The Future of Electronic Music II

[David Westling]

Same location as the first essay. On the intersection of the psychoanalytic theory of music and some musical observations by Varese.

Comments welcome.

http://www.davidwestling.typepad.com/redlegs_masticate/

[bachus]

Oops sorry I replied to the wrong essay

[elektro80]

You did?

[David Westling]

Thank you.

[bachus]

[bachus]

I've read the (correct) essay several times and it touches so much territory out side my experience that I can respond to little other than the closing paragraph.

[David Westling]

Your question is simple but the answer requires many thousands of words. Just why is it that the old has died and the new cannot be born, and why is it so crucial? One of the things one is talking about is the evaporation of Christianity, of course. There are many who do not acknowledge this evaporation, but it has nevertheless happened. One of the primary sources for the description of this state of affairs is Friedrich Nietzsche. God is dead, he said, and morality is only a human construct, which shifts from culture to culture. Things haven't really changed in the 120 years since his writings first came to light. The old has died, meaning that God has died. He has outlived his usefulness. Dostoevsky has also charted this forbidding territory, and left us with one of the most chilling phrases on this subject one could ask for: "If God does not exist, everything would be permitted." In other words, Dostoevsky believed that if there exists no absolute standard of right and wrong, which God is the sole guarantor of, then any system of morality, custom, or law is open to question. One opens the door to...Nazi atrocities, Stalinist atrocities, the Khmer Rouge. The State becomes God. The new cannot be born because we don't know what we are as a race, as a people. Our whole epistemology in a pan-human sense was formed with the idea that God could be referred to legitimately. Now that this illusion has been effectively shattered, there is a, what shall I call it, an interregnum. We are at the shores of a time of apocalypse, very much like that which obtained at the cusp of the Renaissance. The last thirty years has brought a definite retrogression against the evolution of the European soul. It is always possible to defer the new evolutionary tendencies indefinitely. But it is a recipe for disaster. One the other hand, if enough people could catch a glimpse of the new way, humanity would be on the brink of a fabulous new advance. I speak extravagantly. One used to hear people say that love is the answer. And you know that. For sure. But this idea has been repudiated. I don't want to get into the reasons for that here. Suffice it to say that it doesn't fit in with the program devised by the US Department of Defense.

[dewdrop_world]

David - have you read Philip Slater's essay on polarization in America? I am not sure everything he says is true, but his main point - that the root of the polarization is that the "old" way ("controller culture") is dying and a "new" way ("connecting culture") is starting to take root - makes me stop and think, and it's optimistic at heart.

I just thought of that here because you mention "the new way" and I think Slater gives voice to what that new way might be. Actually, if he's right, the so-called new way would actually be a return to ancient ways.

James

[dewdrop_world]

Didn't have time to read your essay before posting the last comment, but this morning I did read it. I generally appreciate the idealism, but have a few concerns.

• Communication theory posits a sender, message and receiver, but Varèse and the psychoanalysts cited don't acknowledge even that there is a receiver, let alone that the receiver might be important in some way. That bothers me tremendously. I can expand later but it's a very old, modernist theoretical framework that's dead as the dodo.
  
  
• Also missing is any theorization of the role of musical community, and the roles of tradition and convention in maintaining community. The checklist in the middle paragraph is a set of norms / community standards / morals, even as it seeks to encourage, or intimidate, or shame composers into overturning older norms. That's the danger of leaving community and conventions out of the picture -- they enter the picture in a coercive way, even though you didn't want them to.
  
  
• Eros is not a bad motivator for the musical impulse Neither is spirituality, also conspicuously absent from the proceedings here.

That obviously doesn't do justice to your thoughts or mine, but it's a start. I can go into more depth later.

