Minded to Landscape, To Sound: George Bejamin's 'A Mind of Winter'

George Benjamin, Ringed by the Flat Horizon/A Mind of Winter/At First Light/Panorama/Antara BBC Symphony Orchestra, London Sinfonietta, Mark Elder, George Benjamin, etc. Nimbus Records, 2006.

Benjamins' ear for colour was clearly a legacy of his mentor Messiaen, and it is this which distinguishes the 20-minute 'Ringed by the Flat Horizon'. Thundering percussion and low brass (in itself something of a modernist staple) alternates with almost concerto-like passages for a more cello, writing that is more concerned with linear melodicism than with the sound groupings of the orchestral clamour (however delicately and painstakingly the details of these are sketched out - for Bejamin's work is anything but messy, unsurprising given the extreme care he takes in composing, spending years on fairly short pieces). The ten-minute setting of Wallace Stevens' 'A Mind of Winter' works with a more stripped-down sound palette, the melismatic and stretched/held notes of the soprano soloist bending Wallace Stevens' words into even extra resonance. By the time of that superb final line - "nothing that is not there and the nothing that is" - it seems not so much that the work is concluding or stopping, but that it is emptying itself out into silence - an emotional, as well formal necessity. The emotional scope and intensity packed into such a short space of time is nothing short of remarkable. 'At First Light', in three movements, juxtaposes the sort of orchestral drama and dynamic one might expect from 'Ringed by the Flat Horizon' - often dark and almost neurotically powerful - with some unexpected melodic strains that could have come straight out of Messiaen (or from somewhere between Messiaen and Debussy). A case in point is the utterly surprising end of the final movement, the final thirty seconds occupied with a woodwind melody that almost dances, a conclusion of surprising and wonderfully affirmative (yet understated) optimism which remains true to the spirit of the rest of the piece even if it seems a radical departure from it. Following is the more playful miniature 'Panorama', an offshoot of the piece it proceeds on the disc, 'Antara', showcasing the synthesized pan pipe sounds which remain Benjamin's only use of electronics. Using much more silence than is normal for Benjamin, the slightly jarring overlaps between notes could be said to be a drawback, resulting from the limitations of the technology of the time (nowadays, computers could create a much smoother effect), but arguably this limitation becomes a vital part of the piece's aesthetic, creating a tension between the desire for extremely long, held notes, or the smoothness seemingly demanded by the opening melody (which sounds almsot folky), and this near-glitchy, discontinuous electronic insistence. It's like a particularly violent enjambment in a poem, cutting across what seems to be the obvious sense and/or sonic pattern, though the piece sounds far less of emotional extrimities than some of the others might. 'Antara' itself manages the breathy pan-synths within the orchestral setting (often by means of merging them with the similarly-toned flute). High held notes over dark rumblings, sonic lava erupting inexorably through tympani roar, crescendos and subsidences maintaining a constant tension. The piece, these works taken together, are a human body engaged and strained to the fullest, a landscape whose smears are clarity, the brutal jewel of snow.

A Power Stronger Than Itself

This review of George E. Lewis' book A Power Than Stronger Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music first appeared in Issue 2 of eartrip magazine. To access the full magazine, go to http://eartripmagazine. blogspot.com. To order the book from The University of Chicago Press, go to http://www.press.uchicago.edu/presssite/ metadata.epl?mode=synopsis&bookkey=236682.



The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians is an organisation of some importance: even its detractors must acknowledge the validity of that statement. Over the years, its ranks have included Muhal Richard Abrams, Anthony Braxton, Roscoe Mitchell, Joseph Jarman, Famoudou Don Moye, Lester Bowie, Amina Claudine Myers, Fred Anderson, Leroy Jenkins, John Stubblefield, Pete Cosey, Wadada Leo Smith, Henry Threadgill – and those are just some of the best-known. Yet, despite documentation and coverage in recordings, journalistic and scholarly articles, and references in academic books, ‘A Power Stronger than Itself’ is the first full-length study of its kind, written by an AACM member who also happens to be a fine academic writer, and who has meticulously researched both the specific and wider contexts of the AACM’s genesis, from the background of economic depression in 1930s Chicago to the present day situation.

‘A Power Stronger than Itself’ is much than just a historical curiosity; in fact, I’d argue that it is one of the most important books about jazz ever written, and is worthy of the attention of anyone who claims to be serious about the music. Lewis is an academic who actually says something through the complexity of his discourse, and is not a vacuous or pretentious name-dropper (his relation of Theodor Adorno and Jacques Attali to what he's talking about is very much to the point and not put in for some intellectual brownie points). I feel this important to assert because of the rather snobby dismissals I've read in various publications, which, dare I say it, come from exactly the sort of views he critiques in the book. A black musician talking about jazz in academic terms? That’s not his place – he must be doing something wrong.

This review can only claim to cover a small number of the issues addressed by Lewis; there’s simply no way that I can write about everything that I had jotted down as an area of immediate interest when reading through for the first time. So, where to begin? Let’s dive straight into controversy…

The issue of race will undoubtedly be raised, with the AACM criticised as an exclusive black-only club. In chapter 6, Lewis brings to light the case of Gordon Emanuel, a vibes player who was the organisation’s only white member (though he regarded himself as essentially black, being the adopted brother of bassist Bob Cranshaw and living in the South Side’s black ghetto). Growing pressures from black nationalists in the group eventually forced a meeting, in which Emanuel was voted out of the organisation. This will provide plenty of ammunition for those who want to argue that AACM members, in combating the detrimental effects of anti-black racism, turned the racism back on white people; indeed, at the time, Leslie Rout argued that the incident showed how, “in the final analysis, all white men are enemies [to the AACM].” Amina Myers, who has the advantage over Rout of an insider’s perspective, admits that “I was one of the ones that was against having somebody white in the organisation. Whites were always having something. They always run everything, come in and take over our stuff, but this was something black we had created, something of our own, and we should keep it black.” Such a mentality was something that Myers had in common with Malcolm X, and those he influenced. Well-meaning whites often did more harm than good; this was about black self-determination, and there was no problem with whites as such, but the process of explicit co-operation could only come about once the generally racist conditions of America had changed to a significant extent.

