Dial "M" for Musicology

Torture and the Angel of History

Phil Ford

Most of the discourse on music and torture has been about the use of music in torture, the most distinguished example being Suzanne Cusick’s JSAM essay, though I might also mention my own blog debate on the subject with Jonathan Bellman and the public discussion that followed the Society for Ethnomusicology’s statement against torture. But today I want to talk about the moral fact of torture—its terrible distinction as the final frontier of human degradation—and how we might use music and sound to mark our crossing into that frontier. When torture appears in our civic life, something final and irrevocable has happened, and the moral fact of torture falls with a thud on our collective consciousness. If Norman Mailer were still alive, he would doubtless call this situation existential: it is a moment that defines both torturer and tortured forever after, and in that moment, when a nation decides to “go there,” to pull that trigger, it is an act of existential will. This says nothing about the morality of the choice, merely that a choice has been made, and that we have signed up for the consequences, though no-one may know what they will be in the end. Quickly, then: I want to think about moments where state violence registers itself on the consciousness of a society, and how such moments might be depicted.

 

One of the peculiar features of the GWOT era has been the redefinition of torture as the “new normal.” What the Bush administration has done above all has been to move the goalposts of discourse, so that being in favor of torture has become a permissible—indeed, at times mandatory—opinion on the conduct of war. Torture has gone from being something against which we define our national identity to being something on which reasonable people might disagree. And under such circumstances the question of what intellectuals can do about torture finds one answer: they can preserve or build or simply inhabit a view of civilization to which torture can never be assimilated. And in their imaginative work they can depict a civilization that does come to accept torture as finding itself in some new, unknown, incommensurate state from which there may be no return. And this is what Suzanne Cusick’s JSAM essay does when she writes that torture is a “condition of sin”—a sin of self-betrayal—which leaves no-one untouched: “resistance to it, once the dynamic is engaged, is futile for interrogators, detainees, commanders, and citizens alike.”

 

And in a certain way this is also the approach of the 1966 film The Battle of Algiers, although I want to be careful not to assimilate that film’s Marxist view of history too much to my own bourgeois humanism. Franco Solinas, a Marxist writer who collaborated with Gillo Pontecorvo on The Battle of Algiers, would probably have thought my own attitude a typical bit of humanist sanctimony. The Battle of Algiers shows how the French government crushed the Algierian FLN (Front de Liberation National) with a campaign of torture and murder; Solinas singled out France because it was “at the same time a colonial power and the most representative example of the bourgeoisie, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution. Politically she posed a contradiction between the slogans, phrases, rhetoric—in other words, the form of the bourgeois revolution—and its contents—the everyday practice of domination, oppression, torture.” The torture regime, then, is not an aberration from the ideals of liberal society, but a fulfillment of them. Thus Solinas wishes to show torture merely as a symptom of the pervasive rottenness of colonialism, and refuses to scold the French for torture as such. He makes the career soldier who institutes the torture regime, Col. Matthieu, an elegant, witty, reasonable, and intelligent interlocutor—indeed, radicals in the 1960s often debated whether he wasn’t just as little too sympathetic. Col. Matthieu embodies France and incarnates the force of a liberal state pushed by an opposing historical force to manifest its latent violence. From this point of view, neither the French nor the Algierians (who also commit atrocities) are doing evil: they are simply working through the historical dynamic by which decolonization proceeds.

 

There is something very cold about Solinas’s analysis: torture is simply a byproduct of capital-H “History,” which means that the broken and mutilated bodies of tortured men are simply the trampled debris left behind by the march of the world spirit. (A view ironically similar to that of the Bush administration’s foreign policy.)* Though it must be said that despite its chilly dialectics the film itself does not minimize suffering—quite the contrary. In one famous scene unnamed Algierians are tortured (in several cases with techniques used by American personnel in the GWOT), their screams silenced on the soundtrack and with Ennio Morricone’s chorale-prelude-like dirge as their only accompaniment. A woman watches silently, tears streaming down her face, and she is the film’s proxy for the viewer. And the music articulates our moral response to what we see as well, and not only in this scene. (In the film’s first scene, for example, a man whom the French have broken has just betrayed the film’s Algierian heroes, and as he comprehends his own betrayal we hear a strain of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion.) The music is the thud with which the moral fact of torture is registered on our conscience. It marks the bright line between the present moment and what just happened, a line we have crossed in an act of existential will. What just happened may be the logical next step of history, but it is still an enormity. The extreme dissonance between Bachian music and torture reframes what we see within a point of view far outside the action; I think it is meant to be the point of view of History itself. I never had any idea of what Walter Benjamin’s famous meditation on the “angel of history” meant until it occurred to me that we see in these scenes what the angel of history sees, but what we hear is how he sees it:

