also appear in variously severe ways, three of which I will identify (there are likely more). The first is this wholesale dismissal of music as "not music," the second, dismissal of the production and distribution systems of music, and third, the dismissal as not applicable to one's individual self. Each of these happens in musical dialog, in part, because of imbalances of perceived musical or personal discursive strength, and each can serve to torment or enlighten others. Dismissal can then proceed as these different functions, a process of gaining or rebuking authority, and creates a space, if the participants are articulate enough of criticism or vapid enough to illuminate ignorance, for the sharing of musical and aesthetic information.<br />
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The first and strongest type, wholesale dismissal, serves to undermine every step of the production/distribution/listening continuum, judging the work put into the music as not musical work. In this way, the people who made it were wrong in the first place, and don't understand how music is supposed to function in whichever context it is being judged. This means that the labor that made the music, the experiences leading to it, the confidence of the industrial support of the music makers, and anyone who would find it appealing as musical work are on the wrong side of the judgment of the critic.<br />
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In Western "classical" music, this is commonly applied to two opposite poles of music making, that which lacks organization, and that which employs total organization. What's interesting about these two extremes getting the same treatment for opposite methods is that the person dismissing these two types of music usually employs the same tactic: claiming insider authority to say that they know every element of the music, usually through experience or assumptions. In the case of music which lacks organization, it is often stated as "anyone could do this." Indeterminate music commonly suffers this charge, since, literally anyone could make it if only they had the tools, understanding of the stylistic goals, the desire to make it, financial support, and an audience to do it for. Highly organized music tends to undergo the same scrutiny, with someone dismissing it because all you need to make it is an understanding of the organizational methods, the aesthetic aims of the end result, the desire to make it, financial support, and a receptive audience.<br />
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Educated musicians tend to think that the point of music is the process of creating it, how you become novel and distinguished as a composer, or what performative challenges you can present (these things, of course, must remain a form of mystification for the audience to create interest). This generalization all too often lacks exactly what this list lacks: the aesthetic understanding and contextual history needed to frame musical work in its environment and establish meaning. Again, music presents itself as particular, meaning it has relationships to other materials and ideas, and <i>cannot</i>,<i> </i>in my view, remain autonomous, although its aesthetic qualities can certainly work toward autonomy. Were it entirely autonomous, it would cease to have a use-value, because it would have no ability to create aesthetic engagement with the intellectual work of the listener (which, if I follow that logic, would make it invisible music). It is a fundamental flaw to think that musical work happens in a total vacuum, no matter how detached it can ultimately appear. What is more important to recognize here is that it can be autonomous of any individual material or idea in existence, but not all of them.<br />
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Of course, this same wholesale dismissal can be employed against popular music, rejecting the entire process of conception, composition, performance, or distribution processes of the popular music industrial mechanism. As a commercial product from the start, all it takes to give life to pop music is an understanding of mass appeal (individual taste on a generalized scale), the capital to enlist experts in the know and performers that can execute these idioms, organization of all of the laborers, and an understanding of the distribution system for that particular genre. Clearly work is being done here. Its aesthetic component, however, is transposed into appeal, changing the nature of its work from the realm of intellectual use into one of exchange. Theodor Adorno's conception of this is as the creation of an already fetishized product, that is, the making of an exchange value masquerading as a cultural fetish. This, of course, has a few logical consequences for bourgeois culture, its renewal, and its proliferation. The narrative here was spoken of earlier, but in ways that addresses this as a structure, although content itself is still important (if only less important than that structure).<br />
<br />
The reason why both structure and content of the cultural institution of music both matter is that aesthetics can be employed as subset of appeal. These divergent terms already form a possible complementary function, where the former is about active perception of a beautiful object (originally from the Greek <i>aisthesthai</i>, beauty is added to its sense in 18th century German) and the latter relates to the passive objective conveyance of an idea (from the Latin <i>appellare</i>). Despite being created out of a sense of mass appeal, a musical object can still carry beauty with it, but does not necessarily. Because of this, the wholesale dismissal of commercial music is not necessarily a rejection to be made out of aesthetic vapidness, but it does still present itself as problematic along the lines of the <i>realistic </i>versus the <i>ideal</i> spheres. Ideally, conflations of intellectual work and exchange value wouldn't exist in music that comes out of the <i>realm of freedom </i>(reflexively stated, the place where idealism is put into action), but with the global domination of the capitalist mode of production, the two realms form a dialectic with one another, despite any idealistic formation. The wholesale dismissal of either entirely aesthetic or commercial music then creates itself into a dismissal of some mixture of both, precluding an absolutist conception or ethic based on participation in either mode of production.<br />
