diabolically inspired and hilarious

Okay, I’ve linked to YouTubified clips to (respectfully) critique an elder of guitar improvisation, discuss a problematic reengineering of performance ritual, and, the last time, to simply point to a beautiful and charmingly sweet little ditty….
Well, this ain’t charming or sweet, and it’s definitely ugly… but it is inspired and hilarious (which is, as far as I’m concerned, an appropriately diabolical combination). Enjoy!

locating the music: past|present|future tense

Still being distracted from that ‘real’ writing I should be doing, but….

This started at surviving the crunch. Well, the entry ‘the past sure is tense’ had this interesting phrase:

At some point in antiquity music only existed in the present tense.

Which is what I queried about. Ted Reichman posted an entry as a reply, and here’s my own response (and some clarification of my short and vague original query).

I understand that TR was “making up these terms as [he] went along,” but sometimes hiding away in little slips like these are the stuff of our culture—how we think about, categorize, and order. It is the kind of thing that, on one occasion, I might say, and, on another occasion, I might question. I queried the statement not because I have any answers, but because it intersects with issues that I’m interested in. Furthermore, since we’ve been handed down a set of beliefs, frameworks and vocabularies to talk about music that might not be one hundred per cent applicable to a given musical practice (in improvised musics, for example), these may be issues that radically affect how we practice and discuss music.
Much musicological discourses, for instance, depend the ‘work’ concept, and values teleological structures. It strikes me, however, that performance, and improvisation in particular, can mess with our ‘normal’ notions of causality and temporality, and question (at the very least) the discrete, autonomous nature of the ‘work.’

I hope this is okay with TR, but I’m not going to reply directly to his entry, but instead use small sections of it as a bounce off point for examining some of these issues, and maybe clarifying (to myself) why I might have asked the question in the first place.

…Until people invented any forms of musical notation, recording etc. and thus became able to fix music, or at least an abstracted representation of music, into a durable physical form, if a specific piece of music, or even a way of making music, faded from the memory of every individual who ever knew it or heard it, poof, it was gone.

As a practicing improviser, I’m pretty sure TR doesn’t mean it in this way, but if we accept this at face value, we’re only a stone’s throw from saying what the very old edition of the Grove Dictionary said:

It [extemporization or improvisation] is… the primitive act of music-making…. Among all primitive peoples… musical composition consists of extemporization subsequently memorized, and the process can proceed no farther until some method of notation is devised to record the composer’s musical thoughts independently of his musical performance. [my emphasis]

entry on ‘extemporization or improvisation’ in Eric Blom ed. (1954), The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians 5th ed. vol. II, 1975 reprint, (London: MacMillan Press), p. 89.

I wonder if we’ve all been brainwashed here. As performers (and improvisers) do we want to accept these terms? Is improvisation a “primitive act”? Is the recording process the route towards progress/evolution?
Having said all this, I think TR articulates the core issue in the following statement:

We wouldn't be able to do this historical examination without the recorded evidence.

True, true, true, but the most basic recording device/technology in this case has nothing to do directly with those that we have been citing (audio recording and notation). The “applying [of] a set of contemporary ideas, canonizing, critiquing in hindsight” can be done with just two things: Memory and language (floating in a soup of society and culture).

…but I still remember the musical material of this concert (and so do John and Matt because we still talk about it)…

All of which is activated by memory and language (feeding-off of, and feeding-back on, society and culture). You are, in more than one sense, ‘re-experiencing it’ and ‘re-creating it.’ TR is in this case, perhaps, “applying a set of contemporary ideas, canonizing, critiquing in hindsight.”

some unanswered questions:

Am I asking if recording is constitutive or constructed?
Does ‘recorded’ music have “meta-existence”?

I am saying that it existed at that historical moment, and not at others, as molecules vibrating either in the air (active expression), or in peoples' brain cells (memory).

How about if I paraphrase this thus: All music (including ‘recorded’ music) exists at a historical moment as molecules vibrating either in the air, or in peoples’ brain cells.

…a piece of music has been fixed in a physical form that will outlive the people who performed and heard that piece of music, it exists in the past tense. Not that it _existed_, which assumes that at some point it ceased to exist, but that it's simultaneously existing NOW, in physical form, and THEN, in the act of composition (in the case of notation) or performance (in the case of recording).

