The Teh-drinking Musicologist

Sumer is icumen in! Say what?

2010-05-01T08:59:00.001-07:00

Source: London, British Library, MS Harley 978, f. 11v

Is this the oldest surviving form of written polyphony? MS Harley 978 is renowned for its comical insert "Sumer is icumen in" (Summer is coming) dating from the mid thirteenth-century, originating in Reading Abbey. The manuscript, however, was most likely to have been copied in Oxford before it found its way to Reading, perhaps by a certain William of Winchester? Today, the musical item in MS Harley 978 is best known for its naughty explication of nature's somatic, indifferent delights:

Sumer is icumen in, Lhude sing cuccu!
Groweþ sed and bloweþ med
And springþ þe wde nu,
Sing cuccu!
Awe bleteþ after lomb,
Lhouþ after calue cu.
Bulluc sterteþ, bucke uerteþ,
Murie sing cuccu!
Cuccu, cuccu, wel singes þu cuccu;
Ne swik þu nauer nu.

Pes:
Sing cuccu nu. Sing cuccu. Sing cuccu. Sing cuccu nu!

Summer has come in,
Loudly sing, Cuckoo!
The seed grows and the meadow
blooms
And the wood springs anew,
Sing, Cuckoo!
The ewe bleats after the lamb
The cow lows after the calf.
The bullock stirs, the stag farts,
Merrily sing, Cuckoo!
Cuckoo, cuckoo, well you sing,
cuckoo;
Don't you ever stop now,

Pes:
Sing cuckoo now. Sing, Cuckoo.
Sing Cuckoo. Sing cuckoo now!

Few actually remember that the "music itself" is a plural diacritical force yanked between two seemingly polar loci; the added red lyrics beneath the secular call to nature is, indeed, a completely religious account of God's sacrifice of Jesus for the holy redemption of mankind:

Perspice Christicola

que dignacio

Celicus agricola

pro uitis vicio

Filio

non parcens exposuit mortis exicio

Qui captiuos semiuiuos a supplicio

Vite donat et secum coronat

in celi solio

Observe, Christian,

such honour!

The heavenly farmer,

due to a defect in the vine,

not sparing the Son,

exposed him to the destruction of death.

To the captives half-dead from torment,

He gives them life and crowns them with himself

on the throne of heaven.

What, then is sumer is icumen in? A neat sort of medieval pointe de capiton which knits two seemingly un-incorporatable texts together at musical "points" - the piece is contrapuntal in an extramusical sense, the two texts "touch" each other at musically prominent positions, to quite ludicrous effect. My favorite part occurs in the movement from the third stave to the fourth stave:

The wonderful explosive moment to the musical item - a worked ascent through A to high F, figures in a bullock stirring and the stag farting in this (musical and animistic) climax of this miniature tour around the farm of sumer is icumen in. The precise peak coincides with the ridiculous cuckoo call: "Sing cucco!" promptly echoed by the Pes repetitive parts, as unchanging as the actual irrational cuckoos who, for want of reason, are imprisoned by their own perpetual canon of mimetic birdsong. From the beastly dimensions of mock fin' amours, the corresponding juxtapositional text figures God as the "heavenly farmer" tending to his symbol-ridden bestiary. In an interpolative gesture, the text is precisely "layered," brought into corporeal proximity with its beastly other by the process of musical knitting. Religion, it seems "overwrites" the previous (proximal) secular lyric as the scribe "overwrites" (writes-over) the scraped, dried animal body (parchment) with meaningful symbols for reading. The music which is not one: always doubled by its own text-ure, but never fully reducible to the signifier either...

Corresponding to the (secular) lyric's conflation of the oral/anal drives (stag farting, the singer reaching a climatic high-f shriek), the sacred lyrics "supplies with captives half-dead with torment," a truly intriguing pairing of disconnect themes. Most interestingly, the climax of the sacred lyric - Vite (life) - is conspicuously disjointed from the musical phrase, only to be completed at the start of the next phrase after the brief rest. What is going on here? In the place of "vite," "supplicio" conforms to the high point, as does the inverted fart-breath of the stag sublimated into a joyous/ambiguous celebration/rejection/abjection of nature's machinic, hermetic writing and re-writing of its contradictory drives. The point of the verse, it seems, circulates around the mimesis of birdly (re)call, and the proper faculty of ars memoria: surely, by hammering in the cyclical (some say irritating) tapping of music, Christ's own torturous sacrifice is torturously hammered into the skull of the participant/listener, even musically displacing the actual receipts of Christ's sacrifice to the musical afterthought preceding the song's climax.

The registral shift from the (sung) bestiary to the ejaculatory wantonness of "cuccu!" frames Christian supplication to free the captive. Who is captive here? After a couple of rounds, inasmuch as music heightens the memoria of text, over-audibility could cause aural fatigue; the paradox, is that the climatic equivocal "cuccu!" flirts with an equally ambiguous "suplicio," perhaps the "suplicio" to rid oneself of the melody, to literally kill the music, to end a life by cutting short one's breath (which now stinks of flatulent music). Yet, the breath ironically supports the sustained (tone/)thought of Christ: the ridiculous conundrum of the cantor is therefore to sustain repetitiveness through perseverance: hopefully his singerly death (loss of voice) which becomes symptomatic of his devotion (his reduction to beastly ineloquence) transcends his corporeal (natural) enslavement: his flatulent "pneuma" turns into a blessed offering for the memorialization of Christ's sacrifice.

Locker Rooms: on exterior interiority

2010-04-30T07:15:00.001-07:00

In my email inbox today, I received an intriguing proposition from "Sportsmen Asia," a Singapore-based website which teeters on the edge of the "open secret." Its concept is simple enough - a few dozen surreptitious "lockers" will be made available for hire in a dusty corner of Chinatown "away from prying eyes," enabling its patrons a sense of purchased security. Although I do not know the details of this enterprise (i.e. the limits on safety and purchased privacy, what is deemed a "storable item" in the box, or does the company impose a threshold on the sotrable), the immediate paradoxes of psychic space and its projective manifestations are made clear, albeit in the comic mode. It is worth noting that the idea of hiding-away pervades the enterprise of Sportsmen Asia. The company name is no more than a mask, a cover, a subterfuge which appears to appeal, on the surface, to fitness-inclined gentlemen. Beneath its misleading guise, however, is a throwback to the well-documented English "gentlemen's clubs" of the 19th Century. Put simply, Sportsmen Asia caters to a very select group of clientele. Ignoring for a moment the genereded implications, it's trade is remarkably queer, just have a look for yourself.

Could we say S.A. is properly queer? It offers no mode of identification except the communal experience of the pink-dollar that could as easily be used to shore up heterosexist desires. This, no doubt, begs the troubling question over queer capital: can the tenacity of capitalism indeed undermine the temporalized, apocalyptic, unsettling throes of queerness? As the owners of Sportsmen Asia have brilliantly shown, it can soundlessly transmorgify the symbolic resistance of ex-scribed, ex-temporalized, ex-iled queer space into its own signifier, the sign of the coin, the symbolic of global financial recognition. It's immediately amazing how quickly the acknowledgment of dangerous heterosexual spatio-temporalities governed by the linearity of the phallus and its fantasy of transparent disclosure threatens to fold up upon itself in another equally libidinous system driven by the flow of capital rather than the charge of skin (a question we may return to is whether the project of Capitalism, since it stabilizes the ex-spatialization of queer space through the dollar, as Edelman might say, returns metonymy to metaphor, disables the monetarily charged micro-spaces its ability to queer the "disclosed" outside in the filed of the heteronormative phallus). Is metonymy marketable? Or is Sportsmen Asia's brand of metonymy simply reminiscent of a flourishing circuitry of capital which, for its flaring moment, returns deferment and displacement to the "tyranny of the [homosexual] signifier"? Recall Edelman's critique of "gay" and "lesbian" lit crit.:

The questions, in short, demanded of us a willingness to assert and affirm a singular, recognizable, and therefore reproducible critical identity: to commodify lesbian and gay criticism by packaging it as a distinctive flavor of literary theory that might find its appropriate market share in the upscale economy of literary production. In the process these questions directed us to locate "homosexual difference" as a determinate entity rather than as an unstable differential relation, and they invited us to provide some general guidelines by which to define what constitutes the homosexual itself. (Edelman, "Homographesis," in Yale Journal of Criticism, 3:1, 1989)

Aside, the Locker Room project aligns other interiorities with queer ex-istence; the charged space of the locker room, of course, itself generates the dangerous - yet compellingly eroticizing - staging of homosociality. In the locker room, however, towels drop: the homosocial is left bare, its "members" jostling in (un)comfortably proximity. Conflicted desires thrash about viciously underneath a sea of calm nudity. Let us not forget that the concept of the "bathhouse," and the explicitly sexualized "sauna" (increasingly popular in Southeast Asia) transforms the hegemonic heteronormative neutral of hyper-masculine sociality into an electrified zone for "cruising" and the fulfillment of illicit (read: lawfully ambiguous) desires. Vis-a-vis Cary Howie, the threshold of the queer enclosure - it's enclosive function - borders on disclosure of the queer subject, but visibility happens literally at the threshold, and is never in itself complete, its borders leaving no cookie-cutter subject for easy alliance. The space of the Sauna is effortlessly recapitulated here; the danger of spatial danger still lurks. After all, is the idea of the "locker" the mediating passage between exteriority and queer (bathhouse) interiority? Paradoxically, what function does the "locker" serve in the sauna? Do the keys strapped around the ankles or wrists of its identity-obliterated folk seal something else other "protect" private possession? Or does the enclosed locker-space within the enclosure of queer space delimit the ultimate reversal within queer space: that is, the locking away of one's "proper" identity, ex-scribing one's queer subjectivity for a skin-taut tabula rasa of anonymity in which the historical particular is denied? From this view, the so-called "queer" space of the enclosure is but fantasy, it's "properly queer" zone, really, shut-away in the locker, ex-iled to interiority.

In the enclosure of the queer bathhouse, the most normative gesture would be to reject the ornamentations of the phallic Symbolic: the very codes which could eventually queer queerness itself. Seldom are words exchanged, seldom is identity revealed, codes govern the necessity for secrecy, but secrecy disables the radicant which demolishes both spaces, and prevents the queer from becoming mere repetition, a jukebox-language which plays the selfsame tune. What then, of Sportsmen Asia's locker room project? Does it not present us with a communal form of "shedding," of spatialized (albeit socialized) temporal dis-identification? Bodies (colliding in queer space) are exchanged for objects rubbing against each other; to be specific - shamefully charged materials which feed on excised abjection, leaving its users, its attached body-part, free to re-enter the Symbolic free of proximal shame, bartered through the (Capital) Symbolic itself. Put differently: is this queerness literally selling out by ex/en-closing in? Are patrons paying to demarcate, control, excise deviant eroticisms by returning it to the overdetermined flow of relations between homosexuals and heterosexuals, by confining it to the Laws and dynamics of homosociality?

And what of "prying eyes?" Whose "prying eyes"? In the discursive locale of the epistemological "locker room" space (not locker) within the Sauna, isn't the locker precisely meant to govern access to the "prying eyes" of individuals who may return the anonymity of metonymy (fleshy, identity-less bodies) to a "marked" form of existence by prying open one's suppressed Symbolic history? In the Bathhouse, 'safety' is guaranteed by de-marking one's libido organized by the (outside) Symbolic, throwing the sign of one's "phallus" into slippery play ("you can be anyone") simply a rejection of queerness? The queer is not, then enclosive function of communal desire, but the registral shift of enclosive/disclosive threat - of recognition, the possibility of bringing the play of (bodily) signs into being named, a name, an identity: a co-worker, a classmate, a colleague, a policeman, a statesperson, a senator, a father, a professional. The loops are endless - seizing the momentum of metonymy and bringing it back into the rigidity of metaphor, the electric circuit of signification, the "lightbulb" goes off. But the "lightbulb" goes off in a/c currents as well, frictional electricity governed by the very differential relation between opposing flows. The Locker Room Project then forcibly governs the spatio-temporalization of safe spaces, built upon an absolute understanding of the hermeticism of enclosures - be it the enclosure of one's public-private life on the verge of the visible (by normative communities), or the enclosure of the deviantly charged Sauna-space, which (falsely) proffers to castrate the flows between either communities. What queerness tries to locate (always impossibly), is the disjunctive, enclosive/disclosive momentum between registers, and the possibility of rupture within imagined, hermetic spaces. Metonymy is not marketable - irreducible to the signifier of queerness or the signifier of the coin, for to market is to designate a product which stabilizes the economy of desire.

Middle Th-[rough/]-ou[g]ht

2010-04-28T12:44:00.000-07:00

Disclaimer: the following post may seem explicitly sexual, and hence offensive to some. Read at your own risk.

Thought - thinking through, thinking out [of the box]; what do these registers of heuristic "penetration" afford us? Historical "rimming" - I find unfocussed, unsettled thoughts tackling Cary Howie's outstanding philo-medieval project "Claustrophilia," or "the love of enclosures." Taking its starting point the attempt to think 'beside' historiography which, as Zizek rightly pronounces, is a metaphysical placeholder for authentic scholarship, Howie investigates the paradox of the enclosure - enclosive, while also orbiting around a disclosive gesture; the disclosure which emerges at the boundaries of enclosure. While I enjoy Howie's theorizing and its fantastic joy (jouissance?), has the disclosive enclosure walked so far ahead beyond penetrative modes? I'm not seeking an appraisal of penetrative violence, of strongly heterosexist models of domination and subordination, especially in an emergent field of Medieval studies creatively fuelled with the libido of enclosive phenomenology and the potency (albeit metonymic shiftiness) of a non-denotative queer, I want to return to one portion of Howie's formulation of "thinking-out-of" [the box] while - here he "enfolds" the Chinese notion of the "box," its paradoxical, in/egested other, that of thinking-through warrants some address.

Certain psychoanalytic directions in the Philosophy of History has sought to query the analysts' propensity to "act-out" an inherited, textual encounter rather than to "work-through" the material, dis- and re-connecting circuits of meaning and their psychic flows vis-a-vis the libido. Acting-out: mimesis, reproduction of power-cycles which leans against a death-wish, a repetitive drive of the self-same, versus "working-through," the possibility of obliteration and reformulation, though flirting with the possibility of violence, of domination. The "binary-star-system" complex may be fantasy, two moments held in perpetual sublative motion without the full destruction of the other (also maintained in current political "translation theory"), but is there a moebius-strip like topology which can fully engage the two?

Thinking-through and thinking-out, perhaps, returns to the ego of the phallus but, like Howie's temeprate ass-licking/rimming version of the historical and ahistorical, social and asocial, may father a non-reproductive (a-futurist, in Edelman-speak) method of ex-egesis. That is, the act of enclosure which preserves the resistiveness of the "historical" resembles more an act of masturbation than it does a clerkly violent rape of the "robed" text. Thinking through-out is a historical handjob, but the formulation begs the question: who gives whom pleasure? Is it text that invigorates the jouissance of the enclosed, or is it the jouissance of never approaching the text's own foreclosed desires? This way, the "wrapping" of the medieval is partial; as easily as it wraps, it unwraps, the penetrator is himself "penetrated," but penetration is never absolute, since the "hole" in question resists cartesian space. Meaning through disclosive-enclosure of the historical hand-job is literally at the limits of "wrapping": the phallus is never dominant, stoked to non-reproductive joy by that which it penetrates, and is enclosed-by. By speaking the medieval, is one's throat choked, or does it wrap? By singing the medieval, does one spit, or does it ingest? A primer for claustrophillic middle-ages music-making might then consider the metonymic relation between reading and listening, except that listening is a sort of a "double-fuck," to extend Madhavi Menon's reflections - the mouth and ears participate in... in what? Can the ear be penetrated, or does it enforce an aural form of "rimming," where sound [from the mouth, the lips] orbits the functional pinnae (the ear's outer bone structure), filtering it into a vor-textual abyss? Then there is the narcissistic mouth, (gagging? spitting?) which flows through the ears and back to the mouth again in a circuitous loop. Where is the enclosure here, then? Through-out. At the threshold of a handjob's joyous friction.

The end of a thesis era: back to the books I love

2010-04-27T16:18:00.001-07:00

I am proud to report that my nocturnal adventures in the enclosures of thesis-land have not been for naught. To my delight, an email arrived a few days ago confirming that my thesis entitled "Musical 'Beastliness' in the Roman de Fauvel: Chaillous 'addicions' and Sensory Danger" was awarded high honors. Retroactively, perhaps I should have bought a more expensive bottle of Champagne instead (refer below):

This queer ritual captured above is known as the annual end-of-thesis-party-on-Olin-Library-Senior-Sendoff, where Wesleyan Seniors indulge in blind drunkenness in the (possibly false) celebration of life's little challenges. This unfortunate event is usually followed by denial, aggression, a chronic lack of academic motivation, and several episodes of nudity on Foss hill. Fortunately, the condition wears off within a few weeks, and most nocturnal subjects return, rejuvenated, to a diurnal lifestyle. Some even manage to recalibrate their scholarly sensibilities towards intellectual productivity, but, alas, constitute a minority especially since the anxieties of graduation are quick to kick in.

To alleviate the aforesaid, I have broken my word by breaking the piggy bank. Amazon be damned! Ever since disappearing into the vortex of "thesis," I am happy to report that several stimulating reads temporarily put on hold for sake of education are now making their way across states, and into my mailbox (hopefully by tomorrow):

"The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I (The Seminars of Jacques Derrida)"
- Definitely one I've been meaning to pick up after examining Derrida's highly provocative essay "The Animal therefore I am" chocked full of titillating ideas on the ani-mot, an ontology modeled on "following," and the gaze of his cat which brings the enterprise of Universalism/Particularism under scrutiny.

"The Renaissance Reform of Medieval Music Theory: Guido of Arezzo between Myth and History"
- Anyone who was at AMS 2009 who heard Mengozzi's paper would agree that this is a hugely important work for late medieval conceptions of the Guidonian Hand, and, correspondingly, the schema of hexachordal space. I'm hoping that Mengozzi's "semantic turn" investigative style will provide clues to the nature of late medieval ars, especially regarding the re-appraisal of musica ficta/falsa, whose story, I believe hasn't been fully told with much certainty.

"The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Series Q)"
- Inexorably excited about this one, ever since reading Edelman's "No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive," in which Edelman critiques the fantasy of "reproductive futurism." He leaves the fantasy intact, however, by avoiding the "queer child" in his accounts of the child-as-Big (or little)-Other supporting the foundation of an anti-anti-futurist ethic. Freud himself is credited by attempting to formulate an understanding of the pre-Symbolic queer subject (as does Lacan), and should be pertinent in unveiling yet another fantasy structured on models of domination, that is, Adultism. I'm interested in seeing how "growing sideways" may be complementary to Sara Ahmed's take on "Queer Phenomenology" which discusses /dis/re-orientation.

"The Christian West and Its Singers: The First Thousand Years"
- Finally! Christopher Page's scholarship on the disciplining of singers in the later medieval ages!

"First As Tragedy, Then As Farce"
- One of Zizek's latest offerings. Anyone read it? How is it? I meant to put a purchase hold on his soon-to-be-released "living in the end times," but I'd rather wait for it to come out before I spend more than I can manage. Was looking forward to "The Monster of Christ," but isn't that topic a little worn out by now?

"This Incredible Need to Believe"
- Kristeva's latest book. Kristeva is always magnificent food for thought.

And with that, I conclude my anticipated reading list for these few months in between gasps of merry-making, singing, concerts, and future-less preparations.

In the [Medieval] "Mittle"

2010-04-26T12:17:00.000-07:00

It's about time that I vociferously slogan the wonderful work of In The Medieval Middle, a truly stunning set of Shenkerian-esque "unfoldings" about everything off-centered we find about the Middle Ages. Or is it time to topple the "Middle" from "Middle Ages," many of the posts argue, not in the least in our exciting age of posthuman scholarship. Rarely do critical medieval-middle-isms meet Musicologists; the latter are still wringing hands over the search for origins, and schema for structural, traceable, "historical" answers. As Jeffrey Cohen (famed for his truly original work on monsters and nonhuman medieval Others, not forgetting their Queer in/carnations for scholarship today) has constantly sought to befuddle our predilections for a "dark" Middle legible only by the light of empiricism, we constantly find our temporalities thrown into deep question when the "Middle," that is, the expositionary, the pulsative inching towards the "/" which enables presentness to be present, infiltrates and muddies the medieval me.

In celebration of (hopefully) another Rhizomatic flight path which "wraps" and imagines a kind of historical "embrace" brought on by contemporary "touch" theory, perhaps (in the spirit of D&G), I will contribute this first act of touching with not a history of music, but a musical history, already somewhat hinted at by Daniel Albright in his strange livret Untwisting the Serpent. My model considers the "flickering" that ensues within the vor-text of the "middle" via Schenkerianism - that (often difficult) mode of musical analysis which, at its perverse core of overdetermining the exactitude of individual constituent pitches in the musical score, disfigures the object itself in favor of a hegemonic "chord of nature" understanding - God's Claves, if you wish:

What draws me to Schenker is not his insistence on the "chord of nature," which supposedly exists only in the hintergrund (background), strenuously extrapolated from the Vordergrund (foreground), but the idea of the Mittelgrund (Middle-ground), that indistinct mediatory step which fluctuates between the despotic one-size-fits-all "chord of nature" and the particular, the full glory of the notated score itself. A musical history wedged in the Mittlegrund gestures uneasily towards both poles, while much more recent work recognizing the creative potential of Schenkerian analysis has re-emphasized the Mittlegrund for its d/r-econstructive potency. What's more - each "level" extrapolated from the score-trace is predicated on a series of chordal "unfoldings," a historical sense which, while seeking consonance between the Vordergrund und der hintergrund demands the analyst to eludicate linear patterns while molding the Mittlegrund to the contours of the Vordergrund.

A musical historical note then to medievalist/musicologists - what does an aesthetic of the medieval "mittle" propose? A reversion to the infinite nature of "unfoldings," to the rhizomatic understanding of the "Mittle" which, even as it acknowledges the insufficiencies of the present hintergrund, nevertheless avails the (analytical) possibility of rebuking it, while weaving a set of twisting-connective operations vis-a-vis the "textual," Vordergrund. If we can think music through history, why shouldn't we be able to think history through music? An aesthetics of the Medieval Mittle, perhaps, would respond to an "unfolding," "leading" quality whilst actively dealing with the manifold received "medievals" and "moderns." For the operation of Schenker's graph of the Mittle is not to lead-to, but to lead-for, to lead-in-lieu-of.

Ah! Cappella!

2010-04-20T06:52:00.001-07:00

On Monday I was contacted by a Hartford Courant reporter who wished to conduct an interview regarding the rise in popularity of collegiate a cappella. And why should one feign an interest in this socio-economic (mostly university) phenomenon? From about 300 singing groups in New England, "a cappella," or, more accurately, its collegiate incarnation, has literally taken the US by storm. I myself am in two very different a cappella groups, Wesleyan's all-male The Wesleyan Spirits and another group I formed with three other individuals in my freshman year named The Mixolydians (you can conceive of all the bad puns by yourself).

But what exactly of a cappella music and its fresh, new faces? When one mentions collegiate a cappella, perhaps the first thing to bubble up to memory's surface is Tuft's Beezelbubs, thanks (or no thanks) to the highly popular, albeit sensationalized Sing Off program produced by NBC. Under the dazzling overexposure of glitzy lights and adoring fans, a cappella's new faces have somewhat trampled the memories of them good 'ol fraternity-like Glee Clubs and barbershop quartets so pervasive in the mid twenties. Less remembered, however, is that the association between "a cappella" and its modern counterpart was based on a mistaken attribution of the Roman Catholic Church in the 19th Century.

But first, back to basics. A-cappella; "cappella" meaning "Church" in Italian. The term first arose in the early 17th Century, denoting polyphonic music composed in the more "modern" concertato style as compared to the older Renaissance form of high counterpoint, exemplified by Palestrina. The surprising twist comes about in the late 19th Century when the Roman Catholic Church (along with a few non-Catholic music conservatists/museumists) attached special favor to the polyphonic repertory of the 16th Century. A cappella then came to connote music sung "without instruments," or so they believed, with Palestrina hilariously heroicized as its exemplar. And so, it is the latter definition we have inherited, although we've unwittingly knocked Palestrina off the pedestal again.

BACK IN THE WORLD OF THE LIVING! (And anticipating MedRen 2010)

2010-04-14T08:43:00.000-07:00

Dearest (fellow) Bloggo-musico-logists of the new world order,

I am pleased to announce that, countless sleepless nights, hundreds of edits and one soused episode of champagne overdose later, my Honors thesis is finally done, uploaded, and I'm back amongst the living. (And, saying that, I'm typing this from a tiny carrel). The lack of sunlight on skin has taken its toll, and I seem to gleam under the moon as well. But for anyone who's curious, I rolled out a thesis investigating musical ontologies of "beastliness" in our favorite fourteenth century source. Everyone repeat after me: Le Roman de Fauvel.

Curious? For all those with spare time (don't laugh...) you can access the FULL unrestricted thesis here:

HANSEL'S THESIS

... and get ready for some Horsey Musicology!

HELLO EVERYONE, it's nice to be back outside!

That said, this year's medieval and renaissance conference looks totally baller. Here are some of my favorite picks from the lineup:

Yossi Maurey: Singing the Praises of
God without Words: The Meaning of
Neumas in Medieval Liturgy

Andrew Hicks: Re-interpreting an
Arithmetical Error in Boethius’s De
institutione music (iii.14-16)

Ali Pemble: Timaeus and the Trumpet:
The Harmonizing Logos in Medieval Art

Timothy Chenette: The Role of Complex
Notation in Complex Rhythm of the Late
14th Century (YES!)

Jeffrey Levenberg: Ouds or Lutes?
“Fumeux Fume’s” Ficta Speculacion
(Finally, another voice about Fumeux Fume that isn't Lefferts)

Richard Parncutt: Historical origins of
major-minor tonality: A psychological
approach (Seriously? Rick Cohn better watch his back!)

Gábor Kiss: Spontaneity or
consciousness? Late-medieval
approaches to the differences of the
liturgical repertories (can't even begin to wonder)

Stefano Mengozzi: Facets of Musical
Renovatio in the Early 15th Century (Everyone should go buy his book when it officially hits the shelves)

Catherine Bradley: Clausula or Motet: Which
Came First? (We're still arguing about it, folks!)

Anna Zayaruznaya: The Composite Tenor of
Vitry’s Cum statua/Hugo (This should be magnificently interesting! Vitry's motet talks about lying and interior deception, using the metaphor of Nebuchadnezzar's statue. She's gonna talk about a hybrid tenor, and I'm hoping she'll court with notions of Alchemy...)

Rachel Lumsden: Mode, Gender, and Aribo’s De Musica (Everyone remember the 12th Century Aribo's very strange articulation of modes as woman's body? I wanted to talk about it in my thesis; never got round to it)

AND FINALLY,

This one's for Phil who lamented some blogposts ago that there really isn't much on musicology and Derrida. I'm happy to say that (1) I've used Derrida's "Hauntology" in my thesis at least once, and MedRen has this in store...

Kate Maxwell: Boethius, Guido, ...
Derrida? ‘Grammatology’ as a means of
understanding early music notation

Curious? So am I. I think I know where she's going with this one, but let's see if it's true.

Signing off,

HT. Going to get coffee now.

The chapter that didn't quite make my thesis: Beastly transformation, Musicality, and Michael Jackson.

2010-04-06T12:42:00.001-07:00

Michael Jackson’s Beastly Transformations in Thriller: Killing the Hypersexualized, “Musical” Body.

Nearly six entire centuries have passed since Chaillou’s interpolated Roman de Fauvel was brought into completion. Today, the enclosed world of reading for whom fr. 146 was probably meant for is replicated under the strict surveillance of the Paris Bibliothèque Nationale, fully accessible only to a limited number of viewers at a time. Despite the restricted circumstances of Fauvel viewership, paradoxically, the musical components of fr. 146 have never been more accessible. Over the last decade, the publication of the colossal Fauvel Studies has ushered in a new wave of Fauvel interest, succeeded by Emma Dillon’s Medieval Music-Making and the Roman de Fauvel, which both seek to relocate Chaillou’s interpolations within the epistemology of the “book,” and correspondingly, its intertextual relations with other items also included in fr. 146.

Acquiring a Fauvellian sound-byte has never been easier, thanks to new disseminative pathways such as the CDs, recordings, and the digitization of music over the internet. At the click of a button, almost every single musical item in the Roman de Fauvel can be purchased over i-tunes, Amazon, “ripped off” via file-sharing networks, or sampled on media-sharing sites such as imeem or youtube. On the front of contemporary music-making, groups as diverse as the Clemencic Consort, Studio der Frühen Musik, Ensemble P.A.N., Boston Camerata, Ordo Virtutum, The Ensemble for Early Music and even community amateur groups have tried their hand at theatricalising Fauvel from page to stage. Contrary to Gervais’ and Chaillou’s poetic predictions, Fauvel is far from deceased; his multiplied, sonorous musical form permeates the far corners of contemporary reconstructions of medieval music-making, with musicologists idolizing the Roman as one of the most important documents of music in the early fourteenth century.

Today, fr. 146 makers’ concerns over hermeneutic and exegetic “beastliness” seem to be lost in contemporary culture. Thanks to the Hollywood industry, medieval worry over the possibility of “beastly mutation” has been largely quelled by recent films such as X-men (2002) and its sequels (2003, 2006, 2009), The Incredible Hulk (2008) and the highly popular Twilight movie series (2008 followed by New Moon in 2009). In these films, the ability to transmute between beastly and humanoid bodies is fashioned as an imaginary additional appendage, a signifier of extraordinary abilities and fantastic powers beyond human possibilities. Although “beastliness” in its contemporary positive incarnations has the power to inspire awe and admiration, it is worth considering how these films as such respond to beast/human hybridity with ambivalence; to use a cursory example, the massive strength of the Incredible Hulk comes at the cost of uncontrollable rage and monstrous destructive urges. Such is the case demonstrated succinctly in Michael Jackson’s (MJ) immortalized music video Thriller (1983) directed for television by famed horror filmmaker John Landis (American House, American Werewolf in London, Twilight Zone), in which the music-star persona of Michael Jackson – then internationally lauded as the “King of Pop” – vacillates with a ghastly, monstrous filmic persona as if both the aura of celebrity musical genius and the horror of beast stem from the same metaphysical source.

In the fourteen minute music video, Landis and Jackson present us with a modern cinematic version of the Roman de Fauvel’s “Gesamtkuntswerk” aesthetic, marrying image, text and music unfolding temporally over a television “page.” More importantly, I believe the video reproduces similar concerns as the Roman de Fauvel’s anxiety over the sensuous, beastly (musically-suffused) body, albeit in a contemporary setting. The video opens with a lengthy expositional narrative sequence without Jackson’s signature pop tune (the catchy C-D-F-G-D repeating bass vamp only begins 4:13 minutes into the video), in which Jackson transforms into a hideous werewolf as soon as he and his onscreen date (Ola Ray, OR) declare their affection for each other, and the former presents her with an engagement ring [1:43] (see fig. 5.1).

Fig. 5.1. MJ presents OR with an engagement ring [1:43].

Leading up to his beastly transformation, the following dialogue ensues:

1:55 MJ: I have something I wanna tell you.
OR: Yes Michael?
MJ: I’m not like other guys.
OR: Of course not! That’s why I love you.
MJ: No, I mean I’m different.
OR: What are you talkin’ about?
2:10 Screenshot of clouds clearing away revealing the moon. MJ winces and crouches over
2:21 OR: Are you alright?
Cut to MJ, who has semi-transformed into a werewolf
2:24 MJ: (With a gruff, beastly voice) Go away!

Fig. 5.2. MJ transformed into a werewolf [2:51].

MJ’s transformation from 2:10 is ominously paired with “scary music” provided by Elmer Bernstein, which juxtaposes the audience’s expectation of Jackson’s lyricized pop tune with a nondiegetic “external” musical accompaniment (that is, music which seems to originate from a source other than onscreen narrative). In the self-contained fantastic world of Thriller, Bernstein’s music is presented as an “excessive” surplus to MJ’s song, conspicuously paired with moments of filmic beastly mutation. In other words, MJ’s mutations are flamboyantly “musical” in the sense that Bernstein’s “addicions” lack the neutralizing component of text (the word). It is as if the dimension of beastly transformation is explicitly linked to the wordless orchestration of Bernstein’s “beastly” scary music, or even apparent as its complicit source. During the transformation, even MJ’s human voice takes on a gruff, bestialized, monstrous quality [2:24], finally overtaking the mechanisms of speech: the fully transformed werewolf is completely “musical” in the sense that he is unable to produce words, his seat of grammatical reason reduced to “musical” howling and chaotic roaring akin to the intoxicated bray of a thought-deprived cantor (see fig. 5.2 above).

This beastly, speech-impaired “musical” version of werewolf-MJ threatens to break the anthropocentric social pact of MJ and OR’s wedding engagement, pursuing her ruthlessly [3:00 – 3:41] and pinning her to the ground (fig. 5.3 below). That is, the masculine hyper-sensualized (-sexualized) “musical” body of MJ-the-werewolf threatens to overwhelm the disciplinary “human” restrictions of nuptial relations. As Bernstein’s “scary music” surges to a crescendo, the “excesses” of the textless musicality of Thriller reaches a high point as the werewolf prepares to “consume” OR. This sequence has been oft interpreted as the rapacious beastliness of sexual predation, recapitulating Alan and Arnulf’s apprehension of the uncontrollable excessiveness of beastly sexual desires we encountered in chapter 1. MJ is suggestively posed above OR who, stricken with fear, lies helplessly on the ground; whether his approach concludes with sexual or oral consummation is, however, ingeniously left to the imagination of the viewer. At the critical point of attack (rape? Devouring?), the camera cuts to a shot of a movie theatre audience watching a horror film, with a “modern-day” (human) version of MJ and a differently fashioned OR amidst the crowd [3:42]; the viewer than “discovers” that the fright sequence was all but a dreamlike movie-style sequence.

Fig. 5.3. A fear-stricken OR [3:39] sprawled on the floor, encroached upon by a werewolf version of MJ [3:41].

In the second half of the video, the “modern-day” MJ (of the movie theatre) leaves the theatre at the request of “modern-day” OR, at which point the C-D-F-G-D bass vamp begins [4:13]. The beastly excesses of Bernstein’s orchestration are left behind in the movie theatre, “domesticated” as such by containing it within the theatre, and hence the fantastic imagination of the film both actors previously “watched.” After singing three permutations of the song’s verse, the camera pans to a graveyard where, accompanied by an organ underscoring, a different sort of monstrous, “beastly” being emerges. From 6:31 to 8:03, zombies (another form of liminal beastly being perched between life and death) emerge from beneath the ground, as if drawn to the infectious “musicality” of the song’s textless, repetitive bass vamp. Like the “imperfect” neumatic coloration of the tenor line of Garrit Gallus/In Nova Fert, the sensuous pulsation of Thriller’s ground bass appears to breathe “pneumatic” life into the corpses of the dead, spawning an army of aural-pleasure-seeking creatures. This monstrous life-giving quality of MJ’s metaphysical musicality is further strengthened by the deterioration of MJ’s vocals into meaningless, sensuous warbling: at 7:32, the zombies rise to MJ’s signature “hiccup” vocal hook, and his musical improvisation on intoning “ooh,” “yeah,” “ooh baby,” and “woah yeah,” approximating nonsensical glossia: precisely the kind of avian-like literate but inarticulate particulate vox which transform the signifying capacities of the sign into pure aural titillation (see chapter 2). Are the zombies drawn to the “musical” qualities of MJ’s voice, or are they enraptured by the significance of his envoiced words (i.e. the logos of the sign)?

Fig. 5.4. MJ’s zombie metamorphosis [8:26].

By 8:03, the auditory zombies have encircled MJ and OR. At this moment, the Thriller vamp drops out completely, while Bernstein’s “scary music” theme irrupts out of its movie theatre enclosure and into “modern” MJ and OR’s narrative, articulated with an alternating E-flat/F dyad (another musically “metamorphosing” pitch sequence?) in the string section [8:09-8:21], proceeded by an atonal D-C#-C falling chromatic pattern in the strings from [8:21-8:24]. This section climaxes on a loud dissonant cluster in the orchestra [8:25], as the camera pans onto “modern” MJ’s, himself suddenly transformed into a beastly, zombie-like being (fig. 5.4 above) to the bewilderment of “modern” OR. Immediately after this ghastly “reveal,” at 8:28 the familiar Thriller bass vamp kicks into gear, inspiring the ghoulish MJ and his zombie accomplices into a wordless dance sequence which continues until 9:40 (fig. 5.5), which heightens the relationship between textless “musicality” and the rhythmic, sensual drives of the (dancing) body. However, at 9:41 where the text of the chorus returns, the ghoulish MJ spins around to face the camera and sing only for the viewer to discover that his beastly “mutation” has abruptly come to an end. Indeed the moment MJ returns his musical piping to a worded chain of signification, all signs of transformation vanishes, leaving the pop star intact in his fully humanized body (fig. 5.6).

Fig. 5.5. The zombie dance sequence [9:24].

Fig. 5.6. A “re-humanized” MJ [9:41].

By returning to the safe, productive realm of signification, the music video seems to suggest that MJ overcomes his own “beastly” self by becoming an intelligent master of the word (logos), thereby returning to the realm of humanness. On the contrary, by abandoning the symbolic functions of the sign and appealing to the metaphysical excesses of “musicality,” MJ is portrayed as degenerating into the sphere of beastliness. Once MJ’s sung chorus break [9:41-10:34] ends, a shot of MJ’s face in 10:40 shows him retransformed into a zombie. It is only by speaking again (“what’s the problem?”) in 11:47 that MJ breaks the spell of his beastly ontology and, predictably, acquires the affection of his recovering girlfriend. The aesthetic of the word’s power in MJ and Landis’ modern-day Gesamtkuntswerk is further reified by an opening message signed by MJ at the beginning of the video:

Due to my strong personal convictions,
I wish to stress that this film in no
Way endorses a belief in the occult.
- Michael Jackson.

MJ and Landis therefore use the hermeneutic strength of the signifying word to quell any alternative “beastly” forms of exegesis, or acts of misreading which may result from watching the film. In other words, MJ’s opening statement covertly works to dispel, indeed “kill” misinformed acts of reading arising from the metaphysical excess of the film’s semiotic signs in play. By “framing” our viewing experience by warning the viewer not to interpret the film as evidence of MJ’s occult-based beliefs, does not MJ position himself as a version of the clerky, masterful “reader” instructing his students (fans/viewers) of “carnal” reading? MJ disciplines the field of the film’s reception through use of the word, reminding spectators that the filmic events should be understood at an aesthetic, “figurative” level rather than one that is “literal.”

From his onscreen persona to his public persona, MJ’s “performance” of the self in public has also repeated the authority of the word against the metaphysical excesses of wordless “musicality.” This has come to bear on MJ’s deliberate refusal to participate in discourses of his sexuality (the discursive domain of the sensuous beast), his business associate Shirley Brooks explaining that it is “none of anyone else’s business.” Yet, MJ’s suppressed “beastly” domain has nonetheless attracted the admiration of thousands of adoring fans, who, like Alan’s pleasure-seeking sodomites, figure MJ’s sexual appeal into the “musicality” of the voice rather that its textual passengers. Mercer explains:

Just what is it that makes this young, black man so different, so appealing? Undoubtedly, it is the voice which lies at the heart of his appeal. Rooted in the Afro-American tradition of ‘soul,’ Jackson’s vocal performance is characterized by breathy gasps, squeaks, sensual sighs and other wordless sounds which have become his stylistic signature. The way in which this style punctuates the emotional resonance and bodily sensuality of the music corresponds to what Roland Barthes called the ‘grain’ of the voice – ‘the grain is the body in the voice as it sings.’ The emotional and erotic expressiveness of the voice is complemented by the sensual grace and sheer excitement of Jackson’s dancing style: even as a child, his stage performance provoked comparisons with James Brown and Jackie Wilson.

However, as we have seen in the Thriller video, MJ’s “stylistic signature” of erotic “musicality” is similarly the sensuous, metaphysical agent which initiates his mutation from man to beast, an uncontrollable monstrous entity which must be killed by the presence of the word for meaningful figurations of the social contract. The beast is undeniably on the outside, and must be brought back within the boundaries of signification in order to discipline, police, and regulate the meanings of human interactions. One only need venture beyond the bounds of MJ’s regulated stronghold of signification into fan-based circles and the discourse of popular tabloids to observe the destructive effects of beastliness and the “musicality” of signification gone awry on MJ’s reputation. In 1993, MJ’s fame was tarnished by a permutation of such sensuous beastliness, himself stigmatized by a spate of child-molestation scandals, the repercussions of which are still felt today after the celebrity’s untimely death in 2009 from drug overdose. Put differently, MJ’s ambiguous flirtations with the realm of beastly, erotic sensuousness in music videos such as Thriller was an integral part of his rise to fame, as much it was ultimately the blemish that tarnished his public “humanly” image. Indeed, the mutative, beastly quality of MJ’s Thriller video spills over to his public persona in which, under the charged rumours of his deviant acts of sexual predation, construes MJ as a queer, hybridized beast of sorts, shuttling between the glorified super-human object of desire and his monstrous incarnation as a predatory paedophile.