<br />
Adorno's rejection of any and all commercial music existed in a time where there were alternatives. First, bourgeois musical culture had found itself as a function of the "greater good," one that could escape the realm of economic ruin through the subscriptions and philanthropies of industrial giants who could affix their name to bourgeois educational music, symphonic music that tacitly endorses itself as the "logical" greatest achievement of artistic expression (see Lawrence Levine's <i>Highbrow/Lowbrow</i>). Second, driven musicians of the so-called "New Objectivity" who tried to make music into a vehicle for social upheaval, like Kurt Weill, created works that subverted this type of pageantry in their own settings, but did not have industrialists bankrolling their performance, which detracted (and detracts) from their accessibility. The world that we exist in barely has reminiscences of either movement, having been fully conquered by the <i>realm of necessity</i>. What we currently have for a social situation of music is a pervasive necessity, a <i>realm of freedom </i>entirely subjugated to the <i>realm of necessity</i>.<br />
<br />
There is very little music which can operate freely, but there is also no necessity that can entirely eliminate the possibility of freedom. Pop songs still do genuine musical work; nothing can eradicate, fully, the sense of true freedom from music, for two reasons. First, because of the mystification of the creation process, and the need for even minute variation in the most mundane of genres, musical work will exert free tendencies and ultimately land on real musically free production, intentionally or not. Second, there is no place left to find music produced entirely in the <i>realm of freedom </i>because of the necessities of distribution; even the works that exert the greatest amount of freedom are still in the <i>realm of necessity </i>when it comes to being able to consume them. For instance, distribution models immediately grant levels of engagement with levels of material support. No artist, no matter how noble, can continue their work without participating in capitalist distribution. Ideals against bourgeois ideology, at this point, are dormant fantasies, and create an opposition that manifests as the isolation of non-bourgeois ideology, as it has been so effective at isolating individuals who do not subscribe to it. Modes outside of bourgeois distribution models are currently impossible to imagine; fungibility of conformity moves outward from musical work in production and consumption. The artist who could escape necessity and make free music must conform to some standard of bourgeois success outside of their music.<br />
<br />
The listener will gravitate to any musical work that they self-identify with, regardless of its industrial character, because some music from the popular industrial system will have some valid work to offer as a token of self-identification, even if it exists in a milieu of aesthetic vapidity. Again, in the consumerist mode of appeal, aesthetics may not even be attached to musical work. The tokens of musical work that still exist in this system are still necessary for social engagement, especially as the <i>freedom </i>of music becomes rarer. Better yet, the systems of free musical work that did exist in the early twentieth century are not only (going) extinct, but have caused the separation of the uncritically minded from the ideas that would counter the ideological deluge that they exist in. Adorno's attacks on "light music" show a dismissal on grounds that were newly gained by the culture industry; today, these lines are not even drawn, because the culture industry is the only thing accessible to the average person and anything outside of it causes scrutiny and repudiation. Marking off these sectors of musical work as only supportive of bourgeois ideology is itself anti-dialectical over a window of time, as the discourse needs the involvement of new minds, i.e. it needs its own rejuvenation system counter to the ruling ideology. By dismissing commercially produced music entirely, we also inherit the side-effect of dismissing a way to generate discourse and create a force of criticism inside of bourgeois culture and begin to loosen its contradictions. Dismissal on grounds of industrial origin, then, cannot be followed as an ideology, simply because our reality no longer presents this option as viable.<br />
<br />
Personal sacrifice of something that can be beautiful or enriching because of the <i>realm of necessity </i>from which it comes seems like an untenable and distasteful position, but points out that any involvement in it constitutes supporting the regeneration of the bourgeois cultural institution. One would necessarily need to become a reactionary or stop participating in musical consumption by looking backward for music that cannot support the bourgeois ideology or abandon musical consumption altogether. Either way, these ideas would not possibly enter into the dialog of the overwhelming majority of consumers in the first place. Again, with the unjust state in which we find our world's order, pedagogic dialog is simply too important to warrant isolation from large swaths of the world's cultural formations, if only because this could create a lack of ability to connect with people who know not which <i>realm </i>they operate in or which "natural" parts of their life were forged by humans to create oppressive ideologies. Theorizing changes in the mode of production starting from musical-economics is severe enough that it warrants this simple reminder: the reordering of all facets of life to be more humane, just, and thoughtful would have effects that ultimately reshape this mechanism in a way that will present fewer contradictions and difficulties. It has not been determined that music can be a leading indicator of social change, even when presented as overtly political work.<br />
<br />