Myers admits that she has since changed her views – and they were undoubtedly very much of their time (though that shouldn’t diminish their validity at that moment in history). Today, she believes that “music is open, and that’s what I look at now. There’s got to be a spiritual quality, regardless of what the color is.” I tend to sympathise with the thought-currents that led to Emanuel’s expulsion, if not the expulsion itself – but they are undoubtedly problematic, and many in the organisation at the time did not share them to such an extreme extent.

One might also note that, despite the very heavy focus on racial injustice, there was often a strongly sexist element to male-female relationships in the free jazz world, with the woman expected to be the supportive home-maker who was there for her man while he went out on his musical explorations (see the relevant chapter in Val Wilmer’s ‘As Serious as Your Life’). Of course, as a blanket statement, this is entirely inaccurate – think of Sam and Beatrice Rivers’ Studio RivBea, Ornette Coleman’s marriage to poet Jayne Cortez, or the relationship between Sonny and Linda Sharrock – but there is still an element of truth to the accusations of sexism. In a valuable sub-section of chapter eleven, entitled ‘Leading the Third Wave: The New Women of the AACM’, Lewis discusses the issue of gender politics. Multi-instrumentalist and composer Maia recounts how she asked Phil Cohran: “When we as black people reach utopia, reach this point that we’re reaching for, is that when you’re going to deal with this issue that we have between men and women? Because the black revolution is more about the revolution of black men. The problems that exist between men and women existed before racism came about.” There’s a slight confusion as to whether the AACM membership was predominantly male because of residual sexism from certain quarters, or whether the situation was more complicated. Maia suggests that the problem was not so much deliberate exclusion as a (perhaps inaccurate) perception of the AACM as what Douglas Ewart calls “a man’s club.” “The revolution was about black men. Nobody meant women any harm. But if you don’t have on a fire suit, you ain’t gonna go into no fire. It may have been open to women, but if it is not inviting to women, women are not going to come.” So, it was clearly important that artists like Maia, Nicole Mitchelle and Shanta Nurullah began to form all-female groups, to highlight female creativity, and the validity of female contributions to black experimental music.

As indicated by such a discussion, nobody is claiming that the AACM is perfect, least of all Lewis; what makes it such an important organisation is that its members acknowledge areas of complexity or disagreement, and seek to work through these. Such an attitude that was there from the start, as made clear by the transcription of the very first AACM meetings, from May 1965, in chapter four, ‘Founding the Collective.’ A major virtue of the book, then, is that it is not sanitised; that it shows the contradictions and struggles of the organisation, at the same time as the way that it remained, as the title puts it, 'a power stronger than itself', representing something much bigger than the Chicago jazz scene, and providing a model for all such initiatives. This is what is overlooked by those who criticise the October Revolution in Jazz, the Jazz Composers’ Guild, or the AACM, by those who argue that the ideals of self-determination and creative autonomy shared by these bodies are laudable but inevitably fail. The AACM was not intended to be the solution to everyone’s problems, but was firmly rooted in the realities of a specific socio-economic, musical and racial situation, and was therefore in a good position to make an impact (on a local level, and perhaps further, as with the migration to New York). Thanks to Lewis, this is now clearer than ever; that should silence those who claim that he lavishing a disproportionate amount of attention to the AACM.

The issues of race and gender are clearly of importance, then: also crucial to Lewis’ investigations is the economic side of things. An academic not mentioned in the book, but relevant to the argument, is Ian Anderson, whose essay ‘Jazz outside the Marketplace’ contains an analysis of free jazz’s growing reconciliation to capitalism, through funding and grants from banks and institutions, that may prove depressing reading to those who associated the music with radical political hopes. This would seem to fit with the standard narrative, to which there may be some truth , which would place the trend identified by Anderson alongside the failure of post-’68 activism, as evidence of the decline of the left. However, pessimism, leading on to capitulation, and, ultimately conformity, are what brought about this change in the first place, and to react in the same way is not the answer.

For, what Lewis’ book offers, beyond informative and (generally) rigorous scholarship, is hope. Lewis shows how (predominantly black) self-organisation and self-promotion could provide a viable alternative to commercialisation, line-toeing and subservience to the greedy, exploitative machinations of big-time club-owners, promoters, and record company bosses. The AACM was not primarily a for-profit organisation –members contributed funds to keep things afloat at first, even if payments were not always diligently kept up, and proceeds from concerts were plunged into further musical developments and, importantly, educational and social projects. Thus, while the AACM was in the service of the art foremost, the art was intimately linked to the life. “My youngest son’s wife called me,” Jodie Christian recalls. “She said, do you know any place where they give piano lessons? I thought, the AACM, that’s what they do. If that ever dies, then the AACM dies. That’s what’s holding it together. That, to me, is the backbone of the AACM.” (P.506) One cannot understand the music without a knowledge of the socio-economic and racial conditions of Chicago (or, for that matter, America as a whole), and one gains a deeper appreciation of the AACM project if one realises its political significance, rather than simply seeing it as ‘interesting’ music. ‘Interesting’ music is what divorces the experimental tradition from a wider audience, creating an ivory-tower elite (most notably in the classical music world) which the free jazz musicians sought to combat from the outset (Val Wilmer’s ‘As Serious As Your Life’ provides further evidence of such ambitions).

