Dial "M" for Musicology

The moving soundscape meditation

Lyle Sanford just added a wonderful quote from Daniel Goleman's Vital Lies, Simple Truths to my last post:

The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice there is little we can do to change until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.

It's wonderful because it gets at the heart of what it is we want from music, art, learning, love, religion, philosophy, sports -- pretty much everything worthwhile we do -- which is personal transformation. And it suggests why that transformation ("change") is so difficult. 

Actually, calling it "personal" is a bit wrong, because the most powerful experiences of art, love, etc., tend to be unitive: they tend towards the subject's total immersion and identification with the object (self with music, self with the beloved, self with the divine), such that the distinction between subject and object disappears. (I've written about one particular kind of unitive experience before.) But getting to that experience, to say nothing about integrating it into one's normal life (so it's not just like a theme park ride or something, a momentary trippy diversion, but something that changes the way you hear music, relate to your spouse, etc.), demands something very hard: we have to change the way we sense and think about the world around us. We have to break old cognitive habits, which (as Goleman notes) is especially hard because we don't even know they're habits. 

So how do we break our cognitive habits? How do we notice what we fail to notice? I've gotten interested in the idea of doing . . . well, I don't quite know what to call them. "Existential exercises," maybe, or "experiential exercises" -- EE for short. (Works either way.) Meditation is one kind of EE: it's a practice where you pay attention to how your body and mind are tuned, how the total organism is working in its environment, what you're thinking about, how you feel. Yoga is a similar sort of thing -- it looks like what we usually mean by exercise (you move your body and get stronger), but it's also a way of paying attention to the body's functioning more generally. (Your mind is a part of your body, too.) And there are other things -- playing the piano, doing judo, etc. -- that can function in similar ways. Sooner or later these practices will all converge on the same discipline: an awareness of how we pay attention, or don't, what we pay attention to, and how well we sustain our concentration. 

At a certain point when I was getting really serious about piano playing I realized that I was getting stuck, not because I couldn't physically move my fingers in certain ways, but because I didn't know how to focus my mind the right way to train my hands to make those movements. I learned one of my great enduring truths of piano playing: learning to play means learning to practice. You have to figure out what you're paying attention to, how you pay attention to it, how your consciousness is organized when you're concentrating (are you self-conscious? what does that feel like? what does it feel like to let go of self-consciousness?), how long you can concentrate, what it feels like to lose focus, and so on. And this is something that is actually very good for one's general happiness and health. When you get good at this meta kind of self-monitoring in your chosen practice, you get better at it all around. You notice things. The world becomes a more beautiful and mysterious place. 

But not everyone plays the piano, so what are they supposed to do? I remember going to a Michael Colgrass workshop about 20 years ago where he did all these exercises in . . . I don't know exactly what the name for it is, but his exercises pertained to that habitual and largely hidden meta level where we structure the various things we do every day. These are what I'm calling EE. (I don't remember what Colgrass called them.) Anyone can do them. 

Here's an example of what I'm talking about, which I found at an esotericist site I stumbled on:

Exercise: 

1. List all of those habits that you maintain that have no benefit beyond the experience itself; 2. Stop doing them for a period of two weeks (you can always start again after this period of time, so you won’t be losing those things you really can’t live without forever); 3. At the end of the two weeks, compare the old habits from step 1 with the new habits that have formed over the last two weeks. 4. Now choose who you are.

Interesting. Here's a more musical EE, which takes the form of a composition that uses an "event score" (i.e., a set of verbal instructions for a performed act). My cultural studies class just did a week on John Cage and the post-Cagean avant garde and read Liz Kotz's badass article on George Brecht's event scores, which I recommend for anyone wanting to go deeper into this phenomenon. Anyway, here's the score of Pauline Oliveros's "Tuning Meditation," which I often use in classes when I want to illustrate the concerns of the American post-1950s avant garde. (I heartily recommend doing this, by the way.) 

Begin by taking a deep breath and letting it all the way out with air sound. Listen with your mind’s ear for a tone. 

On the next breath using any vowel sound, sing the tone that you have silently perceived on one comfortable breath. 

Listen to the whole field of sound the group is making. 
Select a voice distant from you and tune as exactly as possible to the tone you are hearing from that voice. 

