PSYKICK DANCEHALL & JON MARSHALL THINKING OURSELVES INTO EXISTENCE
a conversation about music between
Hannah Ellul & Ben Knight (Psykick Dancehall)
and Jon Marshall (Singing Knives)
Thinking Ourselves into Existence is the third in a series of four projects in CCA’s Vanguard initiative. Vanguard is a curatorial development programme that aims to support early career curators to realise ambitious programming within Scotland.
By way of introduction, we should explain how we got here. Psykick Dancehall began with a particular interest in underground experimental music. As inadequate as this phrase is as a means of referring to recordings and performances that span so many different approaches, we have settled upon it as the most pragmatic option. It hints at what preoccupies us. 1 To clarify, there are certain characteristics which reoccur in the musics we take as our object. They are, usually, largely improvised, and embrace awkwardness, dissonance and atonality. We began a journal, D A N C E H A L L, as an attempt to understand the discourses that inflect these activities, and the implications of this kind of improvisation as a collaboratively-articulated mode of action, a communicative act that emerges from flaws, clashes, misunderstandings and constraints.
V
C H R I S TOPHER SMALL, MUSICKING
3
During a Creative Lab residency at the CCA in October 2011, we began to pursue this train of thought in discussion with Jon Marshall, Sheffield-based musician and founder of the Singing Knives record label. 2 We wanted to share our experiences of this precarious, improvised music. We felt - we still do feel - obliged to make certain claims for it. But we also wanted to hold the claims we were making up to scrutiny. And it gave us the opportunity to interrogate what other assumptions may be implicit in our actions when we play as musicians, arrange gigs, or release and distribute recordings. In other words, we wanted to explore the wider networks of the music we are involved with and the relationships and events that sustain it. We are using the Vanguard space to document the conversation which ensued. Like the music we are interested in, we wanted our conversations to emerge as attempts to communicate with inconsistencies and clashes on display. A precarious process of learning in public, bringing together recordings, conversations, diagrams, questions and polemics in a space to be explored collectively. In this way, the space becomes a microcosm of a musical community and the activities that bind it. It begs another question: can improvised experimental music provide a model for forms of collaboration in other contexts?
We are interested in the idea of a kind of collaboration or collective action which does not require unanimity, which does not attempt to reconcile fractures but proceeds from fracture - where incompletion is an impetus for proliferation. We have to reappraise what collaboration might mean, reflect upon the networks of production in that we operate within, and how all this might inform a contemporary understanding of the kind of politics which inheres in music. What follows are some observations that have emerged from this project, jointly authored by us and Marshall. Psykick Dancehall
5
The close collaboration of musicians, negotiating a shared auditory space and being mutually satisfied with the process and result, can often veil divergent understandings and conflicting political opinions. Similarly, two people with a close, shared understanding and agreement on most socio-political issues can have such contrasting musical predilections as to make mutually satisfying collaboration in this medium highly unlikely. This is because - as Adorno asserted - despite being similar in many regards, music is not language.3 Yet meanings can be articulated from music. If we are to make claims for the political agency of music then we need to assess the processes by which these meanings are produced. Anyone who organises experimental/improvised music gigs and makes efforts to pull in listeners from outside the ‘engaged community’ will often be asked by bewildered audience members what the music means and what the criteria are for assessing it. Whatever prompts these questions, they are valid, interesting and too rarely addressed by ‘insiders’. Clearly, music has many very positive functions that are not particularly cerebral (e.g. to uplift, to console, to motivate) and collective understandings can be generated without verbal articulation. But as Barthes warned, we should be aware of the “imaginary” in music which constitutes ‘the subject hear-
ing it”.4 This request from ‘outsiders’ for help in ascertaining the meaning of an improvised music performance is a reminder of its particular inscrutability as a form of signification. Despite the importance of a search for meaning, for implications, it might also be taken as a reminder of the persistence of receiving music as a self-contained entity. The musicologist Christopher Small was so convinced that the reification of music as a commodifiable form was restricting not just our understanding of music, but preventing ‘listeners’ from gaining an awareness of how musical activity can ideologically serve elite classes and capitalism, that he reinvented music as a verb. Musicking, Small argued, is to take part, in any way, in a musical performance, whether by performing, listening, dancing, etc. The radical value in putting the community and social occasion back into the musical picture is that it creates a perspective that reveals a lot more about the social relationships involved than the abstract noun ‘music’ (a word, significantly, absent amongst many pre-industrial societies). This persistence amongst audiences of looking for significance within the music itself runs contrary to the academic poststructuralist shift in musicology away from such for-