Yes, perhaps some of the participants have gained (even courted) the support of the 'establishment' (George Lewis' own work at IRCAM, for instance, although that was a slightly strange episode, and one he felt somewhat uncomfortable with, I believe) - but, as Lewis argues, quite persuasively I think, the 'establishment' (the sort of 'high culture' institutions that Anderson argues have come to support free jazz) tended to (and still does tend to) look down on the music. As many, many people will tell you, it is still a struggling music – consider the state of free improvisation in the UK (the closure of one the major venues, the Red Rose; the cutting of funding for the LMC; and the post-Thatcherite bureaucratic muddle that complicates things still further). I think it’s more the case that that a few token 'progressives’ and 'radicals, get establishment support, as a means for the capitalist hierarchy to appear 'progressive' and 'liberal', at the same time as denting the subversive force of the art they have ‘embraced.’ When trumpeter Bill Dixon was featured on a BBC Radio 3 programme devoted to ‘new music’, for instance, his work was treated with a marked lack of respect, in comparison to the numerous classical composers that the programme features, week in, week out. Underlying it all, I’m afraid to say, is a residual racism that is all the more pernicious for being unconscious. If Dixon, one of the most important instrumentalists and composers of the past forty years, is characterised as “mad,” there’s not much hope for the free music project being taken seriously.

I mentioned the danger of elitism for (predominantly white, classical) experimental music, and there are those who criticise black experimental music in a similar manner, as elitist and inherently anti-popular. These charges are not hard to repudiate, and the connection between the black avant-garde and popular music should not need too much defending – Amiri Baraka had always maintained that Albert Ayler and James Brown were equally important as figures of black self-consciousness and self-expression (see his essay ‘The Changing Same’), and Lewis provides a corroborating anecdote about Henry Threadgill playing “free” in evangelical meetings (pp.75-6). Yet the other attack, often from critics with a black power agenda, like Baraka or Stanley Crouch, needs addressing – that connections with European classical music (Braxton, Cecil Taylor, and George Lewis with Cage, Stockhausen and IRCAM) are betrayals of blackness, ‘whitening’ the music and rendering it impotent, effectively obscuring and ignoring a part of one’s identity as an African-American by moving away from one’s heritage. This leads Baraka to claim that he would prefer to listen to the hegemonic comfort of Wynton Marsalis’ revivalism than to Lester Bowie or Henry Threadgill (though he believes that they too should have “regular stages” (p.444)). Lewis’ book is crucial in this respect, showing how misguided such criticisms are, and how the AACM’s avant-garde approach actually stays truer to heritage than Marsalis’ more overt engagements with black tradition. Maybe the Lincoln centre ‘jazz neo-conservatism’ is on its way out by now, though Stanley Crouch is still yelling out its propaganda at the top of his voice – still, for those taken with its proclamations, it might be helpful to consider this: who would berate contemporary rock musicians for not sounding like Hendrix, or contemporary composers for not sounding like Vivaldi?

Lewis, then, persuasively shows how much criticism of the work of black experimentalists, from both black and white critics, is based on outmoded principles and simplistic assumptions that might have people up in arms if applied to white composers - hence the famous 'anti-jazz' slur on Coltrane, and the assumption that one must be in the tradition (this mysterious, single tradition, always prefixed by the definite article) or one is nothing, and hence the straitjacketing of people to fit rules that you yourself have artificially imposed onto them. I don’t have the space to go into it here, but there are some crucial passages in which he argues that the annecdotalism of (predominantly white) 1950s and 60s jazz criticism (such as Leonard Feather’s ‘Blindfold Tests’) deliberately stirred up antagonism, and opened up a false and unnecessary chasm between traditional musicians and experimentalists, as well as creating a simplified and distorted climate, ill-suited for the reception of music (like the AACM’s) that went beyond a certain level of complexity, that went outside the bounds of certain fairly strict parameters.

In conclusion, then, Lewis has much say that is relevant and of interest, in relation to perceptions of music, and ways of avoiding the capitalist norm (communal, self organisation, art and mastery of a craft valued over 'product' and the market). Most relevant is his penetrating analysis of the still-present subtle and perhaps unconscious racial discrimination that exists when talking about this music: put the black man in his place, don't let him mix his entertaining jazz with serious music of any kind - hence the criticism of Braxton for taking an interest in Stockhausen. There are numerous thought-provoking passages which really do change one's perceptions of things might have just taken for granted – but I’ll leave individual readers to discover these for themselves.

In the end, despite compromises that may have had to be made (the move to New York, while creatively fruitful), and difficulties overcome. As attested to by the work of Anthony Braxton, Muhal Richard Abrams, Wadada Leo Smith, and Lewis himself, these artists are still as creative as ever, and, even if some have moved beyond the AACM, they retain its ethos in all their activities. The younger generation is thriving too, and is in a reciprocal relationship with the older generation of pioneers, as seen in such examples as the collaboration between Matana Roberts and Fred Anderson on her album ‘The Chicago Project’ (reviewed elsewhere in this issue).

Characterising all these diverse activities is a strongly-held belief in the power of music as a force for good – not in a vague utopian sense, but as something that can have a real and positive impact on the lives of human beings. As Nicole Mitchell puts it, “we take for granted the power of what music really is. It’s not about trying to make a few dollars at some concert. It’s not about, do we have a crowd, or do I have an image, or have I, quote-unquote, made it.” (p.512) What it is about is the substance of this book.

Peter de Bolla, 'Art Matters' (2003)

Just finished reading Peter de Bolla’s ‘Art Matters’, having been meaning to look at it for several months after it was recommended to me by a tutor at university (who nevertheless had rather disparaging things to say about it). It’s an attempt to analyse the way we experience art (what he calls ‘the aesthetic experience’), through the author’s personal experience of three works (visual, aural, and verbal), out of which he attempts to draw some more general points. So, book-ended by an introductory and a concluding chapter, we are presented with writing on Barnett Newman’s ‘Vir Heroicus Sublimis’, Glenn Gould’s 1981 recording of J.S. Bach’s ‘Goldberg Variations’, and William Wordsworth’s poem ‘We Are Seven’ (not forgetting an important discussion of British artist Marc Quinn’s ‘Self’ in the first and final chapters).