Listen again to the whole field of sound the group is making.
Contribute by singing a new tone that no one else is singing. 

Continue by listening then singing a tone of your own or tuning to the tone of another voice alternately.

Commentary: 

Always keep the same tone for any single breath. Change to a new tone on another breath. Listen for distant partners for tuning.
Sound your new tone so that it may be heard distantly. 

Communicate with as many difference voices as possible. 

Sing warmly!

OK, so I made an event score of my own, which I tried out yesterday as I was walking across campus after getting my flu shot. Call it the "moving soundscape meditation." 

Go for a walk by yourself. As you walk, pay attention to every sound that comes to your ears. 

Listen to how each sound in your environment arises and passes away. Pay special attention to the beginnings of sounds.

Listen to the sounds of your own body -- your breathing, your heartbeat, your footsteps, and so on. 

Treat all sounds as equally important.

Commentary:

You will find it surprisingly difficult to notice when sounds begin. Often you will be following how one sound dies away and won't notice another sound beginning to enter your field of hearing. Or you might get distracted by something you see, or start thinking about something else. When you notice this happening, redirect your attention back to the sounds in your immediate environment. Pay attention to how often you need to refocus your attention. 

Pay enough attention to your surroundings that you remain physically safe. You should walk with your eyes open, though if visual stimuli are too distracting you may focus your gaze on the ground in front of you.

The composition is over when you reach your destination. Take a bow.

Hello, or Thinking of Nico

Greetings. I, like Michael, am new around these parts. Phil kindly asked me to contribute to Dial M on occasion and it’s a pleasure to be a more active part of a blog I’ve come to love. So as my inaugural post, I’d like to address an under-sung figure of our musical life: Christa Paffgen, better known as the incomparable Nico.

If there was a time that Nico entered my consciousness it was really this moment in Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums:

Institutional bacon

Biking in to work this morning before sunrise, zipping past frat houses just beginning to stir, I catch a whiff of something that catches me a sledgehammer blow of reminiscence and nostalgia  -- the smell of what can only be described as institutional bacon. You know, the steam-tray bacon that you find in every dorm cafeteria. Its faux-homey comfort perfectly captures the mingled excitement and dread of the beginning of every academic year.

So it's that time of year, which means I have little time for writing anything except syllabi, so today I'll let someone else provide the content. Ben Piekut, a rising new scholar in the 1960s avant-garde, has created a large and ambitious video project, Henry Flynt in New York. Henry Flynt has been a figure in the New York avant-garde scene for more than forty years, and although he's created a steady stream of fiercely individual work, he's probably best known for doing things like picketing Lincoln Center and MOMA (here, pictured with Jack Smith):

(Source here, at Flynt's own website, with some other cool photos.)

Piekut's film project is decidedly minimal and low-key -- his camera follows Flynt around as he visits sites notable in the history of the New York avant-garde and delivers his own opinionated reminiscences. Check it out.

Make an avant-garde jazz noise here

Last summer spent a day in New York with my friend John, and we wanted to see something of the city. Mostly we walked around south of 14th street rather than seeing sights; sights, we agreed, are lame. Take Mount Rushmore: you drive there, get out of the car, and it looks just like the postcard (which you then buy in the gift shop). The reason you go at all is to have had the experience, to check a box on an imaginary list of things to say you've done. You see the sight in order to have seen it. The sight itself is fully conventional, simply the realization of a pattern that already exists fully-realized in the mind. You don't get anything unexpected out of seeing Mt. Rushmore: that's not the point.

So John and I, being intellectual types who must at all times seek substance and meaning rather than the empty touristic rituals, went to a jazz poetry concert at a place called the Brecht Forum, which advertises itself as "a place for people who are working for social justice, equality and a new culture that puts human needs first." Its music series, which hosted the jazz poetry program we saw, is a "volunteer-run collective." The performance space was a room the size and odd, improvised proportions of a basement rec room, with a metal-and-plastic stacking chairs and small round tables scattered around a loosely-defined performance space. This room was open to another which had a table laid with some snacks and a big tub of ice with beers sticking out; you could go over and grab a beer and sit back down, just as if you were listening to some guys jamming at a friend's house. Even the small detail of the refreshments table bore out a sensibility in which one is at all times to struggle against reified social relations under capitalism: you pay your cover fee, you can get your own beer. I counted fourteen audience members, including ourselves, before we left after the first set.