7
Mark Fisher, ‘How the world got turned the right way up again’, K-Punk
malism.Some musicologists have expressed annoyance at attacks on the legacy of formal musicological theory. Kofi Agawu, for example, has argued that “[although] the meanings of a motivic parallelism, …or a modulation to a tritone-related key are not always discussed in affective or expressive terms, …this does not mean that the economy of relations from which they stem is pure, or based solely on abstract, logical relations, or lacking semantic or affective residue”. Yet, despite his belief that technical knowledge is critical to analyses of musical meaning, Agawu sees clearly that, in music, “meanings are contingent”. 5 This is significant for those seeking to assess the ways in which meanings are drawn from music. The vast majority of contingencies will vary between all individuals, be they performer or listener. The infinitely varied sets of historical, psychological, physical, musicological factors, understandings and dispositions ensure that no two participants will ever interpret even the same performance from identical positions. But this does not necessarily imply a pluralist depoliticisation. As Agawu has argued, questions regarding possible definitions, purposes and meanings of musical performance, and the discourses these questions generate, “are not
Play KNOWLEDGE AND INTERESTS by SCRITTI POLITTI
Even in its malformed messiness, even with all its sound-potholes and indecisions, there is an icy lucidity to Scritti‘s music at this time. The time being 1978. It is a laser cut through the end of history haze. Unlike The Pop Group, there is nothing Dionysiac about Scritti. In fact, they were possibly the least Dionysiac pop group ever. The methodology then was improvisational, but the group didn’t want anyone (least of all themselves) to be under the illusion that it issued from some vitalist wellspring of creativity. It was the sound of a collectivity thinking (itself into existence) under and through material constraints. Talking to Simon Reynolds five years ago, Green said: It’s a kind of scratching, collapsing, irritated, dissatisfied music. I was listening to some music the other night, on 6 FM or whatever it’s called, BBC 6, their alternative rock station, and I was struck by all the bands: there was no trepidation. I had no sense that the bands were ever playing with anything that they were slightly frightened of - in themselves or in the music. No sense that they were going anywhere where they weren’t sure where they would end up.
meant to be answered definitively nor with a commanding transhistorical attribution”. Rather these questions should be posed periodically and contextually “to keep us alert and honest”, with the only “authority for any interpretation rest[ing] on present understanding”. 6 • We have talked about thinking of improvised performances as communicative acts, but with flaws, clashes and misunderstandings inherent and evident. To think this way is to value precariousness and dissonance, the possibility of failure. Failure in this sense is related to the notion that a performance or recording can somehow have a quality of being ‘unfinished’ - and yet it is exactly because of this that it opens up questions rather than foreclosing them.7 There’s a sense, too, of the refusal to give anything to the listener without a struggle/to hand anything over too easily. Something approaching failure as a question of political strategy, what Timothy Bewes has called the refusal of “the symbolic transfiguration of immediacy into transcendence”, as a means of preserving “the possibility of something other than what exists”, for example.8
9
The question to ask now is: how is this doubt beat, this negative capability, different from blank postmodern scepticism, from the end of history’s circulation of infinitely revisable opinion? Because it is a matter of questing as much as questioning Of exploring a new space A space that is under construction A space that is a gap in the world A puncture wound, described by Alenka Zupancic: “Sublimation is thus related to ethics insofar as it is not entirely subordinated to the reality principle, but liberates or creates a space from which it is possible to attribute certain values to something other than the recognized and established “common good.” ... What is at stake is not the act of replacing one “good” (or one value) with the same planetary system of the reality principle. The creative act of sublimation is not only a creation of some new good, but also (and principally) the creation and maintenance of a certain space for objects that have no place in the given, extant reality, objects that are considered ‘impossible’.” What was the ‘beyond good and evil’ of Scritti, the Pop Group and the Raincoats if not the production of just such a space?