The subject is a tricky, but fascinating and important one. De Bolla knows a lot more about it than me, but he doesn’t flash this knowledge about – there are few footnotes, and the references to critics and thinkers, such as Kant and Hegel, are sparsely spread out and very much to the point when they do appear. That said, one could criticise his style for being overly wordy, even needlessly impenetrable, setting a maze for itself through contorted syntax, nested clauses, and ‘clever’ wordplay. Here is one of the knottiest passages in the book, and the most glaring example of de Bolla’s facetious punning play on language, which I can’t help feeling rather gets in the way of his argument:

Consequently, in attending to something I am in effect making present presence, and in so doing I experience myself as being present to the object of attention…we may inattend to the unattended to, thereby attending to the unintended. In attending to the unintended through inattention, we make what we have previously kept out of attention sit up and attend to us, to our attentive gaze; we ask it to pay attention….An inquiry into inattention must be a call to attention of attention itself.

(Art Matters, pp.62-3)

I realise I may be being a little unfair in the example I’ve chosen, ripped out of context (it comes in the Bach chapter, from the preliminary section where de Bolla is talking about the way we listen to and concentrate on music). But – and this is precisely the main criticism by university tutor made about the book – de Bolla has the chance to articulate and make clear (as far as that is possible) some very complex and perplexing issues, to really grab the subject of aesthetics by the throat and force it to give up some of its secrets. He does this, but at times so obscures what he is doing through the self-consciously flashy manner of doing it. Yes, these are complex issues, I said that it in the previous sentence. But talking about them needn’t necessarily involve such fussy writing – it would still be possible to make them a little clearer, without compromising the meaning.

Another problem might be that de Bolla, while covering a fairly wide spectrum in the aural and verbal works he analyses – a twentieth-century Canadian pianist’s interpretation of an eighteenth-century German keyboard work (with references to twentieth-century American jazz musicians thrown in as well), and a (very late) eighteenth-century English poem – restricts his consideration of visual art to twentieth-century examples. While the canon of western music that is still listened to today is primarily a more recent phenomenon, covering the past three centuries or so, the visual canon as it remains a subject for discussion stretches further back. To talk about Newman, Quinn and the Chapmans is fine – and, indeed, is probably a far more difficult task than talking about more traditional art-works (abstraction is a tricky thing, and de Bolla manages to discuss it in an extremely perceptive manner) – but I did hanker after at least a mention of one of the Great Masters. How would de Bolla’s arguments pan out if he was talking about a work of art that represented something tangible, rather than simply existing in abstraction? I suppose he does this with the Marc Quinn – which is a life-size cast of a human head – but the modernity of that work (the materials used, the acknowledgment of its ephemerality and changing, decaying nature as the blood turns black and decays) still distances it somewhat from the canon.

Criticisms aside, what are the issues that arise during the book’s 150-odd pages. Briefly, I’ll touch on some of them: the more specific ones that arise from de Bolla’s consideration of the three individual works. The Barnett Newman chapter is concerned with serenity, and with scale: to an extant, de Bolla argues, the massive painting scales us, gives us an altered sense of scale and space, alters our sense of existing in its presence and thereby effects our sense of our own presence in relation to this.

Newman’s pictures overtly pose the question of distance; they ask the viewer to scale him- or herself as an act of witnessing the work. This requires the viewer to accept what I have called the necessity of reconciling two competing statements of presence: that made by the image and that announced by the viewer. In the reconciliation of these two positions the distance between viewer and canvas is all but erased, for the optimum point of sight is identical to the space occupied by the image, suggesting that the canvas itself is a part of the picture-seeing mechanism….What I see is seen under the auspices of what the image presents to sight, what it lets me see. Indeed, to put it one way, the pictures itself ‘sees’ me as much as I see it, and this is certainly a function of distance.

(Art Matters, p.51)



After this, Gould/Bach. Music is perhaps the hardest of the arts to talk about, in that there’s nothing really to grasp onto that will provide a method of entry into describing one’s experience of it (unless we’re talking about music with lyrics, I suppose). Works of literature are written in language, which signifies definite meanings (or, at least, which we expect to do so in everyday discourse – though of course poetry plays on and with the ambiguities inherent within words and syntax), and works of visual art more often than not deal with objects that correspond to something we might see in the world around us (as in the case of a still life, a landscape, or a portrait). But music is fundamentally abstract in comparison. Perhaps because of this, de Bolla’s chapter on Glenn Gould’s 1981 performance of Bach’s ‘Goldberg Variations’ (which, of course, I’ve written about myself, in a post previously published on this blog), is the weakest of the three considerations of individual works of art. It certainly sees him bring in the most contextual information, relating to Gould’s various idiosyncrasies, and, though I agree with his evaluation of the performance, I feel, far more so than in the other chapters, some rather sharp subjective jolts – ‘that’s just your opinion’; why do you define the state this provokes in you as ‘wonder’?


But moving, on we finally reach what is perhaps the pick of the three essays (saving the best for last): an analysis of Wordsworth’s ‘We Are Seven’ that both is and is not a model exercise in ‘close reading’. De Bolla doesn’t really talk that much about specific linguistic features – his analysis tends to focus instead on the philosophical implications of a particular phrase. Rather than discussing rhyme, or rhythm, or syntax, he’ll worry away at a single line for several pages, talking about naming and numbering and the relation between words and reality, language and experience, a child’s and an adult’s perception of the world, of life and of death. It’s masterful, though not exhaustive (and not intended to be so), and leads on to some of the most important ideas/ conclusions in the book.

‘Thoughts that lie too deep for tears’ is a Wordsworthian phrase de Bolla picks up on, and he makes an important argument about what he thinks an aesthetic experience is not. It is not, as one might generally suppose, of feeling (though this is present, undeniably – de Bolla is, as he readily admits, talking about occasions when he was in a state of being ‘profoundly moved’ by works of art). But that is not the most important thing. The most trivial things can spark off torrents of emotion in different people – what de Bolla is primarily interested in is not the trigger to the individual, subjective emotional response that a work of art might provide, but in the knowledge that the artwork might have – knowledge about itself, about the world, even about the viewer. Seeking out art for solely emotional needs, then, leads to it becoming almost commodified (in de Bolla’s example: I’ll listen to Beethoven’s 3rd piano concert tonight in order to give myself (in order for it to give me) the feeling of elation familiar to me from that work – like an artistic happy pill).

