jerusalem syndrome

PhIL Final Thoughts & Mix

 First off, thanks to all of you for a phenomenal five weeks. I’ve learned, read, written and thought more than I *thought* possible, and have fuel/food for continued explorations of several topics, themes, and ideas at the nexus between music, philosophy, politics, culture, history, et al, to last me more than a lifetime. Thank you for all your contributions and shared thoughts/ideas.

  So we traversed most everything we could *in our condensed semester* in the veritable landscape of Western music/its relationships with Western philosophy, and there were several concepts/properties/patterns – teleological, repetitive, and emergent – that struck and stuck with me. If asked to sum them up in one *severely overgeneralized* sentence, I’d have to go with neoliberalism: it’s here, it’s got its thumb on our world, and where/what can we/music go/do about it? 

We all seemed to get on the same page about the language/logic of “resistance” not cutting it (“resistance” as escaping/subverting the transcendental, sovereign powers of modernism/classical liberalism). Our questions and conversations kept coming back around to asking what is/could be “resistance” to/from/in neoliberalism—does it even makes sense to try to find or build a proxy?

If we read neoliberalism as co-mingling hetero-genealogies of social/political/cultural economies and norms that want and push us toward perceiving of ourselves as, now and inescapably, homo economicus – always and forever subjects-toward-economy – then an (undeniably difficult, yes) *ethical* place to start is exactly *not* that. We cannot think of our response/set of responses as a “place to start”—even that marks us, sends us back into the unworkable and unmistakably *modern/humanist* language/logic of “progress”. The heterogeneity of neoliberal forces of power can’t be resolved/undone/understood by such a classically teleological approach. 

This is where Latour’s “compositionism”—an idea of creating/exploring “prospects” for the creation of a common world—comes in: we’ve got to try all sorts of things. Several different, differently coherent, *not nearly as immediately revolutionary/revolutionarily ruptural as we’d like* sorts of things. We’ll sometimes use the logic of (neo)liberalism as a “counter-veiling force to (its) calculation” (Peter Gratton in his response to Shannon Winnubt’s “A Biopolitics of Cool: Neoliberalism, Difference, Ethics). We’ll have to give up the ghost of fixed/separate subjectivities/objectivities, holistic/determinate selves/identities, and humanistic lifestyles/politics/priorities. “Our (un)common responsibility…calls us to reduce violence, which ironically…comes with the call for any means necessary…we strategically align and…occupy ourselves with our communist, anarchist…liberal (*and nonhuman*) friends” (Gratton again; *and nonhuman* addition/emphasis mine). 

How? Through experimentation. Through gradual processes. Through explorations that excavate our implicit understandings and epistemologies of ignorance. In multitudinous ways.

As I was working on my final project/SoundCloud set, I initially set out to collect Steve Reich-ian process pieces. More specifically, I tried to think about and find examples of sound art and music that draws attention to things we’re ordinarily not thinking about when we listen. I had a conversation with a stranger while working on the SC earlier this week. When I described Reich’s “Pendulum Music” to him, his response was a fairly standard one: “that’s not music.” When I pressed him to flesh out his statement, he went on to say “I want something that sounds ‘musical’…to me, a piece like that is just an item in a sound bank for me to make ‘real music’ with.” In other words, “Pendulum Music” is just a source for sampling—it isn’t/doesn’t belong in the world of “real music” because it doesn’t automatically appeal to our socialized aesthetic sensibilities—it doesn’t “sound good”. 

Thinking about this helped me realize something that shifted the trajectory of my playlist: though Reich’s work, and “minimalist”/“noisy” pieces like it can have something of an unsettling effect—they don’t operate in the way we expect/desire music to operate, and so have the *potential* to cause us to think about the ordinarily-implicit elements of music/sound (what’s different about them? What’s causing the phasing/feedback that I find so disruptive? What’s that sound in the background, and why is it there? What’s the material makeup of that weird thing I’m hearing?)—so, too, can other approaches to music-making and musicality. Recognizing—not resisting—our relationships with/positions within neoliberal hetero-genealogies can be accomplished through a number of strategies, tactics, and (a)musical methods. These prospects/potentialities manifest in myriad ways and cause us to (re)think music, musicianship, materiality; affect, association, and agency; pleasure, the political, and participation; even thought and teleology. In other words, music doesn’t have to be avant-garde, unpopular, or unpleasant to “remix the remix”. I built the playlist with this shifted and multivalent view in mind. Though my late-game realization opened up a whole new world of “prospects” and possibilities for my project, this iteration had a deadline [and @doctaj, though seemingly superheroesque in her listening capabilities and personal/professional productivity, certainly has other and better things to do] so I cut v1 off at 12 sounds [about 1.25 hrs]. I’ll probably keep adding tracks that augment my ideas on process/compositionism until I hit SC’s set length limit. In the meantime, my annotations for the original set are included below.