At times, social idealism sometimes turns into great art, but this was not one of those times. On our way out I turned to John and said, we just saw Mt. Rushmore. I was now able to check off the "Greenwich Village jazz-poetry concert" box on the lifetime list of things to do, and like Mt. Rushmore, it was a sight, something that fulfilled the necessary expectations of what a jazz poetry concert would be.

The music was in the traditional style of the jazz avant-garde. Each piece seemed to have two possible textures: Sound #1, the quiet one, which allowed you to hear the speaker, and Sound #2, the loud one, when the ecstasy of transgression would crest in a feverish roil. At those moments the trumpet and saxophone players would ride up to altissimo range and play short chromatic/microtonal run figures over and over again as loud as they could (or just half-valve a trill as fast as possible). Sound #1 had a lot of cymbal rolls and long bowed notes from the bass, a lugubrious ground against which the other instruments would play misterioso figures. Many of the poems were appreciations of canonic jazz musicians and seemed to blame their deaths on the indifference of the American public. Musical allusions would poke up out of the texture in response to the poems: the first four notes of "Yardbird Suite" at a mention of Charlie Parker, a few repetitions of the "Love Supreme" motive at a mention of Coltrane.

The cadences of the poems followed the canonic patterns of the established jazz poetry style, too. Important words were complicated bifurcated gestures, poised between the explosive tension of their initial articulation and the falling croon into which the word-gesture would relax. (This is a pattern familiar from the Last Poets, who, however intense and serious their political purpose, always end up sounding incongruously like a crew of Afrocentric William Shatners.) Word repetitions were used to ramp up to explosive shouted climaxes, at which point, on cue, the musicians would move from Sound #1 to Sound #2. One musician, reading a poem about American shallowness and materialism that ended with the thought that America is a country that gives nothing and takes everything, worked himself into an apoplectic fury -- "take, take, take, take, TAKE, TAKE, TAKE, TAKE!!!! " -- doubling over, his pale goateed face turning red, as the band went nuts behind him.

And the form of the poems themselves traveled well-worn paths of Beat poetry. Much of the time they seemed to have traveled to the source, mimicking the cadences of Howl, with its long chains of co-ordinated subordinate clauses:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked [. . . .]

who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,

who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night,

who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas [etc.]

each one articulated in the same bifurcated way, the explosive beginning and cool crooned continuation writ large at line length.

God, I sound like such a hater. Really, I'm not. I like Muhal Richard Abrams as much as the next guy. Like anything else, there's both good and bad avant-garde jazz. But avant-garde clichés seem especially lame because the avant-garde makes such a big deal out of not being clichéd. As I've  written before, the avant-garde has always considered itself as a negation, a refusal, of the current "state of the material." Peter Bürger's classic work of literary philosophy, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, argues that the avant-garde doesn't have a style of its own -- it's not a style or a movement, but is instead a certain way of incorporating existing artistic materials into an assault on artistic and social institutions. And in Bürger's view, this assault is a response to the objective conditions of society. In a sense, the avant-garde is called into being by history itself. This certainly is the pose of the musicians I heard at the Brecht Forum -- the pretense is that this music is ripped from their souls as they encounter modern society, and in the concert you watch them locked in battle with the demons of industrial capitalism itself. But it's always the same battle fought over and over again, like a Civil War re-enactment or something. If you believe that there really is an existential battle between Moloch and the troubled free soul of modern man, then it is depressing to see it enacted again and again, with the same 14 people on the same stacking chairs, because nothing is ever resolved -- see you here next week! This is not how Revolution is supposed to feel. Or else you suspect there's no battle at all, never was one, and this is all just another show. Which wouldn't be such a bad thing, except that they can never bring themselves to admit that that's what they're doing -- putting on a show.

Frankenstein

A couple of days ago Squashed, of the fine music blogs Bricolage Fantasy and Motel De Moka, wrote the following comment to my "Hippist" post of last week:

If it is a habit, how can it be hip? . . . . also, by introducing the idea of habit, it doesn't seem possible for a hipster to adopt radically new style. How can it be? If it is radically new, it coulnd't be possibly be a habit yet. (even if it is just frame of mind) . . . . wouldn't defining hip as "awareness of zeitgeist and its expression" be sufficient?