In the final section, de Bolla talks about the aesthetic experience and the problems in defining it, for it is at once subjective yet rooted in the ‘art-ness’ of the work itself, which (as Michael Wood also argues in his ‘Literature and the Taste of Knowledge’), ‘knows’ something (though not in any propositional sense – it doesn’t ‘know’ easily-describable/utterable data). Yet to sense this sense/knowledge, we are still rooted (trapped) in the subjective – we can only perceive the quality inherent in the work of art from our own point of view. No two people can have the same aesthetic experience. It is not reproducible outside of oneself.

Perhaps it’s because of this that de Bolla resorts to using generalised words like ‘wonder’, ‘amazement’ and ‘spell-binding’. Perhaps it’s inevitable, something one just can’t get round once one reaches a certain point in the discussion of art. After all, even the resolutely taciturn Derek Bailey approaches the mystical when he talks about the ‘magical side’ to the sort of interaction encountered in free group improvisation (‘Improvisation, Its Nature and Practice in Music’, p.112). Still, I’m a little sceptical of de Bolla’s resort to the word ‘wonder’ to define the essential quality of the aesthetic experience – at first, it seems a little randomly chosen, though I think he just about justifies its use by the time we reach the book’s conclusion. It’s about acceptance of solitude, arising from the subjective nature of the necessarily individual aesthetic experience, as outlined above – although I can convince someone else of the validity of my own experience, I can never convince them to share exactly the same experience. It’s also about sensing a knowledge that one can never quite grasp – the (great) artwork never quite gives up its secrets, and neither does the human condition, the condition of living in the world, the transience and ignorance of being human. Art helps us to accept this, at the same time as forcing us into thinking about it, exacerbating this thought – it tries to cure the wound it creates (or, at least, the wound it dis(un)covers, brings to light). This fragility, this keen balance, this disturbing quality, is what de Bolla so admires about Marc Quinn’s head-constructed-out-of-frozen-blood sculpture, ‘Self’ – though he carefully distances his appreciation of this work from the simple and short-lived ‘shock’ factor purveyed by artists such as the Chapman brothers, which leaves little of lasting value after the initial startling impact. There is, then, a distance/difference between ‘wonder’ and ‘surprise’ or ‘shock’ – the latter being something which must necessarily end far sooner.

Confronted with something new and for which we are unprepared […] we find it very easy to accommodate the new and to render the force of the shock unremarkable. Wordsworth had a good phrase for that which takes a little longer; he called it the ‘shock of mild surprise’, and the milder the surprise, generally speaking, the more enduring the shock…Much contemporary visual art has the capacity to shock in spades: many of the works in the Saatchi Collection displayed at the 1998 Royal Academy ‘Sensation’ show would provide good examples – the sculptures produced by the Chapman brothers that distort the human body and displace the sexual organs come to mind –of how surprise quickly runs out of steam, loses it appeal, fades into the familiarity of being shocked.

(Art Matters, p.142)

It is on the state of wondering fragility, rather than shock, that de Bolla concludes. His is not a perfect book (more criticisms over at http://posthegemony.blogspot.com/2006/02/refinery.html), but it is a valuable one, and timely too, in that it is becoming so common to read and hear misunderstanding definitions of the role and nature of art in modern society. Of course, our appreciation of art is to some extent ideologically driven – de Bolla doesn’t deny this, but he allows art its autonomy, its independence – he goes some way towards defining it what makes it art, its reason, mode, and method of existence. In the process he suggests the ways in which it can teach us some valuable lessons – and the most valuable lesson of all is perhaps that these lessons will be lessons in not knowing as much as in knowing.

Through a glass, Darkly

LIVRE D’ORGUE, by Olivier Messiaen. Performed by Oliver Brett. King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, Saturday 1st March 2008.

As part of Messiaen’s centenary celebrations, King’s College Chapel in Cambridge are putting on his complete organ works, over a period of several months. Unfortunately, I missed the first concert, which featured Stephen Cleobury playing La Nativité de Seigneur, but on Saturday I made it along to the second in the series, a shorter programme which again only contained one work: Livre d’Orgue, from 1951. The piece was performed by Oliver Brett, who graduated as King’s organ scholar and is now an organ scholar at Westminster cathedral.

Messiaen always had a strange, paradoxical role in twentieth-century classical music. He found himself either criticised by traditionalists for being too weird (with his interest in birdsong, mysticism, Sanskrit, surrealism, and a voluptuous and sensual Catholic conservatism) or by modernists for being too old-fashioned (lush harmonies, sweeping melodies, an obsessively religious programmatic basis for nearly all of his pieces). In the late 40s, he’d written such works as ‘Trois Petites Liturgies de la Presence Divine’, scored for orchestra, women’s voice and the otherworldly electronic sounds of the ondes martenot, and the massive ‘Turangalîla-Symphonie,’ a hymn to earthy love which was, in effect, a virtuoso piano concert, drawing on elements of the myth of Tristan and Yseult, Sanskrit symbolism, Javanese Gamelan music, and, of course, birdsong. While these scandalised those who were not quite so esoteric in their Catholicism as Messiaen, they also offended the avant-garde musicians and composers with whom Messiaen was associated through his teaching classes at the Paris Conservatoire, where his pupils had included the likes of Xenakis, Stockhausen and Boulez. Boulez even described Turangalîla as ‘brothel music’ (which would surely have offended Messiaen’s religious sensibilities), and the composer duly changed direction, taking the implications of Schoenberg’s serial (twelve-tone) system even further, and applying them to duration, articulation and dynamics as well as to pitches.