  PhIL 1.0 [or “It’s Gonna Rain on Dem Watermelons”]

  1. It’s Gonna Rain/Piano Phase – Steve Reich/SoundCloud User

I started with an abbreviated, SoundCloud-user generated version of the playlist’s namesake. It’s about three minutes long, has some synth sounds layered over Reich’s tracks, and phases over into a segment of another Reich composition, “Piano Phase,” about midway through.

2. Music for 18 Musicians – Steve Reich/Coldcut

Coldcut’s reiteration of Reich preserves the original mallet percussion melody and adds some simple, soft electronic swells over top. The result’s a soothing, accessible electrojazz akin to a lot of contemporary instrumental post-rock—there’s repetition, but a satisfactory amount of tension and release.

3. Call Me Maybe (147-Time Overlay Mix) – Carly Rae Jepsen/Dan Deacon

American electronica darling Dan Deacon’s cover of Carly Rae Jepsen’s superhit “Call Me Maybe” starts layering the track upon itself in the opening seconds of the song and continues doing so throughout the 4-minute, 14-second version of the track. It starts phasing almost immediately, becomes practically indecipherable about 2 minutes in, with Carly Rae’s voice coming in and out of discernibility, until the last minute just becomes a big buzz of feedback and noise.

4. Excerpt (Live) – Jelena Glazova w/Constantine Katsiris

Glazova is a Latvian experimental sound artist who builds drone and ambient soundscapes, usually out of processed vocals. Her live shows are a combinatory 4D experience of installation/mixed media/projection art, poetic text, and live constructions of feedback/activity fields.

5. Spread Eagle Cross The Block – Death Grips

Emcee Stefan “MC Ride” Burns fronts this experimental hiphop outfit, accompanied by producers Zach Hill and Andy “Flatlander” Morin. Burns and DG gained notoriety for their intensive stage shows and racy cover art and “anticommercialism,” but I picked “Spread Eagle Cross The Block” specifically because of the lyrics. Johnny brought DG up in an in-class convo about appropriation by/co-option into neoliberal social and political economy (specifically, that DG’s counter-cultural presentation is exactly what neoliberalism wants/figures out how to capitalize on), but Burns isn’t unaware of this—far from it. He’s rapping about and making a mockery of neoliberal intensity and the 21c music industry: “I fuck the music, I make it come…I want some more of it, I want too much…What is it, where is it, how will it affect me”. Burns knows what the “hustle” is, how to do it and use it—even “counterculturally”—but also recognizes the latent “othering within inclusion” that takes place when he participates in/masters the “game.” Burns’ conclusion—“Shit is mine, it’s all mine/All the time, shit is mine”—is jointly an acknowledgment and a claim to mastery. He’s figured out the logic of the system, he knows that there are multiple ways he can work within/out of and *fuck with* it, and he’s reveling in that—his ability to win the game in a way that shines a light on the fucked-up nature of the game and its rules.

6. Bop – The Brandt Brauer Frick Ensemble

“Bop” is the biggest single off Berlin-based BBF’s breakout albumYou Make Me Real and a super-accessible example of their signature techno-with-analog-instruments model. Like several of BBF’s compositions, “Bop” simulates “traditional” techno and house techniques. I chose a live version of the song because BBF meticulously tweaks tracks for their albums, so thought a live iteration would better capture the “process” idea/ology – there’s “indeterminacy” in the materiality and performativity of the track’s (re)presentation.

7. marimba and shit-drums – Moonface

Spencer Krug [known more for his role in several bands from a Canadian collective, mostly housed by Moonface’s label Jagjagwar Records]’s solo project Moonface has released a series of variously experimental and collaboarative EPs, the first of which was Dreamland: marimba and shitdrums. It’s a 20-minute track that sounds like it could be either a loop/set of loops, or just Krug sweating over the vibraphone in a semi-stupor, but the length, looping effects, and instrumentation conjured Reich’s phasing techniques and his homages to Ghanaian drumming in “Nagoya Marimba” to me—and whether Krug knows it or not, he owes the space for his masturbatory dream-journal-to-shitdrums to Reich, Reich’s influences, and the pieces/patterns other SR-related predecessors have gifted him along the way.