 

A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. When we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

*Thomas Ricks' comparison to Bush and Jerry Rubin is weirdly apt here: “They really were going to, kind of, ‘groove on the rubble,’ as Jerry Rubin used to say. They were going to tear it down and see what happened.”

Torture again

Phil Ford

For some reason, there's an awful lot of people looking at the old posts in the music-and-torture debates that Jonathan and I had last summer. (Why is this?) [UPDATE: Apparently these links were posted to the AMS-list. OK, I admit it, I haven't resubscribed to the AMS-list since moving jobs. I'll get right on it, promise.] So as a convenience, for those surfing in, the posts are here, then here, here, here, and here. I should point out a couple of things by way of an update:

First, there's a book called Torture Taxi about American-operated "black sites" into which people have disappeared and been tortured. I haven't read it but it looks fascinating, if depressing. The story is, apparently, that the existence of "black sites" was discovered by planespotters who noticed that a bunch of airplanes marked as commercial jets were traveling on paths that no ordinary commercial jet ever takes, and the patterns, once noticed, spelled out the existence of a worldwide network of secret prisons. This sounds like the kind of thing William Gibson would invent, but it's true. Anyway, one of the authors, Trevor Paglen, is a geographer who specializes in mapping secret and restricted zones and the (usually invisible) boundaries between the overt and covert worlds. His photographs have begun circulating as art objects, and they are eerily beautiful. In some he uses high-power optics to create images of things like military installations and labs -- images of distant secrets emerging partway into the visible world. And, using satellite photos from Google Maps and testimony of former prisoners, he became the only known person to take a picture of the infamous Salt Pit prison outside of Kabul:

I dunno, I just think this sort of thing -- "radical geography" and a kind of conceptual art derived therefrom -- seems really cool.

On a related note, the new issue of the Journal of the Society for American Music is out, with a new article by Suzanne Cusick on music and torture. It's called "You are in a place that is out of the world . . . ": Music in the Detention Camps of the 'Global War on Terror.'" Even more importantly*, the same issue also has my review of the 2-CD reissue of the complete Ken Nordine word jazz albums on Dot. Here's a a pdf the review. I'm rather proud of having written the first thing about Nordine to appear in a musicological journal (that I know of, anyway). 

*kidding. This is a really important article. One line in particular, something an interrogator said of his own work in breaking Muslim prisoners, stuck out to me:

We fear most not what evil will do to our bodies, but what it will do to our orderly, civilized worldview, our fragile psychology that's so dependent on predictability and a belief in the goodness of human souls.

As Cusick writes, "it [is] the confrontation with their interrogator's capacity for evil that really breaks prisoners." (p. 11) And, as Cusick writes a bit later, this is an evil that sucks everyone into it.

[W]hether or not one thinks "futility music" [music that breaks the will to resist] or "gender coercion" produces sufficient pain to merit the description "torture," the possible positive outcomes of their use to produce a psychic break are always  inextricably caught in the structural conundrum that characterizes the dynamic of torture. The punishment is delivered before there is evidence of a crime, because the punishment -- that is, the inflicting of pain -- is a necessary condition to producing that evidence. If it is not produced, or if it proves to be false, the interrogator will have caused an innocent person to betray himself, body and soul. Interrogators always risk, then, committing acts of unnecessary evil. When an army's commanders or a nation's citizens order them to do so, the commanders order them to do something they believe to be morally wrong; thus commanders force them to enter a condition of sin very like the one forced on Muhammad al-Qatani -- the betrayal of one's own soul. In a soldier's terms, this is more likely his civil soul as a citizen than his soul as various religions might define it. There is no way out of this conundrum. Resistance to it, once the dynamic is engaged, is futile for interrogators, detainees, commanders, and citizens alike. (pp. 17-18)