This period of avant-garde experimentation was to prove short-lived, and the pieces Messiaen wrote during this time (including the Livre) are neither his most popular, nor his most critically acclaimed (although they were very influential on the development of Boulez in particular). One can’t help feeling that Messiaen was pushed into a language not his own, and he seems to have realised this too; later in life, he made it clear that he did not feel the music was successful.


So what are we to make of the Livre d’Orgue, then? Well, its concerns seem mainly to be technical, rather than focussing on the emotional/religious/programmatic areas that Messiaen normally covered (although two of the seven movements are inspired by Biblical quotations, and one by birdsong). There is much rhythmic complexity (deriving from Messiaen’s use of Greek and Hindu rhythms).

The first piece, ‘Reprises par Interversion’ is entirely monodic – in other words, only one note sounds a time. This gives it a very fractured, disjointed quality, more akin to Stockahusen or Boulez than to his usual style. It also very much explores a separation between the organ registers: the emphasis is on harsh alternation and juxtaposition, rather than unity. (Although, to be fair, Messiaen had always been composing in ‘blocks’ which were sometimes only tenuously related – he eschewed more conventional notions of linear harmonic development, which gives the music its curiously static, ‘timeless’ quality.)

Following ‘Reprises’ comes the uneasy three-part polyphony of ‘Piece en Trio’, meant to represent the confusion and lack of clear vision faced in life on earth, as expressed in the first half of St Paul’s famous phrase “now see through a glass, darkly, but then we will see face to face.” Messiaen himself later wrote: “I was unable to realise my intention of expressing the darkness [surrounding the Mystery of the Holy Trinity], and only managed to write a short and fairly nondescript dodecaphonic [12-tone] piece: no blackness, no confusion, no mystery.” That illuminates the piece’s impact on me, too: despite the sometimes interesting sounds (Alexander Goehr, another of Messiaen’s pupils, commented that the Livre didn’t really sound like organ music at all – “it sounded like electronics”), it does feel rather colourless when compared to the orgiastic splendour of Turangalila or with the mysterious, grave beauty of the other organ works.

The third movement is more successful: entitled ‘Les Mains de l’Abime’, it erupts as a thunderous cry from the abyss inspired by a quasi-surrealistic verse from the Old Testament prophet Habakkuk: “the abyss has cried out! The depths have raised up their hands!” Sections of massive, dissonant organ thunder bookend a quiet, eerily ambiguous central section, which brings to mind another Biblical description: that of the “still, small voice” with which God speaks to Elijah in the middle of a howling thunderstorm, as the prophet flees into the desert.

As some sort of recovery from the abyss, an interlude based on ‘Chants d’Oiseaux,’ but we’re soon back to more troubled waters, with another rhythmically complex ‘Piece en Trio’, and then, in the following movement, more Old-Testament prophecy, this time from Ezekiel. “The rims of the four wheels were full of eyes all around…for the spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels.” Messiaen’s depiction of these nightmarish eyes in the wheels – ‘Les Yeux dans les Roues’ – is characterised by serious, booming bass pedal notes and rippling, endlessly questioning figures in the higher register.

Finally, in ‘Soixante-Quatre Durees’, a fantastically intricate movement based on sixty-four different note durations, tension is built by slowly moving held notes punctuated by alternating high and low register bursts, somewhat reminiscent of Charles Ives’ ‘The Unanswered Question.’ The piece ends on a final, held note, fading away unexpectedly, unsettlingly, leaving the question answered.


The work as a whole is deeply serious, grave. Messiaen chooses to focus on the darker aspects of the Bible, and Livre seems to fall more into the anguished, mid-century Catholic doubt of Penderecki, than the composer’s usual rhapsodic, paradisal visions.

In other works, such as ‘Les Canyons Aux Etoiles’, the awe and mystery generated by the nature of God and his creation, beyond human comprehension, is celebrated as a source of mystic wonderment: the child-like rapture that can sometimes come from not knowing things. Livre, though, is much more about confusion, doubt, lack of clarity – paradoxically, despite the extremely ordered serial framework, the listener has less to cling on to. Messiaen’s characteristic, slightly off-kilter melodies, are kept largely at bay, and his weird, idiosyncratic harmonic language reined in. It feels too restricted – an attempt to make order that actually ends up creating disorder in the listener’s mind. That’s one way of looking at it, anyway.

I’ve barely talked about the performance at all –I was so preoccupied with trying to understand the work itself that I wasn’t really concentrating on how it was played. I will note that the candlelit surroundings of the Chapel appeared suitably austere, in keeping with the music: shadows were cast on the inscrutable, immobile faces of carvings projecting outwards, high above on the wall, and the stained-glass windows, denied sunlight, showed only the blank blackness of the night outside.

The organ’s not an instrument one normally associates with avant-garde music, and this is a work that constantly catches you off-guard, and doesn’t offer you an alternative: you’re not given the catharsis of shrieking dissonance that Penderecki’s ‘Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima’, and neither are you given much consolation. Instead, a curious musical limbo opens up, and there’s no way out.

Livre d’Orgue is a work that puts up barriers, which I find it really hard to engage with, and I can’t help feeling that this is because Messiaen doesn’t really understand serialism. Well, let me qualify that – of course he understands it in a technical sense – he taught serial scores at the Conservatoire – but he just can’t seem to make it his own. Writing within this system causes him to lose his voice, rather than allowing him to express himself through it, as Anton Webern or Arnold Schoenberg had been able to. Perhaps this is because he’s coming out of the same late-Romantic Germanic tradition as the members of the Second Viennese school – but then, neither were the new generation of avant-gardists who had (partly) pressured him into this method. The strict control of the system causes his music to lose some of that woozy unpredictability, and even the birds which make their way into the fourth movement sound distant, filtered through the bars of a serialist cage, rather than fluttering free in the open air of Messiaen’s personal musical language.