Any wholesale dismissal of music (at any level) should be suspect of not having critical engagement behind it, unless it reaches that level of critique that involves the entirety of our historical moment. My guess is that there is not a single musical work in existence that makes it worth going fully into that mode of protest, certainly not if it is commercially constructed. On the other hand, I really dislike what Jay-Z's <i>Holy Grail</i> means about our state of production and ideology formation. But as stated above, it was made with some actual work, however ineffective and offensively ill-conceived that work was. To blame the song for the problems of world-historical modes of production is a bit too far, and having critically engaged with it, my dismissal does not constitute wholesale dismissal, as I still grant that it is, indeed, music. Had I decided that it is not worthy of being called music, then it constitute wholesale dismissal, and our dialog would have taken a different tone entirely.<br />
<br />
Were I to say "this song is not even music," what would be aim, in dialog with you, the reader? I have offered some analysis that is, as a professor of mine likes to call it, "a gentlemanly shiv" to an entire industry, and am currently mounting an attack on individuals who are incapable of using their critical faculties to engage with music. By dragging down the productive process of music to the level of meaningless toil instead of critically engaging, I would be saying that I do not recognize the producers' having even done their jobs in creating music, and labeling them as failures. Clearly, this type of dismissal serves to show my conceptions of music as superior to whomever I dismiss. But the producers are not the only ones whom I am judging.<br />
<br />
My analysis of this song almost certainly varies from the mass reception of the song (or else it would not be on the radio). It is clearly being supported, however organically through the endorsement of the public or artificially through a marketing push (or, as I often dream, the tastemakers of the media industry completely misreading or misrepresenting the tastes of the public). If you, the reader, as a musical consumer, enjoy the song and self-identify it as in some way reflective of who you are or what you want, then you have, to some extent, also been dismissed by me. My conception and analysis of music, in my view, would be stronger than yours, at least in this case, and I will have exerted that strength. Of course, a rebuttal, real or imagined may form, but if I exert enough strength, and garner enough musical authority, there's a possibility that the conflict ends in your conceit, having more or less violently reformed your ideology. This could be for any conceivable reason in the course of our relationship, our dialog, our interaction.<br />
<br />
Further, it does not matter how substantive my dismissal and attack are, because my authority is only based on the appearance of strength, that is, the signs that I use in our dialog to say what I know. The only way I could have brought together a reasonable amount of strength is by criticism and/or knowing the subject, and enough context to sound strong. It is likely that the more detailed my understanding of the music appears, including its technical details (or empirical trivia), it will seem as though I have a greater understanding of the back-stage in which the music was forged. If that amounts to me claiming that there is no possible way that this comes into something called music, because the work that built it was amusical, then it is an artifact made of something else, an illogical conception, perhaps. But, the contradiction here within my wholesale dismissal is inversional: if I do have musical authority, I'd have to either be wildly over-dramatizing the failures in the process, or, I'd be claiming to have so much musical authority that I also have amusical authority (or illogical conception authority), authority that transcends what I claim to know and branches out into something that I only know the opposite of. I'd venture as far to say that it is highly unlikely that I am so specialized in musical knowledge that my musical knowledge automatically grants me authority in charlatanry, which is more likely not based on knowledge of music, but simply on wider critical abilities.<br />
<br />
It is even more interesting to look at this question with a non-musician leveling the charge of "that's not even music." The claim here is that even someone who does not have technical knowledge of what they are listening to can (although their labor specialization is in another field) identify musical work as charlatanry. This awkward construction is discursively impenetrable, proscribing critical engagement and probably relating more to the particulars of the discourse as much as an actual judgment of musical elements. Granted, there are people who dismiss whole genres of music based on an inability to endure certain sounds that are hallmarks of those genres (hip-hop and metal come to mind), and they cannot be asked to engage critically with the particular musical elements. Of course, sound is merely sound at some point, and the irritations caused by sounds are acculturated, meaning that their applicability as musical elements are simply part of the genre-complex the musical work is being done. Interestingly, the timbral and lyrical qualities are foremost in this difficulty, at least from my experience. Other sonic qualities seem to have little impact, or are, at least, haphazard.<br />
<br />
A common place for this discursive dismissal to take place is in the family, when a younger generation adopts seemingly radical music to self-identify with. The process of defining one's musical self depends on such a great deal of factors, and I cannot do much more than relay my own conception of my formation to help construct it and will not do so here. However, it's important to point out that the rebuke of musical choice at an early age creates a conflict with authority on the same level of any other drive for pleasure. Music can be particularly dismaying in this fashion, since a young person may not be able to understand why they identify with the music they do. The authority of the parent in dismissing music that appears radical to them is part of a complex of acculturating the submission to authority or defiance of it. Conflict over music can be, however thinly veiled, a conflict over identity, a conflict over choice and aspiration. The archetypal teenager who responds to a parent who disparages their musical identity by saying "you don't know me," is a trope that everyone knows, but we probably afford little thought to how real the sentiment is.<br />