Okay we need to extricate a couple of (interdependent) issues here.
1. What is “a piece of music”? Does this construction depend on the ‘work’—non-real-time, finite length, single author, autonomous—concept? Or can we define a ‘piece’ to encompass, say, improvised musics as well? In which case, is that redefinition of boundaries unproblematic? If it is problematic, what are the consequences of accepting this redefinition of boundaries?
2. What do we mean by the past and present tense? What are we assuming about causality?

engineering ritual: a curious case of the body in concert

I came across this interesting entry at Mixed Meters. The performance in question is by Debora Petrina—a self-identified ‘polymorphic artist.’ (Incidentally there’s an un-YouTubified version of the video in question on her site. YouTubified video.)
I’ve got no special insight into the specific whys or whats of Petrina’s performance, but what I find fascinating about this is the idea of self-consciously engineering the body and movement into the (concert) performance ritual.

Much of performance ritual gets handed down, and, perhaps in European Concert Music more than in any other tradition, without thought or critique. “Well, that’s how we’ve always done it”—never mind that, as anthropologists will tell you, such statements are (powerful) fiction. A stark example of this might be in acousmatiques in which the concert hall context and metaphor was accepted and (super-)imposed without, apparently, discussion or dissent.
I’m sympathetic to the idea that these rituals and context can (should?) be (re)examined, and the process of opening up these black boxes might reveal the unfamiliar, the unorthodox, and the complex (all good creative stuff).
I also find the self-conscious visibility of the body in this performance compelling—the body in motion as a site of creation, maybe. As discussed by Suzanne Cusick, European Concert Music has come to value the mind over the body, attempting to exorcise the body out of the Concert Hall:

The ideology of listening… strongly discourages physical engagement when listening. Even more, it discourages identification with the bodily work of performers. [my emphasis]

Cusick, 1999, p. 495.

Again, think of the ‘all ears,’ discorporate, mind-to-mind model embedded in much acousmatiques.

As each discouragement draws the listener’s identification away from the physical, it directs it towards the imaginative mastery of all possible combinations embodied by ‘the music itself’. Socially mobile, freed from physical work, seeming to encompass all possibilities in a unified whole… a sonic experience of the middle-class self.

Ibid., p. 495.

By making the body invisible, we’re positing a vanilla, mayonnaise, ‘universal’ human, but the result is, ironically, very much gender, race, class and culture specific.
I’ve briefly touched on the body in performance, and also on the hegemonic, European musical orthodoxy, so I won’t go into much more detail here other than to add that the West European Concert Music Tradition “is suspicious of the body, of real-time movement, and of the possibility of creation taking place during performance or reception.”

Okay let’s get a few things out of the way before I end up playing critic…. I have no idea if any of this is necessarily what Petrina is attempting to do, and there’s plenty of cool things about the performance. Additionally, I don’t know these Feldman scores at all. But this performance (at least this isolated sample) is interesting: It brings up issues that are significant to those of us who do want to (re)examine and (re)engineer performance rituals, and it also flags up potential pitfalls in trying to (re)introduce and (re)activate the body into these contexts.
Here’s what I find problematic about Petrina’s performance: The dance is basically auxiliary to the movement (sanctioned to be) necessary for the ‘music itself’—that which is “free of any verbal or dramatic association or explicit social function” (ibid., p. 493). I don’t mean that the whole should be unified or anything as silly as that. Nor do I have problems with juxtapositions and contrasts (hey, I’d use the word ‘dialectical’ if I knew what it meant). However the relationship between the ‘music itself’ and the performer remains largely uni-directional. In other words, the ‘music itself’ is allowed to dictate the parameters of movement (when and how much bodily movement is possible/practical) while the body remains servant and passive to the dictates of the ‘music itself’.
Ultimately it leaves intact the orthodoxy of European Concert Music; leaves unexamined the single-author, non-real-time, autonomous work. Rather than blowing open the Concert Hall ritual, rather than problematizing the score or the ‘music itself,’ it reinforces these elements (in a similar way to Cage’s 4'33") by allowing the corporeal infection to be carefully quarantined to those areas that do not affect performance practice or the ‘music itself.’