Such distancing, such inaccessibility, was heightened by the fact that Oliver Brett was invisible up in the organ loft, meaning that there was no visual centre either. His performance can’t be faulted though – that this concert remained a puzzling, rather troubling experience (in a negative, rather than a stimulating way) was due to the composition itself. There is only so far one can go with interpretation of a score – if something isn’t in the music itself, the performer cannot create it, except in exceptional circumstances, and Brett delivered the Livre as well as could be expected.

I’m not sure whether I will ever understand this work – I think it’s a failure, an interesting failure, but a failure nonetheless. I may come to some epiphany, I may find the key to understanding this piece, but I’m not sure there is a key. We do indeed see through the glass darkly, and maybe we don’t even see through it at all.

Music is the Healing Force of the Universe

THE DIFFERENT STATUSES OF MODERNISM IN VISUAL ART AND MUSIC

Modernist visual art has arguably become part of our visual culture - we think nothing of a once-shocking Picasso painting and Warholian collages are part and parcel of TV makeover design. But modernist music hasn't permeated mainstream musical culture to nearly the same extent. Why is that modernism in the visual arts has received so more widespread acceptance than modernism in music? Virtually everyone knows who Picasso is, and could probably recognise one of his works if they tried, but mention Schoenberg or Cecil Taylor or Captain Beefheart and you'll either get a bemused, non-comprehending look or a sigh of disgust.

POSSIBLE REASONS FOR THIS: MUSIC AS A LINK TO FEELINGS AT THE DEEPEST LEVEL

Is it because music reaches to a deeper level, cuts to the heart, cuts beneath the barrier we can construct between ourself and what we see, what we read? We can filter these through our mind, we can take time to consider them: we can look at a work of art for minutes on end, because as it exists as an object in space, we can read a sentence from a book and then ponder it for several minutes before moving on to the next sentence. But music is different - you can't keep pausing it to digest the latest bit of information, you can't stand around it and examine the details like you can with a painting or sculpture, except afterwards, in your mind, or, if you're very dedicated, and with the appropriate technology, by going back to the track and playing it a few seconds at a time. If you listen to a piece of music, you have to let it flow straight into you, and because it's much more of an immediate thing than other art forms, it's also more frightening; it exposes you to the possibility of having to feel. Sure, you can be moved by a painting or a novel, or a poem, but, I'd argue, not in the same way as you can be moved by music. It catches you off your guard, there's something about it that provokes a deep level of feeling in the listener that is beyond words, beyond images - something deep and mysterious which accounts for its great attraction to so many people. In early cultures this might have been the intense physical sensation of banging the drum (the next step up from banging the bone on the piece of rock, from tapping out the first rhythm), or of letting loose the voice from the throat, in an aesthetised version of such deep-rooted, primeval human noises as the scream, the cry, the laugh. [Incidentally, on this point, my ideas about the blues are that they are also deeply connected to such sounds. Interestingly, the playing of Ornette Coleman, a player who, though pioneering free jazz, was heavily influenced by blues feeling (if less so by blues form), was described as "like someone crying...or laughing." More on this stuff in my future post on the concept of the blues].

MUSIC AS SPONTANIETY, SOMETHING OF THE MOMENT

As Eric Dolphy puts it in an interview snippet at the end of his superlative record 'Last Date' (which I highly reccommend), "when you hear music, after it's over, it's gone, in the air. You can never capture it again." It doesn't exist as an object. It exists as something living, not static - to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, words and music move in (or through) time. And it's in the twentieth century, with the advent of jazz, and, in particularly, the absolute spontaneity of elements of free jazz and free improvisation, that music's potentiality for such a flowing, organic, NATURAL role has really found expression, after centuries of thought-through, composed classical music. This is particularly applicable to jazz, as I'll go on to explain. Different performers of classical works undoubtedly bring different interpretative elements to the music, meaning that it can never be heard exactly the same way twice - there is no absolutely precise template for how it should sound, though the musical notation of the composition gives a pretty precise idea. However, such differences are generally minimal - even an extreme case, like Glenn Gould's different recordings of Bach's Goldberg Variations, taking at radically different tempos and with different emotional viewpoints, are recognisably versions of the same notated piece of music. (More on Gould here - http://www.amazon.com/State-Wonder-Complete-Goldberg-Variations/dp/B00006FI7C) Jazz improvisation is a different kettle of fish, though: by its nature, it is something of the moment, expressing the player's socially/culturally/musically conditioned attitudes (whether to a small or large extent depends on the player) but in a spontaneous form which lays them bare. And maybe it's this we don't like - it expresses the things beneath the surface, things we might be uncomfortable with, it implies the loss of control, away from the safety of written notation and into a region where creativity can be exercised in a much freer, looser way.

AN ASIDE ON IMPROVISATION AND VIEWS OF JAZZ

Now I realise this view of improvisation in jazz is very simplistic, and is certainly not applicable to much of jazz - but that's perhaps also because players and audiences don't really understand what jazz really is (more on this in the next paragraph). Classical music (and pop music, etc, etc) can of course express emotion wonderfully well - I am by no means implying that music being written makes it less viable, less emotionally strong. Far from it, in fact - perhaps having time to think through your ideas and write them down means you express them more fully, you draw out every last inch of emotion. And some jazz seems almost emotionally shallow compared to classical music.

To audiences especially, it becomes just a sound, a way of being less stuffy than classical music but more sophisticated than pop music, an idea of 'cool'. The 'Beat generation' of the 1950s saw writers such as Kerouac linking it with a whole social attitude, so that it became a sort of zietgiest, the soundtrack to a counter-cultural movement (in much the same way as Hendrix, Santana, et al, would be for the 60s Hippie Movement). But today, jazz is either pleasant, sophisticated background music, or, if not background music, music not to be listened to THAT closely, not to be analysed too much, because it's not an intellectual form, it's easy on the ear, it's not too much trouble. (An alternative view is that perhaps encouraged by some critical commentary on jazz, that perpetuated by the Fast Show sketch where it becomes a series of stock, smarmy 'hipster' phrases ("nice...great...") and hopelessly members-only musical jargon spinning ("the famous chorus in double time modulating between the keys of B and A flat, and resolving itself in E...crazy!"). In short, it becomes a cliche, without serious thought into what the musical tics that have become cliches once stood for, and what once made them so innovative (such as be-bop melody and phrasing, once at the forefront of jazz modernism, now turned into old hat by decades of use). At its best though, jazz improvisation embodies the qualities expressed a few paragraphs ago: the exercise of creativity in a freer, looser sense than in written music.