<br />
Disparaging or dismissing the music that someone loves fractures their sense of identity, and marks off a part of them that cannot, through any means, be communicated to a particular person because they are unwilling to engage. Inside of a relationship (in any sense), it stops people from being able to express themselves and be known in whole, and the brute force of the assertion likely does not stay isolated as "you don't know a part of me," but creates conditions that are more like the violent suppression of individuality that we would expect from an authoritarian discourse. Spiraling outward from discourse, musical identification can affect the ways we see people, offer insight into their judgment, and builds a more holistic view of a person. If we are not offered social interaction with our musical self, we are being denied freedom to identify and share ourselves. This leads to a decrease in the ability to know each other, with our discourses lacking a conduit for certain ideas or beliefs that would be created by common identification. As we saw before, one member of the discourse can appear to have enough strength to overpower the other, whether it is a just authority or not; the same is true of commonality and sharing identification through musical means, as self-identification of music is probably one of the most individualized aspects of our culture, due to music's lack of formal communication and the upholding of musical mystery as personal freedom.<br />
<br />
As I mentioned above, wholesale dismissal is not the only form of dismissal that happens in musical discourse, and dismissal can happen in forms of partial acknowledgement, which tend to open the ability for sharing musical conceptions. They are not irreducibly vile in the same way that wholesale dismissal is, because they always allow for a certain amount of discourse. Of course, their ability to transpose into broken discourses always exists, but the exchange of musical knowledge is not tarnished by the fact that they can be reinterpreted as negative discourse. The fact that people can have a reasoned exchange of musical ideas matters, because it is the only thing that exists as retaliation against (bourgeois) musical ideologies, and only if done responsibly. What little work can be done in these discourses is important, offering people, possibly not in real-time conversation, contrasting views that allows them to access other interpretations, instead of meaninglessly nodding along to an ideology they do not understand.<br />
<br />
Discourse about musical work is, itself, musical work. There is no way to create music in an autonomous environment where social relations are invalid. Support for musical work is, undeniably, the only thing that keeps musical work possible. This is done by all listeners in their discourses, self-identification, and our material transactions that relate to music. To think that music is an isolated area where our conceptions are free to fall however they may, that we take what we are given and make the best of it, induces a lack of criticism that cannot sustain music in any reasonable way. If we cannot talk about music in an honest way, elucidating meanings and explaining histories personal and general, then we relent to ideology. The cards are stacked against us, because the culture industry is in full control and unrelenting. Interrupting that machine, in honest, small, interpersonal dialog is one of the few things that we have access to on a daily basis. Creating an environment where music functions with our lives, not as a hidden compartment within it to hide ourselves, constitutes real musical freedom, and freedom for us to pursue meanings that could not be found otherwise. Not understanding or being able to communicate our musical lives leads to musical isolation that looks the same as philosophical isolation, religious isolation, or physical isolation, because they are all ways of organizing our identity. Musical discourse, intimate or cursory, tells as much about us as any other self-identified feature, and the way we carry ourselves in the musical world is simply another facet of how we carry ourselves in general.derek.k.jeppsenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04666636081163461931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1657024236671077114.post-75324123640490425902013-11-13T21:27:00.003-08:002013-11-13T21:27:57.572-08:00On forgiveness:<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; white-space: pre-wrap;">
A friend asked me to write an introduction of my short poetry collection <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/forgiveness-instructions-formalizing-rational-love-ebook/dp/B00E0DKV8Y/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1384406705&sr=8-1&keywords=derek+k+jeppsen">Forgiveness: Instructions on Formalizing Rational Love</a> </i>with the method I used to write the poetry:</div>
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<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; white-space: pre-wrap;">
My will wasn't interested in your kinds of structures, so they haphazardly appeared, I stripped extra items out of their leaky homes, and built habitats that undermine their <i>habitus</i>. The vault opened a torrent inside words themselves, opening around charred and fixed stone and reading ancient emissions until the machine’s will replaced mine, and then I created its will. Birds fell from the sky and I reported it, contorted it. Whether whomever knows, it matters less than you would think. Neither punish every route nor ignore your own. Likely, these things were and I moved around what was known. Prior to knowing, one confused mention along the way to digression unfolded completely and here we are. The recipe was straight forward: the result is straightforward.</div>
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derek.k.jeppsenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04666636081163461931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1657024236671077114.post-47360477132815664672013-09-03T03:11:00.000-07:002013-09-03T03:11:32.624-07:00Absence and NothingnessMy hips are pressured and I found the most offensive pick-up line tonight. Intentionality be damned, this means something. Here are a few things that could go here (like I said and deleted):<br />