Precariousness and dissonance both loom large in a more prosaic understanding of how collaboration must inevitably emerge, through the problems encountered in the effort to communicate. They also enable us to conceive of forms which are both open and productive, a spur to new action driven by the desire to reclaim the possibility of change from a deathless cycle of tautologous reinventions. Jacques Rancière, writing about equality, has described it as “not a goal to be attained but a point of departure, a supposition to be maintained in all circumstances.” As such, it is “the power of inconsistent, disintegrative and ever replayed division”. 9 It is that disruptive potential, this antagonism which is provoked in this music, that puncture wound that Fisher discerns in the scratching, collapsing, irritated, dissatisfied take on pop by Scritti Politti and the Pop Group. That is, “the creation and maintenance of a certain space for objects that have no place in the given, extant reality, objects that are considered ‘impossible’.” The renegotiation of parameters. It calls to mind Adam Kotsko’s words about the ‘awkward improvisation’ of social encounters. This idea of ‘awkward improvisation’ throws into relief Christopher Small’s notion of musicking, where “the relationships articulated by a musical performance are not so much those that actually exist as they are the relationships
A DAM KOTSKO, AWKWARDNESS
that those taking part desire to exist”.10 An awkward musicking would be an interaction characterised by a certain dislocation or precariousness - a musical object with all its flaws and mistakes made in public. 11 “Nothing more or less than human”, interactions can also be disappointing, boring, underwhelming, antagonistic towards, or just different from the relationships that we desire to exist. This is the potential for dissonance, or an incompatibility that cannot be consistently pinned down to a particular sound. It makes for a musical object that is searching and incomplete, where dissonance manifests itself in assemblages of sounds, musicians, ways of listening, environments and audiences. Erving Goffman, writing about the linguistic and paralinguistic elements that maintain normal social relations, reminds us that “we must be prepared to see that the impression of reality fostered by a performance is a delicate, fragile thing that can be shattered by very minor mishaps”. 12 An awkward musicking opens up a space of contention within the acceptable. It can be explored sonically, and it can be explored in terms of the relationships that constitute it. So what are they, and what spaces do they exist within?