Which are good questions. Anatole Broyard, the first intellectual to interest himself with the problem of hipness, called hipness a quality of being "superiorly aware," and historically this is how it is most often understood. (Whether you believe that hipsters really are superiorly aware is another matter. At the very least we can say that hipsters have always been about being superiorly aware.) Hipness, then, can't be a fixed style, a habit, as Squashed puts it, any more than having acute hearing or being 6'8" is a "habit." Hipness isn't a set repertory of stylistic tics, or an artistic vocabulary, which makes the analogy with modernism suspect.

BUT. Ideology and reality part company here, because I think it can be shown that hipness does end up being a style. The situation is sorta like that of the avant-garde. When I was writing about the Canadian Opera Company's production of the Ring, I complained about the stage design for Die Walküre and its use of certain avant-garde stylstic tics:

My program book tells me that the set was intended to recreate the feel of photos from Germany at the end of WWII and is aimed at "presenting a world in chaos as a result of Wotan's addictive obsession with the gold and the Ring." No, what it presents is the art world's addictive obsession with the threadbare visual tropes of the avant-garde. All the little piles of dirt on gallery floors, all the tangles of industrial materials in arte povera installations, all the anhedonic anxious obsession over "commodification." You know, a pile of dirt on the floor is just another commodity -- but an ugly, unlovable one whose value is assigned by the command economy of academic art criticism. The avant-garde keeps up its pretense of growing organically out of of the present historical moment through its negation of it. This would imply that the avant-garde is not a style but a moment of trangression sanctioned by History. But in truth the avant-garde has become just another style, just another set of mannerisms to be copied by artists and institutions anxious to appropriate something of its cultural capital.

The ideology of hipness has something in common with that of the avant-garde: that notion that it grows organically out of the present moment through its negation (or, sometimes, affirmation) of it. The idea is, you're hip to something in the present-day, and you define your persona, your tastes, in relation to that thing. Since society changes, so does hipness. John Leland, his book Hip: The History, sticks close to this argument when he says that hipness is a "game," something more about process than products:

The essence of hip talk, the game says, lies not in its vocabulary or syntax but in its ability to continually make these anew. This is a constant of hip: it lies in the process of invention, not the products. For example, to dress hip means to play coherently with the language of fashion, not to wear the correct black jeans or turtlenecks. To dress square, or be a fashion victim, is to mistake the means for the ends.

But then why is the black turtleneck permanently in the rotation of hip fashion? To be sure, it is not always hip to wear a black turtleneck, but then again, the black turtleneck isn’t just another arbitrary item of fashion, picked out of an infinity of possible garments, and imbued with hipness by someone playing “the game.” After all, there’s a reason why all the poseurs picked it out at the same time. The black turtleneck means something: it is a shorthand, a sign for beat-ness, just as a goatee or a clove cigarette or Naked Lunch is. To insist on the primacy of process is to ignore the fact that hip culture consists in the constant recycling of particular, definable products.

This point is made, albeit with greater wit, by the Onion: "U.S. Trendsetters Go On Strike." Since all the hipsters are refusing to "listen to any synthesized music, wear makeup, shop at thrift stores, bake cupcakes, "make the scene," or discuss any potential trends or up-and-coming drugs," scabs are brought in to think up new trends:

If a collective-bargaining agreement cannot be reached, trendsetters will likely be replaced with scabs. Indeed, some second-rate trends have already begun sprouting up, as aspiring tastemakers—often the same people maligned by the ultrahip as "poseurs"—cross picket lines and attempt to fill the void left by the strike. Many of their ideas, such as adopting chinchillas as pets, are largely recycled, and, while their original innovations, such as wearing top hats and paper shoes, walking with crutches, and referring to friends as "Frankenstein," may seem forced, they could potentially be the only trends available for some time.

The thing is, if you come up with some arbitrary weird thing, like wearing paper shoes, and say "well, that's my thing, yo," it won't automatically be hip. If being hip is simply doing some radically new thing; if being hip is defined by the completeness of your rejection of the mass-culture scene, with its Britneys and Brangelinas; then the hippest thing you could do would be to throw out your TV, stop going to movies, cancel your subscription to EW, and play Bach or read the Iliad in facing-page translation. But then this isn't what anyone thinks of as hip transgression, because it isn't something you can do with your friends on TV. The ideology of hipness is one of radical individualism, but the mechanism by which things become hip is inescapably social and collective. If it's a game, as Leland puts it, it's a game you play with a million of your closest friends. Which is probably why Jonathan responds calls it "craven conformity masquerading as individuality."