Foltermusik

Phil Ford

Re. Jonathan's latest: 

The rub of my disagreement with Jonathan is this: he believes that when music is used in torture, it is no longer music, but merely torture, and so there's no point in talking about "music as torture," because torture-music* does not exist as an independent entity. Thus, Jonathan writes that a clear instance where music has been used to inflict lasting harm "clearly qualifies as 'physical or moral degradation,'" not music; "it is sonic torture, or just torture. To act as if 'music' is relevant in this discussion is like suggesting that the only differences between a caress and being beaten to a pulp are gradations of intensity." So if it is music, it is not torture, and if it is torture, it is not music.

If you read my original post again, it's pretty clear that I do think that something can be music and torture at the same time -- that, indeed, the use of music in torture carries a symbolic charge that gives this particular kind of torture its signature cruel twist. This is what I have in common with Cusick. I'm not sticking up for every aspect of her article, but we do agree on this.

Perhaps one could draw an analogy to rape. It is generally held that rape is a crime of violence, not sex (just as music played at ear-bleeding volume for hours under conditions of forced confinement is not an object of aesthetic contemplation, but an implement of torture). Here there is no question of "gradations of intensity"; rape and consensual sex are qualitatively different things. But at the same time, a rape is not the same as a beating, or just a different kind of beating. What rapists do to their victims (and torturers, like the late Uday Hussein, have figured this out, too) is to relocate an act of love into the terrain of hate and domination. Sex, with all its private emotional meanings and social connotations, is turned against the victim; it is consequently a particularly drastic kind of domination. Rape and sex aren't the same thing, but you can't say that sex is a symbolically neutral vessel for violence. And while I am not arguing any kind of strict parallel here -- one must be careful -- at least one can say that music carries a symbolic, emotional weight that Beanie Babies and single-malt Scotch do not. Perhaps it is true that when you torture someone with music it is the same as if you are doing it with pliers and lit cigarettes, insofar as you end up with the same thing at the end -- a damaged and degraded human being. But then it seems to me that this argument also ignores a good deal. In a weird way it reminds me of the disingenuous arguments people used to make in defense of Andres Serrano's "Piss Christ." Why, it's just a cruciform object immersed in some sort of yellow fluid! What's the problem with that? Obviously, the emotional import of both body waste and Jesus Christ -- to say nothing of their conjunction in a photograph -- had a lot to do with the intended (and fully realized) effects on the audience.

But this is probably a point on which Jonathan and I will have to agree to disagree, because, while we can keep going back and forth on whether music used in torture is a special case, it's not the kind of point that anyone can "prove," but rather a question of interpretation.

*a German compound noun would be useful here, to denote to conceptual particularity of music-that-retains-its-identity-as-music-within-the-act-of-torture

Music Blogging as Torture

Jonathan Bellman

Phil chides me for my long (1074-word) blog of August 21—in which I took issue with a certain glib fatuousness in musicological discussions of torture, and a certain lame, head-in-the-sand do-goodism in academics’ responses to such things—and he takes (no lie) 1067 words to do so.  Moreover, he begins with “Then we agree! End of debate.” and concludes with “So I take it back, I don’t suggest that the AMS draft a position against torture, because, hey, I don't want to put people through that kind of nonsense.”  So the purpose of these 1067 words, it seems, is in the sentence that follows: “I do, however, think that I, and Suzanne Cusick, and every other academic and intellectual, can do something useful by writing about torture, and that it’s not just posturing.” 

I’ll address that in a moment.  But first, Chris Molla’s comment to my blog likewise pulls no punches:

“Jonathan falls into the trap of conflating the imposition of one person’s taste or aesthetic upon another person with the actual technique of subjecting a prisoner to hours-long sessions of exposure to music at extreme high volumes.”  And then: “This is just the sort of ignorant double-think that cripples efforts to generate any kind of general awareness of the nature and consequences of torture (not only for the victims, but for society at large).”

My comment was: “Given its existence, though, I think I am willing to go on record as preferring the use of music as a torture implement to physical injury or physical or moral degradation.”  The instance Chris quoted from someone else’s Vanity Fair article clearly qualifies as “physical or moral degradation.”  That isn’t music; it is sonic torture, or just torture.  To act as if  “music” is relevant in this discussion is like suggesting that the only differences between a caress and being beaten to a pulp are gradations of intensity.  That, probably, was where I encountered the banana peel (and I’m not alone), succumbing to the temptation to continue talking about music (which, admittedly, probably looked trivial). 