Another name for the musical, sensuous beastliness which dominated MJ’s charges is suggested by John Nguyet Erni as “queer,” a term which designates a deviance from yardsticks of (sexual) normativity while also containing the potential to “queer” the “givenness” of normative templates against which it was first measured. Drawing on the work of literary queer theorists such as Michael Warner and Judith Butler, Erni describes MJ’s “queer figuration” in the realm of the cultural-political as:

[Increasingly] a zone of socially licensed excess, and one without guarantee. “Queer” is a point of resistance, a locus of repeated stigmatization, and a site for overcommodification all at the same time. However, realizing this is never an underestimation of the over-and-above charge of queer practices and queer practices and queer modes of articulation. Rather, it is to trust, with due caution, that the queer performative self – whether it is about performing the transitive “race,” the crossover “gender,” or the topsy-turvy “sexuality,” [and, one should add, the beast-human hybrid,] Michael Jackson style or otherwise plays in the phantom space on all sides of the social and political sphere, and produces itself as vigilant, imaginative, and vastly revisable, but invariably paradoxical, political fictions.

On the front of musicology, the late Philip Brett brilliantly demonstrated the historical semantic connection between beastly “queerness” and “musicality.” Inspired by the work of Eve Sedgwick, Brett argues that the beastly ineffability of queerness (under the regulating gaze of the heteronormative) due to what Sedgwick calls the “epistemology of the closet” made it structurally complementary to music’s own alleged ineffability, to the extent that they became nearly coterminous. “Musical” came to be a slippery “codeword,” an identifying catchphrase amidst members of the same deviating class that could potentially signify that which was other than itself, in other words, signify the beastly, unstable transmuting locus of the “queer.”

Paradoxically, then, “musical” only “signifies” queerness when it signifies defectively, when it short-circuits the pathway of normative signification. Like Fauvel’s visual and musical ontology as a sensuous/sign hybrid, musical queerness threatens the legitimacy of normative signifying systems by being impossible to firmly “pin down.” It revels in the metaphysical, sonorous excesses of the sign and the uncontrollable generation of multiple meanings through play while refuting a unidirectional epistemology of signification. Instead, as the sonorous explosion of “boive” and its sister signs on folio 45r, meaning is amplified (amplificato) in all directions, rupturing a one-way signification street and causing an experience of disorientation or intoxication. Similarly, MJ’s “beastly” persona in Thriller is equally resistant to the grasp of reason – his mutating body slips effortlessly between human, werewolf and zombie, in turn “queering” the authenticity of his “original” humanly appearance, relating, as it were, to the slippery, hybridized quality of the Fauvellian sign teetering between signification and self-absorption.

Politicomusicologico-ism: should we be afraid?

2009-12-25T09:56:00.000-08:00

Yes, chestnuts are roasting on an open fire.

Jackfrost nipping at your nose.

You know the drill, except on this early Christmas afternoon, the sordid interjection of Facebook did more than just reintroduce icicles hanging over my nose. It introduced this:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/dec/22/copenhagen-climate-change-mark-lynas

Surprise! And a very merry Christmas to you!

Not exactly your average way to start off the holiday celebrations by getting politically infuriated over the Coppenhagen dealings. Holiday space, like musical/musicological space is supposed to be ritualised space, where clean lines of method, process and knowledge intersect predictably. Where, for a bite-sized oatmeal cookie chunk of time, we stave-off the staves, becoming domestic holiday-beings, chorusing good cheer while all this lip-service to goodwill appears to be a simple pat on the back for not getting embroiled in sticky world-situations.

Sometimes, it's a gordian knot, isn't it? In a world that demands the intellectual to properly intervene, his space has likewise been reduced to the domesticated coffee-mafia of sterile scholasticism. In this bubble, "change" is what we believe in, but sometimes we're happier when all "change" denotes is a shift in scholarly perspective, unearthing some dusty deconstructive debate if only to give the 'ol knowledge box a shiny veneer. Has the musicological endeavor absorbed enough of corporate values that it has finally become a bookmark, a footnote in the historical-citation practice of the future? Are we narcissists, gazing into the imaginary mirror of futurism, secretly imagining how our output will be viewed in the years to come?

I want to expand a little on Dominick LaCapra's bitter essay in the 1985s concerning the "archival" turn. His critique was philosophical, a post-Hayden White generation of thinkers who took the "aesthetic" argument of History seriously, and believed that its extension into politics was more metaphysical than objectively navigated. In the wake of Derrida & co's linguistic turn, La Capra criticized historians for conferring a Benjaminesque auratic quality to the "archive" where The Truth (see the capitals?) promised to reside, where authentic knowledge could be extracted over other (inauthentic??) means. I won't ponder over the authentic/inauthentic unesay currencies reminiscent of Heidegger and National Socialism - others have done a good job of explicating the ways in which theory and practice do diverge, but by diverging, they inadvertedly touch each other. In such touchings, the inertia from their interactivity determines certain countours of history, contours of the present which also serve to delimit the nature of contemporary "truths".

LaCapra calls archival fever no more than a "fetish", a "literal substitute for the ‘reality’ of the past which is ‘always already’ lost for the historian". Of course, LaCapra continues to be debated in spheres of the philosophy of history, and lately conceptions of the "presentness of the past" (remember Taruskin?) have come back into play. Theorists such as Runia confer theoretical legitimacy upon "Experiences" of the past as irruptive windows into the Real real of the past. I myself am more Zizkekian; skeptical of the Real real, I tend to agree that the real tends to present itself as a rupture of chronotypes, which does not simply offer one a "window" into the past, but disfigures the ontological authority of "the past", "the present" and "the future" as we know it. In short - trauma, horror, symbolic breakdown. Do other manifestations of the "real" exist outside Lacan which extend a "softer" version of the historical real like that envisioned by Runia? Perhaps, but perhaps this version of fantastical unmediate access would merely make "thrill-seekers" of us, and not fastidious poststructuralist inquirers.

Anyway, this "rupture" destroys the symbolic efficacy of Christmas for me. The irruption of the "real", I think, can be no more than a discursive infection, where one discursive sphere suddenly spills into the ritualized, ordered discursivity of festivity. Christmas is fantasy. Me listening to old recordings of Nat King Cole singing "The Christmas Song" over youtube is merely the flexibility, insistence and tenacity of the Symbolic to quickly conscript bedfellows in its reproductive series. And this series says "rest, dear academic", for battles can be forgotten for a day. But we forget these battles for a day, and the musical umbilical to fantasy is prematurely severed upon the insistence of the pleasurable. The wonderful. Or, if I may warrant: the fetishistic.

I'm not all negative nancy. I know I dissed the eco-musicology symposium, but this was in faith that we could someday avoid neologisms (eco-) to legitimate an endeavour that is always already political, or partisan in a reproductive fantasy of differentiated political space. We love music, we love it, we love it, we love it. Our worrying love for the subject infects the field of the historical to bend to our contours of love, or vice versa. But this is the "touching" of spheres, its colouring by our orientation towards the fetishistic object. But to love, I think, requires us to acknowledge the infectous "hate" typical of any object of desire, any objet petit a, delimiting a structural vortex in our system of pleasure. We tend to excribe the unpleasurable from the musicological, don't we? We give analytical treatises on why we should love, cherish and enjoy music, but maybe we should also pay attention to relieving our conscience of the insistence of enjoyment. When free to hate, or extend dislike, we turn our objects of fetishistic love into monstrous relics, threatening to devour the very amorous speaker. Inscribing the monstrous element of the musical, affirming its ability to turn against us, is just an important task as appraisal.

So, to sum up briefly on this happy day - yes. Be very afraid of politicomusicologico-ism (I made up that word. It's a mouthful). Because fear, as much as it is a manipulatory tool, is an affirmative counterbalance to our fetishistic insistence on the musical, the nonconforming structural hole in the middle of the symbolic. By returning the duplicity of the fetishistic object as both desirable and horrific/abject, we make room for the object to speak back and punish the lover. It becomes frighteningly queer, and the "musical" demands a different sort of attention to its agenda. I cite a couple of visionary examples - Suzanne G. Cusik's incredibly important article in Radical Musicology on "Musicology, Torture, Repair", and another article (I can't remember the source) on News-TV opening-titles. Such investigations re-open the wound of the fetish, and expose its other quality: the abject, the foreclosed feature of the object which incites fear, disgust, and the possibility of denoting new lines of flight.

So Ho ho ho,

Oh fear!

Merry Christmas.

Merry Chirstmas Eve!

2009-12-24T09:06:00.000-08:00

Because of various externalities, I decided to cancel my little trip around the freezing, forrested areas of New England for Christmas. Instead, I'm spending it with my little sister who travelled from Stanford to stay with me in Connecticut. And lemme tell ya'all folks: it's cold here! We've all got the sniffles, reduced to rubbing hands in front of the faulty heating to warm up. At least we have music to share! We can't eradicate world hunger and injustice, but boy, can we sightread.

In the spirit of Christmas, I thought I'd post a little video from the last concert I had with the mixolydians, a small singing consort that I direct at Wesleyan. We usually do lots of funky, eclectic 21st century Eastern European stuff (think lots of cluster chords and an over-zealous penchant for stacked major-seconds), but this year we decided to improve our musicality by going back to "basics". And by basics, I mean the hefty interpretative task of Poulenc's gorgeous 1952 Ave Verum Corpus for female choir.

You can just see my back, conducting this piece, milking the musicality for all its worth. But I think slowing down the tempo and underplaying the architectonics paradoxically stresses its psychically schizophrenic texture. Poulenc is, of course, famous for composing in juxtapositionary cells, but here he seems to have a keen pulse of voice-leading techniques than in his Mass for choir and orchestra, for example. I let the music "speak for itself" (don't press me on this point on Christmas Eve, let's celebrate!)

Get a cup of eggnog people, and kick back on those upholstery. Merry Christmas Eve.

un/dissing Bent

2009-12-23T09:07:00.001-08:00

Addendum after this was posted: I'd better keep under wraps. I feel some passions are going to fly after I've blatantly mentioned the "B" word. And no, it's not that prize-winning homosexual Nazi-play. See below, but please, don't judge too harshly or call All Souls.

I think I've been rather unfair to Margaret Bent, whose lucid analyses and keen insight into medieval musicology has rejuvinated a field always in danger of going stale. Looking back, like Leech-Wilkinson, I reeled a little from her distinction between historically "valid" and "invalid" modes of analyses, even though she was attempting to designate a regulative principle, indeed a scholarly code of conduct to historical musicology. In other words, she was engaging in matters of methodology, not "moral" principles. But can we fully disengage ourselves from the manifestations of the "moral" in so-called cold, hard analyses? As a disciplinary field, Music Theory has sometimes moved towards the polarity of ahistoricism - think David Lewin's phenomenological investigations, Lerdahl and Jackendoff's psychological tree-diagrams or Richard Cohn's revitalization of Riemann's harmonic theory, turning Schubert into a mathematical grid. Cohn rhetorically calls them eyeglasses for "gazing" at the wonderful stars of tonality, an endeavor in translation, making them statistically decodable to our generation far removed from Schubert's. Sometimes medieval musicologists claim that we cannot move in the same direction - to do so is to enact postmodern rape. Postmodern rape = bad, historically-informed analyses = good. Hence empiricism is sufficiently defended from those historically insensitive theorists. Bah humbug on them.

Wait... let's take a step back, shall we? How far off is the "historicist" approach to medieval music theory from the cube-like architectural constructions of Douhett's musical cubes? Most recently, Jennifer Bain has recently attempted a "statistical" breakdown of Machaut's monophonic chromatic inflections, and, in turn, composing a hierarchy of ouvert/clos strengths based on those figures. Her research has been lauded as an important addition to medieval music and theory, a pat on the empiricist's back for toiling away, counting chromatic inflections. I don't want to discuss the epistemological shortcomings of this painstaking work, but simply to point out some - Bain's main statistical pool consists of Machaut's 200-or-so virelai, leaving out the monophonic chansons of Machaut's Lais which, I think, are equally important to the concept of chromatic inflections. This is not even considering the blatant disregard for issues of ficta; like Brothers, Bain takes Machaut's text as God's holy word - no signa there, means no inflection implied. Done, end of story. And should "Machaut" speak for the rest of 14th-century chromatic practices? This is assuming that Machuat, from the onset of his career, conceived of the heirarchical function that Bain extracts from her figures, or has remained consistent in his approach to said inflections.

The million-dollar question is this: is it alright to assign an idea of "hierarchy" to Machaut's chromatic inflections in the first place? The question may a methodological puzzle of chicken-and-egg: which came first? Machaut penciling chromatic hierarchies, or the hierarchy-seeking analyst who labels such structural features as chromatic hierarchies? I am not dissing Bain as a replacement to Bent. No, in fact, I welcome her work, especially the ontological problem they shed on her analyses. All in all, extrapolating structural conclusions from statistical data like this is not much different than extracting a middleground voice-leading graph in neo-Schenkerian Analysis. The difference is that while the "ahistorical" theorist tends to sidestep contingent historical traces to construct modern hermeneutic grids that "work" for certain musics (think Kuhn, Rorty, and the debate about scientific knowledge), historicists assign value to contemporaneous historical sources as collaborators in their analytical/narrativistic enterprises. And, beholden to the historical trace as a methodological bedfellow, historical musicologists tend to have to straddle more discursive practices than the theorist. This may mean more work for the musicologist/historicist over the theorist (I'm not making any claims here), which may serve to explain the emotional righteousness historians feel over "ahistorians", if such a designation may even be meaningful.

So, after this minor diversion, can we fully disengage the "moral" from the "method"? To this, we should say that the story is more complicated. To say we can be free of the "moral" from the "method" is to theoretically compartmentalize these terms in order to preserve a certain sense of autonomy to one's historical preoccupations. The reality is Foucauldian; no one can simply say anything one likes. That is to say, both Leech-Wilkinson and Bent are right, and in the logic of scholarly debate, more valuable than right. After all, arguments generate papers, and papers generate citation and more papers: the machine of scholarly production rarely grinds to a halt with dispute. Rather, dispute feeds the paper industry, which, in turn, works to sustain scholars whose very lives depend on the production of papers. The method is the moral (of the story), what we say and do affects the regulative contours of the discipline, and the disciplinary models we pass on to future generations or inherit from older ones. Centering the debate on "methodology" obscures the fact that "methodology" generates a ripple effect, which vibrate with passionate self-beliefs - one's set of morals oriented towards the other, if you may. Strong words call to be read strongly in the field of the other: amicability is one mode of ethics when dealing with a clash of methodological beliefs, and can be of serious consequences.

To be continued.

Musica Ficta: Ruminations when Music History seems to Fail us

2009-12-23T08:44:00.000-08:00

It is one thing to write about history as a historian, and another to write about music history as a musicologist. As a corollary to the actual performance of music, musicology is sometimes seen as performance’s little brother, busying in the field of history, getting the details “precisely right”, so that musicians can “do their thing” without fear of offending a properly “historical” rendition of a non-contemporary work of music. The scrupulous archival empiricism of medieval musicologists, in particular, may be pivotal in determining the fate of a single work. If a piece of music is discovered to be wrongly attributed, the work may drop out of repertory entirely. On the other hand, the excitement of discovering a new attribution may propel a piece from forgotten history into the forefront of performance, analysis and discussion. Similarly, close historical analyses revealing clues about performance practice have instigated an entire industry of “historically-informed” performances, perhaps (mis)construing other performative interpretations as lesser or uninformed. “Authenticity” (at least prior to the ‘80s) was a shiny badge to be worn with pride, a step up the ladder of teleological positivism, a beacon of a commitment to knowledge which casts a long shadow over performers and musicians who fail to step into its dazzling terrain. Or, as Joseph Kerman put it, a “baleful term which has caused endless acrimony” for it “resonates with unearned good vibrations”.[1]

Of course, debates in the 1980s over authenticity in music have concluded that such figments of accuracy are but pipe dreams, remnants of the great 19th century Hegelian progress-myth enabling us to approximate “truth” tangentially.[2] “Authenticity” has become a dirty-word, embarrassingly replaced by the benign term “historically informed”, denoting a principled system of musical production rather than a commitment to any single, latent historical truth.[3] The infamous listening experiment in which musicologist Daniel Leech-Wilkinson paired “authentistic” recordings with those that were not led him to declare that in every case,

“[The] stylistic contrast between the earlier and the “authentic” performance is essentially the same. [...] In a nutshell, the difference is that between performer as “interpreter” and performer as “transmitter” [...] The remarkable uniformity of approach which dominates early music performance … is nothing more than a reflection of current taste”.[4]

Richard Taruskin chimes in on the anti-authenticity camp with characteristic wit and insight, claiming that “It is the latter [historically “authentic” performances] that is truly modern performance … while the former [“modern” performance] represents the progressively weakening survival of an earlier style, inherited from the nineteenth century, one that is fast becoming historical”.[5] Attempting to sum up the difficulties involved in the “veneer” of historicism through the debates,[6] Colin Lawson and Robin Stowell remark that “Early music as a concept is surely beginning to be eroded, as period principles begin to be applied to mainstream situations”,[7] attesting to the force of modern-day music reproduction technologies such as CDs, mp3s and I-pods to restructure entire social and international networks of listening.[8] I do not wish to resurface many of the torturous and complicated arguments in this paper, but to convey a sense of how such conceptual preoccupations are still “live” theoretical materials, weighing heavily upon scholars who plumb the depths of the “historical” for information which may impact the reception or performance of a particular “work”.

No musicologist today claims that we can ever accurately reconstruct the proper epistemological conditions by which to “accurately” listen to music. No amount of historical clothing, historical instruments or site-specific re-enactments can ever magically open an experiential hatch into a world long lost. Such “veneers” we erect over a systematic process of scholastic appraisal or disproval cannot be taken as properly “historical” in-and-of-itself. The paradox of “live” performance and recordings is that while it gestures towards a sort of “presencing” of (the music of) the past, it is inevitably mediated through written, textual documents – blueprints for realization – not to mention intermediate stages of editing, transcribing and documents regarding period-specific performance practices. As Rick Altman has brilliantly demonstrated, our formalised “codes of listening” and “codes of representation” are themselves subject to historical change;[9] even Lydia Goehr’s biting critique of the “work concept” in musical ontology has accused modern listeners of “conceptual imperialism”, superimposing today’s codes of listening and presentation upon the music of the past.[10] In this sense, the present day concert-hall performance situation appearing to deliver a sense of aural immediacy is itself a fantasy of unmediated listening access to a sonorous past. Here, the “experience” of live music drawn from historical sources cannot and should not present itself as a doorway into some hidden kernel of the past. As Taruskin suggests, one should be critically aware of “historical” performance as modern forms of “historicism” which “clothes a performance style that is completely of our own time”.[11]

In light of recent discourses over the problem of the photograph composing a form of historical “presence”, one could conceivably gesture towards forms of musical recording as an analogue of the photograph’s trace-like “indexicality” criterion. This may argument may be pertinent to recorded pieces of the late 19th and 20th Century, indeed serving as indispensible audio-documents concerning performance practice.[12] But what happens when such recordings do not exist? For medieval musicologists, the significant absence of an audible evidence to test their hypothesis leaves a gaping hole in the history of early music; without recourse to such sources, musicologists have tended to foreground text to offer insights into the realization of early scores. “The sound of modern performances and recordings may beckon us into the realm of early music,” says Margaret Bent, “but it is only when we recognize performance sound to be a modern construction … that we may penetrate beyond it, to the intrinsic content of the music independently of the performance, and learn new ways of listening to unfamiliar [early] music styles” (My emphasis).[13]

For Bent, a corresponding gateway into appreciating early music is dispensing with the interpretive gesture of performance (the variable) and focussing on the score (the invariable), suggesting that abstract, “intrinsic” musical form can be separated from timbral content. There is, however, the danger that attempting to “penetrate beyond” the mediated sound-world of performances to the “intrinsic content of the music” risks simply replacing the interpretive liberties of performance with an assumedly more historically-filial object – namely, medieval source documents themselves such as treatises, scores and manuscripts. In other words, the mode of “presence” is shifted from the sonic immediacy of “performance” to the sphere of the “textual”, bestowing source documents with a quasi-religious aura not unlike the seductive call of “authenticity”.[14] As Harry White points out, such musicological preoccupations “with the textual integrity of contemporary [early music] performance [becomes] an expression par excellence of the regulative force of [Lydia Goehr’s] work-concept”,[15] leaving us trapped in a reductive circuit which accepts no more than the aura of the textual as a metaphysical substitute for “authenticity”.

Bent goes further, claiming that a more fruitful musicological endeavour should involve restricting our gaze to the determinable, quantifiable elements in the score. By tweaking our musicological proclivities to produce “knowledge of the music” rather than “knowledge about the music”,[16] she seems to suggest that we can somehow recover a historically shared “grammar” of early music, bolstered by fastidious historical citation:

“A methodology cannot be sensitive to the particular language of pretonal music unless that language was taken into account in formulating the analytical method – in which case it would indeed be to some extent a historically sensitive method. The task is to reconstruct, as precisely as possible in the absence of native witnesses, the languages, grammars and dialects proper to specific repertories, as we would in dealing with their verbal counterparts, if we aspire not a ventriloquized monologue but a true dialogue”.[17]

The task of constructing “as precisely as possible” the “languages, grammars and dialects” most pertinent to the repertory analysed, Bent seems to argue, would be to fashion our analytical tools out of historically valid “premises”. These “languages” are “fundamentals … essential to correct interpretation of the music as is knowledge of sexagesimal calculation to understanding early astronomy”,[18] fundamentals which will allow savvy musicologists (painting by Bent’s numbers) to distinguish “between notes that are clearly right and notes that are clearly wrong”.[19] Bent means serious business, lashing out strongly against the “barbarisms” of wrong notes which still prevail in scholarly editions of composers such as Guillaume de Machaut. Putting aside the defensive self-righteousness of Bent’s positivism,[20] the danger is that we risk homogenizing a notion of “the Music” with a capital M, by privileging the textual authority of the “score”, thereby foreclosing the possibility that each surviving version of “the Music” may constitute a very different ontology in relation to its textual vehicle.[21] Furthermore, this universalizing view of Music works to reinforce the idea of an “original” distinguishable from disagreeing sources by scribal error and corruption along the disseminating chain; deeply Platonic in its conviction that proper historical work will reveal an essential, uncorrupted originating source,[22] or even the “perfect language”.[23] The problem is the movement from the particular (the individual manuscript source) to the general (historical concepts about music) – how can we fashion historically appropriate hermeneutic tools without subscribing to a “one-size-fits-all” ontology of early music?

In these cases of complexity where the historical-empiricist approach seems to work too well, perhaps we should take a step back and consider the cases where music history fails us, where the cherished goals of tedious archaeological research disable instead of en-able the production of “historically-informed” music. By doing so, we become more aware of the points of contact between historical musicology and the “historicism” promised by early music performance practice, a shared-space where a choice is demanded of the performer/musicologist: to enact a form of radical reverence to some fantastical notion of an authentically recoverable past and to cease performance altogether, or to perform in spite of historical uncertainty, acknowledging the pitfalls of the unknowable, while at the same time celebrating the agency of the performer as a creative co-collaborator in the production of music, rescuing historical interpretation as a necessarily creative endeavour rather than a scrupulous (not to mention impossible) iteration of a past always and already lost.

Such an example is the notoriously tedious phenomenon of musica ficta or falsa (fictitious or false music). Ficta may be crudely paralleled to a modern-day version of accidentals in music – that is, sharps or flats, which were used since the 12th Century to denote an alteration of an interval. A signa durum which would equate to today’s “natural” sign indicated the augmentation of an adjacent pitch dyad by a semitone. The signa durum denoted both the “natural” and the “sharp” sign, indicating to the singer to raise the written pitch accordingly. Similarly, the signa molle (or what we call the “flat” sign today) would signal a corresponding lowering of pitch. The origins of such signs, however, did not presuppose a democratic pitch-set of 12 chromatic tones. In addition to the Church system of modes (groups of scales organized by stepwise patterns), the Guidonian Hexachord quickly became a popular pedagogical tool for navigating pretonal space in the 9th Century, later taken to be a prominent feature of diatonic pitch-space by the 13th Century.[24] The Hexachordal system of pitch-navigation was initially developed by Guido of Arezzo, who sought to reduce errors in the singing of plainchant by cantors who sang incorrect intervals. In a nutshell, the Hexachord is a portable gamut of six pitches arranged on the letter notation (claves) of the properly divided monochoral scale:[25]

Each hexachord consists of five solmisation syllables ut-re-mi-fa-sol-la, the medieval predecessors of our familiar “do-re-mi” scale. The intervals between ut-re, re-mi, fa-sol and sol-la were fixed at a whole tone, while the only semitone in the Guidonian hexachord was the interval between mi-fa. When several of these hexachords are superimposed upon the claves, it allows the cantor to navigate the pitch-space of the claves, keeping the position of the mi-fa semitone intact to the particular context which the hexachord is situated. The “natural” hexachord (naturale) maps the ut of the hexachord onto C clave (indicated as C-ut). The “hard” hexachord (durum) maps ut onto Gamma Γ (Γ-ut), rendering B-mi as b-durum (or b-natural) to preserve the intervallic integrity of a semitone between B-mi and C-fa. Likewise, the “soft” hexachord (molle) maps ut onto F (F-ut): because B-C claves of the monochord correspond to fa-sol on the hexachord (an interval of a whole tone), the B is flattened into b-molle and given a signa molle (flat sign). By doing so, this also preserves the mi-fa semitone by mapping directly onto A-B-molle. Because the naturale, durum and molle hexachords all overlap each other by a series of claves, the singer can navigate the pitch-space of the claves by switching from one hexachord to another through a shared note. To give an example, if the cantor were on the Γ-ut durum hexachord (the first vertical hexachord on the left in the diagram) and wanted to sing a G clave, he would have to effect a hexachordal mutation from the Γ-ut hexachord to the C-ut naturale hexachord by singing ut on C-fa, re on D-sol or mi on E-la (see the boxed space in the figure above). What is important to note is that the signa durum and molle do not indicate local pitch-changes in the context of the claves; the signa serves to draw attention to a change in the position of solmisation syllables mi-fa in relation to the claves, hence signalling a hexachordal mutation. Signa durum and molle denote the proprietas (property) of the new hexachord one mutates to without affecting the intrinsic proprietas of individual claves.

Two-dimensional systems of overlapping hexachords were frequently presented in a visual schema called the Guidonian hand, where each step in the claves corresponded to a notch on the bare hand.[26] For novice singers, this mental schema could be embodied, indeed grafted onto their own bodies – students could visually navigate the mutation of hexachords through paired solmisation syllables using their hands as visual references (See diagram above).[27] The system of overlapping hexachords contained by the Guidonian hand also set epistemological limits to the apperception of pre-tonal space. The pitch-boundaries delimited by the hand was called musica vera, recta or regularis (true, right or regular music), since they reflected the “regular” hexachoral mapping over the letter claves.[28] Musica ficta, on the other hand, refers to intervals that lay “outside” the Guidonian hand which were not found on the regular letter claves. Amongst other reasons, musica ficta was theorized in to accommodate an increasing amount of chromaticism, regulating them under a common mnemonic system.[29]

If a composer wanted to indicate a singer to sing a C-durum (C-sharp), for example, the singer would have to draw the C-durum from a hexachord not found on the Guidonian Hand. Since applying a signa durum on C implies that it takes on a C-mi solmisation, the theoretical implication would be to “borrow” the C-mi from an A-ut hexachord, which is alien to the musica recta designations on the Guidonian hand. The A-ut hexachord is thus “feigned” or “fictitious” in relation to musica recta, contrived to fill in the composer’s demands for musical chromaticism. The problem is that numerous musica ficta in polyphonic compositions were un-notated; composers usually relied on a singer’s understandings of the performance practices of the day to inflect such notes with ficta.[30] Burdened by a lack of clear theoretical evidence by a scarcity of historical treatises, one can understand the difficulties of editing late medieval music. As Bent relates:

“A twofold dilemma faces the editor of early music when he comes to supply accidentals. Firstly, he has insufficient evidence on which to base a definitive solution but must nonetheless specify what is to be performed; and secondly, such evidence as he does have appears to embody a conflict between the testimony of theorists and the evidence of manuscript accidentals”.[31]

While Bent presents a “working hypothesis” to guide the editing of old manuscripts for performance purposes, her “hypothesis” does not eliminate the degree of uncertainty to which editors should fill-in implied ficta. Some theorists such as Elizabeth Leach propose a radical ficta-cization of “directed progressions” – conspicuous cadence features in polyphonic music.[32] Others, such as Thomas Brothers, advocate a less totalitarian approach to ficta applications, reinterpreting musica ficta based on “the expressive potential of accidentals rather than … a topic for performance practice”.[33] Brothers takes Anonymous 2’s depiction of ficta as causa neccesitatis (reason of necessity) and causa pulchritudinis (reason of beauty) at his word, arguing that “necessity” referred to the avoidance of contrapuntally occurring tritones, leaving space for chromatic experimentation (hence “beauty”) where compositions did not violate the tritone principle. This leads Brothers to uncertain ground where he reads ficta as “digressions” from the Guidonian space of recta hexachords, suggesting that “the possibility that the manuscript evidence can be taken at face value”, dispensing entirely with the “performance practice” haggle.[34] Perhaps entertaining such “possibilities” may be a welcome gesture in the discipline of musicology, which has seen earlier 19th Century theorists such as Hugo Riemann, who edited ficta markings to reflect contemporaneous understandings of tonality.[35] More recently, Thomas Christenson has unearthed the politics of ficta editorial decisions in early 17th Century France between opposing camps expressing diverging attitudes towards “modern” tonality.[36]

What this little excursus reveals is the problems inherent in the project of medieval musicological archaeology when the sources refuse to speak back on clear, equal terms to their scholastic interlocutors. Conceivably, performers and analysts could wish to ignore musica ficta entirely in their assessment of the pieces, although this is to historically reject an oral tradition which has shaped the pitch and melodic contours of medieval song; in counterpoint, this may invariably lead to glaring tritones and mi-contra-fa violations.[37] The failure of the musicological project to shed certain light upon the proper inflection of musica ficta is today reflected in the sheepish editorial markings of suggested ficta, with accidentals notated above the note rather than on the same staff line prior to the note (as conventionally indicated today). For performers, ficta uncertainty may offer a liberating opportunity for creativity and interpretation, although it spells despair for the musicologist. Ficta uncertainty opens up a gap between the “historicism” desired from the musicologist and the “historicism” demanded by the fantasy of “historically-informed” performance practice, a clear-and-present “absence” that haunts our reception of the score-trace.

This ficta ghost which comes back periodically to haunt the insufficiencies of modern transcriptions threatens to pull the thread, completely unravelling our epistemologically sound hammock of the “work-concept”. In such cases, giving up (to) the ghost could mean abandoning the editorial project altogether – indeed refusing to perform based on the conviction that “historically-informed” performances demand a degree of textual authenticity and accuracy, a conviction that is itself “fictitious” and illusory in the first place. In such cases the ficta ghost of absence terrifies the petrified musicologist/performer to inaction, and frazzled retreat. For a few philosophers of history following Derrida’s “Hauntology”,[38] however, grappling with history’s blind-spots through the uncanny experience of the ghost may be an enabling function rather than disabling. This “blind spot” has been theorized in a number of fields as a vortex which resists our scholarly, analytic gazes: Roland Barthes’s photographic “punctum”,[39] Michael Fried’s “anti-theatricalism”[40] and the “stain” of the Lacanian Real as interpreted by Slavoj Žižek’.[41] This “stain” on the canvas of historical knowledge that reminds us its failure to comply with our rules is but a feature of our own epistemological horizons, a condition of perspectival blindness on our part that makes the project of history possible (and valuable) in the first place.

Rather than recoil from the field of the vortex that threatens to render meaningless the historical project of musica ficta, the “spectre” of the past “returns to remind us that the past is incomplete and therefore to come”.[42] In this way, the spectre of ficta-absence gestures towards the future, opening up possibilities for renewal, renovation and imaginative innovation not so much in spite of absence, but in the face of absence-as-presence:

“It is a proper characteristic of the spectre, if there is any, that no one can be sure if by returning it testifies to a living past or to a living future … A phantom never dies, it remains always to come and to come back … The thinking of the spectre … contrary to what good sense leads us to believe, signals toward the future”.[43]

In the case of ficta, the spectral absence of certainty allows us to be open towards possibilities for coming to terms with a past irretrievably lost through ingenuity and invention. When one historical method fails us, surely this must not hamper our efforts to productively deal with mysterious historical traces – methodological failure should compel us to whittle new hermeneutic tools with creativity and imagination, not to mention inventing transcriptive tools to enable the sounding of these blueprint-like traces. While we may not be able to fully disengage ourselves from the epistemological confines of the “work-concept”, two alternatives come to mind. Firstly, we may concede to the intrinsic limitations of the “work-concept” warts-and-all. The “work-concept”, as Goehr attests, is also a “regulative concept”, one that helps to define the position of music (and musicology) and productively discipline the contours of “musicking”[44] without falling into the bleak, deconstructive relativism of Leech-Wilkinson’s tautological dictum: “musicology is whatever musicologists do as musicologists”.[45] Goehr explains:

“Regulative concepts … provide the rules of the game … [guiding] the practice externally by indicating the point of following the constitutive rules. [They] do not make up the structure of the practice; rather, in their interrelations, they determine what the structure should be like. In their normative function, regulative concepts determine, stabilize, and order the structure of practices”.[46]

To put it another way, the “regulative” rule-bestowing function of the “work-concept” confers meaning upon the spectrum of musical activities under its wing. It justifies the production of music-as-works by accepting that there is no prior, “purer” historical frame of reference by which we can relate to these early pieces of music. Ficta decisions today may not necessarily be made in relation to the 17th Century teleological-leanings of Joseph Fétis’ tonalité moderne, Edmond Coussemaker or the anti-moderne Joseph d’Ortigue,[47] but this is neither to assert that the hypothesizing of Bent, Berger and Brothers necessarily reflect an ontologically rarefied state. It makes the historical trace complicit to its varying degrees of disclosure by focusing on the presentness of the past’s trace, preserving the meaningful possibilities of historical musicology while acknowledging that we are subjective “fallible human beings”.[48]

Secondly, we might seek to preserve the resistive dimension of historical blind-spots through acts of criticism, using, as Haydn White suggests, interpretive gestures “to create perplexity in the face of the real – not to clear it up”.[49] But “perplexity” does not mean taking a postmodern attitude of relativistic free-play in the face of the void. What White means by “creating perplexity” is to transform the unresponsive resistive void of the historical into a productive force, a force to unsettle normative musicological concepts taken for granted, and a creative force to imagine other regulative possibilities for musical ontology. This approach foregrounds the importance of musicology’s affective orientation towards performance and criticism as a necessary “co-product” of performance-reception,[50] reminding the listener of the levels of mediation and uncertainty in the medium of performance. The unsettling character of the ficta ghost by nature already delimits “space for the bird to fly”,[51] even though one may find such freedom of choice “uncanny” by the strict, logical demands of musicological standards. Transposing the effects of the “uncanny” into an opportunity for reinterpretation and critique, as Joan W. Scott writes, keeps us open to the future of performance-possibilities while being faithful to the trace’s ability to surprise and unsettle our expectations:

“For historians, there is a double challenge here: to write the kind of history that will serve as a lever, unearthing the foundational premises upon which our social and political [and musical!] verities rest, in order … to clear the space for the operations of a history whose direction cannot be determined and whose end will never come”.[52]

Thomas Brother’s face-value “interpretation” of ficta employs precisely that option in seeking alternative ways to conceive of ficta without fashioning a pedestal of authority from which to speak from. By flirting with the “possibility” of his interpretation, Brothers phantomocizes his own theory, acknowledging its own shelf-life and even imminent death by the renovative flux of time, where evolving listening conventions and methodological concerns would have rendered his interpretation defunct. But courting with uncertainty certainly clears the musicological field for other ways of transcribing and presenting early music. Different treatments of musica ficta alter the pitch-content of transcribed scores, allowing for new experiences of listening, and unsettling old ones. Similarly, as Brothers himself has shown, imaginative filling-in of the gaps can lead to creative, thought-provoking analyses capable of grasping the reader and listener’s imagination. If the latter reason is precisely what draws us to music in the first place, then why should we let the void of uncertainty obscure our attempts to make music? Engaging with the historical trace in the face of absence throws into relief the contingencies by which our regulative concepts control and discipline the rules of musical production and listening; creative interpretation makes room for the aggregation of other regulative possibilities, indeed other work concepts – fictional (though meaningful) yardsticks to measure medieval musics yet-to-come. I leave the last words to Lydia Goehr in her reconsideration of the “work-concept” project seven years after her book’s initial publication:

“Either we would seek a work-concept so thin that it could accommodate all descriptions given of it, or we would allow that descriptions could conflict, given our choice of very different prototypes. Again, I prefer, and have tried to argue for, the latter route, not least because it shows so well that how we think about music, how our musical discourses develop, depends in very interesting ways on the prototypes we employ and on the myths we construct. On the purest philosophical plane, our choice of examples perhaps does not matter. But I chose the route of philosophical impurity where our choices matter a great deal. That impurity symbolizes … the intersection between philosophy and cultural diagnosis”.[53]

[1] Joseph Kerman, Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1985), 192

[2] For a collection of the complicated views presented, see Nicholas Kenyon, Authenticity and Early Music: A Symposium, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988)

[3] In 1986, for example, the American Musicological Society used the term “historically-aware” in its guidelines for the Noah Greenberg Awards. See the AMS Newsletter 16/2, (August, 1986): 5, 14

[4] Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, Early Music, 12, (1984), 14

[5] Richard Taruskin, “The Pastness of the Present and the Presence of the Past” in Text and Act: Essays in Music and Performance, (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 140

[6] Ibid., 102

[7] Colin Lawson & Robin Stowell, The Historical Performance of Music: An Introduction, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 160

[8] See, for example, Greg Kot, Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music, (New York: Scribner, 2009)

[9] Rick Altman, Silent Film Sound, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), See Introduction

[10] Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992)

[11] Taruskin, (1995), 102

[12] This is not to suggest that recordings themselves are “authentic” representations of the time period in any way. The technological restrictions of recording devices may impose real, musical restrictions on the way a piece of music is performed ‘for the microphone’. The time-restrictions on the early 331/3 rpm record, for example, affected tempo-decisions and repertoire choices and playing styles to suit the demands of technology of the day. See Timothy Day, A Century of Recorded Music: Listening to Music History, (New Haven, Connecticut & London: Yale University Press, 2000)

[13] Margaret Bent, “Words and Music in Machaut’s Motet 9” in Early Music, 2003, 387

[14] One can draw an analogue between the auraticization of manuscript sources and Derridean “archival-fever” as what Dominick LaCapra calls a “fetish”, a “literal substitute for the ‘reality’ of the past which is ‘always already’ lost for the historian” and, as such, a condition privileged by fantasies of presence and authenticity. See LaCapra, History and Criticism, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985)

[15] Harry White, “‘If It’s Baroque, Don’t Fix It’: Reflections on Lydia Goehr’s ‘Work-Concept’ and the Historical Integrity of Musical Composition” in Acta Musicologica, Vol. 69, Fasc. 1. (Jan – Jun, 1997), 97

[16] Margaret Bent, “The Grammar of Early Music: Preconditions for Analysis” in Tonal Structures in Early Music, Ed. Cristle Collins Judd, (New York & London: Garland, 1998), 18

[17] Ibid., 19

[18] Ibid., 20

[19] Ibid., 19

[20] To be fair to Bent, she does later point out that sometimes unica (unique cases) offer divergences from the hard-and-fast musical language “rules” she seeks to unearth. But she maintains firmly that such faults must be solely that of the scholar who places “too much weight” on “isolated or eccentric statements” that “may not have universal or prescriptive value” (ibid., 39). However, who decides which theories have “prescriptive value” over those that supposedly do not? By looking for “the” musical grammar, Bent perhaps unfairly disowns the possibility of multiple coexistent grammars, even plural, contradictory ones existing synchronically within the same time period.

[21] This is especially pertinent to music edition-making, in which various sources are collapsed into a single “authoritative” form. Disputes over the “correct” edition of a piece of music may take place when there are more than one surviving manuscript sources, a condition Lydia Goehr (1992) would ascribe to the late 18th Century “work-fidelity” concept that has survived into modern ontologies of music. More recently, the status of notated music has been given a materialist spin, teasing out the individualities of a piece of music preserved in more than one source. See Ardis Butterfield, Poetry and Music in Medieval France: from Jean Renart to Guillaume Machaut, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). For a concept of multiple musical ontologies, see Philip V Bohlman, “Ontologies of Music” in Rethinking Music, Ed. Nicholas Cook & Mark Everist, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 17-34

[22] This problematic aspect has been debated by musicologists with regard to the “work concept”. See especially Leo Treitler, “History and the Ontology of the Musical Work” in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 51, No. 3, (Summer, 1993), 483-97, in which he discusses specific musical examples which seem to fall outside the regulative hold of the “work concept”.

