music + violence (part i: silence)

Recently, issues of violence, control and suffering have weighed heavy on my mind. I think about the ways in which we do violence to ourselves, how we induce suffering on others, how we are bound to prevailing, subversive cultural systems intended to control our bodies. Obviously there are no bullet points and no simple strategies for resistance.

I cannot help but consider the violence we do to our bodies in the interest of (all forms of) beauty. I am reading Naomi Wolff's The Beauty Myth, and I find profound resonance with the text. We are implicated in this system of control wherein our own bodies are used against us. We feel a strange combination of shame and guilt for our success, and induce psychological and physical suffering to compensate. Wolff argues that this attitude has been fostered by the (patriarchal) institution as a backlash to the successes of the second wave.

Given my current work in eighteenth century cultural/disciplinary machinations, I began to wonder about musical performance as an inherently violent act. If I wanted to wax poetic on the subject, I might suggest that, to interrupt silence with sound is to disrupt the immaculate and ineffable with an inevitably inadequate (and often sullied) expression of being. Going on, I might say, that it is in our nature to destroy this perfect quiet. We cannot remain complacent in the subtle luminescence of silence. Shimmering, it is a microcosmic representation of the infinite--a contemporary analogue to antediluvian moments of quietude preceding the big bang. We are, from the moment of our inception, conditioned by the urge to move forward, to incite catastrophe. If I wanted to wax poetic, that is what I would say.

So how is this intrinsically violent act manifested, resisted, or understood over time? A huge topic to be sure. I've written about an obvious example--Cage's 4'33"--before, however it deserves further visitation in the context of our present discussion of sound as intrinsically violent and catastrophic. Although I would hate to fall into the composer-biography trap, in Cage's case--considering his historical moment and his espousal of (all forms of) silence--it seems appropriate. Given his identification with Buddhist philosophy, could we read Cage's 4'33" as musical pacifism? Cage, not wanting to participate in inherently violent discourses of and about music, creates a "musical" work designed to resist--through silence--the intrinsically violent nature of music.

samuel steward + john cage = foucauldian resistance

So I read this book, and then I read this article. The combination of the two forced me to think about means of resistance. How did these two artists utilize silence and documentation to resist marginalization and persecution of homosexuals in mid-century America?

Eccolo, excerpts from a recent paper:
Traversing numerous cultural boundaries, Samuel Steward’s narrative invites understanding not only of the homosexual experience in twentieth century American culture, but also the lingering effects of eighteenth century treatments of sexuality. Spring chronicles Steward’s unconventional trajectory: the journey from precocious university student to Parisian literati to unfulfilled academic, tattoo artist, and finally Steward’s tragic end in a filthy Berkeley apartment, a space pregnant with poignant recollections of an ultimately hollow past. Through Spring’s aforesaid elucidation, recurring themes are illustrated, the most pervasive being obsessive representation in the form of documentation, fastidious record keeping, a kind of sexual curiosity cabinet, and artistic output (Steward’s oeuvre in both literature—the Andros novels—and body art).

Spring provides insight into the homosexual experience in twentieth century America, revisiting in various guises themes of reticence and declaration. Providing a theoretical framework for the subsequent discussion, Foucault writes:

"Silence itself--the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the discretion that is required between different speakers--is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within over-all strategies." (1)

Indeed, homosexuality was that which was “forbidden to name” in mid-century America. While Steward resisted hegemonic normativity through artistic production and collection, others utilized silence to oppose a tradition of discriminatory discourse. Through a comparison to American composer John Cage’s reticence, Steward’s obsessive record keeping, “curiosity cabinet,” novels, and tattoos can be understood as the violent vocalizations complementing Cage’s silent resistance.

The life and output of American composer John Cage are both mired in complexity: drawing on cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary inspirations, Cage’s oeuvre is inextricably linked to his personal life (2). Thus through a brief overview of his works, one can better understand the means by which Cage resisted the construction of homosexual deviancy in mid-century America and throughout history.

The most pertinent form of “silent resistance” can be understood through noticing Cage’s relationship to the concept and implications of authorship. The aleatoric practices with which Cage began to experiment in the late 1930s (3) signal the composer’s separation from the western art music tradition and the culture therein—decidedly elitist, masculine. Rather than assert his authorship, thus assuming the role of male genius with all its history and implications, Cage opts for a “third way.” Authorship is neither valorized nor vilified, but rather, it is merely vacant thus offering a new space for artistic production and analysis.