I wonder, in a sense, if it is no more or less transformative than the (gentle) irreverence of Victor Borge (I don’t mean that as an insult at all).

…Hey, but I could be wrong. (Boy, do I hate playing critic.)

references:

Cusick, Suzanne (1999), ‘Gender, Musicology, and Feminism’ in Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist (eds) Rethinking Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

updates:

03–28–07: Add link to YouTube video.

the score, the authority of

By the way, some weeks ago I saw the damnedest thing. One of the best things I'd witnessed in a while, and one of the worst… on the same bill. The second act was so baaaaaaad that MLM and I just packed up and left after barely three minutes. I mean, it was lame, lame, lame… lame.
Well, okay, we've all been spectators to lousy performances, so why am I writing about this one? It brought out something interesting in the audience’s reactions, illustrating something about our desires and expectations of music and performance in a way significant to those of us who practice improvisation and not-one-hundred-per-cent-idiomatic performance practice, and, in particular, those of us who sometimes perform for skeptical, unversed, and/or hostile audiences.
During the first act (the one that MLM and I thought rocked), the audience in general was unruly, loud, boisterous. Actually, I didn’t mind too much (I’ve played clubs with worse), but for MLM (who is more familiar with concert audiences) it was a major distraction. But, like I said, I really did not mind the audience’s general unruliness. However, here’s the deal, come the second act…

silence

Well, actually the silence followed several “shhhh” noises (from, as far as we could tell, some of the the same loudmouthed individuals from the first half), which in turn followed on from comments such as “this bodes well: They have a bass player.”
So what triggered this self-imposed, self-policed reverent silence? What cued these individuals—who were more than happy to mumble, talk, laugh and shuffle ’round during the previous act?

I think they were responding to the music stands.

Both acts, IMHO, displayed a certain lack of presentation skills and theatrical know-how. The second act was certainly not more ‘professional’ or ‘serious’ (for starters the guitar player spent the whole of the setup time noodling away with the amp turned up)…

…but, hey, they at least were (apparently) ready to read from parts.

I’m not about to do a ranting piece of ‘the state of culture in our society.’ I don’t believe that this audience was stupid. I might be persuaded that they’re not fully conscious of what they were doing and why, probably unaware of the implication of their actions and behavior, but I don’t believe they were acting out of ignorance per se. Our little cultural economies put enormous value on texts, scores, parts and notation, and put enormous value on traditions and practices that employ these texts, scores, parts and notation (however much that may be a pantomime act). The audience that night were responding to this. They knew the second act had greater worth.
They weren’t dumb, they just weren’t thinking.

structur(e|ing): towards a music(ology) of verbs

I’ve briefly touched on the subject of ‘structure’ (October 11th and October 3rd). In regard to structure imposed from outside, as I said in limits and boundaries: wikiality that

I don’t believe that this particular understanding of ‘structure’ is helpful to the practice of improvisation. Nor do I have much affinity with the desire for this ‘structure.’

We tend to see structure and form as things—as objects.

Head to your library and look up musical structure or form and you are likely to come away with ideas of a framework around which the musical ‘surface detail’ somehow sits (although why it should generally be that way around, I’ve never understood). ‘Surface detail’ is noise to be filtered out by the analyst out to excavate the essential; never mind that the details might contain, in the terms of the vernacular, an iconic lick, the hook, swing or shuffle. It’s appropriate that traditional analysis, stemming from West European orthodoxy, should gravitate towards glorifying the inanimate musical skeleton, rather than tendons and muscle, seeing everything else as extraneous fat. This is, after all, a reductive tradition of scholarship and pedagogy with a hegemonic commitment. A tradition that is suspicious of the body, of real-time movement, and of the possibility of creation taking place during performance or reception. Structure and form, in this context, can only be teleological, it cannot exist either retroactively or in real-time. Traditional analysis sees objects; it has difficulty seeing processes.
John Law describes this difficulty. Here’s my paraphrase:

Perhaps it is obvious that the musical is a process? Perhaps it is something that we knew already? It sounds obvious, but I’m not certain about this, for large parts of musicology have found it difficult to handle processes. Perhaps this is a symptom of the desire to cleave to the purity of order and avoid the uncertainties of ordering. For one way of putting the point is to note that musicologists, like many others, tend to prefer to deal in nouns rather than verbs. They slip into assuming that musical structure is an object, like the scaffolding round a building, that will stay in place once it has been erected.

my paraphrase of Law, 1994, p. 14.