8. To Here Knows When – My Bloody Valentine

Irish shoegaze staples MBV found multiple ways to make the “tension-toward-naught” in repetitive song structures and stylistic elements work for them—guitars strummed with a tremolo bar, sampled drum loops, and “muffled”/underemphasized vocals directed the band’s move from punk to post, created a soft but striking sound, and arguably spawned countless bands and a space for their genre. “THKW” was released on both the Tremolo EP and MBV’s magnum opus Loveless.

9. Tu non mi perderai mai – Johann Johannsson

Icelandic composer/producer Johannsson is known for slow builds and haunting melodies in his works, many of which pay structural homage to Reich’s canon. “Tnmpm” can be categorized through this lens.

10. Disintegration Loops 1.1 (excerpt) – William Basinski

Basinski’s 2002 Disintegration Loops is the outcome of Basinski’s attempt to salvage 20-year-old recordings on magnetic tape. When Basinksi tried to transfer the tapes to a digital format, the ferrite on the tapes fell off because of the extent of the material deterioration. Basinski, who lived in New York City during the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center, set the first loop [which this segment is excerpted from] to a videorecording he took that focuses on the smoke where the towers had fallen on the last hour of daylight on 9/11.

11. Charlotte Street at Night – Hannah Levinson

This is a one-minute iPhone audiorecording taken outside on a suburban street near Independence Boulevard at approximately 9 p.m. The sounds include a muffled sound of Basinksi’s Disintegration Loops, typing, ambient outdoor/street sound, and two other musical recordings that were playing from different parts of the street—one at the end of the street, about two houses away, and another at a similar distance but in the opposite direction.

12. Make it Rain – citation:obsolete & PHIL 4050/5050

Teaser for upcoming NON-Official full video of this great song from Daft Punk’s new album “Random Access Memories”.

In OPM, we find an extension of Adorno’s antagonism toward popular music, whose “fundamental characteristic” is standardization: “the hit will lead back to the same familiar experience,” he argues, “and nothing fundamentally novel will be introduced” (OPM 18). In contrast, for A, “serious” music “derives its musical sense from the concrete totality of the piece” – serious music, because it is never a “mere enforcement of a musical scheme,” has the potential/higher value of being idiosyncratic: “each musical element…is ‘itself’” (OPM 20). Serious musics resist being co-opted into the record industry’s culture of “plugging” new pop hits—it doesn’t follow the formula of being simultaneously the same as everything popular that came before it/throw in one singular/special variable that makes it unique enough to succeed.

A’s argument against pop/defense of the serious hinges, too, on an argument against “glamor” – a trait which “betokens dependence”/instills childlike behaviors, tendencies, and expectations in industrialized societies that create desires in their citizenries for a separation of work and entertainment: I work an unfulfilling/exhausting/mentally draining job, am separated from the products of my labors, and when I finally get home at the end of the day, want nothing more than to inactively receive aesthetic/entertaining pleasure that doesn’t ask me to reflexively participate or engage, but merely to absorb and agree. It’s not quite this simple, though; A argues that there’s an element of the “plug” working to convince those absorbing popular music to not think of themselves as passive, unwitting participants in a culture that decides their tastes for them—there’s a piece of the formula/the presentation that tells audiences that their tastes are unique, individual, and that they’re freely choosing what they like and want to listen to—and this rides on the needs for “recognition” and “acceptance” that’s un- or subconsciously impacting choices/purchases/aesthetic preference. 

In light of this, Susan Cook briefly demonstrates the work she finds herself needing to do in both theory and musicology to work back against the influence of theorists like Adorno and arguments that “popular music objects all sound alike” (Cook 141). “Popular” and “classical” categories for music, Cook explains, are (like so many other cultural descriptors/classifiers) imagined/socialised hierarchical categories, but clearly influential—and deleteriously so. The “staggering cultural baggage” associated with pop music, Cook explains, is irrevocably linked to its feminization; pop’s long been made an “oppositional foil” to hegemonic/heteropatriarchal trends, qualities, and aesthetic creations. Pop music is devalued in order to maintain and strengthen dichotomies that reinscribe racism, classism, and misogynism; a fear of pop stems from a fear of “female desire and female consumption, of valuing women, and especially girls, as thinking, knowledgeable consumers and critics who have enormous power in the commercial and aesthetic marketplaces” (144). Cook isn’t arguing that popular music and culture isn’t fraught or problematic, but that “a feminist embrace of ‘the popular’ takes seriously the use and place of music in all people’s lives” (144). “What they’ve made (those left out of the ‘classical’ category of prestige) of and made in that abject space deserves our full attention,” she states. For Cook, musicological, sociocultural/historical, and really any attention and conversation diverted and attributed back to the abjected “popular” is a step in the direction of revaluing living and lived women—“a good thing for all of us” (145).