Jazzabration!

This clip, with Stephen Colbert ragging John Zorn and showing his own "Hiphopketball: A Jazzabration," made me laugh.

Now, I like John Zorn. I have a bunch of his albums, and besides my brother-in-law plays with him, so liking avant-garde jazz is kind of the family business. If I didn't have a sense of humor I'd probably be offended. But Colbert's hat-and-cane routine is funny because, let's face it, there is something funny about the avant-garde.* You can't help but make fun of it, even if you actually like it.

Maybe this is because the avant-garde (a vague term I have no intention of defining) has a certain seriousness of purpose that may or may not be in synch with its style or contingent form of expression. If Zorn's "Spillane" is entertaining (in its way) and even occasionally funny (after a fashion), it  nevertheless owes its existence to a way of looking at art that is serious as a heart attack. Avant-garde art doesn't just want to fool around with new styles; it wants to question the conceptual framework within which styles are perceived, and, so doing, it wants to force us to re-examine our relationship to art itself. Or, put another way, the avant-garde doesn't just demand new art, it demands new people. The avant-garde is a deeply moral enterprise, then, even if the people who make up the avant-garde all seem like louche decadent punks and performance artists and free-jazz screamers. Which is why the avant-garde is always good for a laugh: moralists are always funny.

Which is a roundabout way of getting at the arguments Jonathan and our readers have gotten into over the weekend. The new musicology** of the early-mid 1990s understood itself, and was understood by its enemies, as an avant-garde, and more than its use of this or that methodology (queer theory, post-Marxism, Lacanian psychoanalytics, etc.) it seemed to be defined by a very avant-gardish desire to change our heads -- to change what we think is important about music, and thus to change how we listen. Which, as I've said, entails a moral stance, though New Criterion-style conservatives always argued that postmodernism (with which the new musicology was allied) was highly immoral. They were wrong, I think, but their mistake was a sign of a more pervasive confusion. In hindsight most of what the "old musicology" (non-new musicology?) folks most disliked was a certain stridency, a certain tone of superiority, a certain exclusionary rhetoric ("you, as a member of the privileged class, cannot understand what we, the subaltern, are saying"). They objected, then, to being looked down on, to being judged from a moral position.

Which of course the new musicologists objected to, too. They too felt judged by alien moral criteria. They were being told that their writing was empty causistry, that their scholarly agenda was philistine and politically looney, and that the kinds of music they liked were unworthy of serious contemplation, by a bunch of people who showed no signs of having read, much less understood, the new musicology's foundational texts. (My man Scott McLemee, reacting to Edward Rothstein's dismissive NYT obituary for Derrida, wrote that Rothstein seemed to have "derived his entire knowledge of deconstruction from reading the back of the video box for a Woody Allen movie with the word in the title.")

I'm making this a narrative in the past tense, which for the most part is appropriate, because the fire went out of this debate years ago, though as we've seen you can still get the old arguments going. But I feel that both sides are still picking fights over moral positions, or defending themselves from an implicit moral judgment, even when they think they're talking about something else, like whether Wayne Koestenbaum is any good.***

For the record, I think The Queen's Throat is awesome. It is one of my favorite books. I also think it inspired a rash of bad imitations, and the thing is, you have to get to the point where you can say which pieces of writing within a scholarly genre are any good. Postmodernism tried to do away with the business of evaluation, and like Terry Eagleton, I think that this was its greatest failing. But that's another post.

*Anyway, is Colbert making fun of Zorn, or is he making fun of boneheads who make fun of people like Zorn? Or both? Doesn't matter, because it's funny.

**Which, let's just say it now, isn't all that new anymore, but I'll use the term anyway, without the scare quotes, because everyone knows what it means.