11
And then, to raise another question which appeared early on in our conversations, is experimental/improvised music able to provide a coherent example of how we might incorporate or exploit the tension between two basically contradictory tendencies commitment to individual autonomy and collective action? If we frame our musical objects as complicated networks of interactions, any ‘commitment to individual autonomy’ becomes complicated, because any performance (playing, listening, not listening, refusing dialogue) is caught up in a tangle of dependencies and connections. It’s a daunting question that cannot be answered definitively, but what we have arrived at is an idea of the musical object (in the widest possible sense) as an evolving assemblage of actions that are constantly up for negotiation. Remembering that ‘to music’ is a verb is remembering that it encompasses meaningful activities across a bigger environment than is sometimes supposed, and animates them as tangible relationships. What you end up with is an unavoidable tension where collectivity cannot really be refuted. But can this form of collectivity be more than an aesthetic, affinity-based articulation of Foucault’s ‘personal insurrection’: arguably an activity premised on ambiguous
critiques of power, and polymorphous and passive agitations for social change that barely venture beyond the imaginary? • Definitive notions of dissonance, and its counterpart, consonance, are problematic. They are terms which have been, and persist in being, variously defined and which continue to serve a multitude of aesthetic and functional purposes. Highly relative and subjective formations have varied not only geographically but within particular cultures through time. It is sufficient here to remark that the many tuning systems “contradict the Western notion that tuning is a natural process... based on the overtone seriesâ€?13 There have been attempts to transcend these problems by distinguishing consonance and dissonance as musical functions rather than a static and inherent property of pitch intervals, although these too have been subject to controversy. 14 These concerns deal with dissonance in relation to pitch. Given the lack of agreement on fixed definitions of consonance and dissonance based on mathematics, acoustics, physiology of hearing and psychoacoustics it seems
13
Edwin Prévost, from ‘Free Improvisation in Music and Capitalism: Resisting Authority and the Cults of Scientism and Celebrity’, Noise and Capitalism
reasonable to consider these concepts, essentially, value-based. Of course, dissonance in music could equally relate to other qualities such as formulations and conceptions related to time, timbre and performative gesture. However, these seem, if anything, even more unlikely to generate points of agreement. In many forms of music the tension between what is considered harsh, or unstable, and what is considered harmonious, or stable, have underpinned compositional form. However, this tension is also utilised more broadly by musical genres or collective movements. Writing in Noise and Capitalism, Anthony Iles wrote about how ‘noise’ currently operates as a ‘non-genre’ by “encompass[ing] that which locates itself self-reflexively at the limit of what can be accepted as music or as musical performance”. 15 In this sense it is a negatively generated aesthetic which is reliant upon cultural notions of dissonance (in the broader senses of the word) and this elusive and mutable property is integral to its identity. It has been suggested that precariousness and dissonance are key characteristics of the experimental/improvised music supported by Psykick Dancehall and Singing Knives. But this is only a necessary defining characteristic in the sense that any collectively
...For years I have thought that some of the exceptionally discordant sounds and general dislocation of expectation would have resisted marketing. Whereas for myself and numerous others it is this otherness in the sonic world that we find attractive, I am familiar with responses to experimental and the freely improvised musics where listeners do not comprehend these things as music at all! What seems to have happened is that in certain contexts, and for a section of the audience, discord and dislocation have become tolerable experiences. Maybe this is what Cardew was referring to when during the 1960s and 70s he observed the bejeweled bourgeois clientele at, for example, the Venice Biennale or those who attended Merce Cunningham Dance Company performances. They listened attentively and politely applauded the music of John Cage et al. ‘The bourgeoisie have learnt to take their medicine’ he said. What does the avant-garde have to do to shock now? Well, nothing. As Chris Cutler suggests with convincing illumination – the avant-garde is dead. Many audiences have learned to applaud politely at almost any occasion, just as long as they have been persuaded that their acquiescence serves some fashionable cause and there is always the after concert drink and dinner to look forward to.
improvised music, in which the interactive use of space is openly negotiated, must, by consequence, be precarious. Dissonance in this music is similarly consequential. It is the highly likely, rather than prescriptively necessary, outcome of collective free improvisation. David Borgo has written about how he envisions free improvisation as “a forum in which to explore various cooperative and conflicting interactive strategies rather than as a traditional ‘artistic form’,” something which “emphasizes process over product creativity, an engendered sense of freedom and discovery, the dialogical nature of real-time interaction, the sensual aspects of performance over abstract intellectual concerns, and a participatory aesthetic over passive reception”. 16 Clearly there are very real dangers in using micro-sociocultural processes as analogy for broader political concerns, and even greater dangers in proposing a clear homology. However, even at the microsocietal level there are worthwhile discussions to be had. In social psychology, cognitive dissonance theory proposes that when parties hold two contradictory cognitions the dissonance that is created generates a negative drive state which motivates parties to restore cognitive consistency by changing behaviour.