Even in Phil’s original 8-21 blog, though, we are no longer talking about music.  It is torture, physical abuse, and for music types to be particularly offended that music is somehow involved is no more relevant than the hurt feelings of a Beanie Baby collector if people were choked to death on Beanie Babies or the dudgeon of a scotch aficionado  if people were drowned in rare single-malt scotch.  They, and we, deserve no greater sense of offense in the matter, because torture is torture and it’s not better or worse to use something certain people—um—like.  The manner does not compound the ultimate felony because of someone else’s outrage.  Twittering about music at all in such a context implies that we as musicians have a privileged voice when we don’t.  We have the same voice everyone else does on this issue, whether people are being brutalized and destroyed with music or single-malt or choked to death with cute fluffy bunnies.

Now, as to glib fatuousness.  I’ll quote again the phrase I found offensive in Phil’s quote from the Suzanne Cusick article (N.B. she’s at NYU, and is a high-profile figure in our discipline): her comment that the use of music as a weapon in the War on Terror “wounds me as a musician–wounds me in that part of my sensibility that remains residually invested in the notion that music is beautiful, even transcendent—is a practice whose contemplation would always lead me to contemplation of bodies and pleasures. Not bodies in pain.”  What enraged me is that this comment is really more about her offense: not the torture, but how it offends her and her “contemplation of bodies and pleasures.”  Phil asks rhetorically if “protest against torture is the same whether an icky new musicologist does it or when someone more appropriately serious does it, right?”  Then he answers:  “Right. That's exactly what it means. Judge the arguments, not the person making them.”

Except that the passage immediately following the one he quoted makes clear that there is no argument being made.  Cusick writes, “It is not my intention here to engage the moral, ethical and political debates around torture, interesting as they are.  Rather, I offer today a rough taxonomy of the complex subject denoted by my title…”  This would be what…post-modern distance?  Fake, pseudo-scientific, “disciplined” “objectivity” was out and unabashed subjectivity is now in, right? 

I recommend that her article be read, for the full context.  Of course, the U.S., Canada, and Israel are the entities who come up for specific mention as those studying or using this kind of torture, a variety of so-called “no touch torture”.  We then spin from a quote of Princeton theorist Edward T. Cone, whom I assume was talking about art-music interpretation: “The goal ... must be identification with the complete musical persona by making its utterance one’s own,” to the author’s earnest thought-question “Could this notion of listening, propagated in elite universities (including those on contract to the CIA) in the last half of the 20th century, have influenced the architects of ‘no touch torture’?”

We then get an account of the blogospheric reactions to uses of music in torture—we at Dial M seem to be retracing others’ steps—and then Cusick’s memories of being pleasantly sonically overpowered as a young person hearing electric guitar and a somewhat older person on the disco dance floor.  Then, imagining (I am not making this up) the experience of a detainee under torture, Cusick writes:

“I imagine it, sometime, as being plunged into it something like the post-modern, post-Foucauldian dystopia where one is unable quite to name, much less resist, the overwhelmingly diffuse Power that is outside one, but also is inside, and that operates by forcing one to comply against one’s will, against one’s interests, because there is no way–not even a retreat to interiority—to escape the pain. What better medium than music to bring into being (as a felicitous performative) the experience of the West’s (the infidel’s) ubiquitous, irresistable [sic] Power?”

There is no argument here, because the author chose not to engage the “moral, ethical, and political debates around torture, interesting though they are,” and no amount of outrage from anyone can make it an argument.  “Interesting”!  Well, that’s strong.  Instead, “taxonomy,” and there is history of the practice, and cultural criticism, and there is autobiography and creative writing.  In a sense it is clever, because the descriptions provoke a kind of outrage, until one realizes that in taking no responsibility for “engaging the political debates around torture” the author has absolved herself of any responsibility to look at the other side—say, the kinds of tortures found in Iraq or Iran, or the rhetoric that is cultural daily bread in such places, or the mass graves.  No, since we’re talking about this kind of torture, we get “the national security state that the US has been since the era of World War II” and move on without whys and wherefores.  I was going to call this “government-issue radicalism” but maybe “anti-government issue radicalism” is better.  Maybe, given the position of the author as NYU professor implying dark things about “elite universities,” “designer radicalism” would also work.