***In trying to take some kind of responsible middle ground I'm probably just pissing off both sides here.

 

making the work vs. making the rules

Piggybacking on Jonathan's post yesterday, I've found a great site, Design Observer, which just published a post on the CD cover design of Beck's new album, The Information. There's no cover design as such: instead, there's a sheet of stick-on decals, a sheet of grid-ruled paper, and some directions to the buyer: make your own album cover art and upload it to a website. Every cover will be a unique result of the interaction between creator and consumer.

The Design Observer post goes on to point out the long history of such projects in the visual arts avant-garde, and the way such projects make hay from the tension between making the work vs. making the rules for making instances of a work. Popular music, as Jonathan pointed out yesterday, is constantly cutting listeners in on the compositional process (if that's the right word), and Dmitri Siegel's smart essay shows how the remix phenomenon both draws from a certain tradition of the visual arts and feeds back into it.

"Concepts" and Where They've Gotten Us

Phil’s posting on Day 2 of the Toronto Ring Cycle is apposite in more than one way. At precisely the time Berlin’s Deutsche Oper is in paroxysms over whether or not to stage a 2004 production of Mozart’s Idomeneo that features, at one point, the severed head of the prophet Mohammed (along with those of Jesus, Buddha, and Poseidon), Phil presents the most pitiless, laser-accurate assessment of a self-indulgent, hubristic director’s “concept” I think I have ever read. Dirt as “commodity,” but more importantly avant-garde as safe, tired cliché. Bravissimo!

I cannot speak about the Berlin Idomeneo with any authority because I’ve not seen it. The situation in Berlin, though, leaves the opera company the almost laughable--were it not so surreal and truly disturbing--choice between knuckling under to a terrorist intimidation (it is not clear if this is generalized intimidation or a clear and present danger) or risking unspecified mayhem and injury, all for a director’s “concept” (i.e. the offense is not in either the music or the text, just the staging), one which is intentionally confrontational.

Confrontation again. Can we finally call confrontation another tired cliché, like radicalism? Is not there something ultimately very familiar and safe--and comforting, to a certain temperament and aesthetic--about being “confronted,” usually with some kind of wholesale insult to authority figures or institutions, or flamboyant, performance-art flouting of a taboo? (I’m not sure what taboos there are in theater anymore.) Golly, that’s how you know it’s really good--someone (the government, or religion, or people richer than you are) is being confronted! They deserve it for their smugness!

I have a hard time considering such a dramatic presentation risky or dangerous (or, frankly, even confrontational) if the state funds it. Surely the Deutsche Oper receives most of its funding from the state, so the situation is somewhere between ironic and truly dangerous. The state funds the opera, the opera might spark a disaster; so, should the opera be cancelled, which would mean the state gives in to terrorists? Is it worth the risk for this Director’s all-important concept, which confronts religion and societal trust in it? (Now, there is a ground-breaking idea.) Have those making the threats, on the other hand, backed the opera into a corner where they will absolutely HAVE to stage the thing so as to stand their ground? Or, if they give in, do we really think that the--uh--power and influence of Islamic non-citizen guest workers will continue to rise in, say, Germany without a violent backlash of some kind? Then distant countries will adorn their stamps with images of the “martyrs,” and the rivers of blood will continue to flow amid competing claims of righteousness. Nothing new there, I guess.

An obvious point of comparison here is Andres Serrano's Piss Christ; I find myself thinking of Philip Pullman’s distasteful--to me--but also completely predictable images of the Almighty as senile vegetable and the Archangel Metatron as (essentially) Lord of the Nazgul in the His Dark Materials trilogy. (Perhaps that’s different, being a literary rather than visual representation.) Ultimately, this kind of thing is no more shocking or “confrontational” than an agitated monkey flinging poop, and I marvel that artists continue to be so impressed with themselves for doing it.

I wonder how Mozart would have responded to the severed head of Jesus. Nothing is more sickening to me than self-righteous religious bullying, which is found in all religions in some measure (including mine), but I would have to stare long and hard in the mirror before I put real live humans (parents, children, siblings, spouses, lovers, friends) at risk in order to put Mohammed’s severed head next to Poseidon’s.

Will the Director be present at all performances, or will he be unavoidably absent? Otherwise engaged? In Switzerland, or South America? Perhaps the bold confrontation can be done by others.

It is really difficult to discern progress sometimes.