15
The theory proposes that this attempt to avoid or reduce inconsistency occurs “even if this reduces the potential for utility maximization”. 17 If valid and applicable to the production of music, this would suggest that the tendency towards resolution of dissonance seen in traditional European classical music should be frequently seen in other musics. Thankfully, modes of creative expression do not generally manifest so uniformly. In a recent talk at Nottingham Contemporary, David Bell talked about the problems of a ‘consonant utopia’. He reminded us that “problems of political organisation cannot be resolved once and for all, and attempts to do so require unacceptable levels of hierarchical control”. He argued that a “consonant utopia becomes a totalitarian dystopia; the happy harmonies of cherubic youths morph into muzak, a sound both mind-numbingly boring and disturbingly authoritarian”. Bell also reminded us of the etymology of utopia - “the word comes from the Greek: ‘eu’ (good), ‘ou’ (no) and ‘topos’ (place): ‘the good place that is no place’’. In a ‘consonant utopia’, Bell argues, “the ‘ou’ has been forgotten and utopia becomes the morally good place in which life conforms to universal principles and from which no further improvement can be imagined. Dissonance has been expunged”. 18 A lot of the use of dissonance in composition in both classical and popular music could be considered an attempt to simulate a tension followed by a resolution. In both realms this tension is generally more often of the emotive rather than explicitly political nature. However, in both explicit and implicated interpretations, the inevitability of this resolution is undeniably pre-meditated. At the risk of drawing tenuous analogies, the political equivalent of such ‘permitted dissonance’ and ‘inevitable resolution’ would be the equivalent of a PR-motivated New Labour/Coalition public consultation: a strategy intended to demonstrate that the opinions of the electorate were valued with, ultimately, no intention of deviating from the pre-planned course. In contrast, as Bell argues, the space of musical improvisation resembles the forms of political organisation which have driven many global movements in the last fifty years in the way that “without aiming for a predetermined goal [it] retains a fidelity to the etymology of utopia”: a perpetual negotiation of shared space in which there will be disagreements and misunderstandings, as well as the possibility of brief moments of harmony, but, ultimately, an awareness that utopia “cannot be
a settled, harmonic state. Rather, it is always constituted by instability; caught like the space between two dissonant notes; unresolved, expectant, open to the future”. 19 • So how do you maintain a “space for [musical] objects that have no place in the given, extant reality, objects that are considered ‘impossible’’? What are the conditions that surround listening & playing, and the production of meanings (in all their manifest forms)? To put it another way, who produces meaning in DIY music? And can these networks of practices (making music, listening, criticism, conversation, trading/buying music etc...) create a strong collective critical space? We began our collective enquiry with Pierre Bourdieu’s The Fields of Cultural Production, so we could start with what concerns Bourdieu most - the wider fields of cultural production that condition the work of art. Bourdieu’s understanding of the field of artistic production is blunt: an inevitable circular logic where artistic practices of provocation or rupture only ever redistribute the surface effects of the hierarchy without upsetting the basic principles on which it is based. Basically, rupture is only symbolic, or an aesthetic face lift for the normative power relations of capital. The moments of crisis or possibility in Bourdieu, are always already circumscribed within the dominant logic of capitalism, where ...the dual reality of the ambivalent painter-dealer or writer-publisher relationship is most clearly revealed in moments of crisis, when the object ive reality of each of the positions and their relationship is unveiled and the values which do the veiling are affirmed.20 Here, art is permanently inscribed within the hierarchies of the status quo - artistic practice cannot escape the social relations and histories that it is itself a product of and which it tries to reflect. So to some extent we must veil this knowledge in order to carry on. This is the secret that (radical) cultural practice lives by: “art cannot reveal the truth about art without snatching it away again by turning the revelation into an artistic event”.21 Crisis provokes ambivalent spaces where a struggle for representation 17
The art business, a trade in things that have no price, belongs to the class of practices in which the logic of the pre- capitalist economy lives on... These practices, functioning as practical negations, can only work by pretending not to be doing what they are doing. Defying ordinary logic, they lend themselves to two opposed readings, both equally false, which each undo their essential duality and duplicity by reducing them either to the disavowal or to what is disavowed – to disinterestedness or self-interest. The challenge which economies based on disavowal of the ‘economic’ present to all forms of economism lies precisely in the fact that they function, and can function, in practice and not merely in the agents’ representations - only by virtue of a constant, collective repression of narrowly ‘economic’ interest and of the real nature of the practices revealed by ‘economic’ analysis.