Her article is online, and as I support freedom of speech I encourage the reading of it.  Still—since I’ve been challenged to judge the argument—I find far more posturing (a very adroit, fashionable, polysyllabic posturing) than argument, and by focusing on music and sound only the author allows herself a very convenient, comfortable, and all too common-and-comfy outsider’s position. 

Phil’s passion about the subject, it seems to me, leads him to see something other in this piece than is really there.  My judgment is that if you’re detained and tortured, don’t expect a postmodernist to have your back.

Fluffy puppies

Phil Ford

I've been reading Jonathan's long post from the other day, which he bills as a "dissonant counterpoint"  to this post of mine, and I'm at a loss to figure out where, in those 1074 words, the "counter" part is. "The issue is really torture, which to me is always wrong, period." Then we agree! End of debate. No, wait, there's still 961 words to go, so something must be getting on Jonathan's nerves. And it turns out his argument is simply this: I don't like torture, but I really don't like the kind of people who make a big deal out of torture.

Sorry Jonathan, but this is humbug. You yourself took a stand against double standards when you asked whether Cusick "et al." (meaning what, exactly? other icky new musicologists?) have written statements against "Central American governments that “disappear” people, or the treatment of women under Saddam’s regime (especially those designated for use by his sons)?" Probably not, and maybe that's bad. Torture is torture, whether we do it or whether Uday Hussein does it. Again, we agree.* So, by the same token, protest against torture is the same whether an icky new musicologist does it or when someone more appropriately serious does it, right?

Right. That's exactly what it means. Judge the arguments, not the person making them. The English pacifist Alex Comfort, arguing against George Orwell's insistence on armed resistance to the Nazis, told American readers of Partisan Review that they "may not realize Mr. Orwell's status in this country and take his commentary seriously." Orwell shot back, "A writer isn't judged by his "status," he is judged by his work."**

There's a kind of vulgar sociology that insists that cultural objects have a value or meaning only relative to their use in society -- so if you like to listen to classical music, it's because you're from the ruling capitalist elite, whereas the urban proletariat properly concerns itself only with hiphop. So individual taste and aesthetic response becomes nothing more than an involuntary reflex borne of one's social position, and individuals nothing more than automata running a cultural script. (Although the people making such arguments always seem willing to make an exception for themselves. And their friends.) Jonathan has expressed irritation at this kind of reductive thinking before, and rightly so. But one of the more annoying features of contemporary intellectual life is the metastization of this idea throughout the wider American discourse. In retrospect, David Brooks's Bobos in Paradise was a huge step forward of this idea from Birmingham-school Marxists to everybody who reads the editorial page of the New York Times. And everyone else, too, because this idea is nothing more than the intellectual rationalization of the high-school clique mentality. Like, my god, he's such a tool, I mean, he listens to Coldplay! And did you see his shoes?

But there's an important principle in Jonathan's post -- liberty of conscience -- so I'm not (completely) mocking Jonathan's stance. I have elsewhere described myself as an anarchist with a mortgage -- someone who dislikes and distrusts politics on principle, and suspects that all political leaders are frauds who wrap their own hunger for power in sanctimonious appeals to virtue. Like, I don't want power for myself, you understand, I just want to protect you from The Terrorists. Or, I don't want power for myself, I just want to fight racism/secularism/sexism/liberalism/war/The Man/puppy-kicking/Zen veganism/priapic onanism etc. Give me that power, and I will fight for you. And if you don't want to submit to their power, then of course it can only be because you actually want to kick puppies.*** And academics are not immune from this authoritarian temptation.