<br />
The list of Derek's productive in most unproductive way way summer, in list form:<br />
<br />
3 EPs as voidesque:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li><a href="http://voidesque.bandcamp.com/album/the-acid-test">http://voidesque.bandcamp.com/album/the-acid-test</a></li>
<li><a href="http://voidesque.bandcamp.com/album/the-water-test">http://voidesque.bandcamp.com/album/the-water-test</a></li>
<li><a href="http://voidesque.bandcamp.com/album/three-meditations-on-waiting">http://voidesque.bandcamp.com/album/three-meditations-on-waiting</a></li>
</ul>
(Only one of which tears my heart apart when I think of it.)<br />
<br />
<br />
Self-released a short collection of exceedingly difficult poetry:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.amazon.com/forgiveness-instructions-formalizing-rational-ebook/dp/B00E0DKV8Y/ref=sr_1_fkmr1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1378201623&sr=1-1-fkmr1&keywords=derek+kay+jeppsen">forgiveness - instructions on formalizing rational love</a></li>
</ul>
<br />
(Which tears my heart apart when I think of it.)<br />
<br />
<br />
Wrote the first half of my prospectus for my thesis (applications and consequences of the Turing Test in IDM):<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>Link withheld.</li>
</ul>
<br />
Wrote and released a Church of the Twelve Jesi album with David Harrison:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li><a href="http://thechurchofthetwelvejesi.bandcamp.com/">http://thechurchofthetwelvejesi.bandcamp.com/</a></li>
<li>also, releasing an excerpt of this on Soundcloud got me 200 plays in a single day</li>
</ul>
<br />
<br />
Wrote one proper house track as a result of building a relationship with mainstream EDM:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>Link only given to those who ask nicely.</li>
</ul>
<br /><br />
Submitted a track for an acid techno compilation that will be on Virtual Urban Records soon:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>Link doesn't exist yet.</li>
</ul>
<br /><br />
Learned to Photoshop for real:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>See bandcamp links above.</li>
</ul>
<br />
Wrote ~ an hour of algorithmic music, some of which is at:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li><a href="https://soundcloud.com/derek-k-jeppsen">https://soundcloud.com/derek-k-jeppsen</a></li>
<li>This will probably become an album soon.</li>
</ul>
<br />
<br />
Learned to make real-time animation with vvvv and pd:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Qzbc0YV-6c">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Qzbc0YV-6c</a></li>
</ul>
<div>
Gave a master-class on acoustics via the interwebs.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Learned how to use a Yamaha QX3.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Learned how to write scripts to poll dictionary files in Python.</div>
<br />
<br />
Found certain limits to human interaction.derek.k.jeppsenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04666636081163461931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1657024236671077114.post-12816472603318690602012-08-13T15:39:00.002-07:002012-08-13T15:40:56.698-07:00voidesque - moving walls and simpler things<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjx3kv5InEnaYDQmD9ozGWGrWFpmcMc4qW2LN8DOplSIm-UY7HF8I4X0SldRKy5Tl1vyAGFszmzm06y6JVDgh5Vat9arykvhiFBpDjm4EpGb2vv1Op0dmT-3VM8Em3uP93udC3vL_vxYq8/s1600/255228_512069552143348_335197379_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjx3kv5InEnaYDQmD9ozGWGrWFpmcMc4qW2LN8DOplSIm-UY7HF8I4X0SldRKy5Tl1vyAGFszmzm06y6JVDgh5Vat9arykvhiFBpDjm4EpGb2vv1Op0dmT-3VM8Em3uP93udC3vL_vxYq8/s200/255228_512069552143348_335197379_n.jpg" width="200" /></span></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">My new album (as voidesque) is out now on Bandcamp. It's called <i>moving walls and simpler things</i>, and is an exploration of many theoretical concepts that I am interested in pertaining to time organization and rhythm, with re-occurring timbres and textures (referenced by the title). You can also expect a little more melody, and little more harmonic movement, a little more complexity, and a few outbursts.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It can be listened to or bought and listened to at <a href="http://voidesque.bandcamp.com/">voidesque.bandcamp.com</a>.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Enjoy!</span><span id="goog_793370863"></span><span id="goog_793370864"></span>derek.k.jeppsenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04666636081163461931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1657024236671077114.post-57043459443065577022012-06-11T16:07:00.000-07:002012-07-09T14:33:37.660-07:00Squarepusher's Ufabulum - a style historical perspective<br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<a href="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61YiE3Wsn-L._SL500_AA300_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61YiE3Wsn-L._SL500_AA300_.jpg" /></a><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;">As
a pioneer of IDM (intelligent dance music), Tom Jenkinson, aka
Squarepusher, has been at the forefront of one of the most difficult
genres of music for more than a decade and a half. This genre, a
catch-all for “avant garde experimental” dance music, is most
notable for its objectionable name and its </span><i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;">stylization </i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;">of
dance, or use of dance materials in a non- or less-dance oriented
way. Some features of IDM are a tacit disregard for what is musically
important to genres around it, a focus on personal experimentation
and aesthetic goals, and a history that informs it only if one
applies a massive stretch of the imagination.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Squarepusher
is essentially reborn with the new album <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Ufabulum-Squarepusher/dp/B007OA0XGU/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1339455799&sr=8-1">Ufabulum</a></i>,
adding another complicated chapter to the history of IDM.