can occur, but there is only the faintest glimmer of hope that they will escape the deterministic cycles described by Bourdieu. If we are understand DIY music production as musicking, then we can begin to see that there is something important to the production of meaning within every part of the network that surrounds a musical performance. This awareness is the first step in an approach that creates a more fluid relationship between the micro and the macro, opening up pockets of possibility for a multifarious musical practice. And yet, questions persist. Does experimental music make do in the face of apparently unassailable social and cultural realities by taking refuge in its own insular communities? The desire to cultivate communitites apart is an understandable one in the face of general indifference. But does that mean that experimental music is defined by its insularity? Would our attempts to parse these practices as in some way emancipatory in fact be to deny what is transparently a state of political inertia? Would it be mere self-justification, leaving our operations, tastes and affinities in tact? A quote from Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: What we are dealing with now is not the incorporation of materials that previously seemed to possess subversive potentials, but instead, their precorporation: the pre-emptive formatting and shaping of desires, aspirations and hopes by capitalist culture. Witness, for instance, the establishment of settled ‘alternative’ or ‘independent’ cultural zones, which endlessly
Pierre Bourdieu, The Production of Belief
repeat older gestures of rebellion and contestation as if for the first time. 22 If there really is no alternative, do we simply put up with making-do with our mutually beneficial communities of the like-minded? It seems both rational and practical to explore what is under-regarded in the spaces and times that are currently available to us, creating a thriving community of exchange that is ineffectual outside its own social and cultural microcosm. An antipathy to professionalism emerges as an inadequate and semi-coherent attempt to reject the strictures of capitalism. How do we negotiate this without re-inscribing our activities somewhere between the two poles of amateur and professional or hobby and work? An insular form of communication that offers a persuasive self-justification for what we are already doing: there is a surely an identifiable sense of resistance here, but what are its horizons? What are we participating in? How can these relations be manifested in a wider experience of the world? How do we avoid the cul de sac of ‘personal insurrection’, whose antagonism is confined to a perpetual tussle over aesthetic affiliations and identities? This is about public space, how we put it to use and what kind of relations can be heard and seen in the musical networks we create. It’s important to stress that the production of meaning in common lies in building enduring creative and critical spaces where practices of engaged self-organisation (promoting gigs, discussion, exhibition, conversation, shared resources, publishing) can create open and renegotiable models for education, thought, and performance. Which returns us to the question of who produces meaning in DIY music. In his recent book Infinite Music, Adam Harper is right to argue that listeners, alongside musicians, must “identify and overcome their images of music... if they want to
19
experience music as new”. Harper acknowledges that a preference for the new ‘is itself a certain image of music, but the need to keep our imaginations working and constantly adapting... is vital to our well-being and improvement as individuals, as societies and as cultures”. 23 The danger is that we are too passive in our reliance on established arbiters of taste. Whilst, as Harper argues, the best journalist (and to this I would add musical curators of all category) can expand rather than “(re)enforce” aesthetic images held by readers or attendees, this is too rarely the case. If music is to produce “commonly held” meanings with radical political implications we must not only insist that musical virtuosity is venerated only when it imaginatively and generatively expands the limits of the possible but that hierarchical notions of journalism and curatorship are indulged only when they have similar aspirations. If we are to produce meanings in common from musical performance, we must be aware that “because of music’s transparency as a form of signification, it offers little resistance to discursive invasion and universalizing ideology”. 