So A’s larger commentary about music/aesthetic formulas being made popular so that they can be commodified/sold to you is premised on an argument about the shift in industrialized/post-war society—women begin to play different roles in both job economies and marketplaces, their opinions and interests are given more attention, they’re denoted with a different type of agency and “value” because they’re “choosing” and spending in ways they didn’t before, pop/musical culture pays attention to that and begins to accommodate it—and this is what Adorno is critiquing/considering less valuable than the “serious,” highbrow, avant-garde that requires engagement and thought, that’s more “difficult” and less generally accessible (accessible to female listeners). What A’s saying is that women (and POC) are less able to make these higher-level aesthetic connections, are superficial/easily manipulated by companies/creators whose only goal is to increase capital. White men can get serious music, resist commodification, critically think about their roles/positions in industrialized society and make spaces to resist it; women/POC are buying into/co-opted by the culture industry and aren’t able to do more than transact/be transacted in/by it.

Contra later-era Nietzsche, in Adorno we find a defense of “avant-garde” musics as spaces for thinking about “the development of truth in aesthetic objectivity” –new “musical means…(that) have arisen out of the immanent movement of the old tonal order, from which they are separated by a qualitative leap” (PNM 13). For Adorno, atonal/serial music like Schoenberg’s is able to successfully critique and illustrate the contradictions of life in alienated, capitalistic societies wherein commodification is (near)totalizing (of all art forms, including music). 

In new music, “the surface alienates a public that is cut of from the production” while “its most distinctive phenomena arise from just those social and anthropological conditions that are those of its listeners” (PNM 11). In other words, avant-garde’s value and potential, for Adorno, stem from the fact that they’re alienating—they’re off-putting and jarring, they don’t provide the average listener’s ear with what they think sounds/is supposed to sound “good,” and they sharply demonstrate what’s lost (devalued? forgotten? destroyed?) when art gets created in/for commoditized societies.

 Babbitt’s position on music is similarly rooted in its difficulty/inaccessibility/opposition to the popular—the more difficult a music is for a layman to understand, the more “advanced”/valuable/good it is. “Serious” music, for Babbitt, is formed out of/in response to/for the purposes of enriching a complex, academic musical genealogy.

For both A and B, pop music either impedes or covers up music’s real utility, value and/or place in society. Music that appeals to mass audiences is relegated to the service of commodification (aesthetically inadequate to B, philosophically dissatisfactory to A) and confines the art to a societal role that needs to be counteracted.

The questions in Dr. J’s lecture notes are thought-provoking and stem from a longer/more informed dialogue with both texts than my own, so I’d like to tackle as many of those as possible. I’d like to spend a little time situating both A and B socioculturally/historically at the outset of the discussion, then make sure we address what to make of both arguments in 21c given the rise/inclusion of electronic music, sites/apps like Bandcamp, Soundcloud, Spotify, etc that make the “avant-garde” readily accessible, music-making apps/tools for smartphones and computers, and the collapsing of distance between academies and a technology-savvy public (ex: open universities, Google Scholar, professors disseminating their work through social media).

Real talk: globalization’s transfer of implicit/affective understanding, e.g. Iggy Azalea’s Af-Am accent & Australian upbringing.

I loved learning To-day through a bit of background research that Rousseau was as much a musician as he was a philosopher. His Confessions are full of music: Swiss folk songs, personal compositions, even songs passed down from Rousseau’s older family members. Rousseau’s character in the Dialogues even refers to the subject, Jean-Jacques, as someone “born for music…(who) discovered approaches that are clearer, easier, simpler, and facilitate composition and performance…(I have) seen no man so passionate about music as he.” Rousseau even published a proposal he’d written to the Academie des Sciences for a new system of musical notation: “it would, he averred, permit a more natural relation of the performer to the musical vocabulary” (Tracy Strong at UCSD). This proposal was thus an applied push for a fundamental reworking of the hegemonic musical language Rousseau later critiques in the Essay “with the explicit goal of making it more human, less professional” (Strong). Rousseau’s discord with Rameau and the Essay followed a few years later. 