Paradoxically, <i>Ufabulum </i>ranks
as one Jenkinson's easiest albums to listen to, in terms of large
scale continuity and clearness of vision, but may be one of the
hardest to grapple with in terms of where it fits in IDM's history.
That is to say that Jenkinson has created something that, unlike most
IDM, reflects the current trends and feel of popular electronic music
but equally weighs that reflection with what he's been working on for
nearly two decades now. It seems that Jenkinson has found a
convincing way of making a Squarepusher album for this decade.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
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<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>“Classic”
Squarepusher and Current Trends:</b></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b><br /></b></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> All
of Jenkinson's albums can be defined as one of the following: an
“instrument album” (<i>Music Is Rotted One Note</i> (1998),
<i>Budakhan Mindphone </i>(1999), <i>Hello Everything</i> (2006)), as
a “programmed album” (<i>Burning'n Tree </i>(1997), <i>Big Loada</i>
(1998), <i>Go Plastic</i> (2001), <i>Ufabulum </i>(2012)) and albums
that have a fair balance of electronics and instruments (<i>Feed Me
Weird Things </i>(1996), <i>Selection Sixteen </i>(1999),
<i>Ultravisitor </i>(2004)). Each album has a different mix of
acoustic and electronic elements, and employ different strategies for
how to the two worlds interact. The programmed albums have a few
consistent elements: dense, frantic “acid” bass-lines; melodic
lead synths over active harmonic structures; digitally manipulated
timbres; and erratic and disjointed textures in multiple virtual
spaces.
</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> The
most identifiable element of Jenkinson's older programmed music
(namely <i>Go Plastic </i>and <i>Big Loada</i>), is his frantic use
of breakbeats (drums sampled from classic drum breaks in soul and R&B
music), an element he expands on from the “drum and bass” genre
of electronic dance music that was popular in the 1990's. Where most
drum and bass employs breakbeats in a one-or two-bar loop, the
signature sound of Jenkinson and Richard D. James (aka Aphex Twin) is
high rhythmic density and not loop-based. In Jenkinson's older
works, he favors continuous variation of the breakbeat, often with
fast syncopated rhythms. Because of this treatment of the breakbeat,
Jenkinson's and James' music has often been referred to as “drill
'n bass.”
</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> This
practice, however, is definitively not present in <i>Ufabulum</i>.
Instead, its percussion mostly moves at a more diffuse pace, as much
popular electronic music currently does. Since the return of
electronic dance music to the public eye, there has been a general
trend toward steady, predictable backbeats. The most popular
electronic acts of the past few years have tended to not stray too
far from the backbeat, instead focusing on timbral complexity and
movement, while sustaining a repetitive, predictable beat underneath
it. More specifically, some of the most popular electronic tracks of
recent years have had zero melodic or harmonic construction, and
focus entirely on timbral movement for a span of a few bars or a
phrase (with as few as one pitch constituting the pitch content of a
phrase). The drum elements of this music are also simplistic, but
are still, basically, the most important element of the music, as
seen in how the music is mixed.