In fact, the 1990s presented almost unlimited opportunities for academics to indulge this temptation. I remember one particular academic meeting long ago (not the AMS, but I won't tell you which one) where, during the business meeting, someone moved to have the society rise up with one voice to affirm our approval of fluffy puppies. (Well not really, but it might just as well have been.) "All in favor of fluffy puppies, raise your hand! Votes against? Very well. (solemnly) Let the record show that our support for fluffy puppies was unanimous." I remember burning in anger and shame at raising my hand, like everyone else, not because I secretly hate fluffy puppies, but because it's degrading to be herded into a pen and have your opinion extorted by the collective moral suasion of "the community." (And, like academics generally, I'm really not brave at all, so I didn't just stand up and scream "this is all bullshit!" but instead just obediently raised my hand and hated myself for being such a wuss.) Regardless of whether the opinion is a good one or not, there is something to be said for liberty of conscience -- which includes the right not to give a damn, even if the cause is really, really important.

So I take it back, I don't suggest that the AMS draft a position against torture, because, hey, I don't want to put people through that kind of nonsense.**** I do, however, think that I, and Suzanne Cusick, and every other academic and intellectual, can do something useful by writing about torture, and that it's not just posturing.***** And, on this particular issue, I really don't care whether you listen to Coldplay (although it might be better if you didn't): if you're against torture, we're on the same page.

*Although I wonder whether we really want to measure American standards of human rights against those of Uday Hussein. Surely we could aim a bit higher?

**This from the exchange titled "Pacifism and the War" (in the Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters), to which owe the "objectively pro-fascist" meme we all heard so much of c. 2001-03. 

***I'm reading the epic Bone comix series with my son, and the one we're doing right now -- book 4, The Dragonslayer -- wonderfully illustrates this dynamic.

****It's probably an index of just how pissed off I get about this issue that I went so far as to suggest this.

*****And even if it is, who cares? If someone's being insincere, it's between him and his conscience -- not my problem. And an insincere argument against torture is still better than a sincere argument for it, because, you know, it's still torture we're talking about here. [UPDATE] Looking back at the penultimate line of this post, it looks like I'm arguing that every academic should start writing about torture, but that's not what I meant. My point was that, for those academics who want to do something about torture, there's nothing wrong with writing about it, even if, as a music scholar, that pretty much means you'll just be writing about torture and music -- and that just because you're writing about torture and music it doesn't mean you're a posturing weenie. That is all. 

Music as Torture: A Dissonant Counterpoint

Jonathan Bellman

To raise a major moral issue like the use of music as a torture device (Phil’s August 20 blog “You like crazy drums?”) is on one hand a clarion call; of course this is serious, and why would the American Musicological Society not issue a symbolic statement such as Phil calls for?  Further, to carp about it and to point up inconsistencies in our collective reactions to perhaps related phenomena seems like a wretched legalistic dodge, the sort of fail-safe strategy that gums up the works, under the guise of earnest concern of course, and  ensures that nothing will change.

And yet, and yet.  The issue is really torture, which to me is always wrong, period.  I can’t see that music as torture is more or less wrong than anything else as torture, and I confess that deep down this feels like special pleading—e.g., water resource managers complaining about the use of water for torture, or (more ridiculously) Hello Kitty aficionados complaining that Hello Kitty armbands were to be used by a Thai police department as badges of malfeasance and indiscipline.* Phil quotes Suzanne Cusick in her concern about this aspect of the global war on terror (which she puts in supercilious square-quotes) “that particularly wounds me as a musician—wounds me in that part of my sensibility that remains residually invested in the notion that music is beautiful, even transcendent—is a practice whose contemplation would always lead me to contemplation of bodies and pleasures. Not bodies in pain.”

Far be it from me to get in the way of Suzanne Cusick’s contemplation of bodies and pleasures, but when did we all become passive mid-70s teenagers listening to Tubular Bells?  Not long ago listeners (particularly American listeners) were being openly browbeaten for their stubborn blandness of taste, wanting things to be pretty and nice.  “Americans do not like to have adventures with their ears!” I remember oboist and composer Heinz Holliger saying, and composers have raged for decades that we don’t have the patience or moral fiber for music that challenges us, discomfits us, or makes us think.  Were all the Dies Irae settings in history intended to make people contemplate pleasure, or to seriously disturb them?  The latter, it seems, if more likely; ask those who understand traditional teachings about the afterlife in the Roman Catholic church; if I’m not mistakent, the purpose was to terrify people away from sin, to “scare ‘em straight” as they’d say in gangster films. 