[23] Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, trans. James Fentress, (London: Fontana Press, 1997)

[24] This idea was recently developed by Stefano Mengozzi (University of Michigan), who delivered it in a talk The Making of the Hexachordal System: Medieval Semiotics in Transition at the 75th Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society in Philadelphia, Nov 2009. Also see Mengozzi, “Virtual Segments: The Hexachordal System in the Late Middle Ages” in Journal of Musicology, Sept 2006, Vol. 23, No. 3, 426-467

[25] The following information is drawn from consistent information found in numerous basic books on medieval-theoretical concepts on music. Some good sources include Charles M. Atkinson, The Critical Nexus: Tone-system, Mode, and Notation in Early Medieval Music, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) and the Grove article on Musica Ficta [Musica Falsa]: Margaret Bent & Alexander Silbiger, “Musica ficta” in Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/19406 (accessed December 22, 2009)

[26] See Karol Berger for a more detailed account, “The Guidonian Hand” in The Medieval Craft of Memory: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures, Ed. Mary Carruthers & Jan M. Ziolkowski, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 71-82

[27] Bruce Holsinger offers an insightful interpretation of the hand’s relation to pedagogical systems of power and discipline. See Holsinger, Music, the Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture, (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2001), 259-94

[28] Karol Berger, Musica Ficta: Theories of Accidental Inflections in Vocal Polyphony from Marchetto da Padova to Gioseffo Zarlino, (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press,1987), 12

[29] Margaret Bent, “Musica Recta and Musica Ficta” in Counterpoint, Composition, and Musica Ficta, (New York & London: Routledge, 2002), 67

[30] Margaret Bent & Alexander Silbiger, “Musica ficta” in Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/19406 (accessed December 22, 2009)

[31] Ibid., 61

[32] Elizabeth Leach, “Counterpoint and Analysis in Fourteenth Century Song” in Journal of Music Theory, 2000, 44(1): 45-79; on the “directed progression”, see Sarah Fuller, “Tendencies and Resolutions: The Directed Progression in Ars Nova Music” in Journal of Music Theory, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Autumn, 1992), 229-258

[33] Thomas Brothers, Chromatic Beauty in the Late Medieval Chanson: An Interpretation of Manuscript Accidentals, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), x

[34] Ibid., 23

[35] See Raymond Haggh’s commentary in Hugo Riemann, History of Music Theory, Books I and II: Polyphonic Theory to the Sixteenth Century, (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1962), 396-7

[36] Thomas Christenson, Tonality Before and After, paper given at the 75th Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society, Nov 2009

[37] Bent, (2002), 82

[38] Jacques Derrida, The Spectres of Marx, (London: Routledge, 1994)

[39] Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard, (London: Vintage, 1993)

[40] Michael Fried, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008)

[41] This formula is elaborated widely in many of Žižek’s books, one of which is The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why is the Christian Legacy worth Fighting For?, (London: Verso, 2008)

[42] Nick Peim, “Spectral Bodies: Derrida and the Philosophy of the Photograph as Historical Document” in Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol. 39, No. 1, 2005, 76

[43] Jacques Derrida, “The Specters of Marx” in The Derrida Reader: Writing Performances, Ed. Julian Wolfreys, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 143

[44] Christopher Small’s preferred term to synthesize the heterogeneous messiness of music-related activity, see Small, Muscking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening, (Hanover & London: University Press of New England, 1998), Chapter 1

[45] Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, The Modern Invention of Medieval Music: Scholarship, Ideology, Performance, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 216

[46] Goehr, (1992), 102

[47] Christensen, (2009)

[48] Rob C. Wegman, “Historical Musicology: Is It Still Possible?” in The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction, Ed. Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert & Richard Middleton, (New York & London: Routledge, 2003), 144

[49] Haydn White, “The Aim of Interpretation is to Create Perplexity in the Face of the Real: Haydn White in Conversation with Erlend Rogne” in History and Theory, 48, (Feb, 2009), 74

[50] Nicholas Cook, Analyzing Musical Multimedia, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)

[51] Robert A. Rosenstone, “Space for the bird to fly” in Manifestos for History, Ed. Keith Jenkins, Sue Morgan & Alun Munslow, (London & New York: Routledge, 2007), 11-18

[52] Joan W. Scott, “History-Writing as Critique” in Manifestos for History, Ed. Keith Jenkins, Sue Morgan & Alun Munslow, (London & New York: Routledge, 2007), 26

[53] Lydia Goehr, “‘On the Problems of Dating’ or ‘Looking Backward and Forward with Strohm’” in Liverpool Music Symposium I, The Musical Work: Reality or Invention?, Ed. Michael Talbot, (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), 245

Mechanical Ears for Masculine Men: Luigi Russolo’s L’Arte dei Rumori, the “Multiplied Man”, and Machine Aesthetics

2009-12-12T18:01:00.000-08:00

In a manifesto dated March 11, 1913, the Italian Futurist painter and composer Luigi Russolo unleashed L’Arte dei Rumori (The Art of Noise), a dynamic piece of literature calling for nothing less than the complete renovation of the musical arts. Commencing with a genealogy of music from the Greek tetrachordal system to what Schoenberg had later proclaimed as the “emancipation of dissonance” in 1911, Russolo declared that the music of his time sought further complexity, searching “for the amalgamation of sounds more dissonant, strange, and harsh to the ear” (Kirby, 167). Thus, Russolo argued, “we are always getting closer to ‘noise-sound’.”

The musical world had gone through an unprecedented revolution as Russolo was writing his manifesto. The symbolist sympathies of Claude Debussy ruptured the Classical diatonic system by exalting the whole-tone scale as a method of composition, turning Balinese tonal influences into the pitch-space of the sensuous, exotic other, as exemplified in the programmatic Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune (Prelude to the afternoon of a Faun, 1894) after Stephan Mallarme’s poem of the same title. Scriabin’s unclassifiable “mystic chord” likewise chipped away at the marble of diatonicism, fusing his theosophical leanings with the sonorous. By 1909, Schoenberg had begun his early experiments in “atonal” music, threatening to chuck the tonality baby out with the bathwater.

From these episodic musical revolutions, Russolo’s treatise of 1913 seems like a natural cadence of what Richard Turaskin calls the “maximalist” impulse of the early 20th Century avant-gardism. Yet, to simply arrest Russolo in a linear trajectory anticipating the Musique Concrete of Pierre Schaeffer or John Cage’s prepared piano is to overly filter the musical from Russolo’s wider philosophical project as a member of the Futurist movement in a fast-modernizing Italian landscape. To begin with, despite growing up in a musical household, Russolo was not a professional musician. Eschewing ambitions to enter a music conservatory like his two brothers, Russolo chose a path of painting instead, and was one of the founding members of Futurism under the charismatic leadership of F.T. Marinetti. Neither was Russolo the “official” composer of the Futurist movement, the position of which went to Francesco Balilla Pratella – the only Futurist musician with an academic background in music – who had authored the first Futurist Music Technical Manifesto earlier in 1911 (Kirby, 160).

Despite his lack of qualifications, Russolo transformed his musical ineptitude into a dynamo for impetuous revolution. “I am not a musician,” he wrote at the end of his manifesto, “I, therefore, do not have acoustic predilections or works to defend. [...] That is why, being bolder than if I were a professional musician, unpreoccupied by my apparent incompetence and convinced that audacity has all rights and all possibilities, I have been able to perceive by intuition the great renovation of music through the Art of Noise.” (Kirby, 174) Unshackled by the conditioning effects of disciplinary artistic institutions, Russolo thus framed himself as a fortuitous outsider, albeit one that can truly invoke the revolutionary spirit of music without years of accumulated biasedness. To prove himself worthy of his task, Russolo went on to create sound-making objects called intonarumori (noise-makers), which he exhibited and toured in futurist concerts around Italy and Europe.

By the late 1920s, however, the initial furor of excitement over Russolo’s project had but faded into the background. Marinetti, once championing Russolo’s intonarumori as tactile objects symbolizing noise as “the language of the new human-mechanical life” (Marinetti, Flint, 138), fails to mention them altogether after the war. Attempting to sum up Russolo’s musical oeuvre, numerous historians such as Caroline Tisdall and Angelo Bozzolla usually anticipate the short-lived glimmer of the intonarumori project, claiming that “noise was Futurism’s contribution to music.” (Risdall & Bozzolla, 111)

Such accounts of music in Futurism, however, to consider Russolo’s second project, which aimed not only to revolutionize the methods of musical production and the universe of “musical” sound, but also to forge modern listening subjects in line with what Marshall Berman calls the “machine aesthetic” (Berman, 26), a quasi-religious faith in the myth of technological progress through the mediation of machine between man and his perceptible environment. Indeed, as Berman points out, it is this incipient form of Modernism which would later occupy artists such as Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus, Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller, with palpable intellectual consequences in what Jean Baudrilliard calls our virtualized, “hyper-real” forms of ontology in 21st century technoculture. Understanding this armature of Russolo’s musical sensibility as a transformation of listening culture under the aesthetics of the machine, furthermore, sheds light on the internal conflicts and inconsistencies of Futurism as an ideological manifestation with multiple players, without over-reducing Russolo’s role to a historical road-marker en route to musical avant-gardism. Furthermore, locating L’Arte dei Rumori in the discourse of the machine might enable us to consider the real, gendered implications of Futurist machine assemblages in light of hybrid theory by Harraway, Deleuze and Guattari, as well as a re-evaluation of the early machine aesthetic not as simple opposition, but reworked extension of Italy’s emerging Decadentismo consciousness.

Indeed, for Mario Morini, the reception of French decadent literature and poetry in early 20th Century was instrumental in giving critical voice to a class of intellectuals predisposed to the politicization of the aesthetic, amidst a recently unified Italy (Morini, 66). Geographical unification, however, did not give rise to political unity: the risorgimento, under the Parlimentary hegemony of Giovanni Giolitti, fostered an ambivalence in the role of the individual in early industrial Italy. Despite ushering in an epoch of “economic progress, civil modernization, cultural renewal and democratic reforms” which gave rise to a “modern and productive bourgeoisie”, Giolitti’s governance from 1903-1913 attracted criticism for “political corruption, a crisis of state, a weakening of the nation and serious moral decay of individual and collective conscience” (Gentile, 11). Decadent literature and poetry was viewed with some suspicion, backed with the imported psychological theories of the modern “nervous” man in studies by Janet, Charcot and Nordeau. As Morini notes:

“The ‘decadent’ style itself indicated the need for artistic and literary languages to refer totally and obsessively to themselves, in an attempt to validate their self-enclosed code against external reality and history at large. [...] Italian Decadentismo appears to have been constructed for the purpose of indicating a variety of signs of an epochal crisis of values, rather than signs of a critique of those values [which were] ... inevitably correlated and complementary. In the last decade of the nineteenth century in Italy, however, the idea of decadence was constructed and conveyed primarily as a crisis rather than a critique.” (Morini, 69)

Italian critics and intellectuals at the end of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century such as Vittorio Pica and Arturo Graf capitalized on decadence as decline, with journals such as Il Convito openly hostile to French decadent literature doomed to stasis and ennui rather than transformative possibilities (Morini, 72). In an essay on Paul Verlaine and other decadent writers, Vittorio Pica characterized the aimlessness of the decadent consumer “fluctuating between sensualism and mysticism”. Indulging in “vain, crazy, and unnatural efforts” at invoking extreme experience, “they spend what little energy they have, and they fall back, disheartened and exhausted, to a sad and incurable lassitute” (Morini, 70). One remarkable exception, however, cast Decadentismo as a transitory phase, a fleeting moment in dialectical history which will eventually pave the way for a better, modern existence. In Libro della figurazioni ideali written in 1894, the Symbolist Poet Gian Pietro Lucini interpreted what he called decadenza as a historically necessary transformative force to topple the gods of the old:

“In any case, we would not be decadent (decadenti) with respect to our artwork, but with respect to life, because everything around us is subject to change: science, religion, political forms, economics, but change comes to an end, and that end is not without death and ruin: nor is a new life possible without death and rottenness.” (Morini, 74)

For Marinetti and the Futurists in early 20th Century Italy, faith in the myth of technological progress found form in the machine both as metaphor and synecdoche, literally and figuratively a “vehicle” for transformation of social consciousness oriented towards the glorification of a new, modern Italy. The machine was to Marinetti what decadenza was to Lucini’s historical dialectic, an intermediary mode of embodiment which would ultimately lead to a greater Italy. In her book The Other Modernism: F.T. Marinetti’s Futurist Fiction of Power, Cinzia Sartini Blum identifies remarkable complicities between Marinetti’s literary personification in La Conquete des Etioles (The Conquest of the Stars) and Huysmans’s des Essientes (Blum, 7-16). Both fictional characters experience a moment of sublime elevation through the locomotive, in which the refreshing vigor of mechanical speed is set as a foil against the effeminizing degradation of nostalgia, the past, and the passivity of the masses. “The attitudes of the two protagonists,” she notes, “differ significantly: Des Essientes’s is one of passive contemplation, whereas that of Marinetti’s protagonist is one of active identification” (Blum, 11). One could also conceivably say that Marinetti’s modernist machine aesthetic is decadenza as extrapolative activity rather than introspective retreat.

Here, we return to Luigi Russolo’s L’Arte dei Rumori of 1913, which he described as the “logical consequence” of Ballila Pratella’s Futurist Music technical manifesto of 1911. The obliteration of traditional forms of harmony, for Russolo, is justified by both the history of musical composition and the transformed demands of the modern listener, attuned to the energizing soundscape of modern life. Central to this progression is the role of the machine which reflects the new sensibilities of the 20th Century:

“THIS EVOLUTION OF MUSIC IS PARALLELED BY THE MULTIPLICATION OF THE MACHINE, which collaborates with man everywhere. Today, the machine has created many varieties and a competition of noises, not only in the noisy atmosphere of the large cities but also in the country that, until yesterday, was normally silent, so that pure sound, in its monotony and exiguity, no longer arouses emotion.” (Kirby, 167)

As a result, Russolo proposes that the ears of modern man “are not content” with conventional harmonic systems, demanding instead “more ample acoustic emotions” (167). A new listening economy measured by the yardstick of machine aesthetics henceforth replaces the traditional sentiments of Beethoven and Wagner; for Russolo, the modern listening subject extracts “pleasure in ideally combining the noises of trams, explosions of motors, trains, and the shouting crowds than in listening again ... to the ‘Eroica’ or the ‘Pastorale’” (168). Great emphasis is placed on the liberating pleasures of listening to machines as music, and Russolo envisions a kind of attentive listening to match that of the visual, with one’s “ear more attentive than our eye”, propelling man’s sensory organs into machine-like receptors for future developments in music:

“Our multiplied sensibility, after being conquered by Futurist eyes, will finally have futurist ears. Thus motors and machines of our industrial cities will one day be skillfully tuned in order to make every factory an intoxicated orchestra of noises” (174)

Russolo’s penultimate passage is particularly telling: one may chose to read it literally, in the sense that, like Russolo’s later intonarumori, the specific pitch class potentials of noise-producing machines would be tuned to evoke specific predetermined compositional templates. In Fedele Azari’s Futurist Aerial Theatre dated April 11, 1919, Azari mentioned a collaborative invention with Russolo of a “special type of hood to increase the resonance of motors and a type of exhaust that regulates the sonority of the motor without modifying its potential” (220). Such contrivances constitute the aestheticization of the machine, prefiguring the mechanical instrument for aesthetic contemplation. Alternatively, one could see Russolo’s tuning of the machine as a function of the “Futurist ear”, a transformed sensibility which automatically hears noise as music, extracting the aesthetic from machine noise. It is this conception of Russolo’s that requires theoretical amplification from contemporaneous Futurist machine discourses, especially Marinetti’s. In particular, Russolo’s “multiplied sensibility” is a direct quotation of Marinetti’s Futuristic “Multiplied Man”, a machine/human cyborg-like hybrid, a subject who experiences ecstatic totality and wholeness through the pseudo-divine union with the machine.

One of the earliest elaborations of Marinetti’s “Multiplied Man” is found in the publication Le Futurisme, from 1911. In the accompanying essay Multiplied Man and the Reign of the Machine, Marinetti decries the traditional “ideological fusion” between woman and beauty (Rainy, Poggy & Whittman, 89), promoting “the idea of mechanical beauty” in its place. The apocalyptic “multiplied man”, for Marinetti, is man invigorated through artifice and machinery, drawn to the aesthetic pleasure of the technological, diverted from the corrupting desire for fleshy women:

“[We] must prepare for the imminent and inevitable identification of man and motor, facilitating and perfecting a continual interchange of intuitions, rhythms, instincts, and metallic disciplines that are absolutely unknown to the great majority of people today and are devined by only the most clear-sighted minds.” (90)

Conceptualizing the “Multiplied Man”, Marinetti describes the “creation of an inhuman type” unsullied by the “poisonous corrosives” of “moral suffering” and “love”, an “inhuman and mechanical type, constructed for omnipresent velocity” who is “naturally cruel, omniscient, and combative”. The neighboring essay We Abjure Our Symbolist Masters, The Last Lovers of the Moon continues the machinic diatribe in more explicit, hybridized terms:

“With us [the Futurists] begins the reign of the man whose roots are cut, the multiplied man who merges himself with iron, is fed by electricity, and no longer understands anything except the sensual delights of danger and quotidian heroism” (94)

Like Deleuze and Guattari’s “desiring machines”, Marinetti and Russolo’s “Multiplied Man” reflect an ontological system characterized by temporal assemblages, circuits of pleasure completed by “plugging” and “unplugging” oneself from these mechanical extensions. Rejecting the Symbolist poets and the sordid pleasures of decadence, Marinetti recasts the “Multiplied Man” as a hygienic form of decadent pleasure whereby flesh fuses with circuitry in what Deleuze and Guattari call the “machine assemblage”. The metamorphosis of man and machine as temporal assemblages constitute Marinetti and Russolo’s multiplied consciousness in which the boundaries between self (subject) and other (machine) break down through “planes” and “potentialities” without recourse to a self-autonomous, enclosed subject. With the dissolution of the stable subject by machinic extension, Marinetti literally reduces the future “Multiplied Man” to mere masculine machine, incapable of extraneous and inconsequential emotions such as love and passions, his heart “reduced to purely distributive function”. Even the erotic is demystified and desexualized, transformed into “copulation for the preservation of the species” like every other banal bodily function (92).

“Attentiveness” of the Futurist ear attuned to the machine thus cast a transformative effect over the “Multiplied Man’s” perception of sound. The boundaries between “noise” and “music”, like the opposition between man and machine, lose their clear definitions: “Noise” becomes music to the ears of the “Multiplied Man”, who looks back with disgust at traditional forms of music as noise to his renewed sensibilities. In The Futurist Intonarumori of 1913, Luigi Russolo further contemplates the formation of the Futurist ear with respect to noises, in which he forsees noise losing “its own accidental character” becoming “an element sufficiently abstract so that it can reach the necessary transfiguration of every primary element in the abstract material of art” (Kirby, 178). Only then, “liberated from the things that produce it” can it become “automatic material, malleable, ready to be shaped by the wishes of the artist who transforms it into an element of emotion, into a work of art”. Alternatively, it is the Futurist listener, the “Multiplied Man” who plays the role of the artist, already reconstituting the noises of machines as aesthetic objects worthy of enjoyment.

On Whale Song: Why Ecomusicology now?

2009-11-20T07:53:00.000-08:00

Over last weekend, I attended AMS Philly, my first foray into the strange and wonderful world of musoids (following the fact that my adviser calls ethnomusicologists "ethnoids"). In an evening session, the Logans session room was packed to capacity for a strange panel entitled "Why Ecomusicology Now", a spin-off from the musicology ecocriticism discussion group. The panel itself was a hodgepodge polyphony of intellectuals, composers and musico-activists, all somehow tangentially invested in what they fell should fall under the rubric of "ecomusicology". Crudely, Ecomusicology is Ecocriticism + Musicology, a broad based examination of how the "natural world" is plumbed for musical purposes. As one might already expect, critical and theoretical perspectives were hardly homogeneous, and one of the panel's main goals was to attempt to articulate some form of direction for the future of ecomusicology. Hence the title: "Why Ecomusicology Now?" - doubly fraught with the need to promote so-called "ecomusicology" in the 21st Century with all its political activist resonances, and, as a corollary of that aim, the desire to organize and self-define. However, by the end of the session, I was still puzzled and more than a little disturbed. Mitchell Morris' lovely keynote ended with a strange appeal for the diverse messiness that ecomusicology - an interdisciplinary space still unburdened by overdetermined forms of reproduction - should precisely remain that way, in order to generate more creative encounters with its supposed object(s) of study.

This, of course, however, came into direct contradiction with the earlier stated goals of the ecomusicological project, which is to organize, to discipline, to define. At the end of the session, I was tempted to stand up and recapitulate: "So... WHY Ecomusicology NOW?" The question remains unanswered, and should - what's the point about arguing over something that everyone agrees about? This is not the issue. As professional, critically-oriented musicologists with a responsibility to illuminating the wondrous capacities of music as well as scrupulously analyzing the contingent assumptions that enables it to flourish, should we really direct our attention to seeking logistical security and well-defined parameters by which we may call "musicology" musicology? Should we be gazing at our navels, imagining phantasmic umbilical cords somehow linking scholars sitting in the same room? I think of Alvin Lucier's "I am sitting in a room", where the implicit contradictions of language games begin to melt away under musical multiplicity, leaving only the ghostly, sonorous echoes of dumb, amplified sound material resonating in space...

To illustrate my points by way of oblique analogy, here are three little (fictional) anecdotes:

1) A whale walks into a bar and says to the bar tender: "[insert long and funny whalesong here]". The other whale sitting at the bar says to the first whale: "dude, you're wasted!"

2) A few years ago, there was a television advertisement that used (abused?) whale song: the opening scene filmed entrepreneurial divers recording their encounters with the whales, the soundbytes traveling to the hands of a club deejay who, through his ingenious mobile device, directly downloads the song into his computer, and instantly plays the song as a scratch-track to hundreds of ravers pulsing in self-glorified ecstasy.

3) Another example of overly contrived for-the-whales marketing strategies:

So what's the point of this slight excursus? The need to answer the difficult question posed by Slavoj Zizek - under whose "gaze" does one operate, and what are the repercussions of such a gaze? Doolittle, the panel's composer, recalled an incident where she heard beautiful music, then only after scrounging the source, realized it was birdsong. For Doolittle, this encounter proved to her the weaknesses of the anthropological exclusivity to realms of music-making. I argue it does the exact obverse. By discovering birdsong was not "human" music in retrospect, it only goes to show that "human music" still serves as a yardstick from which to measure all music, human or nonhuman. It is the structural positioning of that sonic yardstick that assures the longevity of this sonorous symbolic universe of human music, admitting nonhuman music only as quasi mystical reverence of their likeness (not sameness!) to us. The whale joke operates precisely on the desettling of our expectations implicit in the nature of the discursive anticipations of the "joke" genre: we expect the whale to open its mouth and speak in human tongues. The joke is only "funny" when the whale falls short of our genre-specific expectations, we only "get-it" when the whale does not adhere to its humanized conventions we have already set up for it in the first place. That's what makes the joke funny, viz-a-viz its sudden disjunctive rupture of expectation (also see Freud on the joke).

The point of this is that we should not rush too quickly into something we imagine to be oriented towards a righteously pious topic. Morris acknowledges this when he speaks of the problems of the "face" of endangered species, as well as the implicit inequalities between members of endangered species through the filter of the media. Some animal faces become more prominent than others. The Dodo, legendary for its supposed stupidity, is also legendary posthumously as an exemplar of the failure of conservation. Lest we forget, the Dodo and other creatures alike are likewise mute in the spheres of language we have forged for ourselves, ineffable in this strangely solipsistic game of human linguistics which may turn out to be no more than a stupid evolutionary mistake, a symptom of gross interactions beyond the human and animal, beyond the organic and the inorganic.

In the end, the call to ecomusicology "Now" looks like it hangs on a precarious self-righteous filament. Unable to answer properly the "Now", it befalls the "eco" to stir up resonances with ethical subjective participation. It's simply saying that you can have your cake and eat it too: "Since narratives are inherently political, let's not get wound up by our previous neuroses over fake objectivity, but let's be more properly political by choosing an object well reputed in other fields." That is to say, if we aren't careful, ecomusicology may end up sounding like a simple pat on the back: "not only can you be musicologists, you also can be ethical musicologists!", whatever that means.

No Futurism – Medieval musicology for monstrous children

2009-11-12T21:04:00.002-08:00

Lately I’ve been going back to Jacques Lacan and co in Edelman’s rescuing of the death-drive in Queer Studies – a position of ethical embodiment he suggests we “impossibly” fill in resistance to the ideology of “reproductive futurism”, an anticipation of some future line of descendancy symbolized by the figure of the “child”. In No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Edelman purposefully rejects the “fascism of the baby’s face” and its seemingly queer-corollary, the homosexual (in opposition to the heterosexual) which simply reproduces its ideology from within the stratified structural position of the Other. The homosexual performs its resistive function too well, collapsing into trivial binary oppositions between us-them, self-other. Instead, he calls for the Saintly-Neighbourly (in a Lacanian sense! Nothing religious about it) category of the “sinthomosexual”. What Edelman calls for is rightly “impossible”; he offers no sound political advice to carry out the potent doxis, nor anticipates its consequences. To anticipate its consequences, to instrumentalize the position in lieu of its future manifestations is, for Edelman, a recourse to the ideology of reproductive futurism, letting our “kids” (whoever they may be – quaint/queer organisms charged with ph/fantasy), and hence an untenable platform from which to announce the apocalyptic insistence on continuous Symbolic death.

In The Medieval Middle, Michael O’Rourke continues Edelman’s investigations as follows:

In a recent issue of PMLA (2005) Jonathan Goldberg and Madhavi Menon revisited some of the terrain charted in Goldberg’s Queering the Renaissance (1994) just over ten years ago, in an effort to alter the ways in which we do the history of sexuality. The challenges they pose to historiography in that article will have, or ought to have, serious ramifications, beyond the field of early modern or Renaissance Studies. I also have no doubt that the methodological propositions Goldberg and Menon make will be enormously productive for those historians who seek to queer the past, and to undo the history of homosexuality. My worry, and it is a major concern, is that the kind of anti-teleological project they propose may only be useful for queering the past and challenging “the notion of a determinate and knowable identity, past and present”. That is to say, Goldberg and Menon’s essay closes off the future, refuses an ethical opening onto the queer future, says fuck the future in much the same way that Lee Edelman does in his polemical book, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. (2004). What I wish to argue is that Goldberg and Menon have fallen under the sway of Edelman and this represents a dangerous turn not just for queer historiography but for queer ethico-political thought more generally. I suggest that Goldberg’s own turn away from Derrida and the problems it brings, both for the politicality of the political and the futurality of the future, could be averted by re-turning to Derrida’s Specters of Marx, a book which came out in the same year as Queering the Renaissance. It was, of course, Derrida’s Politics of Friendship which Alan Bray argued (in The Friend) would become the new political charter, rather than Foucault’s History of Sexuality: Volume One, for an anti-identitarian queer ethical project, one that does not block off the possibilities of differently imagined futures. Specters of Marx (1994) lays the foundations for many of the concepts developed further in Politics of Friendship (1996) two years later: mourning, spectrality, messianicity, hauntology, impossibility and the perhaps but it is to the earlier text, at once a brilliant reading of Marx and a virtuoso philosophical reading of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, that I turn to find philosophico-historical concepts which might help us produce a queer historiography which bears a responsibility to the past, the present and the future.

But first let me briefly introduce some of the concepts which Goldberg and Menon develop in their article. The first is “unhistoricism” which they set up in opposition to “a historicism which proposes to know the definitive difference between the past and the present”. Rather than embracing ahistoricism, as Valerie Rohy does in a recent GL Q article, they argue against a prevailing historicism (misidentified by them as to be found in the work of David Halperin and Valerie Traub) which emphasizes alterity over sameness. In refusing the way that “history has come to equal alterity” Goldberg and Menon choose instead to practice what they call “homohistory”. Homohistory is set up in opposition to “a history based on heterodifference”. Now, this is not a history of homos but rather this history would be “invested in suspending determinate sexual and chronological differences while expanding the possibilities of the nonhetero, with all its connotations of sameness, similarity, proximity, and anachronism”. The third concept they propose is “idemtity”, invoking the earliest usage of the word in 1570 in opposition to what has come to be sedimented in what we call identity, usually in the concrete formulation, identity politics. They say that pursuing “the project of queering under the rubric of identity or alterity, then, might productively push categories-in this instance, the categories of sameness and difference that serve congruent normalizing purposes in both the field of history and the domain of sexuality”. Finally, Goldberg and Menon reject what they term “heterotemporality” or the compulsory heterotemporality which bedevils historicism whether it “insists on difference or produces a version of the normative same”. They set the historian two challenges, firstly a deheterochronologization which would seek “to resist mapping sexual difference onto chronological difference such that the difference between past and present becomes also the difference between sexual regimes”, and secondly “to challenge the notion of a determinate and knowable identity, past and present”. So far so good, but for all this emphasis on differàntial history, or homohistory, and resistance to the strictures of knowability and possibility, Goldberg and Menon still remain teleologically bounded, to the past and the present, a capitulation which in the end refuses and forecloses, is spooked by the promise of, the future.

Lest it sounds as if I am being, like any good deconstructionist, a little bit too suspicious, let me trace this resistance to futurity back to Goldberg’s recent collection of essays Shakespeare’s Hand, where he acknowledges his enormous debt to Derrida but admits his growing impatience with the politics of deconstruction, claiming that deconstruction, “is itself a politics of a kind of patience that risks maintaining the status quo in the belief that the divisions and differences that make any moment or regime non-self-identical are the resources of futurity”. It is hard to see how one can square this with the projects of homohistory or the new unhistoricism. Goldberg goes on to reject his own Derridean past more emphatically in ways which sound distinctly Edelmanian; he says “I do not agree with the stance of biding one’s time that seems to go along with a certain ‘proper’ philosophical attitude, and I have even less tolerance for the notion that some spectral regime may some day herald a future worth waiting for”. Now that book was written two years before Edelman’s No Future where Edelman argues that heteronormativity and compulsory heterotemporality are imbricated with reproductive futurism (something Michael Warner had already argued years before with the brilliant coinage “reproteleology”) and also explains how homosexuals and homosexuality come to figure the death drive, something he urges queers to embrace (how teleological is that? Freud’s death drive is after all about a return to origins, a determinable endpoint) when faced with the fascist figure of the Child. He coins the neologism sinthomosexual based on the Lacanian term sinthome, to designate an an-archic resistance to meaning which unsettles any (literal) belief in the subject (maybe that should be Subject) or in futurity ( I am all for the first but not for the sinthomosexual’s unethical refusal of the future,which amounts to a Zizekian disdain for all the “democracy-to-come-deconstructionist-postsecular-Levinasian-respect-for-Otherness suspects” as he calls Liberals like Butler and Derrida in The Parallax View). In her own recent article “Spurning Teleology in Venus and Adonis”, Madhavi Menon reads Adonis’ refusal of heterosexual reproductivity in Shakespeare’s poem and his embrace of failure in terms which implicitly recognize him as what Edelman would call a sinthomosexual. What Edelman, Goldberg, and Menon seem to be arguing for is a swerve away from intelligibility, a refusal of literality and meaning in the direction of a sinthomosexual or homohistorical embrace of “the logic that makes it [the sinthomosexual as pure sign] a figure for what meaning can never grasp?” This is a move which Edelman, Goldberg and Menon never make because it would give us over to futurity, to the telepoietic, to the event as surprise, to the promise of a kind of religio-political redemption, to what Derrida calls the emancipatory messianic promise. In opposition to the sinthomosexual which is only im-plicitly ethical (and in Edelman explicitly unethical), I propose what I would like to call the phantomosexual or more properly and in less identitarian fashion, phantomohistory (fantôme is French for specter or its synonym ghost), a queer history which is haunted by the past, the endlessly contested and contestable present, and the undecidable and unmasterable future to-come. Phantomohistoriography would also be what I would term, a little awkwardly, historiopitality, an ethico-affective history which is not about exorcising the ghosts of/or the past but to make them, as Derrida puts it in Specters “come back alive, as revenants who would no longer be revenants, but as other arrivants to whom a hospitable memory or promise must offer welcome-without certainty, ever, that they present themselves as such. Not in order to grant them the right in this sense but out of a concern for justice”.

Now, I turn very briefly to conjure the specters, or phantoms, of Derrida. From “Force of Law” in 1989, Derrida’s first explicit foray into the juridico-ethico-political sphere his work has taken on an ethico-political cast, is marked, or structured, by what he calls a certain “religion without religion”, a kind of political messianism or what he has continually called a “messianicity without messianism”. Derrida’s “political messianism” involves a Levinasian-Blanchotian aporicity, a crossing of the uncrossable, a passing through the impassable (or an experience of the impossible), an infinite resonsibility before and ex-posure to the Other, or as he puts it in The Gift of Death, “all the other others” (both living and dead), to what Levinas calls “the widow, the orphan, and the stranger”. This religious (without religion) political demand, to recognize the singularity of the tout autre entails a messianic waiting without waiting for the (in)coming of the wholly other, making way for an incalculable, undeconstructable, abyssal, khoric justice, for the democracy to-come. The democracy to-come makes a demand on us in the here and now but the present, as Nancy and Derrida aver, is always unpresentifiable. Derrida’s particular take on historicity does not involve “an end of history or an anhistoricity” but rather:

A matter of thinking another historicity-not a new history or still less a “new historicism”, but another opening of event-ness as historicity that permitted one not to renounce, but on the contrary to open up access to an affirmative thinking of the messianic and emancipatory promise as promise: as promise and not as onto-theological or teleo-eschatological program or design.

By structuring historicity as emancipatory promise and the monstrous arrivant of/as justice “the very dimension of events irreducibly to come” Derrida stubbornly refuses to program the future, choosing instead to tear up chrono-phenomeno-temporality (to tear up Being/Dasein and Time). This tearing, these abrupt breaches are “the condition of a re-politicization, perhaps of another concept of the political”. (In fairness to Edelman he never does set out a political program and this opens up the ethical possibility of reconfigured futures even if he disavows them).If this sounds like an untimely politics then that is because, for Derrida, the time is “out of joint” and this temporal unhinging and disjoining is closely aligned to what Derrida calls the specter, the phantom, or the ghost. In Dertrida’s ana(r)chronic view of historicity and temporality, the radical untimeliness of the spectre signifies both an event of the past and of the future (“it figures both a dead man who comes back and a ghost whose expected return repeats itself, again and again”) and skews the chrono-temporal dimensions of past event and future-to-come (“a specter is always a revenant and thus it begins by coming back”). The phantomohistory or spectrohistoriography I am arguing for is marked by similar circulations and returns of differential or differàntial repetition (here deleuze meets Derrida and Cohen recognizes this I think) and like Derrida’s hauntology “dislodges any present out of its contemporaneity with itself” and thereby determines “historicity as future-to-come”. Spectrality in Derrida’s ethico-political-messianic scheme is similar to homohistory and idemtity, but differs (and defers) insofar as it encompasses the infinite ethical relationship and the political precisely as messianic future-to-come, or what Nancy calls finite history. At the “end” of Specters of Marx Derrida encourages others to join him in lending an ear to the specters that hover around him and us and prophetically warns us that “If he loves justice at least, the ‘scholar’ of the future, the ‘intellectual’ of tomorrow should learn it from the ghost”. One scholar prepared to learn from ghosts is John Caputo who argues, following Benjamin and Levinas, that the historian’s cultural responsibility is to the past, the present and the future. In his article “No Tear Shall be Lost: The History of Prayers and Tears” Caputo agues that history and justice come too late for the dead but that the “irreparability of the past goes hand in hand with the open-endedness of the future, with the radicality of the to-come, so that the more intensely we experience the tension and intensity of the past, the prayers and tears of the past, the more radically we pray and weep on their behalf for a future to come, the more radically we pray and weep “viens, oui, oui, viens!”.

Before I conclude (and open up to others in the middle) I want to stage with Caputo a deliberately counter-polemical argument for the future to-come as it is embodied in the spectral figure of the child, merely to highlight the unethical trap into which historians who follow Edelman, as I think Goldberg and Menon do, will fall. Here’s Caputo:

The child is the future, the other that is the same and not the same, the one to whom past and present generations are asked to give without return. The child is no less a paradigm for the historian, for the children are the ones to come in history no less than in the family. History is being written for the children, to children, and it is to the children that we call “come”, for whom we pray and weep, viens, oui, oui. The historian writes in the time between the dead and the children, between irreparable suffering and hope for the unforeseeable to-come”.

To finish then, but not to have done with all these ghosts, I am arguing that the term queer, in its spectral indeterminacy, makes way for historiographical practices that do justice to the reven(an)tal effects of the irreparable past as they live on in the present and to the specters/revenants who will come in the unanticipatable future-to-come. For, as Derrida says “It is a proper characteristic of the specter, if there is any, that no one can be sure if by returning it testifies to a living past or to a living future… A phantom never dies, it remains always to come and to come back… The thinking of the specter… contrary to what good sense leads us to believe, signals toward the future”. What I am calling phantomohistory, is a phantomalization of queer history or what Carla Freccero in Queer/Early/Modern calls a “fantasmatic historiography”, a spectrohistoriography which extends hospitality and justice to the wholly Other, living or dead, dreams of, prays and weeps over, the messianic time, the time of what Goldberg was once able to call “the history that will be”. Posted by Michael O’Rourke at 9:56 PM

Source:
http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2007/02/historys-tears.html

“Phantomohistory” – an ulterior form of historiographically reconstructive “piety” (in Michael Roth’s words?) O’Rourke has provided us with no simple article with which to orientate ourselves towards a meaningless past already prefigured (Hayden White) by the intentionalisms of the que(e)rying spectator. However, acknowledging the “spectral” force of queerness in and through time dialogically announces the immanent death of one’s critically queer positioning, though it simultaneously ‘phantomosizes’ its life-form as a spectre that will haunt the future. Perhaps we should go back to the death-drive, in attempts to undo the force of the burden of that spectre.

Is there reproduction futurism in the force of medieval listening? For whom do we write analyses for? For whom do we reconstruct/destruct/suggest tactics and codes for listening under the aegis of “authentic” or “valid” or “invalid”? Even theorizing the aural gaze of my “master listener” in Vitry’s Garrit Gallus/In Nova Fert/[Neuma] versus its auxiliary, the “defective” listener, can one accuse me of overlapping the “master listener” to the privileged role of the contemporary musicological theorist (not exactly a neologism, but one relatively sidelined by centering contemporary musical theory practice)? In Dominic LaCapra’s terms, do I “act out” the problems of sonic exclusivity of an archaic language, repeating Vitry’s aural modes of description and proscription in founding privileged aural communitas? Who is this futurist child I am addressing?

The problem here is that “futurism” insists on longevity and the teleological capacity for integration and development. As scholars, this trajectory is tried and tested, albeit rewarded in the scholarly field. An article, essay or book, garnering citational force in quotation, retroactively increases the [at least material] acclaim of the writer. A potential receptive field of which the analysis is “birthed” makes the parent proud: a little anecdote of mine I remember was the pressures of superego during the festive season of Chinese New Year when our parents used to boast about us to other relatives. Insidiously objectified (at least to me), we were subsumed under a hermeneutical value-laden grid anticipating fluid societal codes of class, gender and belief. Thus our parents exchanged poisonous innuendos with other parents while we eavesdropped at the next table. Even though we were aware this “grid” was hardly essential, such a meritocratic lens with which to evaluate success and distinguish hierarchies of value – we slowly learnt – could be ways in which our own access to jouissance could be managed and regulated. In short, we found pleasure marking our bodies by the Symbolic instruments of intersubjective calculations used by our parents, measuring our distance to and from such markers of selfhood. Birthing our analytical/polemical child into the field of the scholarly likewise involves the same risk of transference, of acting-out, violently forcing the reproduction of ideological (aesthetic) discourse and behavioral practices upon a privileged “higher” field accessible through ritualized schema and linguistic ciphers.

But what if – and here is another thought experiment – what if we write for queer nonhumans? The immediate parallel I could think of was St Francis of Assisi’s sermoning to animals and beasts, reminiscent of the biblical “peaceable kingdom”, and immediately thought of this CD cover in a recording of Randall Thompson’s works by Schola Cantorum:

Like Agamben’s posthuman future which levels the living to “bare life”, indeed sacrificing the homo sacer himself (that is, the sacred man that can be killed but cannot be sacrificed), the artist’s impression of the end of history imagines a Garden of Eden-like paradise where beast bows with humanoid-animals (notice they are all cherubic, angelic, child-like?), juxtaposed with a peculiar res in the left-hand clearing of the image. There, a group of explorers are passionately greeted by indigenous individuals, both parties bearing gifts of exchange – articles of equal symbolic exchange. It is strange that envisioning a utopia that relinquishes itself of the hierarchical tendencies of language, one should find recourse to the ultimate symbolic-language of trade and exchange. Recall Adam Smith’s meritocratic economic principle or hands-off regulation, where the “invisible hand” (the hand of the Big Other which lays down the rules for success, the codes of childlike performability in the case of my CNY reminiscence) gently ushers the market into optimum economic growth. This peaceable kingdom, perhaps, is charged with the gaze of that Big Other of free exchange, frozen in time perhaps to meditate on this temporal evanescence of idealism before it spirals into temporalized inequality and struggle for self-expression under the guide-posts of the Big Other.

Can we escape the gaze of the Big Other figured through the “fascism of the baby’s face”? Should we reflect on our own analytical attempts (musically and historically) in the background of this begotten child?

Here I turn to an unlikely candidate for theorizing this Foucauldian problem of power integrated with knowledge-of, the 1984 hit-film Gremlins.

I am fascinated by the album cover: it accurately portrays the duality of the “fascism” of the baby in a distorted light. Gizmo, a huggable babylike nonhuman animal pet automatically spawns its horrific other, monstrous Gremlins which embody the death-drive. These monstrous beings are Gizmo’s shadow in the image, insistent on an irrational ethic of Freudian Thanatos of sheer destruction without reason. In the beginning of the film, Gizmo is “Mogwai”, a Chinese pet which literally translates into “little devil” or “little demon”. Under the White, heteronormative language of the owner, “Mogwai” is transformed into “Gizmo”, with all its pet-like affectionate-machinic associations (are animals machines? cyborgs? posthumans? See JJ Cohen/Dona Harraway et al.)