James

[bachus]

[m.earthman]

Been trying to find an entry point and to get my head around this. The dates supplied then my head racing with the progress of musics in between those periods and then just even from 61 - 69 the progress of music, or music technology. How music acquired the studio as the other member with multi-tracking and so forth. But anyhoo. I found this quote which made me think of a few folks from history. "The entire work will flow as a river flows." Just like Debussy then, I would guess.
Music is rooted in mourning? A portion maybe is that really all tho? I really have a hard time accepting that that is all to it tho. If you've been anywhere with a high ceiling you make noise and play with the accoustics available more often than not if you have the oppurtunity. That's the joy of sound.
I do feel I need to have a few really weighty books at my disposal to really penetrate some of the other areas. There seems also to be a few ways we can get very very far off of music by talking about the degradation of the European character (what of the American character pre and post depression and say for example the 70s going forward) and then we dig into a deeper condition the world has been forced under due to progress.

Restlessness? We are a terribly distracted people anymore. So many ways to attract our attention away from it's proper focal point. I guess that's capitalism doing its thing by offering us everything we never knew we needed or wanted until it was advertised like it was what we wanted and so and so has it.
Music needs the community to progress. Look at the last 50 years just for starters. Did it progress? I dunno. Something happened and there's an awful bit more to choose from now then even just 10 or even 5 years years ago. If it's just a lone instance like a tree in the woods that falls. What good is it? Sure we can praise the books not published and the music not heard, but it's just that. Not published and not heard. Awaiting discovery, or not.

So yeah, I'm still a bit confused.

[bachus]

[seraph]

[bachus]

[David Westling]

[m.earthman]

spirit of society. hmm. The spirit of society. explain this one a bit more please. I'n not exactly feeling how you implicate it.
The whole artist in a vacuum thing can be really, well, tiring for the artist. We are the canaries in the cage and how can one live in the world and among people without repsonding to that fact? I've long held to that and through study of the histories see that that is the case and with our tuning and pitch towards the world we have the empathy to detect and pick up on the spirit of society, its joy, its illness, its happiness and its sickness far far quicker than most, not too mention we, through our chosen fields have the canvas: the space in which to put down these thoughts, emotions reactions and responses. We can turn the light on and put the feeling into the history by making the creations and capturing the essence in them of the time.
Certain breaks from the past, yes. That must come too with a certain knowledge and understanding of where the fissure is. I think too sometimes, you really need to outright just steal from the past. Read it wrong. Mis read it. Know how to mis read it. Apply it far and removed from its original context, set or setting.
There has to be something, some energy, some frustration and generally for a good many artists, a lot of that energy I dare say comes from the spirit of society. Some condition, some thing that a creator, whether visual, written or musical responds to or is compelled to harness and make use of.

Aren't we the obstinate ones? Soceity or I mean, the Public is more often than not, too distracted to be pigheaded. I'm at ease with that. I'll tell who I can to mess it up finely and to stop being pure and do everything I can to encourage people to push off to another space. Who wants them en masse anyways? Then you have to answer to them and your vacuum bag is full. And they expect that one trick over and over.

Blue man group versus ambient records?! Blue man group sells more tickets in a week with their various outlets than a many ambient records sell in the course of years.

[dewdrop_world]

In my view, the purpose of art is to teach individuals and societies what they did not know before. This extends beyond the cognitive into the experiential. Art and music have had this function for millennia -- perhaps societies retained that wisdom, but individuals have to be taught again and again. Bach is a teacher (present tense chosen deliberately). Mahler is a teacher. Webern, on the other hand, is a solipsist -- as if he glimpsed the grave responsibility of carrying wisdom forward and shrunk from it, retreating within himself to a kind of autistic state that led to the the postwar modernists' profoundly alienated state of denial. Mind you, some of Webern's music is like a whisper that fells a tree, but not much. (Varèse is not in league with them -- on the contrary, his music speaks loud and clear to me.)

I think "artistic integrity" is a fiction, invented in the 19th century to support the related fiction of the composer-as-prophet (which later would figure prominently in Schoenberg's view of music history). It would be interesting to interrogate this idea historically; it seems to me linked to the increasing commodification of music in the 19th century. If "integrity" is a valuable rhetorical device to question the ways that we take music for granted as a commodity, I'm all for it, but I find it equally valuable to be aware of the social conditions that gave rise to the idea of artistic integrity, and to wonder whether the idea, as received from the Romantics, is still meaningful a century later, and to consider alternate conceptions of integrity that speak to today's world.