The Ring day 2

I need to correct a couple of things from yesterday's post. First of all, I should have given the name of the lighting designer, David Finn, rather than giving the impression that Michael Levine had dreamed up all the effects I was getting all rapturous about. And second, I need to ease up on the rapture, because the stage design of Die Walkure exemplified some of the worst aspects of modernized stagings I described yesterday, right down to the weird modern-opera fetish for scaffolding. Rheingold, while the first opera in the cycle, has been produced last, and has been performed by the COC for the first time this month, on its new stage, whereas all the others have been done separately at the old O'Keefe center in the last couple of years, with Walkure having been designed and staged first. But of course I experienced Rheingold first, and now suspect that its luminousness and richness probably represents a sort of do-over of Walkure, a way of addressing some pretty grave problems in Walkure's staging.

Namely, the fact that the stage set is a tangle of broken scaffolding surrounding a tree trunk and a pile of broken masonry and dirt. That's it. For five hours. It's sort of interesting for the first few minutes, but after the first-act intermission you return to your seat and . . . still the pile of dirt. And then a couple of hours later, returning from the second intermission for the last act, again with the dirt. The fact that the Valkyries are tossing shrouded dead bodies around like beachballs while prancing through the dirt does nothing to alleviate the basic lack of visual interest that dirt might be said to possess.

This production had the feel of being dug in on a bad idea. My program book tells me that the set was intended to recreate the feel of photos from Germany at the end of WWII and is aimed at "presenting a world in chaos as a result of Wotan's addictive obsession with the gold and the Ring." No, what it presents is the art world's addictive obsession with the threadbare visual tropes of the avant-garde. All the little piles of dirt on gallery floors, all the tangles of industrial materials in arte povera installations, all the anhedonic anxious obsession over "commodification." You know, a pile of dirt on the floor is just another commodity -- but an ugly, unlovable one whose value is assigned by the command economy of academic art criticism. The avant-garde keeps up its pretense of growing organically out of of the present historical moment through its negation of it. This would imply that the avant-garde is not a style but a moment of trangression sanctioned by History. But in truth the avant-garde has become just another style, just another set of mannerisms to be copied by artists and institutions anxious to appropriate something of its cultural capital.

But enough of that. The singing was great, the orchestra sounds better than it ever has, and although Richard Bradshaw is no great charismatic maestro in the James Levine mold, he gets the job done. One disappointment is Wotan, originally supposed to be sung by Pavlo Hunka but taken over by Peteris Eglitis, who isn't really heavy-metal enough to be Lord of the Gods. He kept getting swamped by the orchestra, and when he was supposed to vent his rage at Brunnhilde he just, I dunno, he just didn't sound all that mad. Phillip Ens, on the other hand, sang Hunding with a voice of iron, a little crackle of thunder in his voice that suggested real menace and danger. Watching Eglitis's good-natured Wotan strike him dead was like seeing Sonny Liston knocked out by your Dad. (Unless your Dad is Muhammed Ali.) I loved Adrianne Pieczonka as Sieglinde -- she managed the trick of projecting a silvery, sweet sound out into the boundless reaches of the Universe, sounding at once intimate and monumental. She's a Canadian singer but she's busting out all over, apparently being acclaimed as the "Sieglinde of our times" at Bayreuth, which one hopes would help ease the perennial Canadian worry over how we're doing on the world stage. Though it probably won't.

*UPDATE*

I just realized that the guy who took over from Pavlo Hunka was Peteris Eglitis, not John Fanning. I've corrected this post, and, uh, sorry . . . that's why I'm not a critic, I guess . . .

Music you could walk around in

At some earlier point I wrote something about sound culture. This is as much a way of listening as it is any intentional artifact of music. The flow of sound that emerges from any continuous chunk of broadcast, for example, is constitutive of a sound culture, but it is not a consciously crafted aesthetic object, which is to say, no-one planned this particular succession of sounds, or even thought of it as a succession of sounds. Sound culture is what we become aware of when we cultivate the avant-garde habits of listening that John Cage practiced, and taught us all to practice. We enter an environment that is full of sound -- whether it be an actual physical space or a virtual one, like the "environment" of a TV broadcast -- and rather than use our ears to select meaningful sounds from the flux of noise, we embrace all sounds equally as elements of a total sound field. It's a bit like Schoenberg's "emancipation of dissonance": Schoenberg insisted that we hear dissonances the way we formerly heard consonances, as things complete in themselves. If you hear a dissonance as the tension that sets up the release of consonance, you are hearing that dissonance as not-consonance: your ears are making hierarchical distinctions which Schoenberg wanted to dissolve. I think Cage's biggest contribution was to extend this principle to sound itself. The recent scholarly interest in auditory culture is, I think, the application of Cage's insight to the study of music. Or, put another way, it is the scholarly weaponization of Cage's insights, which results in a conceptual shift from the study of music to the study of human-created sound.