Under the gaze of reproductive futurism, Gizmo embodies the ideology of the child, a figure integrated (indeed given a position of embodiment) through the lens of the normative middle-class white nuclear family. At the same time, Gizmo spawns further Mogwai, transformed figures of death which threaten to disfigure the phantasy of family, destroying the sacred rituals which feeds its reproductive machine (i.e. Christmas). The unknowable, irrational force of “Mogwai” which is Other, Chinese, alien, distanced in its difference, acts like the return of the suppressed kernel of meaningless – the traumatic encounter with the Real (Zizek, Edelman), which threatens to expose the fundamental meaningless upon which family values and the mechanics of reproductive futurism operate. In other words, Mogwai is the untranslatable surplus of “Gizmo”, non-subsumable under the protagonist’s family’s act of integration. Although the film can be “read” under the light of racial and diasporic integrative encounters with the the fabric of Nation State policies, I wish to dwell longer on the dialogic implications of Mogwai/Gizmo.

Like the chaotic meaninglessness of the past, Mogwai is transformed by intellectualism and scholastic academicism into a sort of Gizmo domesticated house pet, given a different name, viewed from a privileged vantage of the present, its sting of the unknowable safely removed. As “Gizmo” itself implies, this transfigured animal reflects more of the epistemological histrionics of the present than it does of the past. The Spectre of the past, its traumatic kernel of unknowability, the pre-translated Mogwai, however, haunts and occasionally irrupts into the present – a queer ghost which continuously lurks in the shadows, destroying the foundations and rituals of modern scholasticism which attempt to domesticate it in the first place.

Musicology for monstrous children, the disfigured Other of reproductive futurism, is recognizing the innate “monster” of the past in the present, acknowledging that the future is itself monstrous. This call for a transformed musicology rejects the maxim that we “stand on the shoulders of giants”, implying that we are but dwarves on a teleological mission or, that we are but youths, “innocent” children, pure and desirous in our attempts to understand the past: a past that might engulf and destroy the tools with which we attempt to figure it with. This notion involves rejecting “authentic” and “inauthentic” listening, “valid” and “invalid” modes of theoretical/analytical reasoning, “historic” and “ahistoric” frames of interrogation, for the misbegotten child of history still haunts us, the monstrous/divine still lurks in the un-recoverability of the medieval musical world through the poverty of the textual and empirical project. Perhaps, above all, doing musicology for monstrous children should encourage us to think of ourselves as destructive beings, ravaging and pillaging the equivocality of the past’s sources, not to align ourselves with an increasingly diminishing asymptotic relation to the revival of the past, but because we are already monstrous for doing so, and take perverse delight in it, monstrous children standing on the shoulders of monstrous parents, desiring machines and pleasure seeking analysts in service of the death-drive, Dyonisians who rapaciously celebrate the polyvalence of the past as spurious surfaces for our interpretive desires.

What’s new to say about the margins?

2009-11-12T21:04:00.001-08:00

Ever since Michele Camille, “hybridity”, “transformation” and cultural theorizing of the “margins” have enjoyed a hude interest in theorizing. Today I received a copy of the 2008 publication “Queering the non/human”, containing a breath of refreshing essays on “queerness” and its figurings in the non/human. Eyebrow-raising conversations between theorists include a section on luminous green bunnies (yes, genetically tampered bunnies with luminous genes from glowing jellyfish grafted into their DNA) hosted by JJ Cohen. Another essay reconsiders the apocalyptic/resistive/policing triadic formulation of Lee Edelman’s “No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive” as a new voice to join in the fray of theorists (including Leo Bersani) who priase Edelman’s work against others such as Judith Butler (who reads “No Future” as a war-like manifesto) and Tim Dean (who sees it as a Fascistic pile of pseudo-religious piddle). An equally thoughtful essay on “queering” sexual deviants and representations of Christ in the later middle ages rehearses the argument that images and allegorical/metaphorical modes of representation sought to represent concepts which were unrepresentable by a leap of hybridizing imagination. “Queerness” in all its confounding modes charge these hybridized sodomites – the referent was undisclosable (that is, “interior”), hence the grotesque was only but a mild form or visualization which metonymically stands in for that terrible unspeakable – the Real void of meaninglessness which, if uncovered, threatens institutions of normativity as much as it “queers” the queer.

But perhaps one should come back to the question: what about the “real” animals? This argument takes on especial significance towards the end of the 13th Century between what we could roughly distinguish between “nominalism” and “realism”, with particular emphasis on modes of signifying and modes of knowing-through-signification. In short, the problematic status of signification as “mediation” became a locus for impassioned theological and philosophical meditation. For most theorists of the animal in the middle ages, it is generally agreed that “real” animals were generally screens with which to project the anxieties of man’s introjected “inner-beast”. Cloaked with the guilt of the corporeality of man, his animal instincts and (Freudian/Kleinian/Lacanian) drives, the animal as projective surface stood as the ultimate ineffable (indecipherable) Other upon which the “human” could be retrospectively defined. For Joyce Salisbury in “The Beast Within”, the 12th Century saw man’s increasing knowledge of his interior proximity to animal, and the diminishing distance between the passive and active (Thomistic) intellect. Cognitive theories of perception from Alberto Magnus to St Thomas Aquinas and beyond gave further prominence to the role of the senses in cognitive knowledge about the phenomenal world, and hence a primary gateway for knowledge of the suprasensible world, including abstracted intellectual categories.

In a joint essay by Umberto Eco et al. in “Medieval Semiotics”, Eco traces the shifting status of human/animal vox in the linguistic classificatory schemes of thinkers in the later middle ages. From Aristotle’s initial assertion that vox was the production of an ensouled thing, classifying the vox became a grid upon which to track the changing status of man’s relationship with animals, although paradoxically through human-made nets/grids such as articulation or writability. Interestingly, the 14th Century philosopher Oxfordian/Parisian philosopher Roger Bacon chose to group certain divisions of human vox under the same classificatory umbrella as animal vox. Precisely what kind of “vox” fell under this category? For Bacon, these were the vox of madmen and babbling lovers who were incapable of reasoned enunciation. This is important in two ways – the vox, a privileged site of human-discursive dominance thus became a blurred site of exchange between the boundaries of the animal and the human, indicating the capacity for humans to “fall” from theological humanistic grace into the level of animal. Retroactively, this leads to the possibility of the “reading” the [human] voice as a potential site of confusion, perhaps even occasioning the need for policing, censorship and control through disseminated networks of power. Secondly, this forces us to rethink the ethical cultral-social context in which fin’ amours operates: if the privileges space of love could also be a space of transgression into animality, then perhaps the operation of fin’ amours, too, demands subtlety in interpretation and re-reading, possessing its own hierarchy of power-distinctions that seperated “good” lovers from “bad” ones.

What we are staring at in this projected surface of the beast is, I argue, the “void” of the Real which threatens to inflict a wound upon the superstructures of ideology, the very space of the internal death-drive which colours the interiority of man caught in the Symbolic. To confront the void would literally be to occupy the position of the beast, to willingly reduce oneself to a Agambian position of “bare life” in opposition to Symbolic “homo sacer”, structured around the meaningless void of the Real to protect one’s traumatic encounter with it. As Lee Edelman suggests, such occupation is an ethical position. Correspondingly, I find myself comporting towards Judith Peraino’s own conceptualization of “queer listening” as an ethic. But there are problems – how does one “listen queerly”? To do so would be to revel in the sinuous intertwining of the motetus and triplum voices of the late medieval chanson de nonne, to anarchically resist the hegemony of Logos by currying in the sensuous internal void of the signifier emptied of function, to fashion new codes of retrospective listening (hearing) which casts a dark shadow over the absurdity of our preoccupation with normative hermeneutical paradigms, indeed exposing these paradims as (contra Bent) themselves perversely “invalid”.

Robin Hood's Merrier Men: Music, Queer Threat, and the escape from the Homosocial

2009-06-18T07:11:00.000-07:00

As one of the costliest sound films to be made in full Technicolor glory, Warner Brother’s release of The Adventures of Robin Hood in 1938 has been lauded as one of the best filmic portrayals of the historical heroic outlaw, securing a legacy that continues even today. Besides thrusting industry underdogs Errol Flynn (playing Robin Hood) and Olivia de Hallivand (playing Maid Marian) into national stardom, Robin Hood did much to reassure the strength of the WB-Korngold partnership as much as it reiterated the latter’s dominance in the field of film music. As Benjamin Winters notes, however, this musical venture very nearly did not come to pass. Korngold, himself already working on several projects including a new opera, displayed less faith with the newfangled project, claiming in a letter to Wallin dated February 11, 1938 that:

“Robin Hood is no picture for me. I have no relation to it and therefore, cannot produce any music for it. I am a musician of the heart, of passions and psychology; I am not a musical illustrator for a ninety-percent action picture.”

Swayed by Hitler’s increasing involvement in Viennese politics and a personal visitation by Wallis the next morning, Korngold eventually agreed to the project. To what extent Korngold felt as if his musical creativity was being aped for “action picture” purposes is lost to history, although his musical conviction to “the heart ... passions and psychology” reveals, to a large degree, the extent to which Wagnerian principles of musical association had come to influence models of film music production under the Classic Hollywood Studio system from the late 1920s onwards. As Caryl Flinn suggests, a re-engineered Wagnerian paradigm of the leitmotif in the Gesamtkuntswerk provided the studio system a practical, economic and formally efficient system of musical signification as part of a wider transformation of Romanticist ideology. At the same time, however, Winters wags a warning finger at hard-and-fast authorial attributions to single composers, itself part of a Romanticist rush to establish the author as a single creative point of origin which, in turn structures what Lydia Goehr calls the “work concept”. Though certainly pivotal, Winters points out that Korngold’s involvement in the production of Robin Hood’s score was not unaided. Indeed for Winters, Korngold as a championed author figure:

“[Is] an inherently plural one, a multi-voiced character who speaks in the language of his past works, and mimics the voices of Elizabethan balladry, as much as he communicates with the voice of the composer of 1938.”

For numerous composers working within the highly differentiated studio system, the finished “work” was itself subject to numerous hands in the production process, filtering past the eyes (and ears) of the music director who walked a fine tightrope between convention, aesthetic creativity and practical economic considerations. As products of a highly collaborative process, the study of film music both compels and eludes easy composerly attribution, serving to historically disavow the complex dialogical interplay between actors of a highly organized film production unit. Better suited to the purpose, however, would be to understand the name of the composer as a placeholder for discursive process, a metonymical stand-in to avert acts of reading over-determined composer intentionality into the score.

Apart from acknowledging the authorial signature of contemporary modes of authorship, it is also possible to “read” the engagement between visual narrative and musical interjection as a dialogical construction, that is, a contractual agreement between producer and receiver. Roland Barthes signals the necessity of such a “counter signature” in the securing of cultural meaning, harkening the “death of the author” not as an epistemological break, but a critical injunction that recognises the limits of the producer’s horizon, inviting constant re-reading of a given text. It is against this backdrop that much of feminist theory and queer theory of the mid to late 20th century critical paradigm has operated, throwing cultural contingencies into (historical and theoretical) question. Both musicology and film studies have benefited greatly from the so-called “critical-turn”, spawning important groundbreaking works such authored by Susan McClary and Caryl Flinn. For Flinn, Hollywood film music’s fitness for feminine enunciation can be historically traced to a mode of musical discourse which submits to the visual image, though without means of subversion:

“[Film] music restores ... ‘lost’ dimensions to the cinematic apparatus only at the same time it carries the threat of denying that completedness and of exposing the fundamental disunity of the apparatus.”

Allied with notions of fictional utopia, Flinn goes on to argue that music’s mapping on several overlapping discursive terrains casts it as an intermediary “other” that cannot be solely pinned down by visual narrative, usually carrying connotations beyond its visible counterpart. Flinn’s own readings pay tribute to the feminist-oriented psychoanalytic proclivities of her forefathers (and foremothers) such as Kristeva, Metz and Mulvey, who work within an understanding of the sonic as phonological, maternal excess reaching beyond (and even undermining) the hegemony of logos. Yet, Flinn’s own allegiance to music’s discursive preparation for participation in ossified masculine/feminine structures risk re-perpetuating the binaries she seeks to query. While tracing the ideological servitude of film music to visual narrative as an outcome of discursive trends, she affirms models of masculinity and femininity when subjecting film music to her own formal constraints of subservience. Even assigning the redemptive possibilities of “utopia” to musical invocations of the feminine recasts her female subjects as inherently impossible objects confined to musical fiction, hammered into submission by the logic of the visible.

However, Flinn’s project reaffirms the ontological slipperiness of film music and its tortured relation to the visual – a relation that does not exist “essentially” and has to be articulated (hence consistently re-articulated) by “a vast array of supporting discourses and technologies”. Music’s curious “ineffability” has been a much-targeted trope for thinkers such as Carolyn Abbate and Vladimir Jankélévitch, whose investigations into difficult “floating signification” both challenge the production of filmic meaning as much as it invites endless opportunities for creative treatment. That is, by giving musical voice to the visual, it both can function as a stable signifier within a closed semantic system as well as give voice to the un-voiceable, rupturing the (illusory) hermetic, hegemonic autonomy of the very system it appears to serve. In other words, as much as music may proffer stable subjectivity to visible objects, it may equally queer the boundaries of such identities through its own excesses, inviting queer readings which sit beyond the reach of any film’s normative ideological terrain.

Music’s relation to queer subjectivity has been surprisingly neglected in the study of film music (itself a relatively fresh discipline) given its ability to actively resist stable signification and normative assignations to the visual. Though much has been written on music, gender and film, queerness as a destabilizing force has yet to be mined in music, perhaps precisely because queerness is only perceivable via a phenomenological contortion of normative Symbolic contours involving stable structures and hierarchies of signification. In relation to the visual image, however, this cinematic marriage is anything but queer, calling for the flourishing of which Rick Altman calls “codes of reality” and “codes of representation” in order to mask the tyranny of its intrinsically unstable signification. Within these prescribed spheres of representation, music’s performativity on extra-diegetic platforms beyond the confines of filmic levels of fiction locate it in a special position of what Foucault calls “transdiscursivity”, operating like a “pointe de capiton” (quilting point) which knits disparate discursive levels into the cinematic fabric. By importing external meaning, adhering to assigned semantic functions and possessing the ability to shake off the shackles of closed signification, music queers the stability of the semantic field into which it is structured, “speaking too much” by its paradoxical nature of not being able to “speak for itself”.

Irving Rapper’s famous insertion of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony in Now, Voyager (1942), for example, blurs the threshold between diegetic and nondiegetic, exteriority and psychological interiority in a scene which both the filmic protagonist Charlotte Vale (Bette Davis) and impossible lover Jerry Durrance (Paul Henreid) watch an orchestral performance. The orchestra’s performance of Tchaikovsk’s fourth, a work infamous for its coded homosexual undertones, slips uneasily between diegesis and non-diegesis: we are never sure whether what we are watching emanates from the diegetic reality of the orchestra or the non-diegetic level of the film’s protagonists. And yet, the semantic excesses of Tchaikovsky’s work concerning the “love that dare not speak its name” compels us to overlap the imported cultural significance of Tchaikovsky’s fourth with an equally impossibly coupling between two doomed lovers; at the same time it invites an (implausible?) added level of speculation that, perhaps, the lovers’ “doomed” romance are shaped by something more than previous social contracts. In short, does music threateningly queer one (or both) of its subjects?

It is here that we re-turn to The Adventures of Robin Hood, praised for its ‘squeaky clean’ antics of utopian idealizing, which, amidst heralding the politics of the Eisenhower New Deal and depicting democratic ideology with fervent zeal, stages heterosexuality as a normative compulsion by narrating Robin’s (Errol Flynn’s) flight and victory over the homosocial. In the atmosphere of late 1930s Hollywood filmmaking, the issue of sexuality had become a particularly tender subject. As a religiously-motivated reaction against what George Chauncey calls the “pansy craze” in the late 1920s and early 1930s over the hypervisibility of filmic homosexual subjects, the institution of the Motion Picture Production Code and the Roman Catholic Legion of Decency led to a major Hollywood ‘clean-up’ act which exiled its overtly effeminate film subjects to the veiled margins. Though not specifically targeted at queer representation, the ratification of the code by the MPPDA on 31 March 1930 listed homosexuality as a “sex perversion” in its revised guidelines. As Richard Barrios notes, the application of the code rattled off to a difficult start, mostly ignored by directors and producers who milked the “pansy craze” for all its entertaining worth in “a near effortless, nose-thumbing defiance”. In an article entitled “Tsk, tsk, such goings on”, Variety Magazine noted the degree to which cultural visibility of homosexuality via pansy embodiment had taken Hollywood by storm:

“Producers are going heavy on the pansy stuff in current pix, despite the watchful eyes of the Hays office, which is attempting to keep the dual-sex boys and Lesbos out of films. With a “queer” flash in [the movie] Calvacade, [the filmmakers’] attitude is that if [a] picture of that type can get away with it, why not in the programmers.”

By 1934, however, the newly strengthened code and its moral allegiance with the Roman Catholic League of Decency exerted a tighter stronghold over the censorship and policing of potentially “offensive” material. The recent stock market crash was far from public forgetting, and, together with the code’s alleged responsibility to moral uprightness, stood for a “symbol of supposed national well-being hailed by most as a needed boost to national modale”. Suddenly, it seemed as if overvisibility had receded into vague or veiled reference, decoded only through implicit knowledge of telltale signs. The code, it seems, had given birth to coded reference, though the onscreen vagrant never truly “vanished” from visibility. Barrios cites numerous examples of coded references including several skirmishes between the PCA and producers over characters which were deemed “too effeminate” for the masculine sensibilities of the post-crash American audience. Though overt “queer flashes” had been sanitised by the code, this did not prevent “queer flickering” from successfully queering the heteronormative sanctity of screen subjectivity. Barely recognizable veiled moments from Cary Grant’s performance in Bringing up Baby (1938), for example, produces “queer flickering”, though reduced to the level of ambiguous language use.

Given the suppression of overt referencing to “pansy” performativity in the late 1930s Hollywood film, where better a disruptive medium to entertain such “queer” feelings as the semantically incestuous level of music? It is possible that music’s privileged position as both servant and potential threat to visual narrative may be precisely harnessed to encode the unnameable in the climate of high censorship. Even if unintended, readings of “queer flickering” supported by musical material allow us to imagine (or creatively activate) new structures of spectatorly embodiment – what Diana Fuss might call “positions of enunciation” – which authorizes a receptive “counter signature” in securing filmic meaning, or acknowledging fissures in the reproduction of normative ideology. Furthermore, by prying apart the contingencies which keep normative ideology afloat, our use of music as a hermeneutic prism with which to view the screen “awry” enables us to unmask the conditions of normative ideology’s securing of discursive power by diffusing and marginalizing the queer threat, veiling, as it were, normativity’s inherent queerness.

Though billed as a family-oriented spectacle, The Adventures of Robin Hood are not exempt from its paraphernalia of “queer flickering” and veiled references. As Winters has pointed out, the most obvious lingering legacy of the “pansy craze” finds form in the villainous Prince John, played with effeminate efficacy by Claude Rains, who is “disentitled to claim the masculine subject position”. Several other visual details give away Prince John’s queer subjectivity, including his overwhelming penchant for ornate dress and lavender-based colours – flashing signposts of earlier modes of “pansy” identification.

As the mastermind of the villainous operation, Prince John has no ownership over musical material. In fact, all musical episodes linked with Prince John’s onscreen appearance are subverted by other sources within diegetic reality. In the sequence after the first opening titles, the trumpet fanfare which had accompanied the town crier [1:32] seems to announce the filmic introduction of both antagonists Prince John and Sir Guy [1:48]. The second fanfare, however, is acoustically muffled, and we are greeted with the sight of Sir Guy staring out of the castle windows, immediately relieving John’s non-diegetic ownership of musical material to the diegetic reality of trumpets blaring outside the castle enclosure. In another heroic trumpet fanfare signalling the fest of Sir Guy [6:23], the regal proceedings meant to celebrate the wealth of Prince John’s parasitic opportunism are usurped by the appearance of an ensuite medieval orchestra. Later, in a clever moment of irony, the fanfare accompanying shouts of “hail to Prince John!” undermines John’s authority when the camera pans to a voracious dog feasting on a leg of meat [7:00]. Clearly, the constant desuturing of musical material and its visual accomplice seem to suggest that Prince John’s emasculate embodiment as a site of authority is but a failed attempt at ventriloquism in place of the rightful king – he never quite “owns” the palace or musical thematic material as he is never fully fairly integrated into the realm of heteronormativity through his own vagrant inclinations.

In Prince John’s enclosure of men, it is revealing that Maid Marian and her servant are the only two female inhabitants. Prince John is never seen accosting the opposite sex; instead, he attempts to wed Sir Guy and Maid Marian for insidious political manoeuvres. At the same time, Sir Guy’s own masculinity seems to be at stake. Directly under the command of the film’s sole “pansy”, the viewer is left wondering whether his heterosexual attraction to Maid Marian is genuine, or a well-known cultural case of “lavender marriage” as coined in the 1920s to describe the coupling of a homosexual with a heterosexual spouse to avoid public stigmatization. In the stage siege of unfairly taxed booty, Sir Guy’s approach (along with Maid Marian) into Robin’s Sherwood Forrest trap is played by soaring, high-octave violins [32:56], anticipatory of the kind of scoring treatment later associated with Maid Marian. Although this mode of scoring may operate as a form of forbearing indicating the presence of a gendered female subject in Sir Guy’s entourage, the inflection of Sir Guy’s theme with a Marian-esque treatment reserved for femininity also effeminizes Sir Guy, aligning him with the faulty masculinity of Prince John rather than worthy masculine competitor of Robin Hood.

The filmic treatment of Sir Guy’s banquet scene reinforces this strange correspondence of “queer flickering” – throughout the scene, the camera cuts back and forth between Prince John, Sir Guy and Maid Marian. When Prince John attempts to cajole Marian into marrying Sir Guy by suggesting the latter was in love with her, Marian and John apparently steal glances at each other, but never share the same frame. As viewers, we are only treated to Sir Guy and Prince John locking eyes with each other in a single frame, which seems to fragment our earlier proposition: did Sir Guy and Marian ever catch each others’ gaze, or does Sir Guy only have eyes for Prince John?

The internal contradictions and ambiguities of musical homosocial networks in The Adventures of Robin Hood are further queered with another unlikely coupling, this time within Robin Hood’s own circle of merry men. The pairing of Robin and William Scarlett (Patrick Knowles) may seem innocent enough to contemporary sensibilities, but the dangers of diminishing homosocial distance are always at bay. Both Robin and William can be read against the backdrop of the late 1930s American pulp fiction and comic book explosion, introducing a wealth of superhero characters and their lesser sidekicks into the public imagination. By the 1940s, The Lone Ranger and Batman were familiar cultural icons, aided by their faithful sidekicks Tonto and Robin respectively, representing the best of nonsexualized homosocial relations. The dissociation from the homosocial to the homoerotic, however, was of large enough concern to revisionist writers in the 1950s such as Frederic Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent (1954). For Wertham, the homoerotic undertones between Batman and Robin were palpable enough to warrant a polemical outing:

“At home they lead an idyllic life. They are Bruce Wayne and ‘Dick’ Grayson. Bruce Wayne is described as a ‘socialite’ and the official relationship is that Dick is Bruce’s ward. They live in sumptuous quarters, with beautiful flowers in large vases, and have a butler, Alfred. Bruce is sometimes shown in a dressing gown. As they sit by the fireplace the young boy sometimes worries about his partner ... it is like a wish dream of two homosexuals living together.”

Although Wertham’s homophobic diatribe was laughed off by other comic-loving communities, the ever-present danger of “queer flickering” between two homosocial subjects reveals the degree to which homoeroticism as a threat itself structures the authority of homosocial networks and its performative injunctions. The relationship between Robin and William itself plays out as a battle for masculine power, in a playful symbolic battle of alpha-male phallic domination. When Robin and William are first presented onscreen, supported by a fanfare, it is William we see first, followed by Robin [3:14]. The theme, however (later ascribed to Robin) only resolves onto a G-major triad (via D-major chord V) when the camera cuts to a closeup of Robin’s face. Similarly, when we first hear the strains of the “Jollity theme”, it is William we see first, followed by Robin. But Willaim’s insufficiencies as a novice masculine subject betray his aspirations to be the controlling alpha male. He is uncomfortable in the forest, complaining to Robin as he stumbles over a tree stump, comically walks into a branch, and never lifts a fighting finger, letting Robin take the lead instead. Clearly, the musical treatment of the visual narrative seems to anticipate and reaffirm Robin’s successful interpolation of masculine subjectivity over a lesser-abled, bumbling William.

Their friendly jousts take on significant value for William Scarlett in the battle between Little John and Robin Hood in a scene choked with double-entendres, specularizing and staging the competition between masculine subjects. Upon first sighting the hulking Little John (Alan Hale) [19:55], Robin’s describes him as “a lusty infant” and proposes to take him on, with William making the snide remark that “his quarter-staff does the reasoning for him”. The testosterone-fuelled approach of Robin and Little John is accompanied by a reiteration of the “Jollity theme” in the low brasses and bassoons, testimonies to the equal masculine threat each subject poses for the other. Here, neither character is given preferential weight; as far as the viewer is concerned, either could be the winner of the match to ensue. After a few exchanged remarks, the following dialogue emerges:

Robin Hood (pulling an arrow from his holder): This fly has a mighty sting, friend.
Little John: I’ve only a staff and you threaten me with a long bow and a grey goose-shaft. Aren’t you man enough...
Robin Hood: Wait. I’ll get myself a staff.

Encountering Little John’s upright (erect) phallic weapon, Robin concedes to ditch his own phallus (his bow and arrow), agreeing to fight Little John on his terms, that is, ascribing to the rules organizing Little John’s economy of masculinity as structured by his phallic centre. Robin proceeds to fashion a long wooden staff of his own [20:40], shearing off the excess foliage, whittling himself to Little John’s level of masculine signification: he fully understands that to win Little John’s approval, there can only be one phallus up for grabs, one phallic economy which may constitute both competitors as fair, equal rivals. While both men compete rather dubiously on a single log (another long thin shaft – the phallic economy of the big Other, the unseen but master-masculine father subject?), it is William who stays out of the fight, leaving his better half to exercise his brawns while he sprawls limpidly on the other side of the bank (away from the liminality of masculine signification), satisfyingly stroking his (stringed) instrument.

It is an indistinctness with which William is positioned within the network of homosocial relations which renders him a(n) (im)properly queer subject: a position which seems to be located on the margins of a proto-Hegelian master-slave narrative (a “fight for recognition” within the order of patriarchal male supremacy) which inscribes its male subjects into the order of functional (if aggressive) masculinity rite-of-passages, while not being thoroughly excluded from that social order either. For Eve Sedgwick, this queer indistinctness does not demonstrate so much the fundamental disunity between homosocial and homosexual networks, as much as a critical turn effected to problematize the artificial spilt driven between these two polarities along the same parabola of cultural desire:

“To draw the “homosocial” back into the orbit of “desire,” of the potentially erotic, then, is to hypothesize the potential unbrokenness of a continuum between homosocial and homosexual – a continuum whose visibility, for men, in our society, is radically disrupted.”

This queer parabola – this unbroken continuum of desire – extends precariously as the thin tightrope upon which the struggle for masculine recognition is staged between Little John and Robin Hood (see still above), reminding the homosocial of its necessary occlusions of the homosexual, as well as the precariously small distance partitioning both worlds of desire. In a highly suggestive frame (shown above), Little John and Robin Hood dance on a long, protruding log which seems to stem from between William Scarlett’s thighs, an overriding “master” phallic platform upon which masculinity is performed, though it is constantly undermined by the secondary objects of phallic identification (the smaller wooden staffs) between warring parties. Both men tread apathetically upon William’s horizontal phallus, indifferent to the fact that it is their disavowal of his “queer erection” to the spectacle of masculinity on display which provides them the stage (hence the initial possibility) for their fight in the first place.

While the visual narrative of the scene belongs to Robin Hood and Little John, musically, the scene belongs unequivocally to William Scarlett. When Robin and William first enter the cinematic frame [19:55], the appearance of William’s back-slung lute coincides perfectly with a triadic strum in the orchestra, drawing the viewer’s visual attention to William’s instrument. A sub-narrative of William and his lute continues, parallel to Robin and Little John’s face-off. As William readies himself along the bank to play [20:53], the camera cuts away from what would be the visual of William playing the first chord on his lute. Instead, the image cuts to Robin and Little John, the first musical strains of the strum from William’s lute extrapolated onto the fighters falling into position, cadencing on an anticipatory V chord. As William starts to play, the strumming accompanies the reigning melody of the “Jollity theme” (itself a derivation from Robin’s theme) while Robin and Little John fight, as if enacting an intricately staged pas de deux without any hint of real danger.

While William musically accompanies the “Jollity theme”, it becomes ambiguous as to who ultimately owns the theme. Even given its relation to Robin’s theme, William’s lute provides the tonal foundation for the melody to stay afloat, suggesting that he is the true musical bedrock for the display of masculinity. With Orpheus-like powers to bewitch his two male companions into a specular performance of virility, Little John feigns an appeal to his godlike musical control of the fight [21:04], shouting: “Hey there, pretty fellow, play a livelier tune that I can make this puny fellow dance to!” Apparently charmed by Little John’s sweet-talking, William returns a smile and does so, launching the music into a more energetic rhythm which leads to Little John’s victory. Indeed, the degree of synchronity between the visual and musical (sutured to William’s musical-productive abilities) seem to suggest a link of causality between William’s music-making and the fight itself. It is as if William’s music directly determines the match, “playing” his male companions as he “plays” his lute, acting like an invisible puppet-master that pulls the strings of his masculine marionettes for his own viewing pleasure. Hoping to prolong this erotic display, William deviously halts the musical progression on a V chord on his lute [21:03], refusing satisfactory musical closure (that is, withholding climatic gesture), causing his puppets to continue fighting in an uncertain stasis, and forcing Little John to break the limbo and lodge a complaint for William to continue the tonal progression.

Like the sexual ambivalence of Sir Guy and the emasculate antics of Prince John, William Scarlett teeters on the uneasy fence between youthful emulation of full-blown masculine homosociality, and the musical suggestiveness of evocative (though closeted) homosexuality. William describes himself as “brains over brawns” at the end of Little John and Robin Hood’s skirmish, exempting himself from the discursive technologies which inscribe male subjects into a form of masculine identity predicated on brute strength. At the same time, William is curiously the only main-speaking character to play an instrument, linking his world with the nebulous semantic indistinctness of musicality. The conception of “musicality”, as Phillip Brett has argued, came to accrue dubious meaning in the history of sexuality, serving as a placeholder for the unnameable “open secret” of closeted homosexuality in the pre-Stonewall era. However, following the advice of Gary Thomas, to “out” William Scarlett would be to assign stable signification to a queer subject, an act that condemns him to the “binary logic” of the closet and cuts off his potential to generate uncertain jouissance, much in the same way the gesture of calling Handel gay would obscure our cultural indebtedness to contemporary identity politics. To be wary of William Scarlett’s musical manoeuvres in the subterranean depths of filmic narrative is to ethically “queer” William’s involvement in Robin Hood’s homosocial community of (very) merry men, and to be aware of how such “unspoken” relations penetrate, problematize and throw the visual into (musical) relief in the construction of fictional heteronormative reality.

Surrounded by “queer threats” on either side of the bank, Robin Hood’s masculinity secured by strength and skill can never fully disentangle him from the queer potentialities of his homosocial activities. Indeed these activities border on mild eroticism, with Robin Hood “riding” the subservient Friar Tuck to the interpolated “Jollity theme” [29:51] leading an angry (emasculated) Friar Tuck to a sword fight with the queer perpetrator. Similarly, this

symbolic advance is paired (staged) with (for) the watchful gaze of his merry men, who peer voyeuristically out of a nearby bush, taking delight at Robin’s queer adventures. Both Robin Hood and Little John partake hungrily of Friar Tuck’s “meat”, constituting an act of homosocial humiliation only differentiated from its fuller, homoerotic potential by a minute shift in perspective. This partaking of the flesh itself is not far from Maid Marian’s own softening attitudes to Robin Hood. Like male characters who feast of meat to insult, Maid Marian’s own chromatic soaring musical theme on a solo violin (not unlike Sir Guy’s previously emasculated theme in [32:56] accompanies her partaking of Robin’s leg of meat [40:29], throwing Robin and Little John’s earlier acts of humiliation into queer relief.

Maid Marian, the object of love in Robin Hood’s eyes, is his sole ticket out of the homosocial community of merry men. Less an equal subject, Maid Marian is Robin Hood’s necessary agent to prove his heterosexuality amidst a network where slippage between the homosocial and the homoerotic queer the boundaries of the heteronormative subject. While the film celebrates the successes of another heteronormative couple – Much the Miller’s Son (Herbert Mundin) and Marian’s ladyservant Bess (Una O’Conner), Much’s masculine success in the field of the heteronormative is downplayed due to his relative inexperience with women. On the other hand, Robin Hood’s triumphs in the league of masculinity and his deft handling of Marian’s colder antics fashion him as a prime poster-boy for heterosexual success. It is Robin’s ability to woo his lady which is ultimately celebrated at the end of the film, consequent to King Richard’s rightful retaking of the royal throne. The intervallic parity between Robin’s opening fanfare and the “King Richard” theme has been noted by Winters, but it is unclear as to which theme is authoritative, and which is derivative.

In the final scene, where King Richard is reinstated in his kingdom, the film shifts its focus to Richard’s authorization of Robin and Marian’s heterosexual coupling. Recognized and given assent by the (rightful) law (of the father), the King Richard theme surges amidst the happy nuptial couple. As Robin’s merry men crowd about the newlyweds-to-be, Robin and Marian secretly “break out” of the encroaching homosocial community of men, signalling Robin’s rejection and breakaway from that network via his betrothal to Marian, startling not only his merry men, but King Richard himself, who searches with his eyes for the couple’s whereabouts. As the music surges to the final cadential conclusion on the supposed King Richard theme, the camera remains focussed on the couple who leave the palace doors. While the King Richard theme confers authority upon Robin Hood’s flight from the homosocial (and hence the possibility of queer threat), the music de-sutures itself from King Richard as a visible subject, finding its object-cause in the Robin-Marian coupling which concludes the film. It becomes clear that the “King Richard theme” was never destined to belong to King Richard, but finds its happy concluding attachment to the ideal of compulsory heteronormativity which Robin has achieved. Furthermore, the melodic similarities between Robin’s theme and the King Richard theme invite us to read the final musical transformation as Robin’s transformation – indeed a thematic elevation in social status to that of a well-constituted heterosexual social subject who has successfully relinquished the inherent queer threat of his previous homosocial dealings.

As the music rushes to harmonic conclusion, the doors of the palace close behind the leaving couple, shutting its inhabitants, Robin’s merry men, and even King Richard himself in the dangerous enclosure of the homosocial. While musically signposting satisfactory closure, the audience is implicated in the company of the homosocial, trapped, as it were, in a cultural system of values that, while musically celebrating heterosexuality as a successful flight from the queer slippages of homosociality, remind the audience of their inherent susceptibility to the queer threat. As viewers shut behind the closed doors of Robin and Marian’s unseen heteronormative utopian future, we are faced with a choice to do as Robin does, or to accept a musical closure behind a castle fortress teeming with queer potentiality. Perhaps rightly so, Robin and Marian’s future is literally black (as the screen fades out), unseen, and hence unknowable: the secrets of their heteronormative utopia occluded behind closed doors may turn out to be an elaborate social sham, as much as it suggests the necessary containment and rejection of queer homosocial proximities as a prerequisite for heteronormative ideology.

False voices and true lovers: Bestializing Machaut’s Lay de Plour (Malgre Fortune)

2009-05-20T05:27:00.000-07:00

As a child, I spent endless hours of fascination over a toy stuffed frog, complete with a zip down its back. When you unzipped the frog and inverted the plush, the frog turned into a prince, its animal identity hidden in the toy whilst giving body to the metamorphosized prince. This model of transfiguration evidently captivated more than just an eight-year-old boy, fascinated with the mechanics of fabric. Bruno Bettelheim’s groundbreaking Freudian analysis of classical fairy tales considers the boundary between man and beast fluid and continuous, reading the frog’s magical transformation into Prince as a psychical shift in perspective of a maturing lover. It is, as Bettelheim argues, the mutating ideological apparatus behind the princess’ gaze which transforms beast into man and vice versa, entailing what Slavoj Zizek might call a shift in “parallax view”, causing the beautification of the beast or the bestializing of the beloved.

Michael Camille’s illuminating studies of representation and figuration in the manuscripts of Roman de Fauvel similarly brings to light the intriguing reversibility between bestiality and humanity. Chaillou’s satirical depiction of Fauvel, the power-hungry horse, undergoes a series of mutations in manuscript illuminations, appearing not only as fully bestialised, but also on a series of hybrid representations from incomplete metamorphosis to full human verisimilitude. In stark contrast to jongoluers and minstrely musicians depicted wearing beastly masks, the illuminations in the Fauvel manuscripts seem to suggest an epistemology of difference that is more than merely “skin-deep”. Chaillou draws from the Aristotelian tradition which casts the body as a vessel caught between the animal (sensuous) and the human (rational) soul, but aestheticizes this critical difference as one of masquerading inversion: Fauvel is a beast masquerading as a human, while the revellers are humans masquerading as beasts. Fauvel's own "false front" is merely an inversion of the mask, with the beastly side flipped on the inside.

The slippery division between lover and beast literally marks the artistic corpus of Guillaume de Machaut as allegorical “masks” in the menagerie of courtly lovers. Two works, Le Dit de l’alerion and Dit dou lyon come to immediate attention. In a comparison of these two dits, both male and female genders are equally presented as beastly beings: L’alerion centers the male (human) protagonist as a learned trapper of (feminized) hunting birds, whereas Lyon bestializes a homosocial network of male rivals vying for the affection of the island’s single (human) dame. In the latter, as Margaret J. Ehrhart opines, the human autonomy of the narrating “I” is threatened by his attraction to the island’s female inhabitant. Moved to amorous emotions, the narrator recognition of the “beasts” as potential rivals both casts himself above them while simultaneously implicates (identifies) himself in their company as one of them, competing under the gaze of the dame. A “kindred spirit” under the auspices of love thus bestializes himself by accepting his given subjectivity under the rules of courtship, acceding to the reduced status of beast in order to battle for his lady’s love.

Machaut’s L’alerion, however, suggests a different take on the subject of love and courtship in the game of fin’ amours. Ladies are bestialized objects of desire, falcon birds that have to be deceived into trapping – in order for the lover to better his chances of winning his ladies’ love, he must first prove a master of deception amidst the homosocial before emerging triumphant in the realm of the heterosexual. L’alerion reads as an extended didactic dit on the tips and tricks of courtly love, but above all, trickery is highlighted as a unifying theme. Trapping a prized falcon bird, the narrator declares, demands that the lover be “suitably equipped with tools” (60), preferably learnt in secret from more experienced lovers in the community of the homosocial. The lover “ought to regulate his thoughts, his actions, and his speech in a form that hides them well ... [and] must be on guard not to draw regard unduly” (51). Later in the dit, Machaut allegorizes the trap in which the lover lays for his beloved as a “small bird”, a bestialized object of affection to attract its prey:

“In this way should a lover act / who would, in his own interest, / set up a trap in such a way / that it appear agreeable, / arranged in the customary way [...] It (the trap) would contain the noble bird / used by most gentlemen / known as the ‘amorous sweet glance,’ / nurtured with the greatest care” (65)

By this double act of bestializing, the narrator implies that to “trap” the falcon, the lover must first offer himself as prey by presenting himself as domesticated beast (a “little bird”) of the courtly trade, disciplined and ennobled by “eloquent and courteous speech” (ibid). Hunter and hunted are obfuscated in Machaut’s clever twist of the bestial mask: lover captivates his beloved by offering himself captive in the first place. Advanced recognition of mutual deceit underlies the risky adventures of courtly love:

“It was thus good to deceive her / with this courteous deception, / for such deceit may benefit / the hearts of many, / when it turns / them towards the good, away from ill: / thus she who finds herself deceived / in such a way is no whit harmed.” (69)

In the same breath, Machaut warns against discarding the ideal lover’s disguise too quickly under the pressures of delayed consummation. To stay implicated within the discourse of fin’ amours, the rejected (or abjected) lover should “hold his peace and mind his task” since “too much talk ... does harm” and transforms his amorous “song ... to a sad lament” (66). Full admission into the economy of fin’ amours demands that the subject “suspend his heart in a true amorous suspense” and “faithfully ... await Love’s approval” (62). In other words, the subject is instructed to betray his true emotions, deceiving even himself in order to be taken seriously as a worthy suitor. The lover dons a “false front” of self-deceit, stoically enduring his lady’s apparent “discordant deeds” (54) for want of a delayed possible future in which both hearts are “so much in tune with one another and ... [thus] truly bound together” (56). The uninitiated novice too inexperienced to sustain his “false appearance” befalls a fate of madness, ousting him out of love’s orbit and into a self-indulgent spectacle of bickering bestiality:

“But even if he holds his peace, / if his heart should him dispose to show his sadness openly / when it intrudes upon his joy, / in manner or in countenance, / he makes his cause quite manifest / to others: this can well be said. / If he cries today, tomorrow laughs, / how he behaves will be remarked / and he can’t be excused for it. / In such behaviour danger lies / as much as if he’d spoken out ...” (51)

True love, the poet seems to suggest, is the prolonged effort of domesticating a wild beast rather than hastily divulging in immediate pleasures of the flesh. An illumination in Manuscript E (Fig. 1) accompanying the dit heightens this observation. Here, the narrative “I” of the dit is portrayed desiring the rare Alerion perched on the hand of one of two merchants. The potential poet/purchaser touches his wallet positioned suggestively near his crotch, while the two merchants gaze dangerously into each others’ eyes. Within the bounds of the frame, the horizons of socially accepted sexual boundaries are threatened by the “suspended animation” of the action – should the poet “purchase” the Alerion with his money (seed), the bird(s) propping the gap between male partners which neutralizes homosocial relations may disappear, leading both poet and merchants into unspeakably bestial acts. Fortunately, defiling the honour of the Alerion and compromising normative structures of sexual relations are not on the mind of the poet. Instead, he takes “great care ... not to attempt to buy the bird, for it was clear [he] never could make her [his] own in such a way.” (95)

Machaut’s oft-neglected Le Lay de Plour (Malgre fortune et son tour) paradoxically goes against his own advice against superfluous exposition. Apparently discarding the warning to keep one’s earnest animal desires at bay, Lay de Plour’s poet-protagonist throws off his “false front” in anguish, confronting – even accosting – his listening (or reading) audience with an all-too-honest disclosure of his heart. Arguably one of Machaut’s later composed works, Lay de Plour shares the same name as an earlier Lay, “composed” out of the narrative demands of Le Jugement du Roy de Navarre where, as penance for his misjudgement of feminine subjectivity, Guillaume the poet is sentenced to compose a lay. (For purposes of clarity, I will be referring to the lay accompanying Navarre as Lay de Plour and the later work as Malgre Fortune.) The musical, lyrical and rhetorical content of both lays, however, could not be more different. While Lay de Plour concerns a grieving feminine “je” mourning over the death of her beloved and the passionate tortures which the memory of her departed inflicts, Malgre Fortune depicts a rejected lover fallen from the vestiges of fin’ amours grace.