It shouldn't surprise us that composers want to think of themselves as prophets, "drag[ging]" the "sick" "kicking and screaming into the light." Pardon me for saying so, but this is more than a little arrogant. If I see you suffering, what should I do? Should I cram my "artistic integrity" down your throat, for your own good? Stalin, Mao Zedong and Pol Pot committed their atrocities "for the good of the people," too, or so they said. Forward-looking music will never be guilty of such crimes, but it can be an act of violence, which I reject unconditionally. I choose instead to be as aware as I can of the nature of that suffering, and to offer in reply what you need in order to become free of it.

That's how I distinguish between mediocre and great artists. The mediocre artist gives people what they want. The great artist recognizes that what people think they want and what they truly need are often very different, and offers what is needed. (And I reserve a special place in hell for composers who are first and foremost concerned with their own sense of self importance.)

Not that I would consign you, David, to that hell -- far from it! It's easy to see that there is more going on than self importance in your thinking. At bottom, we're both wrestling with the same basic question -- what is the role of music in today's society? -- and I don't have a problem with the fact that we reach different conclusions. Optimistically, I could say that your music seeks to fill one set of needs, and mine seeks another. That's as it should be! No one person can see everything.

James

[bachus]

[dewdrop_world]

At work now so I must be quick, but re the "grave responsibility," I don't think composers should take it on as a weight or burden. That's part of the issue I have with the second Viennese school -- Schoenberg was really big on that responsibility and I think its influence later in the century was detrimental.

Also I agree that "the purpose of art" is not the right way to say it. Art has many purposes, yes.

James

[David Westling]

[dewdrop_world]

Thanks, David. That makes your position more clear, and I think you're right, we disagree in a number of particulars but the core is not so different.

Still at work so more later...

James

[dewdrop_world]

It's a bit late here, so again, I must be brief but I did leave some things unsaid during the day.

I do think artists have a responsibility, though to call it "grave" was perhaps an overstatement. I also think that to fulfill the responsibility, we have to keep it only lightly in mind. If we have a lot of angst about it, the work of art suffers and might be impaired in fulfilling its mission (though what that specific mission is, for a specific piece, we might not understand consciously until the piece is long finished!).

I question whether artists have any greater capacity than anyone else to search and find the wisdom we're talking about (and I see, David, that you question this too). I would say that artists are more generally predisposed to spend the time on the search.

One thing I'm not talking about is negotiating with the audience. I still struggle a bit to communicate exactly what I mean -- since "uncompromising" is so often used as a term of praise in academic composition departments, when I talk about bringing awareness of the audience and the social situation into the compositional process, it might be assumed the composer or artist has only two choices: be "uncompromising," or capitulate to audience expectations. But I don't mean that, of course. What I mean is that it's right to make one kind of music for the concert hall, another kind for the coffeehouse, and another kind for the living room or streetcorner. For me, it's crucial to consider where the music will be heard and by whom. Sometimes the greatest impact is obtained by doing something inappropriate to the social setting -- the Dadaist impulse! -- but other times, fitting into the social setting is more important than asserting one's will (or mere contrariness). That's a compositional decision. But most of the time we don't think about it at all, and by shutting it out of awareness, we give up the ability to decide how to relate to the social space (to work within, or in opposition to).

I can't claim to have theorized this in any systematic way, but I make it a point to consider it for every piece.

I guess that's all for tonight. Very interesting topic.

James

PS Oh yes, on Webern -- I admit I put it that way partly to be controversial and mischievous. Still, somehow Webern attained legendary status but, as many times as I've given the music a try and considerable benefit of the doubt, for the most part, I just don't get it. It's not for lack of trying... I'm not quite sure why. Maybe it's too cold for me.

[bachus]

[spaceyoface]

http://www.myspace.com/xybrium
XYBRIUM IS THE FUTURE OF MUSIC!
take a listen

[seraph]