BACK TO MUSIC AS FEELING...

However, that's not really the point I'm trying to make here - I'm not trying to argue the case for the virtues of improvisation over composition or vice versa (lets not even begin to get into the complexities of the chord changes (limiting the improvisation or tying it down?), jazz composition, and so on). I'm instead trying to argue that music makes us FEEL, hits us in a different, almost physical way that other art forms can't (apart from film, which utilises music for a lot of its emotional appeal, and then you have the actual moving image, an approximation of reality far greater than any other art form, which makes it something else entirely, and out of my scope today). The thing with feeling is that we often can't control what we feel, though we can hide it, to the outside world, or even partially to ourselves, through social conditioning and emotional denial, or apathy. And if music makes us feel, then perhaps we're reaching to emotional levels we might not wish to reach - yes, it's fine if it's the easy romantic glow or tear-jearking of the pop ballad, or the brash exuebrence of soul music or the I don't give a fuck attitude of rock music. But modernist music? - that's something different. The fact is, a lot of us don't like being put in touch with the pessimism, the despair, the bleakness of much 12-tone classical music (such as Schoenberg's hideously disturbing Pierrot Lunnaire - http://www.cduniverse.com/search/xx/music/pid/1057813/a/Schoenberg:+Pierrot+Lunaire,+etc+%2F+Boulez,+Sch%E4fer,+et+al.htm), the bizarre, twisted humour of Captain Beefheart's experimental blues-rock (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trout_Mask_Replica) or the anger, the pain, the utter depth of feeling in the free jazz of Archie Shepp or Peter Brotzmann (both using the music to express their radical political views).

MODERNIST MUSIC AS REFLECTING THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, A CENTURY OF PROGRESS, TURMOIL AND CHANGE, AND ITS ROLE IN HELPING US COPE WITH THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE CENTURY

The fact is that free jazz, and modern classical music, and experimental music of various other forms, expresses what the twentieth century was really all about - progress, to an extent (what progress! technology, arts - you name it, it's progressed massively), but, more importantly, the realisation that established forms of authority were corrupt/inadequate (take your pick), and the attempt to overthrow them. The failure of religion, of Communism, of government - all engendered feelings of rebellion and anger and pain, yet at the same time, there was a real sense of vitality and excitement at the changes. This paradox comes through precisely in free jazz - while Schoenberg may be stuck in a gloomy Expressionist forest of pessimism (though he has his lighter moments) and Webern retreats into a crystalline, microscopic world of his own, the brutality and vitality of free jazz echoes the mixed feelings the various counter-cultural and rebellious movements of the twentieth century brought with them.

A few lines from T.S. Eliot seem uncannily appropriate to the chaotic nature and apparent randomness of such music:
"Words strain,/Crack, and sometimes break, under the burden,/ Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,/ Will not stay still. Shrieking voices/ Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering/Always assail them." (Four Quartets, Burnt Norton) He could almost be talking about a John Coltrane or Pharoah Sanders or Albert Ayler solo - cracked notes, multiphonics, split reed technique - all methods of distorting the pure notes (or words) to try and get at the essence, to express the inexpressable (in Coltrane's case, to express several ideas at once), to get back to the pure sound so often submerged by the weight of words, of conversation, of musical form - the cry, the scream, the shout.

It may all be tottering on the edge of the brink (of meaninglessness, of despair, of utter pessimism, of death), but if it's going to go over, it's going to go over with a bang - it's not going to go timidly. Thus, modernist music may seem incomprehensible in terms of our normal expecations of music - meaningless of terms of what has gone before. But in a century inventing new ways of thinking, of acting, of being, perhaps that's what was needed. The Pollockian notion of action painting, the random amounts of paint chucked onto the canvas, comes to mind - Ornette Coleman's landmark recording for 'double quartet', "Free Jazz", had a Jackson Pollock painting on the front of the album sleeve, and though Coleman's essentialy melody-based, blues-soaked style isn't the best analogy, the Pollockian notion of action painting does have strong parallels with the free improvisations of artists such as Derek Bailey (who once said that the ideal situation to play in would be after you'd just woken up, where you were in a state of consciousness a step below your normal waking state, with all its social/cultural baggage). This is challenging stuff, sometimes moving beyond the levels of feeling I was talking about before (despair, depression, anger, etc) into a strange, colder-seeming realm (Bailey's guitar sound, Webern's miniatures) - but is there feeling there too? By that I mean feeling in the sense that the act of making music is in itself a way of expressing one's own humanity, through creativity, and thus asserting one's place in a totally destablised world where now one knows where they are any more. Music becomes not just a form of entertainment, but a form or asserting one's identity, be it political and ideological (Brotzmann, Shepp), be it philosphical or religious (Sanders, Ayler, Coltrane), be it simply the act of existing (Bailey). I play (or listen), therefore I am. In an age of no absolutes, music could really be, as Ayler put it, "the healing force of the universe."

AFTERWOOD

A PERFECT EXAMPLE -
ALBERT AYLER - FOR JOHN COLTRANE

Absolutely superb music, totally disproves the idea that Ayler was just a free jazz screamer, here he plays with real lyricism and a depth of feeling that is almost unbearable in its soulfulness - 1000 x better than the posturing 'emotion' of so much commercial music. Captures the sense of the time - its despair, its anger, its frustration, its beauty - yet also speaks to/of, something universal in all humans throughout history. Click on the link and marvel (but not at the video, which is pretty shabby).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTrC6IH2w3g&mode=related&search=