</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> The
rise of these <i>musical </i>strategies has been accompanied by the
<i>technical</i>,<i> </i>mixing-based techniques of “side-chain
compression” (sometimes referred to as “keying”), and drum
layering, both of which ensure that the kick drum, in particular, is
the loudest element of the song. Side-chain compression automates an
attenuation of the synthesizer lines during each occurrence of the
kick drum, making the synthesizers decrease in the mix as to not
“muddy up” the kick drum, or cover it up. Drum layering is a
simple update to traditional additive synthesis techniques: simply
using more than one drum sample or synthesizer as if they were one.
The resulting sound of these techniques often sees the kick drum
being bigger than the rest of the mix, creating a “heavy” sound.
</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Jenkinson's
adoption of these techniques on <i>Ufabulum </i>marks
a significant departure from the old “drill 'n bass” sound. It
isn't that Jenkinson has set out to make a dubstep album though, as
there are a number of differences in how the beats appear on
<i>Ufabulum</i>. For
instance, on the tracks “Unreal Square,” “Stadium Ice,” and
“Energy Wizard,” there are sections which each use a modified
backbeat at ~60 BPM, but also use double-time (~120 BPM) structures
in other sections. While the faster versions of these tempos are not
far removed from Jenkinson's tempos on previous albums, the slow
tempos are, generally, a departure from his previous sound. There
are plenty of exceptions to these constructs also. “303 Scopem
Hard” is in an uptempo “acid” style (as the name would suggest
to those in the know), although, it does have a consistent backbeat
to it (unlike, say, “Go! Spastic” from <i>Go Plastic </i>which
is stylistically similar, but with continuous variation in the
drums). The consistent use of the backbeat on this album is a
departure from Jenkinson's previous programmed music, but not from
his recent output (which is largely instrumental). </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 200%;">The
sonic nature of the drums has changed to the more modern techniques
as well. On the tracks “The Metallurgist” and “Dark Steering”
the synthesizer lines are obviously side-chained to the kick drum,
ducking the synthesizers out every time the kick hits.</span></div>
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<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> These
techniques may sound like minor technical details, but they have a
very obvious role to play in the psychology of listeners. They let
the listener know that the kick drum is the most important element of
the song, a nearly ubiquitous feature of electronic dance music. This
is a departure for an IDM artist: to come to the table with something
that is so prominently dance oriented. IDM has usually been seen as
approaching dance from the opposite direction: something that was a
possibility, but not compulsory or crucial to the aesthetic of the
music because the artists are working with dance elements to create
more “experimental” structures. Autechre, Aphex Twin, and
Squarepusher have consistently approached dance music with new modes
of composition that generally weaken the dance element, whether on
purpose or inadvertently, in servitude of more experimental
techniques. The utilization of these modern mixing techniques shows
that Jenkinson is more directly confronting the dance question that
has contributed much ambiguity to IDM's identity in the past.</span></div>
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<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Stylistic Movement and Stasis:</b></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Although
Jenkinson has toned down the percussion's rhythmic density on this
album, it still is not as overtly simplistic like much of today's
popular electronic dance music is. There are some serious rhythmic
outbursts, specifically in the later half of “Drax 2.” At the
end of this track, all of the elements of the texture are recombined
(a sort of textural recapitulation, if you will), making huge,
scattered textures that sound like they could just devolve into pure
noise at any moment. The rhythmic density in the drums is increased
with the addition of a breakbeat, while the bass-line becomes more
frantic frantic, dense, and heavily modulated, and appears in
multiple virtual reverberations around the outbursts of noise.