Written in 12 standard versicles, ouvert-clos structures and a recapitulation of the opening incipit up a perfect 5th in the 12th verse, Machaut’s poet-protagonist in Malgre Fortune directs his mournful aggression against his beloved, and against the pressures of performative “false fronts”. In contrast to Lay de Plour, the declamatory “je” does not wish to find aesthetic “life” in a “book”. Rather, the poetic “je” establishes himself as authorial source of the musical and lyrical, pronouncing that he wishes to make:

“De mon amoureus labour “From my amorous labour

Un piteus lay A piteous lay

Que je nomme et nommeray That I am naming and shall name

Le lay de plour” The lay of weeping.”

Both lays, however, parodies the craft of lay-making by foregrounding the writing process instead of the finished product. An aesthetic excess haunts both lays, denying them a sense of closure and self-referentiality. While Lay de Plour’s female protagonist continues articulating her desire to be enshrined in writing long after the writing is brought to completion, Malgre Fortune’s lovesick poet declares that he will write a “lay de plour”, but never succeeds in completing the actual poem. Instead, Malgre Fortune tracks the poet’s pseudo-biographical transition from uncouth, maddened beastly lover to smooth, refined subject under the laws of fin’ amours at the cost of the lay itself. Listening to his narcissistic ramblings, the poet discovers his own deficiencies and abandons the project of the Lay midway, seeking forgiveness for his vulgar excesses and humbly acceding to perform the “false front” of a refined lover. Put another way, the poet is saved from the cause his solipsistic artistic inspiration precisely by his artistic enterprise: his impulse to etch the lay upon the back of another sacrificed beast (the parchment) helps him to externalize (materialize and therefore stage) the gaze of his lover, revealing to him his own inner beastly qualities. Only by doing so, as Lacan might posit, can the poet comport his performative structure to the gaze of his beloved, inverting the bestial mask to transform himself into a well-subjectivized object of desire of the “Other’s desire”.

Lamenting that the object of his affection has forbidden the poet to “pass the threshold of her dwelling”, he bemoans the maddening imprisonment of his solitary thoughts, claiming that Love has done him wrong for his “humblement l’endure” (“humble enduring”), causing him to live “contre nature” (“contrary to nature”) in “desconfiture” (discomfort). Perched on the verge of despair, the poet decries the necessity of such “false fronts”, although later he pines:

“Si que pleindre “Thus I do not wish to plain

Ne complaindre or complain

Ne me vueil plus ains vueil findre more than I wish to fain

Que mi doloureus complaint that my sorrowful complaint

Soient maindre might be less

Puis qu’attaindre” than that which I attaint”

His song of expressive detesting becomes one of self-reflexivity, a project of realigning himself with the necessity of his performed “false front” for fear of further making a spectacular beast of himself in the social presence of others. Likening his song to “Li cignes contre sa mort / se reconforte en chantant” (“the swan before his death / [comforting] himself in singing”, the poet ruminates over the dangers of unbridled beastly gestures, noting that such unrefined (in)versions of the animal-mask makes a fool of him. Indeed, he berates himself for “je parole contre moy” (“speaking against [himself]”), having committed the sin of disclosing his heart’s lamentations. In verse 11, the poet then commits himself to Venus, seeking forgiveness for “pechie de la rudesse” (“the sin of crudeness/rudeness”) by his narcissistic outburst. Vowing to comport himself to the role of stoic lover, the poet ennobles his activity through the exercise of humanly restraint, domesticating his bestial side by inverting the mask, although, paradoxically, betraying his essential emotions. On the other hand, the torture of exile from his beloved’s quarters is sublimated into gentlemanly gesture of nobility and refined social stature, ennobling the poet within his immediate community.

Yet, Machaut clues us in to another hidden detail of the poet’s well-camouflaged relations with the lady. In verse 7, the poet berates Love for turning against him, “me fait plus contraire Qu’Alixandres ne fist Daire” (“[making] more against [him] than Alexander was ever against Darius”). In this rhetorical slip-of-the-tongue, the poet (perhaps unwittingly) allies himself with one of history’s best-remembered losers, famous for his cowardly acts of flight from battling with Alexandria. Has the poet indicated yet another “false front” he has adopted, duping listeners by their undiscerning leap to sympathy? Is the poet not secretly confessing that the truth regarding his banishment from his ladies’ territories is not in fact a red-herring, that his plight is caused by his own cowardice and lack of courage to confront his lady face-to-face? After comparing himself as a contemporary Darius, the poet explains:

“Et si ne m’os traire “And so I dare not pull

Vers son dous viaire against the sweet image of her

Pour mes maus retraire to drag back my ills,

Car mieus me vaut taire for it is better for me to keep silent

Qu’a li plus desplaire than to cause her further displeasure,

Qui me puet faire et deffaire.” who can make and unmake me.”

The poet’s true dilemma, is twofold: he is both unable to digest harsh reality of rejection and cannot bear to bring himself under the direct gaze of his lady who “can make and unmake” him. It is the bestial version of his lady and her de-subjectivizing gaze that “se taindre et destaindre” (“makes [him] lose courage and destroys [him]”), a two-faced (even hybridized) chameleon that collapses beauty and beast into a single continuum, though on opposing sides. This, Slavoj Zizek reminds us, is the crucial ambivalent nature of the objet petit a raised to the level of das ding (“The Thing”). For Zizek, the “censoring” (displacement) of the Lady as a form of power-discourse authorised by an overriding “Big Other” affects:

“[Not only] the status of the marginal or subversive force that the power discourse endeavours to dominate but, at an even more radical level, splits the power discourse itself from within.” (31)

That is, the lady is the monstrous loved-other of the split objet, the traumatic void about which the entire support of the lovesick subject is structured, regulating his access to jouissance (a position between pleasure/pain, between laughing/crying (L’alerion, 54). By embracing his animal side, the poet dislocates himself from the Symbolic of fin’ amours, “traversing the fantasy” and becoming abject-subject of the Freudian death drive (42). The teleology of the subject’s reidentification with the Symbolic order of fin’ amours and triumphant re-emergence as “fully constituted” fin’ amours subject can thus be read as the inversion of Zizek’s “traversing the fantasy”, literally a “regression into fantasy” by logical sleight of hand, finding refuge in the fantasy that he may be someday “addressed” by his beloved and have his pangs of love finally cured, or, at least elevated as an honourable, faithful lover amongst his peers.

Musically, Machaut effectively portrays the poet’s “regression into fantasy” via a teleological trajectory dominated by two musica recta hexachordal poles of F and C respectively. Figure 2 shows a reduced voice-leading graph of the discrete pitch-based “cells” that compose each successive verse. Verses 1-5 are dominated mainly by a three-note descending figure A-G-F, strengthening the tonal importance of F as a cadential port-of-call, reinforcing the initial authority of the recta F-hexachord with numerous inflections of B-fa as well as its strategic participation in ouvert-clos relations in verses 3,4,6 and 7 (see figure 3 for a condensation of final, ouvert-clos and incipit features).

From verses 7-12, however, an 8-note voice-leading figure (F-E-D-C, Bb-A-G-F) begins to fill out the pitch progressions. While potentially reifying the controlling feature of a diatonic mode centred about F, it is also possible to consider the octachordal descending figure as an overlapping of both the F (F-G-A- Bb-C) and C (C-D-E-F-G) hexachord members, navigating the shifting tonal terrain to a higher musical goal. In verse 8, a sudden increase in B-mi population density over B-fa tips the tonal balance in favour of the C-hexachord, overriding the F-hexachord’s organizing role. Furthermore, the involvement of B-mi in both verse 8’s ouvert and clos procedures shifts hexachordal gears, stabilizing C as a new gravitational centre of attraction. Indeed the proceeding verses confirm this pole-swapping: verse 9, 10 and 11 consist of a repeating G-F-E-D-C figure, with C being the clos final for verses 5 and 8-12. Rhetorically, it is as if the subject migrates to the ‘natural’ recta C-hexachord by forfeiting his drive-centred insistence on B-fa (F-hexachord), precisely “naturalised” by means of embracing a disciplined subjectivity in the Symbolic of fin’ amours.

More curiously, however, are the random interjections of an F# ficta note, belonging neither to the economy of the B or C-hexachords. Springing to declamatory prominence in verses 2, 9 and 12, the F# ficta appears like a foreign bestial body, haunting the (bodily) sanctity of Malgre et Fortune’s dominantly recta circuit. Upon close inspection of manuscript sources, the mystery deepens. Based on existing evidence, Machaut’s Malgre Fortune survives in four sources: MS A, MS F-G, MS E and MS V-G. Of these four sources, only MS A, F-G and V-G contain the poem with notated music, usually found in the Lays section of the manuscript. MS E, presumably compiled after the composer’s death, interestingly attributes Malgre Fortune to the end of Machaut’s Le Livre du Voir Dit (“True Story”), though it survives without any notated music to the poem. Machaut’s other Lay de Plour is linked directly to Navarre by means of narrative, but no other surviving manuscript except MS E makes the attribution of Malgre Fortune to Voir Dit. Though it is possible that Machaut later decided to make such a connection, we have no evidence available to suggest so, or otherwise. If, following the compiler of MS E’s suggestion, we decide to read Malgre Fortune against Voir Dit, one is left with two works querying and queering the nature of “truth” by means of “false fronts” and masterly deception.

To my songbird, in memory of Judy Bethea

2009-03-31T09:27:00.000-07:00

Allie's email came last night, but I only checked my inbox this afternoon. It was only then that I realized that a large part of my life had suddenly dissolved and disappeared. Judy passed away peacefully at 5pm on the 30th of March, 2009 from repeated stages of cancer. And this was the one Spring Break that I had to be away from New Orleans, away from Wesleyan, tucked in the confines of the Bod or the faculty library chasing images and words rather than singing with the boys for Judy. The second Spring Break, before we drove up to New Orleans, Judy had emailed me with a request to perform a song for Bill. Her secret idea was to rehearse surreptitiously by herself before the Spirits materialized, then when we did, we'd sneak to the hall downstairs - me on the piano and Judy on vocals - to hammer out a love surprise for Bill. That song never came to be; when I arrived in New Orleans, Judy was feeling far too weak to sing. Even so, she still mustered the strength to resonate the earth-shattering solo on "change in my life", which she always sang with the Spirits, year after year. Her other request was that we sing "Lullabye" at her funeral. We were always ready to perform that number (as we had done year after year); in my freshman year, Judy cried while we sang. In my Sophomore year, she held back the tears, overcoming something that we could not bear witness to. It was with this email that I realized what she had finally overcome. And I think she was ready to go, unbeholden, with a rigourous, beautiful song.

Judy is a songbird unlike any other. Her generosity unfailing, always excessive, always wordless with a hug you'd never forget. It is only befitting that we return the hug in song, indeed in lullabye, for all that she has selflessly given. Judy Bethea, an architectural historian of New Orleans - one of the best in the intellectual community - made it a point to force us into a van on a sunny Spring Break afternoon, and drive us right into the heart of post-Katrina devastation, impelling us to encounter the other side of human life. A reminder in our somewhat hyperactive celebration of academic freedom, other people were busy rebuilding their lives. These were the Spring songs she sang every year, songs that were enriching, soul-lifting, but at the same time realistic and mindful of our interventions. Her enthusiasm for life was contagious, her love for Bill examplary. I'm sorry, Judy, that I forgot what song you wanted to sing for Bill. If I had the means to reach back into the trough of emailing history before the Wesleyan server moved to the new gmail network, I would. But this sudden shift exhausted it all. I no longer have material momentoes of you, of us. But I have your hugs, your love, and most importantly, your song. Your song that transgressed whatever state of wear your body was subject to, your song that dis-articulated the most unrelenting of emotional states. Your song that ultimately became our song because you sang it and owned it.

In Medieval Bestiaries, there is a palpable gendered tension between two cultural manifestation of sung birds. One, as Elizabeth Leach points out, is the nightingale, the male counterpart to philomela which hankered out illogical melodies without rational vox. Yet the Medieval's fascination with the sung bird cannot resist moralizing and valorizing the nobility of life unto song. In Cassiodorus' account of the singing nightingale, he repeates fascination with the "tenacious spirit" through which song is made manifest in the "tiny" body of the nightingale, causing it to sing, even unto death. The nightingale kills itself through song. Another popular image which is paired with the nightingale is the Swan, and accounts of the beauty of the Swan's final song are rife in the Middle Ages. Yet a single Bestiary trumps these associations, one that is still found in the Bodelian library. It's author praises the laudible musical abilities of the nightingale, but strangely, likens it to the archetypal singing maiden who, through song, overcomes her physical tedium and accomplishes her task. The maiden transgresses her gedered body, considered weak and incompetent in numerous 12th and 13th century accounts of sexual divisions, seeking strength in her own song, and yet being elevated to the status of the nightingale's sweet crooning. Song was understood to be properly metaphysical, affective and penetrating. Judy's song always bespoke of a life that refused to be caged by physical limitations, a song that challenged while inspired. It is to your impossible song I look, Judy, because you've transfigured us in a way that will always leave our music wanting, empty, lacking. But we sing nonetheless, because you've taught us how we can precisely overcome ourselves, effecting a material "change in our lives", encouraging us to go out and do the same.

I love you Judy, and I know you're still singing.

Goodnight, my angel
Time to close your eyes
And save these questions for another day
I think I know what you've been asking me
I think you know what I've been trying to say
I promised I would never leave you
And you should always know
Wherever you may go
No matter where you are
I never will be far away

Goodnight, my angel
Now it's time to sleep
And still so many things I want to say
Remember all the songs you sang for me
When we went sailing on an emerald bay
And like a boat out on the ocean
I'm rocking you to sleep
The water's dark and deep
Inside this ancient heart
You'll always be a part of me

Goodnight, my angel
Now it's time to dream
And dream how wonderful your life will be
Someday your child may cry
And if you sing this lullabye
Then in your heart
There will always be a part of me

Someday we'll all be gone
But lullabyes go on and on...
They never die
That's how you
And I
Will be

Sensuous/sensory politics: Auditory Blindness

2009-03-27T10:42:00.000-07:00

In a recent article on Music, torture and Repair, Suzanne G. Cusik asks the perennial Gordian question that keeps scholars' heads a turning: "but is this musicology?" She replies firmly "no", but always working on the margins of disciplinary standards and means. The more my eyes skim devotional texts, architecture, manuscripts and artefacts of the 12th and 13th century, this single barb - not unlike Bruce Holsinger's torturouos neumes that "pick" and penetrate the flesh - digs deep into my own disciplinary concerns. "But is this musicology," I ask myself, wondering where the wonderful permutations of Sirenhood and medieval music-making off the page may somehow effect a clausula, that is, a "turn" in my own musical thinking, leading me back to aesthetically privileged realms of "the music itself".

Indeed perusing the "Other" of musicology, its sister faculties of embodiment (such as Gothic cathedrals, manuals, treatises and art) tend to interpallate my own desirous tendencies to wander off interconnected pathways, delving into cultural issues that give "flesh" to abstract formulations which tend to exist freeze-dried in the many mausoleums of medieval scholarship. But ignoring these modes of embodiment, these marginal issues that trouble the dividing lines between pure signifiers and menstrually-charged ones (as in the case of much feminist discourse) tends to emphasize an unfair advantage to textuality, marking the point of phonocentric decline. I am not, as Derrida might warn, suggesting a return to an epistemology of orality which privileges the phonocentric as a marker of cultural presence, but bearing in mind the ways in which the "extra-textual" precisely figures medieval or contemporary notions of music and musicality.

Echoing Carolyn Abbate, one should not attempt to continue driving a hard-and-fast barrier between doxis and praxis. Rather, one should be wary of how such distinctions are brought to bear on material practices by their very modes of embodiment, indeed how they are located (in all senses of the word) as mediated objects. The contested nature of the "book" in the 12th century Medieval "renaissance" (for lack of a better descriptive) articulates a mode of embodiment, a Darstellung if you like, in a culture caught between orality, literacy and multilingualism. Similarly, preserving (or inscribing) neumes onto a page tends to eclipse the actual process of decoding these neumes in performance, reading, or decoration. The material culture of these books, these media, demands a closer investigation into means of embodiment, and the fashioning of the Medieval (performative) body.

In discussions of musica falsa, for example, these very practices which were deemed vagrant in ecclesiastical liturgy cannot simply be lifted off a post-19th century romanticized conceptualization of the autonomous "score" as a placeholder or trace of some metaphysical Platonic essence, wafting amids the fronds of our historically-tainted imaginations. Indeed such a valorization of the written (the inscribed) is to forget that inscription was a somatic gesture that facilitated memory and recall (as suggested by Carruthers), and somewhat constitutes a case of auditory blindness that simply extrapolates what was "notated" back into that same, safe conceptual sphere of "music" that jostles with the like of Mozart, Beethoven and Chopin. Even as these neumes provided visual "hooks" with which to drag the sonic out of the orifices of memory (and out through another orifice, the mouth), we should be careful not to allow the mere "visual" to "sing" all on its own, for the imagined bodies we pump its logic through are none other than our own contemporary bodies, fastidiously fashioned by years of listening and acculturation. The neumes - the word - performs precisely what Medieval writers were wary about: postlapsarian corruption.

What bodies, then, should we accord these tracks? Imagining such vocalic bodies would be an excavatory task, albeit one frought with possible misinterpretation, crass assumptions and erroneous conclusions. But better give these voices flesh, I say, than recourse to yet another act of scholastic disembodiment. Perhaps it turns out that contemporary emphases on the empirical, that is, the systematic and notated, is but a fetishistic "blinding" of our scholastic condition to Orpheus's post-Bacchic condition. We choose to listen to the sweet, systematized and logical products of his severed head, while wearing dark glasses that filter out the horrific sight of his fragmented body. What unfathomable, abject secrets may lurk in the squirming entrails of Orpheus's horrific site of vocalic production becomes what Julia Kristeva calls the "semiotic", that pre-Oedipal choratic space of diffraction which contorts the health and safetly of our sanitized sanctuary of "the music itself".

Neither is the task to re-suture Orpheus' body to reflect our fantasies of normative sites of production. Indeed the journey at hand is to queer our eyes and ears not by backstepping to the authorial word, but by seeing with our eyes: reconstruing a sonograph of voice-body relations based on the already-queer features of the voice which functions simultaneously as a crutch of identification, and a "lost object", or what Lacan calls the objet petit a. By uncovering our own fantasies of voice-body suturing through an investigation of the "queer" medieval voice, I suggest that this may throw into relief our assumptions about the operation of music in culture and as a somatic artefact with destabalising ontological concerns. Vocalic body where voices mark the flesh and flesh taints the voice is charged empirical proof of our intrinsically "queer" features. One may imagine these "sewing surfaces" (or, as Zizek puts is, pointe de capiton) as cinemas which structure our phenomenal encounter with the world by masking an ontological lack or "gap" which forever threatens to throw the conceptual and the experiential out of joint. That is, a fundamental lack which threatens to sever our bodies and steal our voices, once and for all.

Sirenic nuns and porous cloisters

2009-03-18T16:43:00.000-07:00

The mid 12th Century classical commenter Master Alberich of London initiated a moralizing spin on the antiquarian Homeric myth of Odysseus and the Sirens. Eschewing the highly fantastical, Alberich proposed a properly Christianized warning-tale:

“The wise man stops up the ears of his dependants, less they hear [the Sirens’] melodies, that is he instructs them with salutary teachings, lest they become entagled in secular delights. But he himself passes by bound to the mast, that is, supported by virtue, although he feels the enticements of the mutable world, yet he despises them and makes course for his fatherland of eternal bliss.”

Alberich of London could have easily been writing this cautionary fable for communities of the sacred as much as it was intended to threaten communities of the heathen. Clothed in highly gendered language, Alberich makes no small insinuation as to the semiotics of the “male”. Wisdom, the defining virtue of the “wise man” casts him as the (after)life-saving good shepherd that “stops up the ears of his dependants”, averting the lascivious calls of the Sirens to “secular delights” en route to an ethereal post-worldly “fatherland of eternal bliss”. The wise man, however, himself protected by “virtue”, is able to deflect the seductive call of harlotry by rejecting its interpellation. What is evacuated by means of this textual construct is precisely the presence or notion of the female body – only briefly indicated via popular contemporary associations of Sirenic voices to female performativity. The single-sided epistemological wall serving to delineate virtuous masculine wisdom simultaneously casts a long, ambiguous shadow over the dwelling properties of the “other”.

Others, like Isidore of Seville, Hugh of St Victor, Brunetto Latini and Eustathius the Homeric commentator, chose to conflate the vocalic qualities of Siren bodies with “lyre-playing harlots who deprived passers-by of their travel goods”, accounting for the ways in which performing harlots “consumed travellers’ money and possessions”. This phenomenon, explicated as early as the 3rd century survived long into texts of the 12th and 13th century, bearing heavy moralizing accents that warned of the dangers of seductive, secular song in clerical circles, and the fundamentally deceptive-inclinations of women in others. These fast-establishing epistemological walls that sought to discipline, contain and control the vocalic dangers of unknown bodily/musical territories were equally matched in architectural structures of division. The 12th and 13th Century, in particular, saw the rapid rise of medieval cities, facilitating the localization of Universities and institutions of cloistered learning. These new physical “walls”, as William Cook and Ronald Herzman note, did not merely foster a structural divide between subscriptive communities and bounded realms of knowledge access, but also encouraged the lively growth and exchange of knowledge-communities organized around disciplinary concerns. Theology, medicine and natural philosophy filled the halls of these new sites of learning, although contemporary concepts of autonomous disciplinary “walls” tend to obscure the fact that intense debate between each of these disciplines was the norm rather than the exception. Fuelled with an increasing body of translated literature distanced by geography and historical time, learned men commented endlessly on matters of the word, slaving hard to integrate disparate sources of knowledge into one harmonious, integrated ‘truthful’ whole.

For intellectuals residing within the structures of the Church, university walls were not always necessarily impervious. Instead, large intersections across institutional borders ensured that Clerics and other religious thinkers stayed in touch, challenged, and effectively affected the translation and dissemination of sources of theoretical debate. As Joan Cadden notes, the commensurability between university and monastic structures of learning rested on their historical parity:

“[Many] of the new tendencies – the interest in systematic science, the development of new formats for discussing it, the elaboration of settings for teaching and learning, and the execution of translations – had roots in the same monastic tradition which in the earlier period had cherished and preserved (if also diluted and fragmented) the remnants of previous transmitted classical learning.”

University scholarship thus supplemented and expanded upon a system that was well in place in Monastic pedagogical structures, resulting in a rich tradition of imported, exported and hybridized epistemological worlds. This also meant that early theological concerns, especially concerning the sexual division between man and women as articulated in biblical scriptures, became what Foucault calls “transdiscursive” sites of linkage and shared scholastic concerns. A number of important scholars such as Constantine the African and Hildergard of Bingen, for example, represented these transdiscursive bodies that were located across monastic and other “extra-sacred” sites of discourse. These writers, drawing on popular intellectual concerns of their time, expanded and nourished the corpus of theorizing the natural body, along the received lines of neo-Platonian, Byzantine and Aristotelian lineages, shedding light on the shadowed epistemology of the “other” side of the sexual wall, that is, the contested dwelling space of the “feminine”, which, in turn, defined or ensured the conceptual integrity of the “masculine”.

Despite obvious contradictions between a large body of theoretical material in circulation, notions of “sexed difference” were mostly concerned with marrying observed empirical “difference” with biblical and philosophical sources – attempts that led many-a-thinker to assume a fundamental essential nature of sexual polarities, informing, as it were, typological or characteristic “dispositions” of the either biological sex. Semantic binaries between hot/cold, dry/moist were popular categories that further extended the conceptual division of gender, though not always uncontested. Theorists such as Jacopo of Forli, Bartholomew the Englishmen and Albertus Magnus echoed popular views that linked such gender-specific qualities in a chain of signification that tended to cast “woman” as the miscreant, albeit derisive counter to the male:

“Women’s complexion is more humid than man’s. [The nature] of the humid receives an impression easily but retains it poorly. The humid is readily mobile, and thus women are unconstant and always seeking something new. Hence when she is engaged in the act under one man, if it were possible, she would like at the same time to be under another. [...] In short, I should say, every woman is to be avoided as much as a poisonous snake and a horned devil.”

Quoted from Quaestiones de animalibus –expositional lectures on Aristotle’s zoological works – Albertus Magnus forged a logical pathway linking empirically observed data with speculative biological thought. Such a descriptive procedure of claiming knowledge over the Other, as Edward Said reminds us, is a mode of power acquisition, a mode of description that operates through prescription, eventually articulating means of proscription. Indeed woman herself is prescribed as naturally unfaithful, guaranteed by her biological disposition that projects itself into cultural typologies. Coupled with the rise of Aristotelian translations and debate in 12th and 13th Century academic circles, “women” also became typecast as a less-perfect or imperfect manifestation of man – a concept that rested well with scriptural evidence of women’s hierarchical subordination to man, having been made from Adam’s rib. As with the writers of Malleus maleficarum, John of Garland emphasizes his pre-redemptive conceptions of Eva’s “imitators” in a language that “put the case in the open”, casting the unredeemed woman as “enthroned” in “death’s eternal kingdom”, her lips dripping with sensuously sweet “honey” although inspection through the de-rarefying faculties of reason reveal her “depths” as being “wormwood”. “Woman”, Garland suggests, “is lovely, beautiful – and destroys everything through lust.”

Matters became further complicated by the complexity of women’s biological rhythms to monastic scholars who tried to align natural bodily phenomena and notions of behavioural proclivities while remaining consonant with scriptural sources. Nowhere was this interplay of intertextuality more pertinent than in the discussion of the Menstrual Cycle in discourses of sin, salvation and medicine. According to Charles T. Wood, medieval menstruation became seen as a symbolic marker or a perpetual bloody reminder of Eve’s “original sin”, although Pope Gregory rhetorically absolved menstruation as being a sin-in-itself:

“A woman’s periods are not sinful, because they happen naturally. But nevertheless, because our nature is itself so depraved that it appears to be polluted even without the consent of the will, the depravity arises from sin, and human nature itself recognizes its depravity to be a judgment upon it.”

Menstruation became an important paradox for scholars who wished to clarify the messy logic between Eve’s original sin (postlapsarian epistemology) with the redeeming virginal qualities of Mary’s immaculate conception. This very fulcrum situated upon the “split” nature of woman carried immense theological weight regarding the salvation of mankind, with Mary symbolising the absolution of bodily-sin by her intrinsic purity. The 15th Century Malleus maleficarum (which notoriously conflated base womanhood with witchcraft and “carnal lust, [of] which is woman insatiable”) spells out the rising importance of virginity over the flesh as no less than an epistemic revolution enabling believers to rise above the postlapsarian corpo-reality of the body:

“[It] is true that in the Old Testemant the Scriptures have much that is evil to say about woman, and this because the first temptress, Eve, and her imitators; yet afterwards in the New Testemant we find a change of name, as from Eva to Ave (as St. Jerome says), and the whole sin of Eve taken away by the benediction of Mary.”

What follows is an instruction for preachers to “say as much praise” of Mary’s redemptive qualities as much as possible, highlighting the grammatical revolution from Eva to Ave that, as Robin Hass Birky suggests, not only elevated the embodied virtue of virginity, but made possible what he calls a “Marian rhetoric”. For Birky, “Marian rhetoric” aesthetically incorporates this conceptual fulcrum into a linguistic one as “the feminized analogues of the masculine incarnational and naked rhetoric”. That is, while discourse on Eve and the “original sin” caused a “fall” that dismantled “language’s efficiency” through filial signification, Mary’s (Ave) conception as virginal purity embodied in flesh “reunites language and meaning”. Writers such as St Jerome and John of Garland do not merely bespeak of the redemptive qualities of Marian virtue; this conceptual revolution is mirrored, even performed rhetorically through a more “ornamental” employment of language. Initially espousing a reduced, “plain”, “naked”, indeed exposing form of rhetoric, John of Garland reverses his previous position on base women when considering the need to reflect an elocutionary shift from Eva to Ave:

“With Mary’s body a fit container for Logos, the virginal purity of that body redeems language’s capacity to depict the truth. Metaphorized as everything but the physical body, the body of Mary purifies language, thus allowing ornamentation.”

What better way to manifest theological markers of difference between Eva/Ave and divisions between the crass secular and the redeemed sacred through dividing architectural structures. The physical walls of the cloister provided a conceptual boundary that delineated spheres of outside/inside, resonating with pre-existing conceptual binaries that functioned to keep these spheres separate and autonomous. For Lisa Colton, architectural bastions extended to mark the physical body of woman metaphorically, especially through the proliferation of chansons piesus and chanson de nonne in the 13th and 14th Centuries. Such musical literature, she shows, exemplifies valorised modes of chastity and sacred virginity by associating bodily boundaries with “walls and other architectural structures”. The dwelling space of the womb, central as it were to the tipping point between Marian virginity, cloister or monastic chastity and secular vices, was commonly described as an enclosure resembling the fortified walls of a nunnery. Fortifications inscribe boundaries of restraint on the human body both physically and conceptually, disciplining its inhabitants to internalize its structures as given psychic reality.

Notions of the voice in medieval accounts of singing and musicianship, however, tend to trouble the authority and impermeability of these cultural markers of difference. In particular, the equivocal nature of a woman’s singing voice was a musical site of ambivalence that appeared to be able to transgress such carefully constructed walls of enclosure. As Colton notes, one of the common tropes of threatened chastity was the “excessive use of a woman’s mouth for ‘display’ ... [and] a singing woman was often feared as seductive and ‘siren’-like”. This dimension of “singing”, for Richard Middleton, features what he calls the “vocalimentary canal” that conceptually links performative body (and all its sexed implications) with the apparent spectrality of the singing voice as a partially “lost” object ejected from the body. But beyond appropriations of St Augustine’s easy division between the “aesthetic” nature of music (managing and regulating psychic-somatic jouissance) and its “representational” instrumentality, Mladen Dolar calls attention to the voice’s “third level” of the “object voice” which stubbornly resists dissolution in the Lacanian order of the Symbolic. For Dolar, this spectral “object voice” corresponds to Lacan’s objet petit a (the “little object” or the “object cause”) beyond the Symbolic or the aesthetic, a “lever of thought as opposed to the anthropomorphic masquerade of thinking”. The coincidence of the “object voice’s” mysterious sensuality yet transgressing alien quality residing impossibly outside Symbolization is the key feature of the objet petit a – an impossible psychic object of pure alterity that produces a horizon of desire always out of reach, a desire that can never be satiated. As Todd McGowan describes:

“Desire is motivated by the mysterious object that the subject posits in the Other – the objet petit a – but the subject relates to this object in a way that sustains the object’s mystery [i.e. sustains his desire]. Hence, the objet petit a is an impossible object: to exist, it would have to be simultaneously part of the subject and completely alien.”

If the voice was desire-inducing as well as irreducibly alien, then such a feature must be deemed dangerous and subject to discipline under clerical law. Indeed the excessive in monastic music was viewed with a suspicious (if not ambivalent) eye by religious authorities such as John of Salisbury who asserted in his 12th Century Policraticus that music defiles the sacred when musicians ornament the instrumental, “showing off as it were, strive with effeminate dalliance of wanton tones and musical phrasing to astound, enervate and dwarf simple souls.” Paraphrasing St Augustine, John warned that “pleasure”, especially in the purely musical, was “the father of lust”. Performance should serve ecclesiastical means and inspire worship rather than stir the loins, the latter which served as a popular denunciation of secular music-making beyond monastic walls in the lusty merriment of popular Caroles. Perhaps it is no surprise that numerous chanson de nonne as explored by Lisa Colton and Suzannah Clark depict female subjects singing in lament of their bartered sexualities for religious chastity. A similar chanson of interest to both scholars is Joliement en douce desirree / Quant voi la floret / Je sui joliete / Aptatur, a four-voiced chanson that draws rhetorical strength from the interplay between what seems to be a nun wishing to be delivered of her cloistered life having found love, a monk debilitating on the consequences of his current love interest, and a youthful nun feeling the pangs of desire.

Inasmuch as architectural metaphor serves to articulate boundaries of possible transgression, Clark’s analysis of the musical operation of the motet traces a link between the triplum (the ambiguously sexed individual that declares “for naught this nunnery confine me”) which derives from another pre-existent chanson de nonne in trouvere repertory Quant ce vient en mai. The chanson of interest tells of “a young woman trapped in a nunnery” singing out to be rescued while the “narrator” who recounts the nun’s tale, “reports that the lover received her message and arrives to rescue her”. If this passage survives in Joliement en douce desirree’s triplum as a culturally-informed quotation that may have been identifiable to listeners, Clark proposes that the subject voice of the triplum, possibly a monk, “sings” the nun’s song both alludes to exclusive knowledge on behalf of the monk in a “seductive routine” that channels the spirit of trouvere chivalry. Furthermore, Clark speculates that the musical parity of both sources suggest that the nun of Quant ce vient en mai and the monk in Joliement en douce desirree “share a unity of purpose”, suggesting that the monk may turn out to be the rescuer of that nun, though piping his response through intertextual means by a voice that, quite literally, transgresses the physical wall of the individual, printed score or autonomous performance.

Sirenic powers of the singing voice to pierce, transgress and penetrate epistemological walls were mirrored by real concerns about the “object voice’s” abilities to elude the sanctified house of knowledge. A scandalous tale recounted by Gerald of Wales told of how a Canon and Nun in the double-house system of the 12th Century Gilbertine Order were “driven to desire” by hearing their singing voices on either sides of the gender-partitioning wall. Both blessed with an “attractive” singing voice, the penetrative powers of their voices caused them to escape “over the cloister wall the same evening”. Although Gerald of Wales equally attributes siren-like transgressive qualities to both the male canon and female nun, the follow-up punishment enacted by Gilbert of Sempringham is highly revealing – Gerald mentions how the nuns were punished by restricting their musical activities for mere “humble psalmody”, and shaving their heads beneath their veils to reduce their physical beauty, but, as Heather Josselyn-Cranson argues, there are disturbing omissions in the text:

“The lacunae in the text leave many unanswered questions: were the lovers caught? Were the canons also punished? The kind of psalmody to which the nuns were restricted is also unclear.”

Indeed no mention of punishment on behalf of the canons were mentioned by Gilbert, perhaps clueing us in on the perceived danger of female sirenic bodies over male ones. An interrogation into the Gilbertine Order, though admittedly the first of its kind to employ the “double-house” system which paired both sexes in the same physical space nonetheless used physical partitioning means to keep carnal temptation from escalating. Walls divided the female and male sections of the Church to “keep the canons from hearing the nuns, and the nuns from seeing the canons”, save a Pyramus-Thisbee-like aperture with which to pass the pax brede in as chaste a manner as possible. Severe disciplinary schemes were enacted to silence the sirenic call, including sections in the Order’s Institutiones which “entirely forbid all of [their] members ... the use of organum and descant, falsetto and pipeth at the Divine Office”, fortifying the heavy-handed control of what was usually deemed “emasculating” and “effeminizing” secular musical practices. The section on sisters in the Institutiones further declares that:

“We do not allow our nuns to sing [cantare] but absolutely forbid it, desiring rather that they chant plainly [indirecto psallare] in a spirit of humility, together with that ever blessed virgin, mother and daughter of almighty God, rather than corrupt the minds of the weak by lustful melody with that wicked daughter of Herodias.”

Although Cranson suggests that indirecto psallare may have come to signify a more “naked” form of plainchant (recalling John of Garland), the specific restrictions applied to the female sex bears testimony to the known powers of the “object-voice” and its uncontrollable order-defiling properties beyond the sacred, self-sufficient realm of the Symbolic. Indeed Nigel de Longchamp’s Speculum Stultorum (1179-80) in description of the Gilbertine Order may be read on two levels concerning the epistemological and architectural walls erected to reinforce each other:

“One house contains a quartered
Arrangement
Of canons, lay brothers, and
Sisters
Similarly divided.
The canons perform masses, and the
Sisters do the rest.
They fulfil the due service of the Office;
A wall separates their bodies, not their
Voices; as one
They sing psalms directly, without a
Tune.”

Indeed the very transgressive qualities of the “object-voice” continue to dismantle the body politic of the church by queering its epistemological fortifications – fortifications that split up an already fragmented symbolic understanding of “women” and the plural nun that, with her voice, slips between Eva and Ave, probing and interrogating the intrinsically porous nature of cloister walls and gender bastions.

siren embodiment... a primer

2009-03-13T07:10:00.001-07:00

In Judith Peraino’s Listening to the Sirens, the Homeric myth of Odysseus’ encounter with the monstrous feminine provides a heuristic fulcrum in order to investigate the potentially queering effects of Siren-song though modern-day musical technologies. In order to navigate the seas without being captivated by the seductive death-bearing potentialities of the Sirens’ song, Odysseus binds himself to the mast of the ship and instructs that wax fill the ears of his rowing mates. The male body politic is thus disembodied, order is momentarily thrown into disorder and irrational solutions: Odysseus forgoes the use of his limbs while his men sacrifice their ability to hear their master’s commands. Though this method of temporary incapacitation eventually prevents their ship from being steered in the direction of the sirens – and into a certain watery death – Peraino shifts the focus of the myth to Odysseus himself. It is he, she notes, that hears/queers himself in the aural proximity of the Sirens, eventually condemned to lead a queer (after)life himself as the sole individual having lived the ordeal to tell it. Odysseus’ predicament is lonely knowledge; the veracity of his tale ironically falling on the same wax-filled deaf ears he initiated in the first place, untranslatable and fragile amongst a community of non-listeners.

In the recent years, musicological studies has indeed beckoned audiences to break the phallic mould of the wax and, restraining themselves as Odysseus did, hear the Sirens without leaping to premature conclusions. Although “Queer” musical culture is a category asserted not without heavy theoretical contestation, its sister platform, the largely influential body of discourse that constitutes Feminism and Feminist theory, seems to have fared little better. Resting on the assumption that “woman” as a unifying social community has been exploited by male-dominated discursive manoeuvres, Feminism’s project tends to look backwards and forwards at the same time; that is, drawing legitimacy from previous (historical) narratives of oppression, suppression and repression, and projecting these narratives forward in time to discuss how such proscriptive apparatuses continue to operate through the exclusion of “woman”, or how sites of resistance and subversive strategies may work to interrupt, interrogate and even dismantle such topologies of power inequalities.

Barbara Bradby’s somewhat angry examination of sampling women’s voice in dance music performs that analytical task, inquiring how theoretical utopias of gender egalitarianism might be better applied in emerging fields of musical technology. Decrying a well-worn binary opposition that all-too-easily reinscribes the category of “woman-as-nature”, Bradby selects theoretical iconoclast Dona Harraway and her musings on the posthuman cyborg body as a liberating enframing device in modern-day feminist dissections of musical technologies. Bradby singles out the disconcerting representational fragmentation in Black Box’s music video “Ride on Time” for its entagled nature in ownership, citation and copyright issues. Black Box’s “Ride on Time” stirred up a messy court case regarding its video that:

“showed a tall, sexy model from Guadaloupe … [one Katherine Quinol], ‘performing’ the passionate vocal line. But the rumour quickly spread that the vocals had been ‘sampled’ from a song called ‘Love Sensation’ by the American soul singer, Loretta Holloway.”