John Law was in fact talking about the social. Substitute ‘social’ for ‘musical,’ ‘sociology’ for ‘musicology,’ and ‘sociologists’ for ‘musicologists,’ and you’ve reconstructed the original text. (He is also defining sociologist broadly to encompass all of us who have a stake in how society functions (or not) and, here, I use musicologist in a similarly broad manner. We are, in a sense, all musicologists.)
Let me return to this idea of group improvisation as society in miniature. Traditional macro-sociology tends to see a top-down, ideology or system driven society. But is this the best way of accounting for social forces? Can we, for example, hold on to this top-down, monolithic ideological drive as being responsible for the recent anti-war demonstrations in which disparate groups including white bourgeois liberals, radical socialists, disenfranchised black activists, left-wing jewish pacifists, secular feminists and conservative muslim groups temporarily and uneasily made an alliance?
Similarly, traditional musicology tends to see a top-down, composition-centered structure. But is this the best description of the musical? Do the assumptions underlying this view point hold up to scrutiny? Are interpreters neutral? Is performance transparent? Are audiences passive? Is the composer the creator? Is structure pre-ordained? Can we hold on to this top-down, monolithic composerly process as being responsible for collective music making practices such as group improvisation (or the relationship between instrumentalist and instrument)?
Leaving aside, for the moment, whether this form of analysis—looking for the essential structure (object) in a piece of music (another object)—produces valid results, what are the political implications of it? If structure is unified, monolithic, has a single source—the composer or the score—and is located in the discorporate, non-real-time ‘music itself’ (Cusick, 1999, pp. 480–482, 491–496)—then difference and dissent can only express itself as noise (that should be filtered out by the analyst). Or, more likely, the other way around: West European orthodoxy assumes that dynamic, heterogeneous, interactive social networks cannot be structured, and thus concludes, I believe erroneously, that the only kind of structure must be unified, fixed, consistent and uni-directional.

We tend to see structure and form as things—as objects. But there’s another way to understand these words. Instead of seeing them as nouns, we can think of these as verbs; we can think of structuring and forming.

Thinking about structure as something we do has implications for the idea of group improvisation as society in miniature. Society (and structure) is, as Bruno Latour argues, “not what holds us together, but what is held together” (Latour, 1986, p. 276). There are some interesting possibilities in thinking about difference, dissent and resistance in this model (as well as some worrying libertarian implications).
Thinking about this bottom-up impulse in improvisation, this performative structure, it’s interesting to revisit the quote I started this blog with: “…Avoid the reflex of trying to make it into somthing you think it ought to be, rather than letting it become what it can be” (Frost and Yarrow, 1990, p. 3).

There are racial, colonial, and gender dimensions to the orthodox West European approach to analysis, but that will have to wait for another post….

I may be shot down in flames for this, but… I sometimes wonder if the difference between composerly and performerly notions of structure are analogous to, say, how Creationists and Darwinists view biological organisms and ecosystems. The former observes the commonality and diversity, simplicity and complexity, and sees design, and concludes, well, yes, of course there is a Creator. The latter observes the same commonality and diversity, simplicity and complexity, and finds the results of natural selection. The former posits a top-down, engineered world crammed full of authorial intent, while the latter assumes a bottom-up, performative world teeming with emergence.

references:

Cusick, Suzanne (1999), ‘Gender, Musicology, and Feminism’ in Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist (eds) Rethinking Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Frost, Anthony, and Ralph Yarrow (1990), Improvisation in Drama (London: MacMillan).
Law, John (1994), Organizing Modernity (Oxford: Blackwell).
Latour, Bruno (1986), ‘The Power of associations’ in John Law (ed) Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge? (London: Routledge).

updates:

11–13–06: Patch in Cusick (1999) reference.
11–30–06: Correct editing errors from the last update.
02–05–07: Correct a reference.