 

One corrolary of this shift is a new way of thinking about music performance. Back in the spring, two students of mine (Kim Schafer, a Ph.D. candidate in musicology, and Leanne Zacharias, a graduate student in cello performance) put together a concert that aimed at creating a "performance" that was also an enviroment -- music you could walk around in. Leanne has been doing several concerts she calls "music for spaces," where she performs cello pieces (often solo, sometimes with various enhancements) in odd, non-canonical spaces -- a stairwell, or under the gigantic fossilized skeleton of a Quetzalcoatlus in the Texas Memorial Museum. (Because I have a seven-year-old son, I knew this creature is called Quetzalcoatlus without even having to look it up.) The spring concert, "New Music at the Tower," took place at the University of Texas tower. The performance took place in the colonnade at the front of the main administrative building of which the tower is the pre-eminent feature:

(Don't know who the person is in this picture: I swiped it from this site, which plays an obnoxious synthesized version of the Texas state song.)

Anyway, at one point Leanne moved out into an open space in front of the building and played a duet with Kim, who played the Tower carillon. They played transcriptions of a couple of songs by Manuel de Falla ("Nana" and "Asturiana"). Kim was unable to see or hear Leanne, who synched her own part to Kim's playing as best she could. Keep in mind that the sound from the carillon was coming from hundreds of yards away and could be heard throughout the campus; Leanne was unamplified and could not be heard properly more than about 50 feet out. The sonic environment this created therefore depended on where you stood. There were maybe 30 of us gathered for the concert, and we followed Leanne around as she played different pieces in different places, but several people walked by as Leanne was playing, and I like to imagine what their sonic experience might have been. It was not the experience of a "performance," which assumes a certain intention to go somewhere at some time in order to listen to something, generally from a single sonic point of view. Theirs was a moving point of view, their ears traversing a space comprising ordinary unsculpted noises (birds, talking, footfalls, leaves in the breeze) and also intentional ones. As you moved towards where Leanne was playing, you would first hear the carillon (or would you hear it? would you tune it out the way you tune out the birds and footfalls?), and only gradually would the cello move into your field of listening. Perhaps it would only gradually dawn on you that the cello coming into focus was doing something with the carillon. As you walked to maybe 30 feet away you would become aware that you were moving through a performance of some kind (what are all these people doing?), and you might stop to listen a while, or you might keep on going, the cello growing fainter against the continuous presence of the carillon.

To a lesser extent, this was the experience of everyone at the concert. My daughter was cranky and I was chasing her around, trying to keep her out of trouble, so my own sonic point of view was changing too. (My son, finding no dinosaurs this time, had gone off somewhere else.) What was really beautiful about this concert was that, when you inhabited the temporary auditory enviroment that Leanne and Kim had created, your ears would do the John Cage thing. You would start to hear not only the cello and carillon but the space between them, not just the music but the music in that temporary enviroment, the birds and the leaves and the people moving around. Your perception would encompass the entire social and spatial field the concert had come to comprise, and this of course is an old move of the avant-garde: make your life the play, make yourself the author, make the passers-by the actors, make chance the script. But here it really worked, because it refreshed our experience of the world, which is what the avant-garde always tries to do.

Here is a recording of the event:

carilloncello.m4a

But of course a recording doesn't capture the lived and embodied sensory experience of the moment. The challenge of auditory culture as an academic sub-discipline lies in trying to write about such moments. What makes them important is what Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht calls their presence, those aspects of their phenomenal existence that do not survive their inscription in writing -- or, for that matter, their inscription in the "machined fusion of literacy and orality" that is recording. (The term is Douglas Kahn's.) The recording captures the presence of sound, but not the presence of the body in sonic space. Recordings are like cut flowers in a vase: presence withers when severed from where it blooms.