For Bradby, however, in addition to being wrongfully “sampled” under the umbrella of a different song, Loretta Holloway seemed to be “doubly ripped off” since the image of her body had been replaced by Katherine Quinol to create a cyborg-like composite of an hyper-sexualized performing body. This, Bradby asserts, did much to reinforce existing fields of discursive struggle including the “tyranny of slenderness” and so-called “acceptable body images for women” that dominate issues in scopophillic culture. Another song on the Black Box label entitled “Strike it up” pays tribute to this hypersexualized/monstrous hybrid by accrediting the “visual performance” of the video to Katrin Quinol while reserving the title of “lead vocal performance” to its rightful singer, Martha Wash. Does this cyborg-like hybrid parading in the face of hyper-reality recruit the male-gaze to reinforce proscriptive images of sexuality, gender and womanhood? The answer is overwhelmingly yes for Bradby:

“Once again, Katrin Quinol appears as the acceptable (because attractive to the male gaze) image of woman that can sell the voice of another woman that has been electronically manipulated by the male producers.”

And yet, Bradby reserves room for small praise, pointing out the way in which Black Box’s double accreditation signals a challenge to “the primacy of the visual in our everyday imaging of the body … [implying] that the voice is somehow ‘disembodied’”, while the “real” bodies of two separate non-cyborg women are indeed given prominence behind the fantasy of the virtual. Such a disjoint, as Richard Middleton argues, interrogates the very embodied notion of performance:

“especially through … a bodily intimate mechanism as singing – [which] is to put a body on display, to flaunt it, offer it up […]. Indeed, in this discursive formation, to own to a body already produces a place of subordination, creating the potential to suffer […]; meanwhile, the owners of discourse … are all words, bodies effaced from view no less than those of the record producers.”

Acknowledging the “spectral” economy of the fragmented being sutured together at the site of fantasy may denote (as is for Bradby), what Donna Haraway terms a “significant prosthesis” or a new kind of embodiment afforded by the site of suturing. But Middleton is also quick to point out the fragility of such forward-thinking gestures:

“listeners [may] immediately invent an imagined source for them [or have fantasy sites perform the operation of bodily suturing], drawing on the contours embedded in their experience of the operations of the vocalimentary canal: the phallus (male or female) writes, the voice translates, and the mapping of this process to the structures of anatomical and other visual and tactile knowledge describes exactly how the sensuous and the symbolic create each other, through the Derridean networks of ‘dissemination’ and ‘invagination’.”

What is at stake, thus, is what Baudrilliard warns of as “integral reality”, or the collapse of the real into the virtual – the point of ultimate commensurability where pure virtual fantasy acquires a sheen of the real more real than the real itself. Perhaps Bradby’s criticism bespeaks a horizon by which fantasy hypersexual Quinol-Wash cyborgs bleed into the parameters of lived embodied experience to announce (voice) new forms of exclusions. The question, for either authors, is one of “authentic” voice, that is, behind the muppet-like flailing of fantasy-creatures, who supplies the words – whose authorial voice speaks? Odysseus, or the men with wax-filled ears? This perspective, however, assumes that there is an ever-present, situated panoptical Big-Other that usurps the complexities of modern day technological assemblages, assemblages that figure into the assembly-line of musical-cultural products and, as Nicholas Cook suggests, by-products. This Big Other attribution of the phallogocentric (to use Irigaray’s formulations), skirts around the fact that, like Irigaray’s metaphorical women, the Big Other is an Other that is not one. Indeed, hard-and-fast feminist accusations of phallogocentrism tend to forget that entire economies of gender are occluded by their epistemological enemies, throwing the male body into crisis as well.

To put a spin on the original question is to investigate how emerging musical technologies “speak back” in sometimes unintended ways, troubling both the normalized “male gaze” as well as the apex at which the feminist gaze returns. Nicholas Cook’s groundbreaking analysis of Madonna’s “material girl” throws questions of ocular-centrism into musical relief by attempting what he terms a “musicology of the image”, showing how purely “musical” attributes inform and penetrate the very autonomy of the image in an MTV. For Cook,

“There is, in effect, a collision between two competing hierarchies, […] the result is to destabalize the meaning of the words and, through them, the closure of the song as a whole. The pictures, in short, serve to open the song up to the emergence of new meaning.”

The semi-sonata altering between two Madonna image-themes which Cook calls “Madonna I” and “Madonna II” blur the distinction between narrative diegesis and fantasy performance space though functioning to keep these dimensions wholly separate. The ultimate effect, Cook suggests, is that an “invisible” master puppeteer works the strings behind the automaton-like Madonna homunculi: “the real persona constructed by ‘Material Girl’ is not Madonna II or Madonna I; it is an unseen, authorial Madonna whom logic compels us to call ‘Madonna 0’”. The problem for Cook is that the most “essential”, albeit “necessary” Madonna is that which escapes the world of a virtual – neither heard nor seen – perhaps the Madonna that never is. A mythological Madonna that vacillates between the disabilities of Odysseus and his men, forever condemned to the dark and watery cave of her lurking. But perhaps this “dark and watery cave” houses no Madonna at all, that the luxurious shrieking of voices are but echo-like reflections that constitute the epistemological somaticism of a pre-virtual Madonna which merely returns our own calls to her by the sonorous contours of the unknown.

Considering authorship: music, identity and authors

2009-03-04T14:40:00.001-08:00

“What is an author”, asks French Poststructuralist Michel Foucault rhetorically. Writing in the late 1960s amidst a philosophical interrogation concerning the relationship between subjectivity and language, Foucault’s own concerns were mirrored by a host of other French intellectuals including Derrida, Lacan and Barthes, just to name a few. Indeed by the mid 20th century, the very notion of authorship was seen to be under radical revision, if not crisis. From the symbolist poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé, the assembled collages of the Dadaists and the epistemological teasers of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, the “traditional” aura of authority, anthropocentricity and originality of classical authorship was thrown into relief by these counter-practices that seemed to challenge the very epistemological structures – structures enabling fields of discourse upon which the ideological seeds of “authorship” were first sown.

If the “auratic” quality of a work for Walter Benjamin denoted a “tissue” of ritual time and space that constituted the author-ity of authorship, Foucault’s steely analysis of the operations of author-ity further deconstructs Benjamin’s mystical quasi-religious universalizing category, preferring to view the construction of the modern author as a specific epistemic product, beholden to the contingencies of culture, history and institutions. For Foucault, simply aligning the title of an author to a specific individual all-too-easily misses the deeper structures that validate and legitimize the author, providing the subject with a discursive position of enunciation and author-ial voice. Rather than penetrating into the deep psyche of a supposed authorial subject and attributing the material (or intellectual) products to him/her, Foucault suggests that we take a step back and reconsider the certain “excess” that escapes the author, as well as the contingencies that produce the locutionary space in which the author resides. Such an approach, no doubt, takes Heidegger under its wing in the sense that a certain cultural validation of “truth” operates by “clearing” a rational visible “opening” by which the speaking (or living) subject becomes visible or legible to a participating community. The author, then, is not simply an imagined transcendental category into which literary criticism invests its analytical sweat in order to explain “the presence of certain events in a work, [...] their transformations, distortions, and diverse modifications”, but, more importantly, a discursive function – a site that “knits” together disparate discursive fields. Indeed for Foucault, the notion of an “author” is explicitly performative, serving to “characterize a certain mode of being of discourse”. Foucault enumerates:

“(1) [The] author-function is linked to the juridicial and institutional system that encompasses, determines, and articulates the universe of discourses; (2) it does not affect all discourses in the same way at all times and in all types of civilization; (3) it is not defined by the spontaneous attribution of a discourse to its producer, but rather by a series of specific and complex operations; (4) it does not refer purely and simply to a real individual, since it can give rise simultaneously to several selves, to several subjects – positions that can be occupied by different classes of individuals.”

What is important for Foucault, then, is the way in which institutions and their collective ideologies participate to produce a stratagem of power that structures the author-function. The very conceptualization of the author as a “function” testifies to its active mode of participation in discursive fields, although it also identifies the degree to which the subject who “fills” that particular role is responsible and beholden to those fields, institutions, and their corresponding laws and modes of regulation. What may serve to problematize the monolithic notion of authorship is the trans-performativity of the subject mistaken as monolithic. The very heterogeneous composition of the enunciating (or writing) subject taken for author does not answer to one source of power nor performs under the roof of a single identity. Like Lacan’s Symbolically saturated body “overladen with signifiers”, the performing subject under the purview of “author” is necessarily what Foucault calls a “transdiscursive” subject that answers to the call of different classification paradigms. The author-function thus performs the (Lacanian) operation as a point de capiton (the “quilting point” or the upholstery button) for these various discursive networks in an ultimate moment of méconaissance, in that it both serves as a fulcrum for understanding selfhood as well as a surface for the attribution of the objective world.

More than simply a linguistic signifier that organizes various discursive practices in a Symbolic web, notions of authorship similarly affects the way in which “works” of music are created, perceived and distributed. Perhaps one could go so far as to claim that the very concept of “work” as a historical trace of 19th Century ideology continues to sustain its scaffold of power through the use of the author-function. Composerly authority, agency and work-fidelity are but manifestations of institutional ideology coalescing around the notion of author-ity, in turn re-defining contemporary uses of the author-function. If we liken the composer to Foucault’s “author-function”, what becomes apparent is the ways in which the composer-function gestures towards “a certain discursive construct and its very particular mode of being”. Analysing the “discursive construct” which symbiotically relies on the “author-function” would mean parsing out the various institutions, industries, forms and media which “music” as a broad category encompasses, a heterogeneous background upon which “authorship” itself is foregrounded. However, as implied by the instable nature of the “author-function”, one cannot merely assume that “music” as a unifying category remains monolithic and unchanged. The rise of technologies that inform, distribute and enable “music”, too, constitute a decisive factor which continues to challenge received notions of authorship and composerly autonomy, perhaps even throwing light upon the constructedness of these functions. It is, as Deleuze and Guattari claim, when the system breaks down, that one locates the source of power and mode of functionality of machinic assemblages.

By examining the role of technology in buttressing the “author-function”, one is immediately reminded of the ways in which music is never its single, autonomous product, but, as Nicholas Cook reminds us, always a “co-product” which requires “mediation” – be it through live performance, media-storage devices or technologies of re-presentation. Instead of consenting too easily to Benjamin’s decay of “aura”, a more useful view of music’s renewed ontological possibilities reside in what Jeremy Stolow terms “liquid aura”, denoting the transmogrified (albeit mobile) nature of ritual’s original reliance on territorialization. “Liquid aura” for Stolow describes the creative ways and means in which the artistic object (or religious encounter) is experienced in a plurality of forms through the intercession of technologies of re-presentation. Indeed these technologies do more than innocently re-present: the relationship between various devices (such as CDs to CD players and mp3 files to decoding softwares) importantly dictate the temporalities and spaces in which these musics may be heard or accessed, thereby articulating new sonic possibilities of being and new modes through which music may participate in individual (or shared) subjective experiences. Similarly, the role of the “author” or “composer” is challenged by these disseminative (and) transformative technologies by their modes of presentation by problematising the idea of originality in music, and revealing the messy interstices where power, institutionalisation and agencies collide.

Indeed for David Horn, Benjaminesque auraticism has returned, though not without undergoing strict epistemological reformulations. In Horn’s exploration of the “work concept” with regard to popular music, he notes that the “work” in an age of (digital!) reproducibility has recruited a new objective status as “a piece of property”. “Reproducibility” thus loses its innocent techno-utopian sheen when realised as a highly contested intellectual and material product, highly regulated by laws and companies that erect barriers in order to “signal both its authorship and its individuality”. The field of popular music is particularly problematic in terms of individuality and authorship since exhibits a “complex relationship within that discourse between the activity of production, especially its performative aspects, and the end product”. In the case of Jazz, for example, what constitutes an “original” work (which then conforms to a rightful originator/composer), given the pervasiveness of “cover” tracks – popular songs which are recorded and performed by different artists? Citing Duke Ellington’s version of “Mood Indigo”, Horn notes the ways in which “individuality” as a substitute for composerly authorship asserts itself as a form of “liquid aura”, the arrangement inhabiting “its own time and its territory above the hurly-burly, preserving its own quality of presence”. The sonic qualities of the song rise above the song itself as an indicator of “originality” and “individuality” by partially “closing down” the space between “text and interpretation”. Thus, for Horn:

“[The] reason that the sound obtained by those voicings become so central to the identity of this Mood Indigo and set it apart from all others lay in the circulation and influence of the first recordings – within the very world of mechanical reproduction.”

However, while reserving much praise for the determining agencies of disseminative technologies, Horn seems to complicate his argument by reviewing the ways in which “invisible” powers that lie beneath mere re-presentation also work to reconfigure authenticity, originality and authorship. The rise of Afro-American music before the 1940s, for example, reveals a terse relationship between musicians (often seen as an originating site) and record producers. During this period, copyrights to these arrangements and songs were held by Record Companies instead of performing groups by declaring the producer as author, and citing the piece performed as being “traditional” – that is, belonging to the public sphere. In order to assert their claims of authorship, early Beebop musicians and songwriters created a new epistemological category of “versions” in order to legitimate their products and claim intellectual rights for themselves. If anything, Horn’s account of the tensions that conglomerate about music as a piece of intellectual property indicates the multiplicity of performing roles that exist behind a single recording. More importantly, the diffracted “performing body” assumed to “produce” or “author” a piece of music is itself “transdiscursive”, owing much to recording engineers, marketing personnel and producers that partake in the formulation of the final “product”. As Susan Horning points out, the birth of new technologies demands certain “tacit knowledge” in order to operate these technologies (such as the studio engineer), which configures the ontology of the final musical product. “Who authored the music” as a primer to inquiry reveals the multiplicity of “authors” that lurk beneath the shadows of an assumed artist, band, or composer. Perhaps Stolow’s “liquid aura” also indicates the phenomenon of “liquid authorship” in ascertaining the autonomy of a single “work”.

Though useful analytically, Foucault’s notion of the “author-function” risks slipping into a posthuman narrative that accords far too much agency upon the economy of technology and its related institutions. Indeed as a linguistic trope, a crucial factor is missing from this display of power and legitimacy. For Roland Barthes, that specific factor is the receptive receptacle which these “works” are intended for – the “audience” or the “reader”. Though Barthes’ radical proclamation of the “death of the author” sidesteps Foucault’s understanding of epistemological categories that lacerate the reading (listening) subject and produces spaces of entrainment for them, Barthes’ warning against “reading” too deeply into compserly/authorial intention focuses on the way in which a text is always necessarily “excessive” in that its performative function is determined largely by reading subjects who participate in the creation of meaning. For Barthes,

“[The] modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, is not the subject with the book as predicate; there is no other time than that of the enunciation and every text is eternally written here and now.”

“Meaning”, for Barthes, resides in the encounter between the written text and the reader. Given that the latter is never stable and located in the shifting tectonics of linguistic signification, every act of reading and re-reading will result in different hues of interpretation, since “the book itself is only a tissue of signs, an imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred.” Likewise, once a sonic product leaves the ink-drenched plume of its originating scribe, the author is “dead” in the sense that the work acquires an extra-scribal dimension in the eyes (and ears) of its recipients. Indeed whole audiences may “make” or “break” a performing nexus by rejecting the interpellation of sonic products. But more interestingly, the performative platforms afforded by new technologies may also point to a shifting site of authorial power akin to Benjamin’s notion of the “author as producer”. Here, Benjamin pays tribute to the idea of a “liquid composer/author” where the source of power (the platforms that give voice) between producers and the public become blurred. For Benjamin:

“The reader is indeed always ready to become a writer, that is to say, someone who describes or even who prescribes. As an expert—even if not a professional, but only a job-occupant—he gains entrance to authorship. Labour itself speaks out for writing it out in words constitutes part of the knowledge necessary to becoming an author. Literary competence is no longer based on specialized training in academic schools, but on technical and commercial training in trade schools and thus becomes common property. In a word, it is the literarization of the relationships of life which overcomes otherwise insoluble antinomies and it is the showplace of the unrestrained degradation of the word—that is, the newspaper—which prepares its salvation.”

The homogenization of vocabulary, for Benjamin, constitutes the revolutionary potential of readers-as-authors, providing common semantic sites for the exchange of information and the deliberation over knowledge and power. Such a homogenization or “flattening” of the playing field is precisely what Friedrich Kittler anticipates in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, in which the process of “alphabetalization” was but the first in a series of informational commensurability that finds its end in information bytes and binary operations. New technologies that ensure the parity between different presentational windows (such as peer-to-peer networks or the internet) equally constitute that field, transforming the instrumental potentiality of, for example, an “uploaded” musical work. Indeed, as Catherine Moore notes, “once music becomes digital information, it can be manipulated at will” with digitization facilitating musical “construction and its remaking”. When music can be so easily manipulated and shared at will, listeners-as-authors are given the possibility of flexing their own autonomy in creating and broadcasting self-created works (even if based on existing ones) through online channels (such as youtube.com or imeem.com) catered for the dissemination of self-produced works. Furthermore, with the availability of online payment systems (the digitization of cash), the dividing line virtually vanishes; individuals may be highly “transdiscursive”, occupying the position of engineer, recorder, publicist, composer, performer, marketer and producer altogether.

Emerging technologies do problematise existing ideologies of authorship and composerly authority, although their intercession in a network of discursive practices perhaps does no more than to reveal the structural contingencies informing “classical” formulas of authorship already existent in these networks. What mutates is the “author-function” under the signifier of “author”, continually negotiating between its various sources of power between discursive sites. Perhaps, as Foucault and Barthes suggest, the point of “origin” for authorship is an illusory one – each subject is an individual “author”, even of a work not created by him/her. On the other hand, the subject is delimited by institutional and cultural ideologies that place epistemological boundaries on representations of the self, disciplined, as it were to maintain heuristic divisions between levels of participation in order to validate or recognize the existence of other discursive spheres that constitute the “work”.

Globalization, "Napsterification" and World Music

2009-02-24T16:23:00.000-08:00

Is “Globalization” a dirty word? A brief survey of google.com cites over 19 million web pages devoted to the scrutiny and discussion of this topic, proof that even if no final verdict had been issued regarding the subject, then at least it has been the grounds for much heated debate. “Globalization” as of today is still a young term, a neologism that gained rhetorical value in the 1980s through the work of various socio-economists attempting to re-theorize the effects of late modernization and capitalism. Most famously, globalization theorists assert the miniaturizing features of the modern world, claiming that the world is essentially “shrinking” due to advances in transportation systems, info-communications and the international compatibility of mediums of dissemination and reproduction (such as the internet, satellite phones et al) which seem to transcend national borders. “Seem” is the right descriptive here, since, as Allen and Hamnett remind us, globalization tends to ignore the fact that not all global communities enjoy equal access to these technologies of interconnectivity. Even “liberal” mediums such as the (once called) world-wide-web tends to be not-so-world-wide, considering the fact that a major proportion of the world’s population still live without access to the internet. Most recently a spate of editorials has further explored issues net-surveillance and censorship which enforce virtual state-specific boundaries, curtailing this so-called transgression of local constraints.

Charting the history of new media technology and its complementary political modes of surveillance would be complex terrain; one could easily get lost and wrongly assume logics of causality. Take the Napster case-study for example, a highly popular peer-to-peer file-sharing program that sent music industry giants into sweaty panic. Created by an enterprising 18-year-old who went by the name of Shawn Fanning, Napster was initially birthed as a student-to-student collective. What was refreshing about the application was the way in which:

“[Napster] collected and provided a centralized list of the music that most students had on their hard drives, and a convenient way to search that list. Using Napster, people could easily search through what amounted to a giant shared music collection, taking whatever they wanted ... for free, instead of [US] $15-20 per CD”

Symbolically, Napster embodied the ideology of a universe of free information, granting its virtual participants a passport to freely “own” whatever other participants had placed on the file-sharing network. Of course, Napster fell short of its near-hippie liberal wonderland goals: in December 1999, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) filed a suit against Napster. Liberal Disneyland became discredited as insouciant piracy, and Napster was forced to close, though not without making a terrific splash in the press. The end of the story is an equally paradoxical one; even though the “free” ideals of Napster were ruthlessly truncated by copyright laws and legal issues of intellectual ownership, the formal popularity of a “Napsterian” interface spurred already-rich media corporate giants such as Apple to formulate their own peer-to-peer systems: Napster was given a (white) facelift and emerged as I-tunes. But we rush ahead of ourselves. How did “music”, a primarily embodied, “auratic” (as Walter Benjamin describes it) praxis develop into a few megabytes of information? A historical trajectory would attempt to chronicle the rise (and fall) of gramophone technologies and records, the emergence of the radio, the “cassette revolution”, CDs, DVDs, and computers. But does “music” remain ontologically unaltered by its Darstellung? Furthermore, does the rise of recombinant media products such as Music Videos suggest different modes of perceiving and conceiving music?

Another problem seems to loom overhead: if self-recorded musics unbound by intellectual copyrights were, too, circulated on Napster, did they ultimately fall under the same laws that governed artistic and corporatist ownership – is it acceptable, perhaps even ethical to assume that all sonic traces that lent themselves to aural reproduction through technological Darstellung shared the same ontological status as each other? Any respectful religious Muslim would attest to the fact that the “melodic” chanting of the Koran is not music. And yet, years ago when participating in a choral music festival in Bandung, Indonesia, the heavily mellismatic chanting of the Koran could indeed be heard at daybreak, amplified from the speakers atop a nearby mosque. Though channelled through the same mediums as other commodified aesthetic products, different cultural and ethnic groups’ conception of “music” differ from each other. What should be made clear, then, is the way in which media’s blind (or deaf) processing of sonic entities open up new pathways of misrecognition, misappropriation and misinformation. In the afternoon, speakers in a neighbouring public park begin to blare Indonesian “popular” music: are these two products of the otological mode of reproduction therefore ontologically alike? It is not difficult to imagine how they could be mistakenly assumed to be so.

Thus, although transnational medias and technologies have brought us closer in (virtual) proximity in which “to connect presence and absence”, what has to be queried here is virtual “relations between ‘absent’ others” that displaces face-to-face presentism with an illusory one. For Anthony Giddens, this new proximity is a “phantasmagoric” one, which, like the case of amplified Koran chanting, appears to speak a ‘neutral’ language while masking complex differences, or latent relations of power. There is another word proposed for this ‘missed’ encounter, what Jonathan Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo call “de/territorialization”:

“There is no dislodging of everyday meanings from their moorings in particular localities without their simultaneous reinsertion into fresh environments. You can’t have one process without the other. It is a matter of both at once. It is a matter of de/territorialization.”

De/territorialization also refers to the stripping and eventual re-accruing of meaning of certain cultural practices once they are uprooted from their originating geographical location and “grafted” into a new culture through diasporic communities. De/territorialization should, in extension, remind us that the cultural meanings of technologies and medias may not be innocent or equally shared across national or continental boundaries. Concepts such as “authenticity” or “originality” are hence problematic when they are used to describe large communities, disregarding the possibility that these cultural objects, such as musical practices, have been themselves subject to evolution through the encounter of Others via communicative technologies. In other words, such narratives assume a “hypodermic” model of passive reception of the Other’s cultural products, without undergoing “local” reinterpretation or meaningful transformation. Xavier and Rosaldo, for example, point out the ways in which Indian film songs are borrowed by religious singers who change the words to sing praises to the Prophet Mohammed in northern Nigeria. The appropriation non-western popular culture in Hausa, as Brian Larkin suggests, is predicated on a specific strategy that bypasses difficult colonizer-colonized power-relations to “envision new styles of fashion, beauty, love, and romance”. For Larkin,

“Indian films [and songs for Hausa viewers] offer images of a parallel modernity to the West ... but rooted in conservative cultural values. [...] Moreover, when Hausa youth rework Indian films within their own culture by ... copying the music styles for religious purposes, [...] they can do so without engaging with the heavy ideological load of “becoming western”.”

Though the de/territorialized encounter and appropriation of Indian popular song for local purposes, the Hausa example reveals the ways in which seemingly innocent cultural objects of exchange become embedded in a wed of meaning, sometimes meanings quite distinct from their reception at their originating scene. “Hybridization” is another such concept to track the mutation of cultural products within differing receptive and semiotic spheres, although one holds reservation for the term, as “hybridization” all too often stresses the plurality of the final product rather than real systems of power and domination that are wired into the figuring of the final article. Most alarmingly, however, under the purview of narratives regarding the music industry and Capitalism, these power-struggles achieve another level of complexity altogether. Take for example the popularization of “Reggae” in the West, which success, as John Connell and Chris Gibson point out, can be traced back to colonial power binaries of the colonizer/colonized whereby the exoticized product (colonized) performs for the gaze of the purchaser (colonizer). The case is further problematized in the case of so-called “World Music” where “authenticity” and “originality” is prized as an exotic commodity to excite the (colonial?) imagination of the West. Of course, sonic realities of “authenticity” are ultimately constructs, fabrications to the extent that truly “authentic” music sometimes becomes significantly altered to appeal to the consumer’s idea of authenticity. Amidst many examples, the Real World music company’s recordings of qawwali were heavily criticised for ignoring “the crucial religious and socio-critical elements of the music,” attempting “to reduce the music to an aesthetic form”.

Furthermore, by articulating the idea of “world music” as a distinct “marketing term”, “world music” fosters an internal paradox whereby “third-world performers ... gain more effective access to global markets” based on marketability. The question “who is listening?” becomes deeply embroiled in acts of performative agency, for, to succeed in the international “world music” market, one must play by its rules. “International success”, Connell and Gibson opine, “required artistic compromise”. Xavier Cugat, for instance, recalls the paradoxical move he had to take in order to please the musical tastes of (foreign) mass markets: “To succeed in America I have the Americans a Latin music that had nothing authentic about it ... Then I began to change the music and play more legitimately.” “Authenticity”, seemingly, is in the ear of the beholder. The difficulty of shoehorning radically different musical worldviews into the neat economic category of “world music” means inevitably contorting the cultural significance of differing musical ontologies upon a single, marketable, commodifiable – hence selleable – plane. This is the troubling question which Steven Feld attempts to unpack, zooming in on the cultural and capital politics at stake in Deep Forest’s use of pygmy tracks for a mix-track in a 1992 album, backed by UNESCO.

Feld’s essay “A Sweet Lullaby for World Music” is a complicated romp through the politics of ownership and musical ethics in Deep Forest’s contested digital sampling of a Baegu lullaby from Northern Malaita. The sample, which appeared in Deep Forest, was then used by Jan Garbarek (a Norwegian saxophonist) as raw material for his ECM CD entitled Visible World. Since Deep Forest failed to reproduce the origin of the lullaby, Garbarek misapprehended its origin to be an “African traditional melody”. When Feld attempted to point out these misappropriations and possible power-inequalities (in what way was the singer of the lullaby credited?) apparent in this cycle of borrowings, a messy fiasco of point-and-blame ensued, and Feld was eventually accused of wrongful defamation. But the primary question remained unanswered: in what way did either company or artist respect the originating context of the lullaby? Afunakwa’s name (the singer of the recorded lullaby) hardly surfaced in the litany of accusations, with Deep Forest representatives and Garbarek adopting angry, reactionary polemics defending the integrity of their “original arrangements”: another way of jokingly calling something an “authentic replica”. “World music”, therefore is far from symmetrical in its structures of accrediting and respectful artistic license. In no way was the community to which the lullaby was attributed to contacted or consulted; instead, heated exchanges were held over board-room tables and manager-to-manager phone calls. Perhaps “world music” corporate protectionists hoard exclusive telecommunication pathways while bypassing the very source of their revenues.

Media has simultaneously made the global flow of music (as a cultural capital) easier, though not symmetrically. Copyright and intellectual property laws continue to curb the disseminative power of these technologies – virtual space is not as liberal as McLuhan’s utopian “Global Village”. On the other hand, the increased mobility of music has led to those of privileged access to new and vast territories of musical encounters. A quick entry into google.com or youtube.com opens hundreds of pathways, allowing one to sample cultural products, or to construct assemblages of wide-ranging musical tastes. Yet, beneath this veneer of mobility lies the complicated and sometimes contradictory mechanisms of the consumer industry to which music (to be enjoyed via medias of reproductive technology) is increasingly bound to. These are, in turn, mediated by marketing conceptual frames of (sometimes) breathtaking triviality such as “world music”, which potentially threaten to reduce musical value to a single barometer of loss and profits. But de/territorialization and “live” musical practices do trouble the hegemony of the international music-industry circuit, often creating intersections of productivity where new musical lives flourish.

Lacanianizing the Media

2009-02-23T10:55:00.001-08:00

Jacques Lacan is a curious figure. Spouting cryptic semi-messianic universalizing statements such as “there is no sexual relationship” or “the unconscious is structured like a language”, Lacan’s psychoanalytical re-engagements with Sigmund Freud’s theories since the 1930s have been the subject of much controversy and debate. Nonetheless, Lacan-speak (or what Slovenian theorist Slavoj Zizek calls “Lacanese”) gained significant (if not notorious) currency in the language of new Media Theory, an intellectual marriage fostered in the 1960s partly through the arrival of “French” theory on American shores, and a growing desire to understand the powers of these media in shaping contemporary subjectivities. Particularly potent to these theorists was Lacan’s 1930s formulation of the “mirror stage”, which suggested that the social subject was precipitated through a primal act of “misrecognition”. According to Lacan, the pre-mirror stage infant experienced the self and the world as fractured and heterogeneous; it was only through the process of “misrecognizing” the image of the self in the mirror as the self could the infant then posit a homogeneous, totalized and self-enclosed ‘subject’ (what Lacan called the “Ideal-ego”), ultimately an illusion which serves as a focal point for the subject’s hopes, fantasies and desires.

If the subject’s entire experience of the self was predicated upon a function of “misrecognition”, indeed an internalized illusion of totality, then it followed that cultural products in society were equally functional sites of identification, conceptual “mirrors” which appeared to “reflect” what socially acceptable subjectivities produced by agents outside the subject. In short, culture itself could be conceived as a mirror upon which the subject misrecognizes him/herself, assuming the images and products he or she encounters as “ideal-egos” on which the self is regulated, constructed and kept in check. Because of the primacy of visual identification in Lacan’s mirror stage, it should come as no surprise that film theorists were the first to pounce on psychoanalytic modes of identification through the cinema. In Britain, the film journal Screen edited by Colin MacCabe and Stephen Heath embraced Lacanian psychoanalysis with much enthusiasm, combining it with Louis Althusser’s theories of subject-formations in the matrix of ideology of the 1970s. Althusser’s essay Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (a Marxist analysis of Ideology that incorporated Freud’s psychic topologies) strongly suggested that ideology “hails” or “interpellates” its individuals as subjects, cueing early film theorists to the possibility of cinema’s subversive potentials as a giant “interpellative” machine of ideology. As such, early incarnations of ‘screen theory’ in the 1960s and 1970s attempted to:

“... uncover the symbolic mechanisms through which cinematic texts confer subjectivity upon readers, sewing them into the film narrative through the production of subject positions.”

Particularly productive in film theory was the notion of the “gaze” of the filmic actor and how audiences misconceive the “gaze” as intended for them. MacCabe’s highly influential essay Realism in Cinema (1974) proposed that the staging of the “gaze” through clever film editing ultimately produced a hypothetical subject-to-be-looked-at. This ‘receiving subject’, so to speak, was less offered to the spectator that had it thrust upon him; the spectator misrecognizes himself as the recipient of the “gaze” (just as he misrecognizes his image for himself in the Lacanian mirror stage), and rather passively occupies the receiving role structured for him by the film. As a heuristic tool, Lacanian psychoanalysis provided these early theorists with a persuasive insight into the “socio-political context of production” as to how “the filmmaker’s (and by extension the culture’s) view of the world became confused with, or displaced by, the spectator’s view”.

Because explorations of Lacan’s mirror stage in media theory tended to (over)privilege the visual over other sensorial facilities, musicologists required another heuristic model in order to access the shifting boundaries of sonic subjectivities through the technological encounter. Their source of inspiration ultimately lay with Lacan’s reconfiguration of Freudian psychic topologies, which Lacan reformulated as the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real. For Lacan, the order of the Imaginary was the site upon which the subject’s fantasy of the “Ideal-ego” was projected as total and unfragmented. The Symbolic order marked the infant’s entry into the realm of language – by appropriating and mastering the use of language, the subject carved a linguistic space of inhabitation within a field of signifiers. However, entrance into the Symbolic through the mirror stage meant forfeiting the infant’s pre-Symbolic state of heterogeneity (his or her relationship with the mother) for illusory totality and self-determination. This introduced a “lack” into the psychic structure of the newly-formed subject (since his/her relationship with the mother is perceived as a unity, a lack-of-a-lack); there is no subject first without lack. The order of the Real thus designated the pre-Symbolic space of inhabitation, and occasionally perforates the Symbolic through trauma and severe psychic perturbation.

For Friedrich A. Kittler, these three orders corresponded directly to the three media technologies of the gramophone, film and typewriter. These three psychic orders bore more than just a passing affinity to these technologies; according to Kittler, Lacan’s tripartite topology effectively theorized the separation of psychic life according to the spaces of inhabitation afforded by these machines in the first place. That is, the machine was no longer neutral territory upon which subjects played out their desires and fantasies. Rather, the machine and the subject enjoyed a symbiotic relationship through which the specifications of the mechanical medium organized the subject’s psychic reality. In fact, Kittler goes so far as to suggest that the Lacanian division of the psyche was an epistemological model which was historically enabled through the production of these media, as Geoffrey Winthrop Young and Michael Wutz point out:

“Hence, the distinctions of Lacanian psychoanalysis ... appear as the “theory” or historical effect” of the possibilities of information processing existent since the beginning of this century.”

Specifically, Lacan’s order of the Symbolic “now encompasses linguistic signs in their materiality and technicity” as made possible through the typewriter: first through the production of standardized “alphabetized” readers, then through higher forms of encoding via computers and the binary system. Recalling Saussure’s famous description of language as a system of “differences” without “positive terms”, Kittler argues that both people and computers are “subject to the appeal of the signifier”, disciplined according to an abstract chain of endless signification without a final “positive” term or destination. With sound recording, however, Kittler designates the gramophone Lacan’s order of the Real, since “only the phonograph can record all the noise produced by the larynx prior to any semiotic order and linguistic meaning”. Alongside the reproduction of phonemes (which conceals the pure, abstracted signifier), the phonograph simultaneously stores the “waste or residue” of “noise”, a sonic excess that is never fully soluble in the realm of the Symbolic. Finally, the medium of film is matched with Lacan’s order of the Imaginary much in the same way the early film theorists sought a relationship between image and subjectivity. Nearly reproducing their claims word for word, “Film”, Kittler claims, “was the first [medium] to store those mobile doubles that humans ... were able to (mis)perceive as their own body”.

It is in Kittler’s insistence once subjectivity as psychic symbiosis between man and machine that leads Nicholas Gane to view him as a theorist of “Post-humanism”. For Gane, Kittler’s exploration of the psychic landscapes between man and machine recasts Lacan’s discourse as a “material definition of consciousness” which (like information theory) “does not start from the question of meaning” but focuses on the ways in which “meanings are generated by an underlying technological framework”. Kittler, Gane asserts, bears the bright new torch of “post-human sociology”. But perhaps Gane’s joyous verdict steps too far ahead of a pressing question too quickly. If Gane’s evaluation of Kittler locates him within the coordinates of an epistemological counter-move (one is tempted to believe as reactionary to human-sociology), then are Kittler’s arguments rhetorical or descriptive? To put it another way, are Kittler’s post-human (cyborg?) psyches the well-paced products of strategic writing in order to overcome certain problematic binaries latent in academic writing (such man/nature or man/machine binary logics), or do they actually articulate a current state of reality?

For Richard Middleton, the answer is the latter; or rather, the latter made possible through the former – new strategies of binary subversion enabling a new logic of social inhabitation beyond power-impasses. Middleton’s work has already invigorated the field of popular music studies through the appropriation of vast Lacanian topics, and in the essay Last Night a DJ Saved My Life, argues that new music technologies (especially that of the DJ “mix”) allow listeners to transgress embodied categories of identification (like race, age or gender) in embrace of a post-human existence. Indeed for Middleton, the (often dense though virtuostic) force of his polemic revolves around the peculiarities of the voice as a bearer of Symbolic meaning and (recalling Roland Barthes) traces of the body. Reproduction technologies and recording apparatuses act as:

“... an acoustic mirror [...]. ‘Reflections’ of the vocal body, traversing anamorphically the gap between mouth and ear, have a capacity to short-circuit the ‘normal’ distinctions between inside and outside, self and other – for ‘the moment we enter the symbolic order, an unbridgeable gap separates forever a human body from “its” voice. The voice acquires a spectral autonomy, it never quite belongs to the body we see.’”

Virtually paraphrasing Kaja Silverman’s concept of vocal “projection” and “introjections”, Middleton offers us a psychoanalytic sonic counterpart to filmic “gaze” theory by theorizing the fundamentally split nature of the sounding voice. There is something “excessive” about the voice that escapes pure acoustic reflection, a dimension of its production that is inevitably “lost” whenever we speak or sing. What Middleton also draws attention to is the extra-Symbolic aspect of the voice, or what Mladen Dolar calls its “third level”, the “object voice” which stubbornly resists symbolisation. For Dolar, this spectral “object voice” is literally what Lacan called the “object petit a” (the little object/the object cause) beyond the mere Symbolic or the aesthetic, a “lever of thought, as opposed to the anthropomorphic masquerade of thinking”. But what is Lacan’s object petit a? To put it crudely: an impossible object of pure alterity that produces a horizon of desire just out of reach, a desire that can never be satiated. As Tood McGowan describes:

“Desire is motivated by the mysterious object that the subject posits in the Other – the object petit a – but the subject relates to this object in a way that sustains the object’s mystery [i.e. sustains his desire]. Hence, the object petit a is an impossible object: to exist, it would have to be simultaneously part of the subject and completely alien.”

Phonographic technologies reproduce precisely this “spectral” quality of this forbidden, disembodied voice, amplifying its “impossible” qualities (in the absence of an originating body to verify its “true” source) through its mechanical mode of presentation. But transfixing oneself upon the qualities of the object petit a as a site of barred jouissance (enjoyment, the threshold of pleasure/pain) in the (re)produced voice “places previous systems of both gender and race relations into crisis ... whose underlying mode ... is one of hysteria”. After all, the very “barred” qualities of the object petit a renders this transmogrified voice thoroughly inconceivable, throwing familiar epistemological structures of elucidation and familiarity into disarray. However, there is a positive note at the end of all these “impossible” objects. Examining the strange vocal qualities present in the tracks of ‘Dr Funkenstein’ (“strangely positioned in a frame of reference between the simian and the avian”), Middleton suggests that these yet-(epistemologically)-identifiable “creatures” may provide (sonic) platforms to rehearse our encounters with post-human Others as a template for intersubjective ethics. On the other hand, “changes in cultural technology” help to illuminate the pre-existing complexities of body politics, allowing us to materially “grasp ... the potentially fluid and always problematic nature” of these social relationships, and to articulate/inhabit new bodies – and possibilities – of being.

Hence for both Kittler and Middleton, Lacanian psychoanalysis possesses more than a mere casual relationship with reproduction technologies. Granted, their theoretical theses are inverted: while Kittler fathoms Lacanian distinctions of the psyche as beholden to technological changes, Middleton believes that phonographic technologies allow us to perceive our problematic (Lacanian) subjectivities with greater perspicuity. Nonetheless, mapping the nebulous terrain of the human psyche is a difficult one; what Lacanian psychoanalysis allows theorists to do is to creatively imagine new wirings of the unconscious amidst shifting social, cultural, political or technological geographies by stressing the horizons of thought and language. Paradoxically, it is these restrictive horizons in the first place that allow us to articulate different possibilities of being, construing the subject as a problematic yet exciting canvas upon which to paint (many) alternative future(s).

"Jesus Rocks it out!", or, the political mediatisation of religion

2009-02-23T10:49:00.000-08:00

In a suburban America household, a mother survey’s her children’s addiction to their television set not without scepticism and reserve, worried that the pervasive use of “secular” references such as sex and violence may shake the staunch Christian orientation of her family. Perhaps the 1999 Columbine massacre orbits at the back of her mind, an event of shocking proportions that incited religious organizations to blame the “popular media”, and its depictions of violence. Grassroot inspired demonstrations speaking out against the socially corrosive effects of the “popular media” wasted no time in signalling out various forms of represented violence ranging from “violence on television, in the movies, and in video games” as affective rehearsals for copy-cat crimes enacted in the real world. Rachel Scott and Cassie Bernall (who both were fatally wounded), both invested evangelical Christians, dominated press headlines, portrayed as religious victims persecuted on the basis of their faith. According to Bernall’s father:

“When that young man asked Cassie if she believed in God, she boldly said yes, and he shot and killed her. The reason he did that was because she believed in God.”

With this statement, a linear pathway of logic linking violence, popular media and anti-Christianity (or hyper secularization) was established that framed Cassie Bernall as a victim of a larger de-sacralising media system that produced what Glenn Muschert calls the “Juvenile Superpredator”. The “media-threat” narrative clearly is not unheard of in larger discourses of the effects of the media on religion. In a sociological project examining the attitudes of American Christians towards media technologies and popular programming, many interviewees eloquently elaborated their views on the “power and pressure” of media influences on the home, while simultaneously expressing their concern for the influence of popular programming on young minds. Stewart Hoover’s research findings, however, suggest a startling degree of self-reflexivity on the part of the survey participants:

“Most of our interviewees readily talked about these things in terms of “accounts of media” through which they positioned themselves on the media landscape.”