I can’t get over the feeling, moreover, that what sets us off is really not the torture but who is doing it.  You really do not want to get me started on the current administration and the people in it, but issuing high-minded protests on anything they do seems almost reflexive, the intellectual equivalent of shooting carp in a barrel.  Are other kinds of torture better?  We all know that torture has always been used by the thugs of both extreme Left and Right (perhaps someday someone will persuasively explain the difference).  Has Cusick et al. written articles against Central American governments that “disappear” people, or the treatment of women under Saddam’s regime (especially those designated for use by his sons)?  Perhaps she has, I don’t know. 

My enraged reactions to music I found fundamentally offensive—OK, torturously so—like Annea Lockwood’s Burning Piano and the like was always met with arch, ironic smiles, with bromides about people often resisting challenges and the comfort of the familiar.  I guess that torture really is relative, and mine doesn’t register on the meters.  Far be it from me to distance myself from love, pleasure, and transcendence, but can musicologists of all people afford to go on record with an earnest, carefully worded version of Music Should Be Nice?  (For a wickedly funny cautionary tale about what intellectuals look like when they venture out of their comfort zones, click here.)

So music as torture is OK?  Of course not.  The problem is the torture, not the music.

Let’s use a less extreme example.  We have all heard (NO I’m not going to look it up) of cases, over the years, where music was used as punishment in law enforcement.  How different is that from torture?  To me it seems a matter of degree, but surely what constitutes torture itself can be seen that way.  I seem to remember discussions on the AMS list: someone would find an article about how young malefactors would be punished by making them sit and listen to classical music, and we’d be outraged and cluck with disapproval.  There was also a case where the punishment was Barry Manilow was used, and we all cackled with glee: “Well, we don’t exactly approve, but…”  Going further back, I remember reading about a judge who sentenced some youthful criminals to a reading list with required reports—the two examples I remember were André Schwartz-Bart’s The Last of the Just and David Wilkerson’s The Cross and the Switchblade.  There was an apparent justice about that: make the little thugs learn something.  Just to be devil’s advocate, though: what if one or more of the little thug were severely dyslexic, and reading itself was torture?  Music, or for that matter physical pain, might have been preferable. 

As always, it’s a matter of elusive dividing lines: how do we distinguish, I mean really, between the you-like-crazy-drums? sort of musical torture, or even the war-on-terror kind and a stern parental you-sit-your-tail-in-that-chair-you-snotnose-and-listen-to-Beethoven-it’s-good-for-you?  In the latter case, would anyone get up in arms?  The neighbor playing hiphop would likely get more flak.  I am not convinced that there is really a distinction, but I am and have always been deeply suspicious about what we feel ideologically justified in criticizing.  Too often it feels passive, lemming-like, politically correct, and worst of all politically safe and, in a certain sense, protected.  Intellectuals tend to take unadventurous public positions, it seems to me, and they are among the most easily co-opted people on earth.  (Recommended reading: Mark Lilla’s The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics, which I’ve mentioned before.)

I repeat, I’m against torture (a very brave statement for a university professor, I admit).  Given its existence, though, I think I am willing to go on record as preferring the use of music as a torture implement to physical injury or physical or moral degradation.  I’ll leave it to everyone else to draw whatever conclusions are necessary about me.

*Relax, Hello Kitty fans, the idea was abandoned.

You like crazy drums?

Phil Ford

I've been meaning to write about The Big Combo for a while. The Big Combo is a 1954 film noir that's now considered a small classic. But when it was made, few would have thought to consider it as anything other than a cheap, nasty, disposable B-picture for drunks to sleep through at the bottom end of a double-feature. Viewers nowadays are more likely to be struck by its expressionistic high-contrast lighting -- The Big Combo is the apotheosis of film noir's characteristic visual style. The man who did more than anyone to cement that style was John Alton, The Big Combo's cinematographer. (This site has a wonderful collection of Alton's high-contrast noir images.) Alton called it "mystery lighting," and it pervades this scene from The Big Combo, where the henchmen of the big boss, Mr. Brown, have kidnapped the hero, Lt. Diamond, and try some "enhanced interrogation techniques" on him. Mr. Brown shows up, though, and shows these amateurs some real technique, with a radio and a hearing aid:

I showed this film in the course on cold war American music that I did a couple of years ago at the University of Texas. I like to use The Big Combo, not for its musical underscore so much as for its use of diegetic music -- notably its use of Chopin's C sharp minor scherzo as the leitmotif of Alicia, a classical pianist who has fallen into the noir sewer and has become Mr. Brown's gun moll. This particular scherzo is famous for its Jekyll/Hyde dualistic character -- the demonic octave passages in C sharp minor bluntly juxtaposed to angelic chorales (with tinkly cascading figures) in the enharmonic major, D flat -- and its repeated appearance in this film (at a concert, on the phonograph) says something about Alicia's character.