Besides the fat, deep kick drum, this is classic Squarepusher. This
section feels like “Greenways Trajectory” from his 2001 album <i>Go
Plastic</i>, with one glaring
difference. The texture of “Greenways Trajectory” moves so
rapidly that you find yourself in an alternate music universe: a
dancehall version of “moment time.” What keeps this from
happening on “Drax 2” is the massive kick drum. The persistence
of the long kick drum from beginning to end of the track gives a
solid metric orientation, which is not necessarily present in older
Squarepusher albums. In his older albums, Jenkinson never went out
of his way to make the kick drum hold so much power. It may appear
at downbeats in his older works, but it never appeared,
sonically, as a focal point of the mix to the extent that it would
cut through all of the other elements to reorient the listener's
sense of downbeat.</span></div>
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<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Jenkinson's
move toward this sound is symptomatic of what seems to be a change in
the role of percussion for him. Where drums were often as much of an
important melodic statement as any of the other elements, they are
now in a role of support. Over the last seven years or so
Squarepusher albums have steadily moved in this direction, but have
each had much different overall tones to them, have focused more on
acoustic instruments, and have much more invested in their harmonic
and melodic content than anything else. Active, dense percussive
structures have simply not been a stylistic focus on these albums,
and with <i>Ufabulum </i>this
trend continues, even though the approach to this album is
dramatically different overall.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Jenkinson's
work has always included the option to use both electronic and
acoustic instruments, but often presents them with a separation
between the two (most starkly on “Time Borb” from <i>Selection
Sixteen</i>). On <i>Ufabulum</i>, there is nothing but electronic
sources, something that immediately snaps the listener back to his
2001 album <i>Go Plastic</i> because the
techniques used on the albums are similar. The urge to compare the two albums is
irresistible, as proven in how many times <i>Go Plastic </i>has come
up here. The more important similarity though, is <i>Ufabulum</i>'s<i>
</i>simultaneous similarity to classic Squarepusher paired with its
similarity to contemporary popular electronic dance music.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i><br /></i></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> The
huge synthesizers in <i>Ufabulum</i>
show the same kind of attention to timbral modulation and movement
that current popular electronic music does. Use of frequency
modulation (FM) synthesizers, granular synthesis, and various digital
effects, in a way that change the timbre of a single instrument over
timespans of a bar or phrase is one of the cornerstones of current
electronic music trends. The kind of chaotic, choppy, and harsh
synthesizer that opens the track “Dark Steering” is a perfect
example of current thought about timbre in popular electronic music.
That is really the most astounding thing about <i>Ufabulum</i>, that it fits in with the current trend, but also points the
listener back to classic Squarepusher albums, illuminating how far
ahead of his time Jenkinson has been. All of the tracks on <i>Go
Plastic</i> have these
same techniques in play to varying degrees.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Another
element that appears in abundance on both classic Squarepusher and
<i>Ufabulum</i>
is the “acid” bass-lines. The bass-lines throughout the album
are the most intricate part of each track's texture. The lack of
rhythmic density in the percussive elements does not jump out at the
listener, because the bass is still as active as on any Squarepusher
album. This construction draws attention to the lack of bass-lines
in popular electronic music. (Even though the “wobble bass”
synthesis technique permeates much of what is going on in that sphere
of influence, it has nearly nothing to do with bass, but rather what
happens when one automates different parameters of a frequency
modulated bass signal, rendering most of the interest to how the
upper harmonic profile, the timbre, changes). Jenkinson uses the bass
as the one of the main melodic and rhythmic focus throughout the album, which is
“typical” for him, and is a long standing compositional technique
of his. These bass-lines are highly processed and modulated at
times, constantly changing their timbre from moment to moment.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i><br /></i></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Ufabulum
</i>reflects how much the
electronic music world has been playing catch-up with more
“experimental” artists over the past two decades. Now that FM
synthesis with heavy modulation and digital effects is in vogue, this
album could function as a new entryway for new electronic music fans
to discover Squarepusher albums that they would have never attempted
to listen to before. Since Jenkinson's music has been labeled IDM
(and all of the phrasal baggage that goes along with it:
experimental, avant garde, etc.) some potential listeners were bound
to be put off just because the “IDM culture” seems inaccessible
or pretentious (that is, if IDM's reputation is as bad as people have
made it out to be for the past twenty years). This album could be a
great chance for newcomers to electronic music to experience what
they have missed out on in the place where the current “norm” was
born.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
</div>derek.k.jeppsenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04666636081163461931noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1657024236671077114.post-61265746049977950802012-01-10T16:59:00.000-08:002012-07-09T14:34:05.161-07:00voidesque - as if it never existed<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">My new album (under my moniker <b>voidesque</b>) <i>as if it never existed</i> is released today on Bandcamp.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<iframe allowtransparency="true" frameborder="0" height="100" src="http://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/v=2/album=3557348140/size=venti/bgcol=FFFFFF/linkcol=4285BB/transparent=true/" style="display: block; height: 100px; position: relative; width: 400px;" width="400">&amp;lt;p&amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://voidesque.bandcamp.com/album/as-if-it-never-existed"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;as if it never existed by voidesque&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;lt;/p&amp;gt;</iframe>
<br />
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The album signifies two distinct periods of my writing: my non-academic compositions while finishing a composition degree, and the six-month period directly following.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Edit:</b> You can read a review of the album by the ever-thoughtful and eclectic Simon Cummings </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">here: <a href="http://5against4.com/2012/04/25/emancipated-beats-voidesque-as-if-it-never-existed/">http://5against4.com/2012/04/25/emancipated-beats-voidesque-as-if-it-never-existed/</a></span><br />
<br />derek.k.jeppsenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04666636081163461931noreply@blogger.com0