Can these accounts therefore be easily trusted as evidence of the media’s threat to religiosity, or is there a flip-side to this coin, suggesting the confluence and conflict between different discursive teams of media technology “played out” over and through these mediums? For Hoover, what this degree of “reflexivity” seems to articulate is not so much the polluting of the ideological hegemony of religious beliefs through the increased encounter with counter-beliefs, but an increased participation and awareness about discourse models of media and technology that have come to dominate public discourse. Furthermore, Hoover points out that despite their mounting concerns over programmatic issues over the media, most Christian families interviewed presuppose the dumb innocence of these broadcasting technologies, treating their “relationship to media as a mediation” between their households and the discursive topics of the public sphere. Television, in particular, is conceived as a window to a garden of shared cultural commodities, representing “symbols, events, and ideas that are both important and lodged in a broader social and cultural context”. As much as televised programs threaten to penetrate the hermetic barrier of Religious censorship, one may also posit that televised content helps to fashion a discursive public sphere heavily reliant on these media as fodder for discourse.

What is problematic, then, by such “hypodermic” models of passive reception (and hence narratives of victimization), is the ways in which religious discourses thrown into relief against media discourses fashion a sense of collectiveness, self-determination, identity and temporal stability. Put another way, by adopting the conceptual framework of victimiser/victimised, religious organisations and subscribing individuals appeal to a mode of ahistoricism, worse – transcendental essentialism – which easily conforms to narratives of decline and corruption by so-called secular media content. Furthermore, “hypodermic” models tend to obscure the (often messy) negotiations that occur at the intersection between religion and the media, masking internal divisions within religious institutions as well as its participation in larger modes of discourse (such as politics and economics) which are tightly woven into the scaffold of their very ontology. To do so would be to deny the dialectical, albeit evolutionary, nature between religion and the media. Jeremy Stolow suggests we place a Foucauldian spin on the matter, and closely examine the “deep entrenchment of religious communities, movements, institutions and cultural forms in the horizons of modern communication technologies and their attendant systems of signification and power.” Indeed for Stolow:

“[The] field of religious symbols, practices, and modes of belonging has been radically extended through the colonization of a dizzying range of genres, technologies and forms: from popular history and pop-psychology books to websites, cartoons, trading cards, posters, rock music, bumper stickers, television dramas, scientific treatises, package tours and sundry forms of public spectacle.”

The very platforms of “secularization”, then, offer religious institutions surfaces for self-expression and Althusserian “interpellation”, offering a counterbalance to what is delineated as “secular” media. The differentiating barrier between the former and the latter, of course, is clouted with grey areas and blurred distinctions, as exemplified in the case of the 1960s Christian Rock Movement (CRM) initially established “by American evangelicals as an alternative to the mainstream ‘secular’ entertainment business”. As “clean” alternatives to hypersexualized MTV spectacles, CRM gained enormous popularity, occupying (and incorporating) diverse commercial rock genres from “soft and MOR through rock, heavy metal, punk and new wave.” As a mode of interpellataion, participating in CRM (though listening, album purchase and discourse) offered Christian youths a platform upon which to articulate difference and, correspondingly, the construction of “social reality” and shared communities of faith, bound by acts of consumption. And yet, this very act of appropriation (or hybridization) troubles simple categorizations of sacred/secular boundaries: how, for example, does one identify a “religious” rock song from a “non-religious” secular one?

One way, as John Reid notes, in which such difference is produced is through characterizing “themes” in lyrics such as “1) personal salvation, 2) witnessing of one’s faith, 3) living by example, 4) human frailties, 5) rebellion, 6) sin, 7) forgiveness and 8) God’s love and mercy.” However, this radically simplified delineation tends to produce examples that overlap with other non-sacred songs and songwriters; can we take, by extension, Bob Dylan’s cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” (the latter an ordained Rinzai Buddhist monk in 1996) as a sacred song? The reverse formula produces a similar paradox: not all self-proclaimed “Christian rock bands” (such as popular Nashville group “Jars of Clay”) continually produce Christian-themed songs. How are we inclined to view the degree of “religiosity” of their secular products? Does the band members’ self-proclamation of faith thereby guarantee the “sacred” status of all their musical products? Last but not least, does the shift of emphasis from the “music-itself” to “lyric contents” as a defining factor indeed suggest a strategic moving away from metaphysical debates that attempt to puppeteer the “ineffable” nature of “autonomous music”, for the productive purposes of Christian/rock music hybridity? The musical aesthetics of the “Other”, it seems, are not simply absorbed or grafted without mutual transformation. What this illustration shows is that existing discursive models that frame the epistemological object of inquiry too, have to change in order to strategically accommodate hybridized entities.

What emerges out of this “tight weave” between media technologies and religiosity is the way in which such “media” (as employed by religious institutions) “have become central to the terms of interaction within and among the embodied regimens and imagined worlds that constitute the sacred in the global present”. As Stolow suggests, what might be worth investigating is not an imagined “impossible” gap between religion and the media, but a fundamental reconceptualising of the nature of religion itself as media. For Stolow:

“The problem with the phrase ‘religion and media’ is that it is a pleonasm. Whether as the transmission of a numinous essence to a community of believers, the self-presencing of the divine in personal experience, of the unfolding of mimetic circuits of exchange between transcendental powers and earthly practitioners, ‘religion’ can only be manifested through some process of mediation.” (My emphasis)

That is, instead of clinging on to conceptually limiting binary opposites, Stolow’s suggestion of viewing religion as media allows us to pursue two tributaries that diverge around an initial epistemological obstacle: the mediation (or mediatisation) of the sacred, and, conversely, the sacralising of the media. Indeed the application of the latter heuristic framework upon case studies in Christian Rock helps us to visualize Christian Rock aesthetics as a (cultural?) sacralising of technologies of reproduction and representation. CDs, DVDs or live performances of contemporary “worship music” (such as the internationally famous Australian “Hillsongs” praise and worship conference) co-opt mediatised Darstellung (modes of presentation) into sacred spheres of signification, re-“auraticizing” supposedly “innocent” medias as religious relics, or sites of religious praxis and collective identification. One may even go so far as to conceive the fanatical “stockpiling” of religious media as a form of religious object-fetish, imbued with a transmogrified form of mobile “liquid aura”, not unlike fascinations with the Shroud of Turin or the respected status of the Bible itself.

On the other hand, the mediation/mediatisation of the sacred attempts to shed light on the ways in which religious organisations recruit technology for their own purposes and, in the process, alter or infuse these medias with cultural, religious and institutional meaning. For example, Charles Hirschkind’s illuminating 2006 study of cassette sermons in urban Cairo districts reveals how the very material qualities of recorded Islamic sermons accrue extra-religious agency, which, in turn, reflect, inflect and transform the very institution(s) from which they originate. According to Hirschkind’s findings, the social mobility of cassette recordings and its “acoustic architecture” it enabled was instrumental in the production of what he calls an “Islamic counterpublic” – an interpellated public organized around the sonic reality governed and potentiated by these cassettes. The “extra-religious” dimension of the cassette tapes, for Hirschkind, lay in its complex interaction between state-politics, institutions and individuals, eventually playing a key role in a nation-wide “Islamic Revival” (ak-Sahwa al-Islamiyya) that led to the critique, interrogation and transformation of existing structures of religious and secular authorities. The ubiquity of the cassette sermons gave a young, rising class of University-educated intellectuals easy accessibly (not to mention easily smuggled) to vast and differing religious opinions, providing, as it were, the “glue” for new discursive forms for “arguing about and acting upon the conditions of social and political life”.

Most importantly, Hirschkind notes how the proliferation of cassette sermons led to an implicit decentralization of religious and secular power by the dissemination of competing points of view and religious interpretations. Counter-opinions were sought beyond state boundaries, assigning the slowly accumulating “counterpublic” the agency to give “public prominence to these orators that the Egypt State ... has been able to do little about”. These sonic discourses occupied a symbolic battle-space outside the cloistered arena of the mosques, deterritorialized, as it were, to spaces wherever cassette-players were available. These mobile soundscapes, Hirschkind argues, created “the sensory conditions of an emergent ethical and political lifeworld [outside the jurisdiction of the mosque], with its specific patterns of behaviour, sensibility, and practical reasoning”. Through Hirschkind’s analysis, the mediatisation of the sacred does not merely reproduce a “hypodermic” model of transformation. Rather, the media “speaks back” to religion, albeit through the fashioning of new technologically-influenced “modern [sonic] subjectivity” which conceives agents of the new Islamic “counterpublic” as human mediums – mediums with transformed “perceptual habits” that constitute:

“A unique religiopolitical configuration that simultaneously compliments and challenges both the secular-bureaucratic rationalities of the state and Egypt’s longstanding institutions of religious authority.”

Though discerning of the wider implications of mediatising religion, Hirschkind’s employment of the “counterpublic” (as a privileged site of resistance or contestation) does not sit easy with Stolow. According to Stolow, the problem with “counterpublic” is ultimately a problem with the question of agency; the notion of a “counterpublic” does nothing to conceptualize the possible contradictions, fractures and fissures imminent in its relation to other co-existing communities. Every “counterpublic”, Stolow reminds us, “is still a ‘public’ – subject to the same performative demand to win legitimacy through claims of representativeness, and the need to marginalize those within and without who threaten to subvert this effort”. As such, Hirschkind’s emphasis on the “counterpublic” tends to over-romanticize the autonomy of such spheres without paying enough attention to “the nature of religious publicity and its relationship with what are purported to be the ‘non-religious’ dominant public spheres” especially in multi-ethnic, multicultural societies. The consideration of the “Other” within the context of plural postmodern communities provide a challenging nexus of intersubjective negotiation in which modes of self-determination of religious organizations undergo compromises under the purview of egalitarian governance.

Tong Soon Lee’s essay on the role of loudspeakers and the Islamic call to prayer (adhan or azan) precisely performs the tricky operation of teasing apart the politics of representation and self-determination in postcolonial Singapore. Owing to the culturally diverse makeup of Singapore’s demographics, the use of loudspeakers atop mosques to broadcast the adhan underwent a series of contestations in the 1970s due to political and ideological social restructuring projects implemented by the government. During the second half of the 1960s, a politically-driven program on “nation building” saw the destruction and local deterritorialization of urban villages or rural kampungs which (due to earlier colonial arrangements by representatives of the British East-Asian Company) were ethnically and hence racially distinct. The resettlement of villagers to multi-ethnic districts was (and still is) highly regulated by the government in order to microcosmically reflect the macroscopic ethnic makeup of Singapore, creating ethnically heterogeneous areas of population. As such, the reterritorialization of the adhan amidst an locally intense heterogeneous environment gave cause for complaint that the sonic universe of the “Other” was unnecessarily “polluting” the sonic terrain of non-Islamic residents. In 1974, despite drawing harsh criticisms from grassroot Islamic groups, the government and Islamic organizations “decided to re-direct the loudspeakers of the mosques inward” in order to minimize the sonic encroaching upon the Other’s space. Eventually, radio was mobilized as a solution to tensions between the public and the authorities, which “broadcast[ed] the call to prayer five times a day” in recompense for reducing “the amplitude of loudspeakers in existing mosques”.

For Lee, the redefinition of an Islamic “acoustic community” via the radio had a profound impact on the way the Islamic faith was practiced in Singapore. Faced with the problem of ethically dealing with the newfound spatial proximity of Others, Lee notes how it was “necessary for Muslims to reinterpret their tools of culture production and adapt to changes in social space”. Through fostering spaces of religiosity by adapting its method of mediatising interpellation, this new ontic property of the adhan subsequently redefined the reception and cultural, embodied response to these new adhan Darstellung. For Lee, “what was previously an inclusive, community-wide tradition has now become decentralized and individualized, reduced to an almost personal, private act of worship”. Lee goes further, claiming that the very production of gender difference in the remediated adhan positions women “equally to men ... in terms of their reception of the Islamic call to prayer” whereas previously, women were not expected to attend prayers.

When perceived as media, religion is understood to be an open-ended process rather than an enclosed hermetic system of static knowledge, beliefs and practices. Indeed one is able to focus on the act of transmission and the structures of knowledge that enable transmission, or problematize transmission. Conversely, the recruitment of new media technologies to widen the girth of possible transmission pathways inevitably tamper with the ontic properties of the transferred, revealing cracks and inconsistencies (or the locatedness) of existing knowledge-structures of transmission. Slowly but subtly, the alteration of these knowledge-praxis structures in order to validate or expedite these new pathways of transmission changes the features of the system itself, leading to the formulation of new beliefs, new challenges, and perhaps new media.

Marilyn Manson: That Cyborg/Posthuman Thing!

2009-02-10T08:12:00.000-08:00

Kin Toffoletti's "Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls" is a great read: the first chapter alone lays bare some of the crucial tensions within the cyborg/posthumanist and feminist debate; each theorist generally views the possibilities of posthumanity very differently, and some criticism is aimed at the "post" prefix as a mode of political transgression. As Middleton suggests, stupid machinery may be easily absorbed into phallogocentric (I really think that's Irigaray's word...) rationality - he cites the "body" of the gramophone in its sexed implications and wonders if the mere materiality of technology may not reproduce conceptual binaries of masculinity/femininity or penetrative/receptive logics.

On the other hand, there are two other strands of thought that emerge beyond the domestication (Symbolic dissolution) of the machine into these simple categories. Sherry Turkle (The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit, 1984) engages playfully with reconstructive subjectivity (with her spin on Simone de Beauvoir), with particular attention to Multi User Domains (MUDS) amd virtual chat rooms. These spaces are evacuated of the body, though they (re)present forums upon which electronic identities coincide and negotiate, upsetting previous forms of embodied essentialism which Middleton also pays attention to. With a nod that anticipates Judith Butler's "Undoing Gender", MUDS may funciton as theatres of masqued confusion, where "users" perform potentially subversive subjectivities (eg. Woman masquerading as a man, vice versa).

Even though the counter-argument is that these playful games of masking reinforce the abysmal dislocation of the self from the Other and reifies old articulations of difference, one may propose that the very ambiguity - that is, the very possibility of subverting (transgressing) the boundaries of one's (over)determined bodies online is reason enough to imagine a "nervous" citizenship in Cybertopia. Thus, the possibility that this always-anticipated "nervousness" (or, for Middleton, "hysteria", the lack of voice-knowledge) can either reformulate models of (cyber)intersubjectivity or illuminate the body as a site that is already (for Lacan) "overloaded with signifiers" beyond the "subject's" control.

Another train of thought is the machine as the anthromorphocized Other. This notion, of course, is frought with theoretical pitfalls that (perhaps) erase the easy distinctions between natural/artificial: as machine thinks more like man, man thinks more like machine? There is a vague echo of Arendt's "banality of evil" residing in the machinic, almost evacuated and sanitized extermination of the Jews as a consequence of systematization, of Heideggerian "enframing" of Otherness as (non/post-human) "standing reserve". Or take Deleuze and Guttari's oft appropriated notion of the post-psychoanalytic BwO that operates without lack, regulated by flows, sites of intensities, and "plugged in" to the sphere of the social/material through compatability with assemblages of desiring machines. There was a recent article (I have to check this up) on an Islamic terrorist group using D&G's (sounds like the Oxford ice-cream chain!!) concepts of "territorialization" and "deterritorialization" to inform their violent activities. "Plugged in" to war machines as modes of desire production, that is.

Even Virilio in "Speed and Politics" (plus Kittler too!) recruit military violence as a genealogical narrative in the formation of contemporary media-politics, and (especially Virilio) warn of the future deployment of these media as mobilizing devices. Or, as Baudrilliard warns us, a war faught upon the mediation of digital interfaces which keeps the soldier's hands clean; in a perverse reversal of logic, the Other that appears on the soldier's screen is already a machine, an image reduced to essentially (pun intended) "null" value.

Where does this take us to in music? Or, perhaps more specifically, the politics of music? Recall Michael Moore's biting inquiry into youth culture, media, representation and 1999 Columbine High School massacre, released in
2002. Moore's journalistic scrutiny parses apart the deeply tangled debate
between representations of violence, and the possibility of these representations in encouraging real "copycat" acts at the fringes of reality/representation. Here, Marylin Manson comes back into the picture, a figure who was automatically blamed as a contingent cause of cultural violence which (at least by Christian political groups) propagated or encouraged real acts of violence. (There is a fantastic related study into fringe violence by Mark Pizzato called Theatres of Human Sacrifice: from ancient ritual to screen violence (SUNY Press, 2005), see especially chapter 3 on "Natural Born Killers") These charges of culturally embedded violence in Manson's music and music videos were caustic enough to cause Manson to cancel the last leg of his American tour in honour of the memory of the victims of the Columbine High School massacre - does this suggest consent of his role?

Manson acutely points out that on the day of the Columbine massacre, American violence on foreign territory had multiplied exponentially, noting that in a cultivated atmosphere of American "fear", the public had hypocritically forgotten the acts of violence carried out in their name on alien soil. That is, to put it in Lacanese, "violent music" is but the object of fetish for subjects in need of verification, of reason, which allows them to "ignore" the wider systematic violence carried out upon the turf of American self-determination. Simple fetishistic disavowal... perhaps... But Manson goes further: "I am fear," s/he says, "I am the embodiment of fear", a monster, an intense locus of abjected being that embraces the radical alterity of the Other (implicit within the split self) upon him/herself. Perhaps this is why s/he is such an easily targetable icon.

Back to the Musical Other...

2009-02-05T08:17:00.000-08:00

What's at stake in Music Theory? After all, isn't it a harmless set of formal procedures set out to (in Ian Bent-ism) find out how music "works"? Then again, we'd better check the ground for landmines (or shards of mirrors) lest we delve into the depths of musical mystery and gaze deep into the reflection of our own bewilderment. In other words, what we risk is "discovering" traces of a logic that we've epistemologically mapped to discover. The same way any text could be correctly 'Marxist', correctly 'psychoanalytical' or "(fill in your own analytical blanks)", the nugget of gold we've found may turn out to be the child-treasure we burried in our backyard years ago in a frisky game of "Cowboys and Indians". "Hang on!" say the neo-Hermeneuticists (Gadamer and Co.) who insist that any productive academic-textual adventure is necessarily an encounter, more, a dialogue. After all, how can you "see yourself" without the mirror being there in the first place? Perhaps, the trick is to recognize the contingencies of one's own values, and the inevitability of getting tangled up in subject/object ambiguities. What I'm trying to say is that faced with the abysmal musical mystery, that dark unknowable plot of nebulous woods, the heuristic tools we manufacture to navigate "construct" the epistemological Object. Das Ding, as it is, is presupposed in some way via the materials we use to dissect it.

But if the seed of analysis we plant blooms into a plant that was "already ours" in one sense, we forget that the same plant is nourished by the dark earth that enables its blossoming in the first place. But let's twist logic a little more, and consider if the deep abyss of unknowability is precisely a symptom, an inevitable remainder of our cognitive and linguistic procedures. It is precisely these hermeneutic structures which de-mystify and instrumentalize our immediate reality that "digs a mysterious hole" in itself, preparing, as it were, spaces of ineffability in which these musical mysteries inhabit. The "ineffable", Abbate reminds us, remains the sailent feature of "Absolute Music" and the point de capiton of Ideological Musical Autonomy. And how does this relate to the musical Other? Can we not examine our critical approaches to analysis as a sort of rehearsal for the encounter betweeen ourselves and radical Otherness, the mysterious Abyss of Radical Alterity as Zizek would put it?

The academic field is indeed replete with examples. Take Susan McClary, whose "thick" investigations into sexual politics in music suggests that language and metaphor suffuse the scaffold of musical structure. We should read McClary more defectively, I think, and wonder if Music's relation to linguistic tropes in a field of historical discourse contributes actively to the "pasting over" its own epistemological insufficiency by trying to define (hence control) its epistemological object. These signifiers, then, orbit about the insoluble kernel of music's Other-space in a frenzy: all McClary can do is to attempt to reconstruct the linguistic politics (the invisible Big Other) that somehow "vanishes" in the act of naming the Object. But the reverse holds true. McClary's investigations are similarly predicated upon a different hold on sexual politics that figures the musical object into a field ready to receive (or to give up) the ghostly secrets of its oppressive Fathers.

We've reached a terrific vanishing point for this stupid slippery object called music. Like Marx who insisted that his revision of Hegel's topology would not reveal the secret of the commodity, but the secret of the system Of commodities itself, perhaps certain Music Theorists should give up the (unconscious) bluff that their tools are overloaded with their fingerprints.

Teleological Polarities, or, making the vanishing mediator (Adorno) reappear!

2009-02-04T04:20:00.000-08:00

No one could have more harshly criticized poor Stravinsky for his culturally destructive objectives than Adorno. According to the latter, Stravinsky signposted the very real material effects of the decline of music qua the culture industry which could not but lead to the "liquidation of the individual" (see Philosophy of New Music), worse still, "Auschwitzch" itself (see Negative Dialectics). Perhaps Stravinsky should have been a little wiser; critical sharks roam fast and hungry in a war-ravaged world plagued by the real ideological threat of Nazism and Fascism (which many intellectuals happily grouped together under the same presuppositions of totalitarian manipulation), bouyed with the still-festering revolutionary ideals of socialism and the utopianist enterprise. By positing such a fiercely nostalgia-presuming title such as "Neo-Classicism", Stravinsky no doubt tossed himself on the grill to be flayed, conceptually bifurcated into two receptive modes of understanding. The first was (perhaps childishly conceived) "anti-modernism", better still, "anti-modernism anti-romaticism" which implied a renewed reverence for the Kantian "thing-in-itself" of objective reality; a critical position. The second, even more infantile than the first, was nostalgia for a utopianistic agenda that was precisely soaked in Romatic German Ideology for a sort of seamless language that resutured the signifier to the signified. A musical objectivity would assume to deliver the "musical object" through a "musical language" to speak of, no less, no more: "for Christssakes Igor, call the spade a spade!"

But is there a peverse "third way", a constructive strategy that troubled the assumptions of the Frankfurt School by precisely working through the conceptual models of Stravinsky and Schoenberg? Here we encounter no simple dichotomy cut-and-dried; in fact, we find Schoenberg straying much farther from the resistive dimension Adorno tried so hard to articulate in order to preserve an "elite" form of critical listening as opposed to anti-teleological "regressive listening". Far from casting himself as revolutionary reactionary, Schoenberg dumbed the axe he first grineded to sever the consonance/dissonance binary. Chaos ensued: without an organizing principle articulating hierarchy, the centripetal pull of tonality was a supernova, blasting a well-organized system of orbiting celestial (tonally pitched) bodies into a constellation of free-roving stars. Musica Mundanna was now a white dwarf, floating sheepishly in space and dimly remnant of the divine light it once showered upon a Republic of happy Platonic composers. No wonder Schoenberg quickly reverted to other forms of teleology to make up for this musical embarrasment: not only was the "emancipation of dissonance" prefigured in Beethoven, Wagner and Debussy, Schoenberg was the latest captain of music's teleo-Logical ship, steering it into the mysterious waters of an exciting future.

And we think - so much so for the Adorno-esque hero that represents a full resistance to the destructive compulsions of Capitalist anti-dialectics. Or, we could simply imply that Schoenberg's 12-tone serial technique announced in the 1920s had reverberant effects beyond what he had originally imagined. That is to say culture misinterpreted what Schoenberg had produced, never mind what he had in mind. On the other hand, we have Stravinsky whose witty transfiguration of historical style pushes merely beyond blind mimesis or self-depricating parody. Let's forget the surface implications of "New-Objectivity" and "Neo-Classicism" for a while, lending our ears, as it was, to the strange twists and turns he inflicted on a growing sense of a (musical) historical universe. History, it seems, was the key word. With the professionalization and institutionalization of the discipline in the late 18th and 19th century, followed by numerous Bach and Mozart revivals, composers, performers and intellectuals at the first unfoldings of the 20th century were immersed in a sense of continuity, and at the same time reverence for so-called "origins". Like incestuous siblings, Origins and Historical consciousness were authors of power (even though along the way they begot some truly disfigured scions), upon which the "new" and the "contemporary" were foregrounded. History and geneaology would triumph over the war-loving grenade-licking tendenceis of the Avant-Garde world who were all to simply linked with the Futurists. Now was not a time to think of the new: now was a time to think of how the new subjectivized, indeed politicized!

And yet we forget that the condition of exile, the condition of displacement pronounces real diasporic effects on composers and long-cherished ideas of teleology. Adorno (and Benjamin) got the drift, forsaking traditional dialectical structures for a more pessimistic tone of an anthropocentric critical subject (just a different kind of utopianism - elitism), holding the deadly abyss of docile conformism at bay with the sheer force of negative dialectics: "If you can't beat 'em, make sure they don't win!!" But perhaps for all his caustic waggings, Adorno just failed to see that the polarity between Stravinsky and Schoenberg was contingent upon his role as the vanishing mediator. That is, contingent upon Adorno subjectivising himself IN the works of either composer. To make Adorno reappear, we have to conjure Brecht, whose own "alienation" (exile) from Berlin to the experience OF "alienation" (foreignness) in America, possibly led him to conceive of a theatrical strategy (no points for guessing what its called) - indeed a Darstellung (presentational mode) - that adressed the spectator as exile in his own cultural space of inhabitation. That is, critically "alienated" from the nonseductive mechanisms of "Epic Theatre", the spectator is free to make critical comparisons that may just ignite that little bit of resistive spirit in us all.

And was this not, too, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Adorno and Benjamin, who sought to verbalize the full condition of the "Unheimlich" in its original form? Perhaps the Freudian condition had its worth of critical truth for these thinkers, since the "return of the repressed" meant, on the flip-side of its definition, a return to a cognitive state prior to the injunctions of the consumer industry. It was precisely being "not at home" where one finally understood how one's apperception of "homeliness" was constructed in the first place. But how does Stravinsky deal with this displacement? Strangely, not through some defacement of a prior system in order to purify the "condition of alienation" musically, but an engagement in bizarre masque ball, whereby historical cosciousness itself as a source of authorative power is questioned. In fact, we can track Stravinsky's long musical development from Russian Nationalism, Neo-Classicism, Jazz-influenced works and late serialism as one long trajectory encapsulated as a single critique, as a single process. It is not that Stravinsky simply appropriates these masks as a peverse game of fort-da ("now you see Stravinsky... oh wait! now you don't!), but rather, Stravinsky's struggle with musical style is precisely one that flattens an idea of historical telos, one that refutes its conceptual categories of "high" and "low", "serious" and "light" or "past" and "present" by simply presenting to us a different form of subjective struggle. In other words, Stravinsky's seemingly "surface" (simulacra) engagement with these materials throw the entire condition by which we judge the veracity and authority of cultural or historical difference and distance into relief, into question.

As Butler would have suggested, Stravinsky's masque of New-Objectivity does not "liquidate" the subject, it necessarily implicates him by revealing the works as a performative encounter of the alien, the struggle to conform and the will-to-hybridity (Homi Bhaba). By doing so, Stravinsky composes (performs) his own attempts to hybridize the subject with a foreign culture, itself a reverse form of "alienation" that, in retrospect, critically espies systems of culture that are often "essentialised" or taken as "givens". But what of his apparent "give-away" quips about "order" and "disciplinarity" to the extent of leaving much musical material excised in order to speak? The contradictions of New-Objectivity are surface, just as the masks culture employs to preserve a sense of its uniqueness. In other words, culture is an intricate fabric of discipline and order in itself that "subjectivizes" the individual, curtails his speech by clearing away and authorizing Symbolic spaces of discourse that are recognized amongst participating subjects. To this effect, any mode of alien "incorporation" to a foreign discursive model must necessarily entail the reconfiguration of one's Symbolic Universe, and reconstitution (hybridization) of such through operations of discipline and control, "repression" as some might negatively call it.

Stravinsky's "hybridization" phase, therefore, is a failure, and a necessary one. For it is through the failure to conform that the mechanism of the diasporic's struggle to assimilate becomes clear, a clarity that works on both levels since to identify the vagrant is to be aware of the system that works to exclude the vagrant. It is through Stravinsky's necessary failure on a mimetic-syntactical level that lends his critique of culture dynamism, a construction that deliberately eschews the telos of style as well as the telos of the compser-individual by treating the musical dimension as surface to begin with. It is only then that we gain an understanding of Stravinsky's anti-utopianist critique that disregards sources of power by penetrating deep into the performative structures that enable supposedly "closed" authoritarian systems of discourse, chiding us to start taking off our masks (or putting on new ones), plunging into a difficult discourse of guess-and-tell by leaving the comfortable armchair of the parade of fools.

Postscript on the picture of Stravinsky's arrest by the Boston Polics Department (see above):

"Stravinsky was arrested by the Boston police for the unconventional major seventh chord in his arrangement of the "Star-Spangled Banner," illustrated with a reproduction of Stravinsky's mug shot" (source: http://www.artsjournal.com/postclassic/2006/09/stravinsky_captured_in_words.html)

Robin Hood: A Second Glance

2009-02-03T06:15:00.000-08:00

I was watching Michael Curtiz and William Keighley's "The Adventures of Robin Hood" (1938) in a class yesterday, which, while marketed for a mass Hollywood audience, employed the cryptic tag line: "Only the rainbow can duplicate its brilliance!" Of course, this referred (almost) explicitly to the fact that "Robin Hood" was produced in Technicolour, then a major market selling-factor for audiences eager to see the virtual approach the tangent of reality with each passing technological marvel.

But doesn't the very implications of the statement already insinuate some kind of "inner-work", some sort of subliminal replacement of the system of signification for an economy of endlessly deferred signifiers? You weren't merely simply watching man's mastery over the optical in a re-presentation of the visual spectacles of nature: you were watching the rainbow itself, in all its exorcisms of nature. You were watching the new nature, the economy of the sign standing as "integral reality" (Baudrilliard). The plot, in the full throes of post-Great Depression optimism, heralds a bygone era of:

"sublime innocence and breathtaking artistry, at a time when its simple values rang true. In these cynical days when swashbucklers cannot be presented without an ironic subtext, this great 1938 film exists in an eternal summer of bravery and romance. We require no Freudian subtext, no revisionist analysis; it is enough that Robin wants to rob the rich, pay the poor and defend the Saxons not against all Normans, only the bad ones: "It's injustice I hate, not the Normans." (Robert Ebert, 2003, Chicago Sun-Times)

Guised through the battle between the Normans and the Saxons is a thin veil barely suggesting the triumph of Liberal Democracy over Fascism. Will Scarlett (played by Patrick Knowles) adopts a gender-queering role as Robin's (Errol Flynn) partner-in-crime, the youth adonis not quite conquered by the vestiges of sexuality, not fully mature enough to grasp the intricacies of the closet binary (Eve Sedgwick). Scarlett is knowingly cast in brilliant red (not simply a play on his name), trotting through the woods of green-ochre-and-brown Merry Men, sticking out like a visual sore-thumb, a bull's eye point on the target with an arrow tagged for the sexual, or communist deviant. It is Scarlett who appropriates the male Orpheus stereotype, bewitching the battle of Robin Hood and Little John with the sensuous strummings of his lyre. Unlike real men, Scarlett cannot fight: he sits, ousted from the orbit of homosociality in the other men's Hegelian master/slave fight for recognition, while knowingly understanding that he is a force of repulsion that keeps their economy in centripetal orbit.

But the main mystery belongs to Maid Mirian (Olivia de Havilland), forever sutured to the self-negating soaring orchestral strings of Korngold's richly-imagined score. Mirian's theme persists only within the community of the (fascist) Normands; like Scarlett, Mirian is subjectively desexualized, though continuously cast as a regelia of sexual desire - her sexuality has outrun her own sex. In a crucial turning point, Mirian "opens her eyes" (aided by Robin) to the deplorable conditions of the working class, "taxed" beyond their abilities to sustain her hedonistic upper-string wails. Only then can Mirian, as a self-determining woman, consider the advances of the vagrant "outlaw" as primal and possible: shattering the master-signifier of the Normands, Mirian's Symbolic world shatters in her "second death" only to find Robin as the only possible crutch. Zizek was right: in a world of reversals and outlaws, "evil" transgressions can only be accorded by a prior "ultimate" form of transgressive evil itself: The Law (of the Normands).

The complete and utter fragmentation of Mirian's Symbolic Universe de-sutures her from Korngold's score - she has no "place" in the Symbolic economy of signification, since her renunciation of beliefs exiles her from that position of privilege, de facto. Shedding the "master-signifier", Korngold's score (like a Peter-Pan shadow) unstiches itself from Mirian's body and unleashes a trap-door beneath her feet by way of falling out - Mirian is now the liminal being, left to reconstruct a universe of meaning based upon a Robin Hood as a new Sinthome. But her new self-determination contains a peverse narcissistic secret: impassioned as she is from breaking out of her initial blindness, it is the fantasmic desire of Robin Hood that sustains her entire being: fulfillment would surely close the impossible gap. Therefore, by saving Robin's life, Mirian's "love theme" returns, but it is not she that is signified, she becomes her own signifier, propelling the music, as it were, by her own will. This is the secret to Mirian's peverse statement to Robin as he climbs through the windows of her castle and proclaims he loves her. She simply replies "I don't love you." Of course she doesn't. She loves herself.

The Soviets... Benjamin revisited

2009-01-29T09:29:00.001-08:00

Was recently revisiting the excellent book "Noise, Water, Meat" and the Soviet Union's post-Futurist experiments in Avant Garde Cinema and came across Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein. Besides being principle participants in early cinematic theorietical discourse about film's artistic potential, Vertov's 1925 essay contains some revealing remarks anticipating Benjamin's own intellectual coordinates. I quote from "Kinopravda and Radiopravda" with particular attention to the final sentence:

"If, with respenct to vision, our kinok-observers have recorded visible life phenomena with cameras, we must now talk about recording audible facts ... In the near future man will be able to broadcast to the entire world the visual and auditory phenomena recorded by the radio-movie camera. We must prepare to turn these inventions of the capitalist world to its own destruction."

Perhaps being to clouted with contemporary fantasies about historical cinema, I conveniently neglected the fact that the "sound-film" (which was only mastered late in the Soviet Union) was an important site of fantasy and re-imagination for the S.U. avant garde, who had to make do with silent film-recording and disorientingly inaccurate sound-reproductive technologies. Also, Vertov's intellectual agenda leaves trace of other ideological developments in 1920s SU where an interest in the aesthetic of the "eccentric" (which Benjamin also mentions with sympathy) began to displace the reigning doctrine of "Naturalism" of Stanislavsky, Chekhov and the Moscow Art Theatre. The precipitated "eccentric", part outcast, part chewn-over and abjected reject of the forces of capitalism (see, for example, Chaplain's famous early film "Modern Times" (1936) portrays the distraught proleteriat battered down by the reductive mechanicization of Taylorism).

More importantly, I think is the ideological dimension of the "eccentric" as a negative reaction to "naturalism" (remembering that the semantic field of the term tended to included a kaleidescope of interests ranging from popular culture, variety theatre and slapstick...) which began to accrete force in the 1920s, transformed into a punching-glove used to refute audio-visual "synchronization" techniques perfected in America. Eisenstein (perhaps oweing to preference for the subversive potentials of montage as seen in Dadaism, Cubism and Futurism) railed against this new instance of "technonaturalism" and "illusionism" that appeared to resuture these
fractured joints of technological re-presentation into a flawless fabric of mimesis. In his "statement on Sound" (August 1928):

"Only the contrapuntal use of sound vis-a-vis the visual fragment of montage will open up new possibilities for the development and perfection of montage."

It was montage as antidote to the suffocating views of "reality" (itself a veil) that propelled the creation of a Kantian community stitched together by the splintering apperception of the fractured, which thus suggested the possibility of short-circuiting the machinery of Capitalism through its own apparatus.

Adorno and Benjamin on Mechanical Reproduction: Objects glanced askew

2009-01-26T03:33:00.000-08:00

By the late 1930s, reproduction technologies were by no means alien to Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, two of Europe’s most influential intellectual post-Marxist powerhouses. Through the 1920s, new technological marvels swept through industrial Berlin, which witnessed the “rampant growth” of reproduction technologies such as photography, the gramophone record and the cinema, leaving no sphere of contemporary life untouched. Parallel to the growth of these reproduction technologies was the equally rapid proliferation of new artistic media such as film, television and the radio, which virtually transformed old modes of perceptions and created entirely new ones. With the uniform structuration of working hours made possible by Fordism and Taylorism, an entire generation of the 20th century found with an abundance of “leisure time”, temporal clearings that quickly became filled with new leisure “activities” through these media. Despite the excitement over this explosion of new territories of entertainment and dissemination, critical scepticism was not unheard of, and many contemporary writers and intellectuals (Benjamin and Adorno included) viewed these reproductive media with careful suspicion.

Discursive pockets of technological suspicion began forming as early as the 1920s, serving to counterbalance the rhetoric of technological celebration echoed in the writings and manifestoes of the Italian Futurists. The camp of scepticism included Gilbert Seldes, who sought to deconstruct the economy of what he called “domestic utility” (borrowing a term from David Sarnoff), while attempting to theorize the transformation of art and the status of the contemporary artist with discernable pessimism. For Seldes, the artist who refused to conform with modes of production dictated by popular taste suffered severe alienation; he had “no sources of strength, no material to work with, [and] no background against which they can see their shadows”. The theorist László Mahoy-Nagy was decidedly more optimistic about the creative possibilities of these new technologies, and was an early theorizer on the role of art in crystallizing the “new relationships between familiar and as yet unfamiliar data” of the rapidly modernizing world. Meanwhile, the real threat of totalitarianism was in the air, marked by the rise of Italian Fascism and Hitler’s annexation of political control in 1933. Both Benjamin and Adorno were all-too-aware of the devastating potentials of political totalitarianism; under the threat of Nazism, both intellectuals had fled to alien continents, writing under exile. It was not surprising that a certain “political urgency” therefore charged the bulk of their writings on technology and politics, in hope that their analyses would provide readers with the necessary critical distance to oppose these oppressive regimes.

For both Benjamin and Adorno, understanding the changing status of the work of art under the forces of mechanical reproduction was key to understanding the political potentiality (or lack thereof) of aesthetic resistance. While Adorno unequivocally accorded music special aesthetic privilege in all his writings (not in the least because of his lifelong intentions to be a professional musician), Benjamin loaded his hopes upon the medium of film to carry out its revolutionary ideals and overthrow the shackles of fascism. Aesthetic mediums aside, both writers appeared to differ as to the actual revolutionary potential of art in countering the sedating effect of mass entertainment propagated by these reproduction technologies. Where Adorno acknowledged art’s transformation as a dialectical process between the artist and “the historically developed techniques of his trade”, Benjamin “situated the dialectic solely within the objective forces of ... the mechanical technologies of art’s reproduction”. For Susan Buck-Morris, although both authors wrote from similar intellectual post-Marxist perspectives,

“Benjamin and Adorno had very different evaluations of the historical present. Specifically, Benjamin, like [Bertold] Brecht, continued to support the USSR [and the redemptive ideology of communism] as the leader of a world proletariat movement, while Adorno decidedly did not.”

Indeed Benjamin, who completed his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” between 1935 and 1936, was upset to find that Adorno did not take well to his concepts. Adorno, who was working on his essay “On Jazz” took issue with Benjamin’s claims that the ideology of l’art pour l’art (or art for art’s sake) was politically impotent. For Adorno, it was crystal clear that:

“[...] the pursuit of technological laws of autonomous art changes this art, instead of rendering it into a taboo or fetish, approximates it to the state of freedom, as something that can be produced and made consciously.”

Curiously enough, when Adorno finally published his essay in 1936, Benjamin wrote to his friend claiming to apprehend a “deep and spontaneous ... communication” in their theories, describing their studies as “two spotlights ... directed at the same object from opposite sides”. Adorno was surprised, and perhaps their continuing intellectual deviation can be tracked by his subsequent work “On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening” published two years later, which may be read as a response to Benjamin’s concerns.

Central to Benjamin’s concept of the changing status of the artwork is the notion of “aura” which he describes as “a strange tissue of space and time: the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be”. For Benjamin, the “aura” of the artwork derives partially from its un-reproducibility (the indication of an original) and the “authority of the object” given its specific temporal-spatial coordinates in ritual space. With the onset of mechanical reproduction, the artwork ceases to lay claim to originality. Recruiting the example of photography, Benjamin points out the fact that the “work reproduced becomes the reproduction of a work designed for reproducibility” to such a degree that any demand for an “original” print becomes absurd. To this effect, the artistic reproducible object loses its “aura” and mystical charm, and begins to become serviceable under the wing of politics. Indeed, for Benjamin, the loss of the object’s aura of mysteriousness clears the path for renewed perceptive objectivity that “challenges” the receiver to construct for himself “a particular way to approach” it. The familiar, worshipped cult-like object suddenly strips its mystical veil, allowing perceivers to obtain a new ‘critical distance’ to the object, potentially leading to an apperception of the mode of production of that object, and the superstructures of power that inform that productive capacity.

The filmic medium, for Benjamin, heralds the possibility for a new political dimension in art par excellence due to its “renunciation of eternal value”. Indeed cinema rehearses the symbolic triumph of the film actor in asserting his individuality (“humanity”) “against the apparatus” on behalf of the masses by “placing that apparatus in the service of his triumph”. The cinema becomes an educational facility in which to rehearse the mastery of man over machine rather than machine over man. The reproductive capacity of film also upsets traditional topologies of power: though not every man may be entitled in making decisions for a nation, “any person today can lay claim to being filmed”, therefore collapsing the distance between “author” and “public”. Faced with the possibilities of new technologies, the “masses” are empowered by their uses of these technologies for their own purposes and in their own interests, disseminating concentrations of political power that had once been allocated to a privileged few. Granted, these daydreams of democratized political authorship requires the “masses” to actively participate in these technologies, not merely “consume” them; and yet for Benjamin, the mere possibility is paramount to counter the forces of fascism which he sees as “an aestheticizing of political life”. The hopeful antidote, then, would be communism’s answer of “politicizing art”.