Notes/rxns to McClary discussion: 

Tonality is a form of musical “conquest” - it assimilates all key changes back to the tonic/originary key, thus creating a uniform/hegemonic framework. Similarly, power [in liberal society] compels individuals to structure their subjectivities in a certain way - e.g., it’s good to have new experiences, but ultimately new experiences should reaffirm your already-existing/essential identity. 

Percussion’s role in tonal music is merely ornamental: think of harmony as the drywall and rhythm as the paint in a construction build [the former is necessary, the latter OK for augmentation but not required/functionally significant]

On Richter & recomposition: critical/deconstructive musical techniques like this are normalized by neoliberal social/political/aesthetic economies - whereas this might’ve been considered ‘ruptural’/destabilizing in the mid-20th century, nowadays it’s domesticated, state-sponsored, and disseminated by purveyors of the cultural [capital] 

 Sun Ra’s logic of ‘deregulation’: laissez-faire composition was radical in the 50s, now dissonance/difference is the norm; average listener is accustomed to a deregulated sound environment

Follow-ups (some addressed in DrJ’s closing remarks, but not all):

Does the stability/success of a set of conventions require internal principles of rightness (e.g. some kind of essentialism) that can be assessed independently of the conventions themselves?

What (if any) sort of normative weight do aesthetic/musical conventions have? Is it comparable/equal to that of moral conventions?

Susan McClary’s focus in “What Was Tonality?” is explicating why “the particular musical conventions that crystallized during this period appealed so much to musicians and audiences of the Enlightenment” (65). She asks “what needs…they satisfy, what functions…they serve,” and “what kinds of cultural work…they perform” (65). Her treatment of the era of the rise of tonality in “popular”/court-sponsored music is meant as a larger illustration of the interplay between musical form and social/political trajectories and provides a very clearly-articulated an answer to TJ’s question from Tuesday: is/why is music significant?

McClary’s using eighteenth century composers and works to demonstrate that the artistic conventions of a culture or period both embody and shape social and political mindsets, ideals, and goals. She’s arguing for a return to or a revaluing of rich historical analysis in her own field of musicology/music theory. What she aims and claims to do differently from her peers is focus not on musicians/works that defy hegemonic musical practices and ideals, but instead those that masterfully utilize them. While doing so, she’s incorporating understandings of narrative from theorists in other disciplines including philosophers like Ricoeur and Lyotard (not Hegel or Gadamer, interestingly, but this may simply be due to our reading this chapter in isolation).

I appreciate McClary’s detailed breakdowns of individual arias and phrases (though “appreciate” here means I appreciate her concerted efforts to support her argument, not that I thoroughly understand her descriptions of the moves within the pieces), but wish she had spent more time detailing the implications and providing concrete illustrations of music’s reflexive influence on social and cultural mores and thought. McClary uses examples from works by Scarlatti, Vivaldi, Bach and Mozart to demonstrate how the ideals of the Enlightenment/classical liberalism influenced and were buttressed by eighteenth century musics—where’s the exploration of Scarlatti and Vivaldi’s choices to play tug-of-war with tonal teleology, with Bach and Mozart’s compositional articulations of the fully realized, autonomous, emotionally three-dimensional subject? I’d love some emplotment of public reactions, even some detailing of critics’ takes on each composer and their pieces. McClary makes a brief aside about Vivaldi’s contemporaries and their disdain for his idiosyncrasy, but after piquing my interest in the broader implications of tonality and musical influence, I wanted her to come out of the musicologist’s vernacular. I’ll acknowledge, though, that this may be less illustrative of her text’s lacking and more my musical naiveté.

So my questions, more simply and straightforwardly, centre right now on the following:

Why does McClary focus so heavily on individual composers/works when her initial argument seems to frame the discussion on tonality around larger societal/cultural exchanges between musical convention and liberals ideals? 

Can we derive an understanding of McClary’s personal/political/philosophical opinion about the liberal ideals that tonal music supports? Is this text meant to be descriptive, normative, or both?

McClary’s drawing out the intersectional nature of music(al) structure, and national/regional/historical ideology and identity. The “microresistances” that she describes in Vivaldi’s “eccentricity,” the discomfiting journey of Bach’s subject, etc, all ultimately reinforce and engender Enlightenment ideals. McClary chose these individuals for a reason, and chose NOT to focus on composers/works that “resisted” the rise of tonality. Is McClary indicating that music/musical choices that resist the ideological overtones of their time are irrelevant or lack transformative/staying power?