And then, of course, there's the use of merry dance-band jazz as a torture device. Noir excels at this sort of thing: the calculated desecration of an emotion, or, rather, desecration of the conventional icon or sign of that emotion. One classic example of this is the opening image from David Lynch's neo-noir Blue Velvet, where the camera pans across blue sky, white picket fence, red roses -- a great icon of suburban contentment -- and we then see the man watering the roses struck down with a heart attack, with the camera sinking down into the dirt beneath the lawn to reveal the seething insect life beneath. Noir always wants to show us what lies beneath. Its technique is (a) to show us something that is not only cheery or wholesome but that also registers on our nervous system as an emblem or sign of cheeriness, and (b) to place that thing in a situation where its emotion is emptied out and what is left is the husk of the sign: the conventional sign is revealed as just that, a convention, a dead letter, the empty mask of a vanished emotion that mocks our sentimentality. You like crazy drums, Lieutenant? Have a good time. Noir makes the sinister out of the sweet, and tells us it was always sinister—only now you see it.

I was thinking about this when I read Suzanne Cusick's recent article on music as an implement of torture. Writes Cusick:

As press reports conflating music’s use on the battlefield with its use in interrogations proliferated, I began desultory research on a phenomenon of the current “global war on terror” that particularly wounds me as a musician -- wounds me in that part of my sensibility that remains residually invested in the notion that music is beautiful, even transcendent -- is a practice whose contemplation would always lead me to contemplation of bodies and pleasures. Not bodies in pain.

But that's the point, isn't it? If music is what lets us feel and express love, then let it serve hate; if it soothes our sore bodies and nerves, then let it hurt; if it lets us feel the humanity of our fellow creatures, and lets us experience our own humanity, then let it dehumanize, brutalize, and degrade. And -- this is the important part, the part that the apologists for torture affect not to understand -- this is a lesson that the state wishes all of us to learn, not only those it tortures. Torture is a pedagogical principle: it teaches us that what we thought was beautiful, or transcendent, or sacred, is in fact as foul as anything else. One of Charles Manson's "family" told John Gilmore that Manson had planned to kill celebrities like Frank Sinatra and Liz Taylor because "that's how you put the fear into people—you butcher what they dream of being. These are all the gilded replicas of fame and happiness, and when you smash them you can go right into the heart of the dark." And this was a philosophy Manson learned in prison: "like a dog that's been whipped and chained and learned only the whip and the chain, there wasn't even a yearning to be free. There was only the whip and the chain."* The state that tortures wants to bring its people to this same condition; like Manson, it wants to teach us that there is nothing but the whip and the chain. If there is no transcendence, in music or anything else, there is nothing left to hope for, nothing to aspire to beyond the whip and the chain, and then whip and chain will become our aspiration; we will have learned our civic lesson, and we, too, will bend to the will of the torturers.

This is why it matters when music becomes an instrument of torture. When the Society of Ethnomusicology published a statement against torture, the response in the right-wing commentariat was, predictably, dismissive: who cares that we made some guy listen to rap against his will? My upstairs neighbor does that to me every day! And: who cares what a bunch of ethnomusicologists think? Even if you oppose torture, you might think that music, compared to waterboarding and cold cells, is a minor concern. But I don't think it is. This is why I respectfully suggest that my own scholarly association, the American Musicological Society, draft its own statement against torture. Granted, this would be a symbolic gesture, but what I've been arguing here is that torture itself is in part a symbolic gesture. If the torturers want to put the fear into us by smashing our icons, we can only resist by insisting that what we love is not yet theirs to destroy. [UPDATE: I changed my mind about this -- see my follow-up post here.]

*These quotes are from Laid Bare, John Gilmore's memoir of Hollywood low life.