24 We would also do well to take Agawu’s advice, and conceive of analysis as a mode of performance, or as a mode of composing, not as an unveiling of resident truths, not as an exercise in decoding... not as a summary narrative that is produced after the doing [but] as a means to an unspecified end, a flexibly conceived end that may range from making relatively trivial observations about style and history to the less trivial pleasure of inhabiting the composition’s space for prolongedperiods and engaging in diverse ways with its elements. 25 And if Agawu suggests that analysis is a mode of performance, Small understands musicking to be performing analysis: Properly understood, all art is action - performance art, if you like - and its meaning lies not in created objects but in acts of creating, displaying and perceiving... In those activities we call the arts, we think with our bodies.26
NOTES 1 A tortuous grappling with labels has, to a certain extent, plagued this conversation. It’s a fine balancing act: to avoid the trap of misrepresenting the nature of certain activities, or over-simplifying the picture in a journalistic attempt at expediency; whilst at the same time confronting the irrefutable evidence that some pinning down is necessary, some naming, if the object of our discussion is to be meaningfully defined as more than just the collective efforts of a group of people known to us - some nebulous notion of a scene, that is. During our Creative Lab residency, an attempt was made at avoiding these difficulties by elaborating a collective picture of the musics we are taking as our object. We invited people to give us their suggestions for recordings or performances, in an attempt to present a collaborative definition of the unsatisfying term “experimental music”. These have been compiled and made available to listen to in the resource space. 2 The residency initiated an ongoing project that charts people’s responses to sounds, performances and recordings, provoked by specific questions. So far we have had responses to music as diverse as Jazzfinger, Nurse With Wound, Plum Slate, Terry Riley and Beethoven. The questions posed had no obvious direct link with music, with the intention of provoking a response that considered music in different contexts, making it echo in other rooms. A full list of questions can be found here: http://www.psykickdancehallrecordings.com/putthemusicinitscoffin/?p=36 3 Theodor Adorno, ‘Music, Language, and Composition’, Musical Quarterly vol. 77, no. 3 (1993); see p.23, this pamphlet. 4 “There is an imaginary in music whose function is to reassure, to constitute the subject hearing it... and this imaginary immediately comes to language via the adjective [the poorest of linguistic categories ...] The musical adjective becomes legal whenever an ethos of music is postulated, each time, that is, that music is attributed a regular—natural or magical—mode of signification.” Roland Barthes, ‘The Grain of the Voice’, Image Music Text (1977) 5 Victor Kofi Agawu, Music as discourse: semiotic adventures in romantic music (2008) 6 Victor Kofi Agawu, Music as discourse: semiotic adventures in romantic music 7 This idea draws on Timothy Bewes’s writings in Reification, or the Anxiety of Late Capitalism (2002) - see, for example, p. 127. 8 Timothy Bewes, Reification, or the Anxiety of Late Capitalism 9 Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (1991) 10 Christopher Small, Musicking (1998) 11 Adam Harper, in his critique of ‘blank-slate’ free-improvisation (Rouge’s Foam, http://rougesfoam.blogspot. com/2010_03_01_archive.html), argues that for the “ritual of musicking to really mean something, there has to be a certain level of stylistic stability”. Does this exists in the music we make - and if it does, can it be articulated/ prescribed? Perhaps this process of re-negotiation is paradoxically its point of stability. Can its precariousness be its strength? 12 Erving Goffman, The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life (1990)
21