Adorno’s reply was decisive: “If nobody can any longer speak, then certainly nobody can any longer listen.” Instead of sharing Benjamin’s dreams of “technological utopianism”, Adorno’s theoretical contribution to the politics-aesthetics nexus was a pessimistic note that sought to describe what he termed “the Regression of listening”. Disciplined and standardized by the needs of the industrial society, Adorno attempted to unapologetically articulate “the pockets of silence that develop between people moulded by anxiety, work and undemanding docility”. The central culprit for this “regression” was ultimately the culture industry, which sought to commodify the artwork in service of the mass market as “so-called cultural goods”. As a result, the work of art pales as an object of genuine contemplation and circulates in the consumer market, becoming an object sought out for its “exchange value” rather than its ‘deep’ principles. A curious vicious cycle of double-anticipation: the leaders of large entertainment companies anticipate the “tastes” of the “mass market” by reproducing what the “market” has deemed “popular”. Yet, Adorno points out that what is “popular” is “the most familiar” and “is therefore played again and again and made still more familiar”. This circuitous nature of production-reproduction could only signal for Adoro a different dimension of listening not based upon the artistic object as one sought after for its “attributes of the ethereal and sublime” but one based upon the aesthetic object as a “fetish” object, valorised for an abstract quality (exchange value) imposed upon it by an external determining system unregulated by aesthetic principles.

Here is where Adorno and Benjamin depart. For Adorno, the Benjaminesque reduction of “aura” only paves the way for the reduction of art “to a common denominator” articulated by the mass industry. Whereas Benjamin accords the loss of aura to the gain in potential critical reflexivity, Adorno sees the reduction of aura as a symptom of over-familiarization with musical “formula” placed into repetitive orbit by the consumer industry. Indeed this over-familiarization of musical formulae can only serve as fodder to fetish, leading to the docile condition of regressive listening which causes listeners to “lose, along with freedom of choice and responsibility, the capacity for conscious perception of music, which was from time immemorial confined to a narrow group, but they stubbornly reject the possibility of such perception.” Reduced to mere otological “surface” or “appearance”, genuine music loses its “deeper” social significance.

Despite the theoretical disputes over “aura” and the nature of l’art pour l’art, it should be noted that Adorno’s main site of criticism was the systematic docility of bodies operated upon by capitalism and the consumer industry which, above all, signposted “the liquidation of the individual” in favour of the entertained, satisfied masses. These symptoms, though seemingly trivial, promoted a ‘stupid’ form of mass subjectivity that bent to the will of the consumer market which was controlled by a small group of individuals in power. In other words, the consumer market perfectly rehearsed the conditions of subordination to totalitarian dictatorship, while preserving the illusion of individuality and free-choice in a distracting sea of commodities. It was this fast-and-easy subservience to a dumb existence of fetish-like consumption that marked the regression of listening – also a metaphor which suggested that the masses were so busy engaging in a systematic trap prepared especially for them that they failed to apprehend the deeper, more insidious political ramifications of their activities. Benjamin shared similar concerns with Adorno; in fact, for all his apparent optimism about the new revolutionary potential of technology, Benjamin was aware that it was a precarious tightrope walk between communism and fascism. Fetishism, in particular, was a great concern on his part:

“It should not be forgotten, of course, that there can be no political advantage derived from this control of film until film has liberated itself from the fetters of capitalist exploitation. Film capital uses the revolutionary opportunities implied by this control for counterrevolutionary purposes. Not only does the cult of the movie star which it fosters preserve that magic of the personality which has long been no more than the putrid magic of its own commodity character, but its counterpart, the cult of the audience, reinforces the corruption by which fascism is seeking to supplant consciousness of the masses.” (My emphasis)

Whereas Benjamin posited a productive possibility for the communist revolutionary cause in the de-auraticized artistic object, Adorno centered his critique solely on the deleterious effects of the consumer market, disagreeing with Benjamin on principle of the de-auraticized object as effect of the industry, not the ambivalent manifestation of potentials. Where the spotlights of their critiques gaze (and inadvertently miss), the object of inquiry bears two shadows in opposing directions. In the first, Adorno indicates the value of retaining the l’art pour l’art dimension as a necessary counterpoint to the standardizing forces of consumerism. In the second, Benjamin’s casts a hopeful shadow toward the political possibilities by carefully harnessing the productivity of these new technologies, always aware, however, that the threat of a larger fascist shadow always looms at large beyond the tipping point.

Reproducing sound: Theorizing the Otological Gaze

2009-01-19T15:48:00.000-08:00

By the early 1930s, sound reproduction technology had virtually revolutionized the entire praxis of musical production and listening. Thomas Edison’s groundbreaking though crude invention of the phonograph in 1877 had already become historicized in a series of further technological advancements that saw the advent of Emile Berliner’s gramophone, the invention of electrical recording, the introduction of the portable microphone and the proliferation of domestic radio sets. Needless to say, sound reproductive technologies had a staggering impact on existing musical communities, as well as the creation of new ones. Apart from mere practical possibilities, more importantly, these technologies manifested new ways of thinking and conceptualizing the immediate landscape of reality, providing surfaces for generating new subjectivities and epistemological structures for understanding and perceiving a world on the cusp of modernity.

For the first time in history, sound recording and reproductive technology through the gramophone and the portable record shattered the traditional social architecture of concert-life, driving a cleft between the performer and the receiver. As Michael Chanan notes, these new techniques of reproduction created a “distance, both physical and psychic” that created a new dimension of relations that privileged the dislocated sonic event over the located, embodied and visual concert setting. This is not to say that the loss of the visual dimension sat well with all consumers. Confronted with the uncanny experience of disembodied voices and invisible instrumentalists, a critic writing in 1923 noted that some listeners could not:

“… bear to hear a remarkably life-like human voice issuing from a box. They desire physical presence. For want of it, the gramophone distresses them.”

Case studies in the Unheimlich aside, other promoters of early sound-recording technology made ideological peace with these queer machines by attempting to normalize their presence in contemporary society. The “Edison Reality Tests” commonplace in gramophone shops as early as 1916 paired the listening experience with detailed manuals on how to compensate the loss of the visual through mental imaging, effectively teaching potential owners to acclimatize themselves to these altered aural experiences. The Victor Company, on the other hand, set about “domesticating” the gramophone by altering its physical design to appear more furniture-like than alien, at the same time advertising these commodities as “essential” home appliances. The eventual transition of the gramophone from the uncanny to “banality” was in no small part buoyed by changing attitudes in scientific discourse on the anatomical body which recast audition as a mechanical (albeit disembodied) function in the late 19th Century.

Despite the relative ease and speed at which gramophone culture was absorbed by society, the cleft that had been driven between performer and receiver was not so easily resolved. Theoretically, a double-sided mirror had been wedged between the traditional relation of the performer and his public – an aural, otological one. For the musician-performer, this otological mirror promised to faithfully reflect the sonic fruits of his labor through a flip of the switch, allowing him instant re-cognition of his work. On the other side, the manifestation of musical works in a “tangible” product and its portability into the sphere of the private allowed new consumers to produce reflections of themselves by reflecting personal musical tastes. In other words, the other side of the otological mirror provided consumers to produce their own musical subjectivities, expressed through the selection, purchase and collection of recordings.

Not all musicians took kindly to this otological mirror of reflection. While these new modes of reproduction offered musicians the opportunity to hear themselves as others heard them, some musicians expressed anxiety when their experience of their musical ideal-ego failed to overlap with the otological one. Saint-Saëns, reviewing a recording of himself in 1900, was appalled to discover “two grave mistakes” in execution and rhythm. Other reproductive technologies such as the automatic reproducing piano which reached its popularity peak in 1925 caused similar abjection to recording artists. Listening to a recording of himself in 1913, Max Pauer was shocked to find that he was “making mistakes that [he] would be the first to condemn in any one of [his] pupils”. At the same time, other performers found satisfaction in the returning gaze of the otological mirror. Pianist Eugen d’Albert was surprised at how “astonishing and deeply affecting” it was for him to sample his own playing, while Josef Lhévinne considered the Welte-Mignon reproducing piano rolls to have reproduced his “exact interpretation … with absolute accuracy as to tempo, touch and tone quality”.

It did not matter whether the otological mirror sought to reaffirm musical subjectivities or to deny them – what mattered more was the reception of these methods of sound reproduction as legitimate mediums of (re)presentation either as metonymic placeholders of performers, or faithful reproductions of them. It was as if the reflection of the musician’s gaze returned in the otological mirror was so with the scrutiny of the machine’s ear that a new compromise, indeed a new aesthetic standard of performance had to be fashioned in order to please these “listening machines” and the new dimension of listening practices they enabled. That is, rather than pleasing the audience in the traditional concert setting, recording artists had to please the listening economy of the machine and its auxiliary enabling of immediate, repeated listening – musicians now had to grapple with a technologically-driven otological gaze.

Contrary to other popular theoretical writings about the visual, disciplining gaze, the otological gaze does not denote the panoptical function of a “big Other”. Rather, the otological gaze indicates a new platform of self re-cognition that effectively, through the medium of the sound reproductive apparatus, allowed the musician to survey (and thus discipline) himself. Under his own gaze returned to him through recordings, the musician could subtly alter his own performance practices to suit the medium that sought to re-present him in public. Understandably, the permanent, repetitive nature of records demanded a whole new standard of perfection never before imagined through the concert scenario. Rachmaninoff admired the possibilities offered by the recording studio because it allowed him to strive for “artistic perfection” through repeated takes. Clifford Curzon expressed the reverse sentiment: “if you can’t risk a wrong note, your right notes are apt to mean less.” Indeed, under the oppression of the otological gaze, many musicians felt out of place, including Arthur Grumiaux and Sviatoslav Richter, who was “frightened” of microphones. Poulenc also ironically noted that both musicians and composers alike had been reduced to “victims of the treachery of the ‘wax’”, indicating the old process of recording directly onto wax cylinders.

Under the “treachery” of the otological gaze, performers found their minds and bodies further disciplined by a new restrictive economy imposed by the studio recording process and microphones. During the pre-electric microphone days of acoustic recording, performers often found themselves in cramped, uncomfortable working conditions, since the ‘listening reach’ of early recording devices were severely limited. The typical working studio is described by Mark Katz as “usually small, windowless, overheated [to keep the wax cylinders pliable], and empty, save for a large megaphone-shaped horn and small red light or perhaps a buzzer attached to one wall.” Singers had to vacillate between spots marked in chalk on the ground to avoid overloading the capacity of the recording instrument while orchestras (if ever rarely recorded) were squashed together in awkward positions to achieve the best sound balance dictated by the economy of recording technology. While conducting a recording of his composition The Planets with the London Symphony Orchestra in 1923, Gustav Holst recalled how the cramped conditions of recording caused horn virtuoso Aubrey Brain to break down thirteen times “as a result of the almost unbearable physical discomfort”.

Rather than being masters of their own surveillance, the recording studio phenomenon also gave rise to two new “masters” which musicians were responsible to under the otological gaze – the recording engineer and the record producer. Under the studio setting, recording became what Timothy Day calls a “cooperative” effort, which further dispersed the autonomy of the performing musician. Recording engineers were masters of a new sonic “tacit knowledge” of which performers were assumed to be deprived of, gatekeepers of a discursive (and epistemological) world to which musicians had little or no control over. Producers such as Fred Gaisberg and Walter Legge were the undisputed kings of the recording studio, mediating between the interests of recording engineers and the interests of the artists. By 1909, HMV’s world-famous trademark of a dog gazing into a gramophone with the caption “His Master’s Voice” couched a hidden irony – it was, in fact, the musician who was the domesticated dog, disciplined and house-trained by several studio “masters” to perform new tricks under circumstances demanded by the otological gaze.

Before the introduction of LP (long playing) technology in 1948, the material characteristics of 78rpm Shellac discs imposed a physical and temporal restriction on musical reproduction. As Mark Katz points out, 78rpm discs were limited to barely “four and one-half minutes of music continuously” which had immense bearings on the presentation of music on these discs. The short recording time allowed by these discs encouraged recording industries to favor musical works of shorter time spans, while simultaneously discouraging the recording of works of larger temporal girths. As a result, vocal works (which best suited the recording bandwidths of early recording technology) were almost unanimously favored over symphonies, sharing a large slice of the recording pie along with other short piano or violin solos. Composers who wanted their longer works recorded often found their feathers ruffled by the propositions of the producers.

Ferruccio Busoni, for example, who loathed the recording process, complained in 1919 that “They [the producers] wanted the Faust waltz [which lasts a good ten minutes] but it was only to take four minutes!” Fitting the “work” uninterrupted on one side of the disc meant “quickly cutting, patching, and improvising”, or relent to awkward discontinuities in the work which Adorno vehemently called “atomized listening”. Performers who chose the former had to exact painful cuts on their recorded repertory, sometimes excising whole chunks of bars in service of the machine’s limitations. Sir Henry Wood’s 1922 recording of Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ Symphony dispensed with nearly half the music, while Elgar trimmed his Cockaigne overture to a third of its original length. Other performers who opted for the latter attempted to remedy the musical breaks as best they could. Stokowski inserted an unwritten ritardando before each disc break in order to “finish each record off gracefully”, in contrast to Ormandy, who simply played as if no cut-off was approaching. Ultimately, the temporal limitations of 78rpm recording complicated issues of musical autonomy, authorship and ontology. Could Sir Henry Wood’s truncated ‘Eroica’ still be considered an authentic Beethoven “product”? If Elgar reworked an original symphony under the otological gaze, was it a legitimate product of musical creativity, or a lesser by-product of technological limitation? Could “atomized listening”, divorced from its temporal position in a flow of a larger work still hold phenomenological legitimacy?

Despite these restrictions, French theorist Michel Foucault reminds us that any disciplinary form of restriction is ultimately a productive endeavor, potentially leading to new products of social inhabitation and acculturation. Performing under the otological gaze led performers to internalize new “changes in interpretation and performance styles”. As the soprano soloist Martina Arroyo recollected, singers like herself made small unconscious adjustments of their techniques under the otological gaze of the microphone, reducing the violence of her rolled R’s when recording. Similarly, a reduced ‘intimate’ style of working with close microphones literally spawned the “soft crooning” technique that was to characterize the singing qualities of “crooners” such as Rudy Vallee, Bing Crosby, Perry Como and Frank Sinatra. More than ever, the repeatable nature of sound reproductive technologies prompted a shift in the conceptualization of musical ownership and authorship. Since similar musical works were being circulated in the economy of records, performer identity and authorship became linked to interpretative styles (and peculiarities) rather than mere virtuosity. As Katz warns:

“With sufficient repetition, listeners may normalize interpretive features of a performance or even mistakes, regarding themselves as integral not only to the performance but to the music. In other words, listeners may come to think of an interpretation as the work itself.”

Coupled with a growing music industry hinged upon the proliferation of records, success became matched with marketability rather than actual musical-ability. Michael Walter, for example, notes with amusement how Marlene Dietrich “proved that her special style was to sing deficiently” although “these defects added up to a special, artless, in a word authentic style”. Dietrich’s popularity, of course, was co-driven by the ubiquity of radio sets flooding domestic life in the 1920s, constructing new social platforms for listening outside the guarded sanctity of the concert hall. In other words, the production of music entered a new domain of power-relations, which were to be determined by the tastes (or distastes) not of traditional music-patrons, but a growing sphere of the ‘masses’ that comprised of a new class of listening communities.

Prospects for musicians under the order of the otological gaze were not always grim. On the contrary, the recording industry was almost solely responsible for catalyzing the popularity of Jazz in the 1920s. The popularity of reproducing pianos in 1919 USA abetted the growing popularity of the “ragtime” genre, allowing amateur pianists to hear more difficult works played out in the comfort of their own homes, while an all-white group of five parading under the title “the Original Dixieland Jass Band” secured their nation-wide popularity through record sales, making history as the first jazz-inspired band to sell 1 million records in 1917. By 1923, jazz had reached such heights of demand that the first recordings of Morton, Bessie Smith, Oliver Bechet and others quickly appeared in shops.
Apart from Jazz, sound recordings allowed composers to broaden their musical horizons by studying the music of other cultures. Alton Adams, for example, received his earliest musical inspirations by listening to 78rpm recordings of John Philip Sousa on Virgin Island, while Darius Milhaud, writing in 1924, opined:

“Thanks to the phonograph, I will be able to play the discs of black music – recorded and published by blacks- that I bought back from the United States. It is truly very precious to be able to study the folklore of the world thanks to this machine.”

The American composer Colin McPhee first took interest in Balinese culture when he received recordings of Balinese Gamelan music in 1929, and interest that would propel him to spend an extended residency in Bali from 1931 which profoundly affected his compositional style. On the other side of the globe, China’s first radio station “Radio Shanghai” began broadcasting in 1923, flooding listeners with Chinese, Japanese and “much Western dance music”. Such a proliferation of music on a global level is but an indication of the power of sound reproductive technologies in effecting transcultural modes of listening and appreciation. By the 1930s, Arnold Copland admitted that “an entirely new public for music had grown up around the radio and the phonograph”, testifying to the depth at which these initial technologies had conquered – indeed imperialized – everyday life.

Disability, Un-ability and Hyperability

2009-01-12T06:52:00.000-08:00

The last decade of musicology has produced a slew of new investigations into the intersections between music and the body. From gender studies to queer musicology, Joseph Straus has not unrecently embarked on a primer research between bodily disability and composition. These inquiries, however, seem to circulate within the orbit of conventional logical orbits; the droning repetition of questions of authorship, authenticity, and referentiality continue to plague music studies, especially investigations into so-called "absolute" music which, amongst others, Susan McClary has continually attempted to con-text-ualize. Yet another angle that has remained scarce in musicological study (though not without certain notable exceptions) seek to theorize the production of the body through performance. Specifically, the production of levels in Ability in musical performance as well as composition articulate a hierarchy of values that continue to challenge our ideas of music, instrumentality, performance, and the ontology of the work-in-itself. The production of the able music body is not without its complications, although history has confirmed that conceptions of the body remain in circulation in the economy of music - a quick survey of examples would include the castrati phenomenon, virtuosity in instrumentism, disability, amatuerism and musical reception.

Ravel's piano concerto for the Left Hand, for example, continue to set debates about ability and disability into motion. Is not this foregrounded disability case for the exercise of compromised hyperability - a new spectre of ability invoked to counter the disable body? And yet an entire field of amateur instrumentism articulates boundaries of subscription and exclusion, carefully intersecting with industries, medias and economics. On the other hand, Alvin Lucier's "I am sitting in a room" tackles another field of disability, precisely by using the discursive realm of "music" (thereby also challenging its conceptual givens) to overcome physical "natural" disability. Specifically, "I am sitting in a room" effaces the Barthesian "grain" of disability within the voice (his stutter) by channelling it into the "playing" of spatial sonorities. Disability, it seems, is performed into ability - composerly (and aesthetic) ability that, by its repeatability, provides the blueprint for not only erasing Lucier's disability, but his locatedness in the produced musical and sonorous text, relegating it into the sphere of conceptual authorship rather than sonic authorship.

The Silencing powers of Spectacle: A State Sonata

2008-11-11T16:16:00.000-08:00

This is not a descriptive essay, merely a speculative one, an essay that attempts to creatively deconstruct the givens of ritual performance, suggesting the hidden ideologies that bear significance on Singaporean Govermental-ity (Foucault). This is an essay that is yet to be written, but is contained in abstract form as such. The excessess of Spectacle is a well-studied one (Debord), and the yearly Singaporean Spectacle - a highly ordered ritual tampering of cathartic energies - should, by no means, be spared analysis. Every year, the nation tunes in either on TV or at a predetermined location to participate in the festive ritual of National Day. Of particular significance is the temporal ordering of events for National Day, a propagandistic tool that reproduces a formal structure year after year in the Sonata Form.

First, the exposition articulates a hypermasculine aesthetic, represented through the contingence of State Power: the Armed Forces. Simultaneously touted as the chief means by which "internal" security is managed and maintained (at what expense?), uniformity, rigor and the sacrifice of individuality (the sacrifice of individual to State for an ideology of the collective) is stressed, ex-pressed as a macho spectacle of dominance, and protection (which functions as presented negative). The Second Subject introduces the second-ary, namely the collective individualities themselves in a flamboyent display of Nationalized individuality. This too, is seized and absorbed under the umbrella of National discourse, such that individualities are re-produced as signifying archetypes. Development - struggle between the (already repressed) representation of archetypal individuality and dominant aggression - usually the military is called on to "perform" along with other constituencies. In doing so, hypermasculine modes of identification (first seen with uniforms) are vagarized by demeaning the soldier to the level of the performer, usually decking him out in "costume". The hypermasculine is emasculated, so to speak, the soldier on the performance tarpaulin is not one performing his excessive gender, but one who is forced to perform in drag.

Thirdly, Recapitulation. But here, recapitulation does not take the form of the domination over masculine/feminine appropriations. Rather, recapitulation articulates itself as a third component of the ideological triangle: multicultural (albeit plural) egalitarianism, symbolized by the harmonious integration of both Repressive State Apparatus and Expressive State Apparatus sharing the common performance tarpaulin. Here, military contingents reappropriated in uniform stand shoulder to shoulder (but not mingle!) with other contingent performers, enounciating the need for radical tolerence, although only a tolerence tolerable by keeping differences distinct both spatially and ideologically. Last, Coda, fireworks, but first - the medley of National Songs. "Count on me Singapore", "This is my country", "We Are Singapore", first seperate entities, then, in counterpoint. The bedazzled spectator ascribes to the power of voice, but disciplined voice. Nonetheless, the spectator may choose one of the contrapuntal voices to mimic - let it be known that his mimesis is one already predetermined, composed to be poylphonically consonant with rudimentary harmonic progressions that resemble a perpetual canon. Like the canon, the citizen sings forever, repetitively, doomed to reproduce a melody that is not his/her own.

What else is there to do as a last resort but to push this perpetual canon to its limits of intelligibility, that is, to push musical harmony to its extreme: that of censorship. In a startling catharsis of repressed jouissance, the medley is put to sudden cadence - interrupted, if you will - by fireworks. This explosion of sound, a carefully controlled dionisiac phenomenon, is less celebration than it is violent explosion. This is always Subjectivity's participation in State Apparatus driven to its end: it always concludes with the violence. What else are fireworks than the ultimate antithesis to ordered harmony, noise itself, absolute unintelligibility? But in this excessiveness of noise (unintelligibility), the individual voice as last means of agency to song is completely eradicated and overpowered. No voice can compete with the thundering silencing effect of complete devastation and destruction. Ironically, fireworks are usually accompanied by Tchaikovsky - an individible remainder of European colonialism, or the suggestion that the machinery that lurks behind this implosion of Self/State is really self-colonialization in process, the grand Singapore Dream not to disrupt the system of colonialization, but to sit at its head seat.

But fireworks are controlled explosions. The disorder that blinds its citizenry turns out to be ordered spectacle. Indeed disorder itself has to be silenced to make way for its final instalment of the ritual: the national pledge. All semblance of melody is effaced, supplanted by the single, mechanistic unision that regurgitates a familiar prose, in rhythm. Counterpoint has collapsed into syllabic repetition (the regimentality of hypermasculinity, perhaps, making a recovery?) at the expense of any last possible harmony. Nobody ever sings the national pledge, it is seen as a mockery, an act of insurbordination. Here, Barthe's "grain of the voice" - the last resource of the individual by means of the body - is totally and completely silenced by State-demanded euphony. The president leaves, and the crowd is dismissed.

A primer on Schoenberg as Postmodernist

2008-11-06T03:46:00.000-08:00

By 1908, Arnold Schoenberg had completely abandoned traditional triadic tonality, signalling the consummation of a process that had begun in 1900. While Schoenberg had tinkered with the limits of traditional triadic tonality in his early song cycles such as the expressionistic Gurre-Lieder (1900-1901) and Zwei-Lieder (1907-1908), his final break with triadic tonality came with the composition of Das Buch der hängenden Gärten (1908). Set to the tragic love poetry of Stefan George, the piece was notorious for its radical use of chromatic harmonies without any single established tonal center. Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet (1908) set out to further develop his newfound compositional idiosyncrasies, although its critical reception met with similar ends, that is, uproar, disapproval and harsh criticism. Needless to say, the premiere of Das Buch der hängenden Gärten in 1910 hardly fared any better. Life, it seems, was a bed of nails for Schoenberg: besides facing rejection from his critics, he was also rejected by his own wife, who ran away with mutual friend and painter Richard Gerstl.

Given these circumstances, it is easy to see why Schoenberg prized the “struggle for [artistic] truth higher than the truth itself”. Seen from a different angle, “struggle” could be interpreted as Schoenberg’s strategy of romanticizing or justifying personal crisis by conflating the realm of the personal with the realm of the artistic. “Beauty,” he claims, does not reside in the completed artistic object but “in that everlasting struggle for truth”. In the first published edition of Harmonielehre (1911), Schoenberg’s preface clearly instructs the pedagogue to adopt the philosophy of the struggle in which “the search itself” for artistic truth is valorized. For Schoenberg,

“[The] thinker, who keeps on searching ... shows that there are problems and that they are unsolved ... Those who so love comfort will never seek where there is definitely not something to find ... movement alone can succeed where deliberation fails ... Only activity, movement is productive ... Comfort avoids movement, it therefore does not take up the search.”

The impulse to “movement”, as demonstrated in the rest of the Harmonielehre, was one that sought to move beyond the “comforts” of traditional triadic harmony, a “search” that involved the exploration of new laws and organizing principles beyond the limited scope that traditional tonality had permitted. It would be nearly a decade later before Schoenberg finally reaped the fruits of his “search” with the invention of the 12-tone composition system. Until then, Harmonielehre was at best a traditional harmony textbook peppered with ruminations and speculative thought, making arguments for what was eventually (and famously) known as “the emancipation of the dissonance”.

Indeed, what Schoenberg set out to demonstrate in various chapters of the Harmonielehre was precisely the very constructedness of tonality as a compositional aggregate of laws and common practices. For Schoenberg, traditional tonality “is no natural law of music [which is] eternally valid” , but a historical construction which has gained its validity through years of shared practice, a “system of presentation (Darstellung)” through which the production and reception of music occurs. This Darstellung may ensure a common tonal language between producers and receivers, but what Schoenberg also points out is the way in which “Tonality” as a system is disciplinary in nature, qualifying certain practices under its umbrella while rejecting other practices as invalid or incorrect (such as parallel fourths and fifths in counterpoint). Schoenberg rejects the totalizing tendencies of the tonal disciplinary system, claiming that any meta-theory of art must necessarily “consist ... of exceptions”, although he remains aware of how the establishing of artistic laws can often “influence the way in which the sense organ of the subject, the observer, orients himself to the attributes of the object observed”.

Based on this logic, Schoenberg deduces that the dialectical separation between “consonances” and “dissonances” within the logic of tonality is inherently faulty for two reasons. Firstly, given that the basis of tonality rests on the acoustical properties Klang (tone), then the Klang must already be intrinsically “dissonant” by virtue of the “dissonant” partials heard in the higher overtone series. Since the “dissonant” partials are higher in pitch and therefore less audible than the “consonant” first few partials of the fundamental Klang (the octave, the 5th and the major 3rd), it follows that the distinction between consonance/dissonance is of “degree, [and] not of kind”. In other words, the consonance/dissonance antithesis is a false one; in the acoustical reality of the Klang, they are merely coordinates on the same trajectory. Secondly, Schoenberg argues that the binary distinction is cultural and based primarily on the level of acceptance of the listener. If the chromaticism of Wagner, Debussy and other composers can be successfully recruited into the realm of “consonance” by acculturated listeners, then it would only be a matter of time when the “growing ability of the analyzing ear” is able to embrace “the whole natural phenomenon” of Klang as consonant.

The longevity of the consonant/dissonant binary (which privileges the former), Schoenberg posits, also partially lies in the historical treatment of the identified “dissonant” tones as “passing tones”, consequently reifying or confirming “the phenomenon of dissonance itself”. What Schoenberg refers to here is the way in which the linguistic tropes used to characterize “dissonances” (i.e. as merely “passing”) simultaneously serves to construct a hierarchy of tones, an act of proscription which “names” certain intervallic relationships as less-essential than others. For Schoenberg, the “dissonant” had to be disciplined by the logic of tonality by constructing an epistemological binary (consonant/dissonant) which served to maintain the pre-established hierarchy, albeit by articulating a repertory of rules by which “dissonances” were to be “treated”: “Dissonance was accepted, but the door through which it was admitted was bolted whenever excess threatened”.

It is important to note that Schoenberg did not altogether dismiss tonality as a tool for the artists’ kit. On the contrary, Schoenberg sought to criticize the way in which tonality as a Darstellung was asserted as natural law or unquestionable rule. “Tonality” for Scheonberg remained a viable “formal possibility that emerge[d] from the nature of the tonal material, a possibility of attaining a certain completeness or closure (Geschlossenheit) by means of a certain uniformity”. To the extent that Schoenberg claimed to be “emancipating” the dissonance, this purely meant that he was attempting to undo a deep-rooted epistemological bias in the tradition of tonal music that established a hierarchy of privilege, assisted by rules of “proper treatment”. Simultaneously, as a composer, Schoenberg was attempting to establish theoretical grounds by which his non-normative chromatic dealings were justified.

To the end, Schoenberg remained resentful of the term “atonal” – an invention of the rival Hauerian school of thought which Schoenberg vehemently disagreed with. For Schoenberg, the notion of ‘atonality’ was oxymoronic in the sense that it “could only signify something inconsistent with the nature of tone”. By proposing the use of “polytonal” or “pantonal”, Schoenberg was sending a clear message that he was not attempting to adopt a radically relativist position in opposition to traditional harmony. Rather, Schoenberg saw himself as reworking the basic assumptions of tonality, rethinking the organizing properties of traditional tonality in terms of the twelve tone chromatic scale. By the end of Harmonielehre, Schoenberg expressed his excitement that:

“[We] are turning to a new epoch of polyphonic style, as in earlier epochs, harmonies will be a product of the voice leading: justified solely by the melodic line!”

In the mid 1920s, Schoenberg’s dreams for a utopian tonal democracy finally came to be realized in the tone row – a series of the twelve chromatic tones arranged without any repetitions. Once the “Basic set” (BS) of 12 non-repeating tones had been established, a series of rows could be derived from the basic set through (1) inversions, (2) Retrogrades, (3) Retrograde inversions, and (4) transpositions of the rows. Through a single BS, 36 different rows may be generated, forming a pool of creative raw material to draw from. Schoenberg’s so-called “method” of composition with twelve tones was not the only system in existence. Josef Matthias Hauer, a rival theoretician, had similarly come up with a system and theory of ordering twelve tones in a composition, based upon pseudo-Romantic ideas of “spiritualization” and “the purely musical phenomenon of the interval”. Similarly, Hebert Eimert’s 1924 treatise entitled Atonale Musiklehre attempted to treat Hauerian speculation in a systematic way, while excising the more abstract “spiritual” claims.

Although both Schoenberg and his rival schools each drew up ideological systems in which to justify and systematize the handling of twelve tone composition, their individual philosophies and approaches to dodecaphonic music differed vastly. Schoenberg harshly criticized Hauer for attempting to elucidate the “natural laws” concerning twelve-tone music, claiming that “[Hauer] looks for laws ... where he will not find them”. Instead, Schoenberg accused Hauer of “inventing kinds of form that will make it possible to accommodate the twelve tones without repetition” as merely “a means to an end” . In other words, Schoenberg accused Hauer of doing exactly what he was accusing tonal conservatives of in Harmonielehre, which is, seeking totalized epistemological universes that try to “round off the system” by increasing the girth of their theoretical fences. Schoenberg, of all people, understood the problems which “theory” and “established convention” inflicted upon the discursive field of music. While “theory” portends to describe, too often it prescribes, and ultimately proscribes, as Schoenberg had argued with the case of the consonance/dissonance binary. Similarly, newly erected laws would inevitably enact new modes of disciplining and hence new methods of exclusion by defining itself against a non-privileged musical “other”.

After all, it was the unshakable walls of historical tradition and musical “law” that operated to “exclude” Schoenberg from wider circles of musical acceptance. In Schoenberg’s eyes, he knew he was categorized as the dissident “dissonant” out of line with conservative “consonance” in Viennese musical life. At the same time, he was painfully aware of the ways in which these binaries operated to affect public musical tastes, and the reception of his works. In some ways, Schoenberg’s utopian ideal of “pantonality” underscored a personal yearning for a plural universe where his music would be properly ‘understood’; a musical universe in which the dissonant could lie beside the consonant in ‘harmony’; where the diversification and conflict of musical “laws” reflected nothing more than personal compositional and theoretical choices; where the “struggle” for truth was to be venerated over (the potentially tyrannical nature of) truth itself. To this end, through the vision of a post-consonant/dissonant world, Schoenberg was already espousing an ethics of postmodernism.

Schoenbereg: the Postmodernist?

2008-11-06T03:42:00.000-08:00

The postmodern condition which I see prevalent in much of Schoenberg's writings (especially in his early work from Harmonielehre onwards) one that finds consonance not in Frederic Jameson's conceptualization of "Late Capitalism", which finds its form in a crises of historical representation, but one that is closer to Jean Lyotard's work (see especially the Postmodern Condition), which treats the condition of postmodernism as an epistemological one, albeit a structural condition concerning the production of knowledge, and knowledge systems. According to Lyotard, postmodernism as a condition of knowledge [systems] 'reject' overarching "metanarratives" that attempt to shoehorn a discontinuous, sublime discursive field into legible scripts, through various explanatory (and ideological) models.

This was precisely what I feel Schoenberg was reacting to by discussing the "emancipation of dissonance", that is, the rejection of the Modernist tendency (eg. Hauer) to articulate new disciplinary laws to organize 'new' discursive practices within the twelve-tone field. For Hauer, this new attempt of organization was rooted in neo-Romanticist notions of transcenence and transhumanity. By figuring the realm of the 'atonal' as a more 'authentic' intermediary space between author (composer) and reader (listener), Hauer pretty much rehearsed old Humanist neo-Platonist thought loosely through the frame of the philosophers of his time (eg. Nietszche, Schopenhauer... et al). His predilections for the "spiritual" vaguely recall absolutist visions of "Musica Mundana", whereby "God" or "Universal Harmony" is simply replaced by a conflation of the Hegelian "Geist", Kantian "Idea" and Nietschean/Schopenhauerian "Will". Human agency and heavenly spiritual realm are thus connected through mimesis of this spiritual realm, "performing" the inevitably flawed "musica instrumentalis" of higher organizing laws. In Lyotard-language, Hauer was merely repeating the act of epistemological (re)closures, finding new manipulations of an old structuralist formula. As it were, you can't teach an old dog to perform new tricks, but the dog may simulate the new by reapplying old methods.

Schoenberg's response is decisive by moving away from the Foucauldian field of "discourse" (and all its entrapments), and into the realm of the "discursive", which, as I have argued in my paper, offered a more democratic reflection of musical practice which Schoenberg both utopianized and idealized through the "emancipation of the dissonance". Read allegorically, this "emancipation" was not a liberation - Schoenberg himself asserted that it was not an excuse for absolute relativisim; and I quote:

"... [A] composer with twelve independent tones apparently possesses the kind of freedon which many would characterize by saying: 'everything is allowed'. 'Everything' has always been allowed to two kinds of artists: to masters on the one hand, and to ignoramuses on the other." (1941)

The "emancipation of the dissonance", put another way, is a crisis in 'freedom' (in the tyrannical Lacanian psychoanalytic "Real") that threatens to overwhelm "ignoramuses" with the harsh rays of meaningless relativity. It is as if to say, one were looking directly into Socrate's Sun years after lazing around in the cave of traditional tonality. And Schoenberg himself was aware of the 'dazzling' (read: overwhelming) implications of this liberation. Conversely, he was aware of false attempts that tried to completely theorize the space under the shadows of tonality (like Hauer) would be quickly recruited as a new 'metatheory', indeed a "confusion would arise" (1936) -

"I could have forseen that, when in 1921 I showed my former pupil Erwin Stein what means I had invented to profoundly provide for an organization, granting logic, coherence and unity. I then asked him to keep this a secret and to consider it as my private method to do the best for my artistic purposes." (December 1949)

Once word got of Schoenberg's method had reached the Viennese and American composerly spheres, Schoenberg was adamant about refuting any alliegence to "theory" of any kind:

"... when I came to America I could not change my trade-mark. I was the man with 'the system of the chromatic scale' ... I was of course only capable [of delivering] a superficial explanation, a description, of the methods of distribution of the twelve tones. I was always aware of this imperfection, and this is why I gave to the lecture the title - METHOD OF COMPOSING WITH TWELVE TONES!" (ibid.)

Clearly, Schoenberg insists on the tone-row method merely a method for composing, and not the be-all and end-all of compositional possibilities. Towards the end of his life, Schoenberg suprised critics and the interested public with a slew of tonal composition, although based on his principles, we should not be surprised at all. While decrying the disciplinary tendencies of tonality (in its construction of laws and strategies of proscription), at the same time Schoenberg recognized the immense value and worth of these limitations as formal constraints for creative composition. Indeed "abandoning tonality can be contemplated only if other satisfactory means for coherence and articulation present themselves". (1934) Tonality was one method of "articulation", but evidently not the only method of articulation.

Schoenberg's split with traditional traid-centered tonality was then secured with a pact: by abandoning the regimented ordering system of presentation (Darstellung), Schoenberg had to first reject the totalizing claims of any theory or musical law that touted itself to be ahistorical and transcendental. As mentioned earlier, this meant retreating from the sphere of discourse to the sphere of the discursive, a 'regression' of sorts. Of course, this was partially ideological. Recycling worn notions of psychological realism, subjectivity and the Freudian Unconscious (all large polemic topics of the late 19th and early 20th century), Schoenberg initiated a movement back to the (composerly) self:

"Tonality's origin is founded ... in the laws of sound. But there are other laws that music obeys, apart from these and the laws that result from the combination of time and sound: namely, those governing the working of our minds." (1926)

The composer then, became the locus of creative and "formal" energies, the ordering authority that authenticates its products based on "sound" as raw material. The consequences are immense, for this meant shifting away from the strongholds of a Tonality as "not an end in itself, but means to an end" (ibid), therefore leaving the system unclosed, open and therefore implicitly plural, susceptible to other laws drawn up by the composer himself. Lyotard sees this pact of knowledge as a postmodern condition, the rejection of metanarratives, whilst operational "rules" of the postmodern "game" are found preceding the "game" itself, i.e. based on the assemblage of raw material.

By harking towards a fluid self-defining concept of "unity" as found in the "Grundgestalt", Schoenberg sought to give name to the unnameable - a phemonenon that could be described as motivic "shape" on one had, or (in my preference), "structural trace", the assemblage of a basic rule or datum that structures the ordering of the entire composition (a lynchpin, if you like). One way to read the "Grundgestalt" is in its linguistic peculiarities. On one hand, "Grund" directly translates into "ground", or "soil", while "Gestalt" (making loud indications at German Gestalt psychology theory) implies "to take shape" or "to show one's true colours" (Collins Dictionary). By combining the seantic fields of both words, one imagines an Organicist idea of the "Grundgestalt" as a growth from "soil" to its full "shape". The "true colours" of the Gestalt, as it seems, would be contained in its germination (i.e. an cosmic-atomist view of musical composition).

Joseph Rufer's ruminations on the "Grundgestalt" implies an abstract germinal musical aggregate that gives rise to an entire composition (1954). Following, it is easy to see how Schoenberg's idea of the Basic Set fit the criteria of the "Grundgestalt" comfortably, a primordial compositional tool with which to flesh out the rest of a composition. On the other hand, the "Grundgestalt" rejects any resolute definition, it is an empty signifier that points to structural possibilities without itself being a determinate structural entity. Is it not so that the "Grundgetalt" as "structural trace" exists as a Lyotard's postmodern prefiguration of the compositional space with an indictement to construct rules BASED ON whatever fills the "Grundgestalt". The "Grundgestalt" therefore fulfills its own organicist destiny by creating rules (structural significance) by virtue of its filler components.

In closing, it must be said that Lyotard's formulation of the postmodern proceeds from the qualities of paradox (eg content (Grundgestalt) prior to rules (Structure)). As Lyotard claims, the postmodern is deceptive: while its etymology suggests a temporal 'afterwards', the postmodern itself resembles something more of the 'pre'Modern, although the condition itself can only arise as a consequence of the Modern. It is as if hitory, surveying its own ideologies, decides to take a step back in time to the messy inter-existing matrix of pre-ideologies with one foot still standing on the beyond. Is this then not Schoenberg, decrying the impoverty of totalizing theories as a modernist tendency, taking a historical step "backwards" to the 'free' indecisive moment of plural composerly activity which structures itself along its own "Grundgestalt"? Is this not Schoenberg, who embodied the very manifestation of paradoxical subjectivity by appealing to both "methods" of composition during his lifetime? Is this not Schoenberg who envisioned new possibilities of "unity" by rejecting epistemological claims to singular truths? This is Schoenberg, I believe, the postmodernist.