13 Terry E. Miller, ‘Southeast Asian Musics: An Overview’, Garland Encyclopedia of World Music vol. 4: Southeast Asia (1998). A comprehensive pan-global survey of the countless creative uses of harmonic interval, and timbral and tonal colour, would be impossible. In European classical music in the early 20th century the ‘emancipation of the dissonance”’was famously used as a “means of liberation for bourgeois music from an established, irrational system” (Adorno). Schoenberg, the composer who coined this phrase, famously articulated a narrative which proposed his twelve-tone serialism as the logical conclusion of a general trend within European classical music. This perceived trend was the progressive incorporation into music convention of increasingly higher intervals on the harmonic series, it widely being held that in the European Middle Ages only the octave and perfect fifth were considered consonant harmonically. However, ignoring the problems of such monolithic conceptions of history and singular conclusions for a moment, European classical music’s reliance on the harmonic series (whose vibration frequencies are multiples of the original tone) is itself fundamentally compromised since twelve-tone equal temperament produces pitches which are out of tune with many of the harmonics. 14 As Cazden has argued, the contradictions caused by static conceptions of dissonance are exemplified by the “unconvincing attempts by theorists to... explain away the undeniable sensuous beauty of numerous usages in twentieth century styles which the older music theory would exclude as horrendously dissonant” [Norman Cazden, ‘The Definition of Consonance and Dissonance’, International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, vol. 11, no. 2 (1980)]. However, the ‘functional’ approach faces similar problems. As Kolinski has written, “it contends that an interval or chord is dissonant or consonant according to whether or not it requires a resolution. The rules for functional appreciation of consonance and dissonance have been established within the framework of traditional harmony, but even there the same interval or chord, depending on its harmonic function, may or may not require a resolution and, therefore, be dissonant in one context and consonant in another one. Even the perfect consonance of a fifth might become a pronounced ‘functional’ dissonance” [Mieczyslaw Kolinski, ‘Consonance and Dissonance’, Ethnomusicology, vol. 6, no. 2 (1962)]. Putting aside the broader relativist notions of consonance and dissonance, let us look at ‘functional rules’ within traditional European classical harmony and counterpoint. Prior to the ‘crisis of tonality’, and the proliferation of early twentieth century European classical music without a tonal centre, these rules “generally prescribed that dissonances be resolved, and further that they be resolved wherever possible to imperfect consonances” (Cazden). Of course, any prescriptive system is going to be contested and one example of this is that posed by the Florentine Camerata group. At the end of the sixteenth century, this group challenged the emphasis on harmony and counterpoint in European classical music, which they saw as undermining the social agency of music. At this time debates ran through Europe as to the conventions, and indeed purposes of music. Examples from twentieth century countercultural forms of music are often used to illustrate the debate about the processes by which antagonistic impulses are co-opted by dominant cultures. However, an earlier example is provided by the synthesis of revolutionary conceptions of dissonance into conventional practice and existing terminology in French Baroque improvisational practice. Through the concept of la supposition, perceived dissonances were tolerated on the basis that, “because of the speed of resulting passages, the ear was not thought to be offended by chance dissonances that might arise” [Albert Cohen, ‘‘La Supposition’ and the Changing Concept of Dissonance in Baroque Theory’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, vol. 24, no. 1 (1971)]. 15 Anthony Iles, ‘Introduction’, Noise and Capitalism. (2009) 16 David Borgo, ‘Negotiating Freedom: Values and Practices in Contemporary Improvised Music’ Black Music Research Journal, vol. 22, no. 2 (2002) 17 Bacharach/Bamberger/Sonnenstuhl 18 David Bell, ‘What is this that stands before me? A journey through dissonance and utopia’, talk given at Nottingham Contemporary, 8 December 2011 19 David Bell, ‘What is this that stands before me? A journey through dissonance and utopia’ 20 Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The Production of Belief: Contribution to an Economy of Symbolic Goods’, The Field of Cultural Production (1993) 21 Pierre Bourdieu ‘The Production of Belief: Contribution to an Economy of Symbolic Goods’ 22 Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism (2009) 23 Adam Harper, Infinite Music (2011) 24 Georgina Born, Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde (1995) 25 Victor Kofi Agawu, Music as discourse: semiotic adventures in romantic music 26 Christopher Small, Musicking
V
adorno, M U S I C , l angu age, a n d co mpo si tio n
23