Steward’s authorship, like Cage’s, similarly creates a novel forum for interpretation. However, where Cage creates this space through aleatory (a form of authorial silence), Steward vigorously asserts his authorship through veiled identities (Phil Andros, Phillip Sparrow, for example) and secret histories. Although Steward participates in a culture obsessed with authorship and “naming,” he does so from the safety of his secrets. By positioning himself in a space of truth-keeping, Steward fulfills one facet of a Foucauldian force relation: knowing that which is true (Steward’s identity apart from his pseudonyms and social subterfuges) imbues him with power.

Additionally, Steward’s records, documents, and “curiosity cabinet” speaks to his need to validate his experiences within the framework of the Western scientific tradition while maintaining participation in a discourse around authorship. For Steward, the documentation of his sexual activities returned them to cultural norms in that they became part of the accepted discourse on sexuality—that of containment, order, and scientific rationality.

Though less conventional, Steward’s experience as a tattoo artist operates within the same documentation compulsion. However, rather than producing a scientific document, Steward imprints a part of himself upon another. The tattoo thus functions not only as a document but also a representation of the artist. Following the tradition of art as the offspring of its creator, Steward’s tattoos take on a new complexity. If one considers the tattoo as an extension of Steward, then he has created a mobile, plural, identity for himself further complicated by tropes of genius, pleasure, pain, bodily mutilation and control.

The tattoo as part of Steward’s artistic output, read through familiar notions of genius, also suggests a “queer” interpretation of hetero-normative social practices. Often, the impulse to procreate, aside from simple biology, is mired in cultural and social expectations: to create offspring is to ensure the continuation of familial tradition: a kind of immortality. Because of Steward’s homosexual identity and historical context, this type of immortality was unavailable to him thus he sought—consciously or not—alternative methods, the tattoo for example. More than merely visual, the tattoo as an artistic expression and subsequent experience is loaded with a multiplicity of socio-cultural meanings and implications. Finally, in contrast with Cage’s authorial and literal silence (the composer’s aleatoric oeuvre and 4’33”, respectively), Steward’s tattoos are declarations: mobile artworks visible to the public eye, created through a process inextricably bound to both pain and power.

(1) Michel Foucault, The history of sexuality, 1st ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). 27
(2) “Jonathan Katz,” http://www.queerculturalcenter.org/Pages/KatzPages/KatzWorse.html.
(3) Robert Morgan, Anthology of Twentieth-century Music (W.W.Norton, 1992). 360

the cmm reading list + a chilling look at things to come

Oh, hello there, CMM blog, didn't see you there. I've read so many things since last we spoke; thus begins the CMM reading list. I recommend: Weimar Culture/Gay; Fin-de-Siecle Vienna/Schorske (a perennial favorite, always useful); History of Sexuality/Foucault (more like a history on the discourse surrounding sexuality); Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud/Lacquer; Discipline and Punish/Foucault; Feminine Endings/McClary (did I already mention this one?); Craft Objects, Aesthetic Contexts: Kant, Heidegger, and Adorno on Craft/Corse; Queer Mother for the Nation/Fiol-Matta; Telling Stories/Maynes; How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves/Eakin; Secret Historian/Spring; The Book of Questions/Jabès; "John Cage's Queer Silence or How to Avoid Making Matters Worse"/Katz (read it in its entirety here); The Gutai Manifesto/Yoshihara (available here). And "Death of the Author" again. Why isn't Barthes required reading for musicians?!

With all these things swimming around in my mind, what does the future hold?
1. Cage as Modernist. We like to believe that Cage's iconic 4'33'' is all about the expression of post-modern plurality and his aleatroric oeuvre an ode to absent authors a la Barthes. But what if, by reducing music to its essential elements (as in 4'33"), Cage offers a musical analogue to a Greenbergian (yes, Greenbergian) concept of art? I am referencing that which Greenberg would refer to as "post-painterly abstraction" and that all-too-loaded descriptor "modern."

2. Hindemith as Author: Conflicting Temporalities, Conflicting Epistemologies. There is a passage from "Death..." that surfaces in my mind with alarming frequency:

The Author...is always conceived of as the past of his own book: book and author stand automatically on a single line divided into a before and after. The Author is thought to nourish the book, which is to say that he exists before it, thinks, suffers, lives for it, is in the same relation of antecedence to his work as a father to his child. In complete contrast, 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 annunciation and every text is eternally written here and now. [1]

Most recently, these words appeared (figuratively speaking of course) as I practiced this concerto's introductory soliloquy. So much of Hindemith's musical material aligns him with a modern (ascetic) compositional style: an organicism indebted to Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and (papa) Schoenberg, an interest in structural austerity (Adolf Loos, anyone?), and aesthetic aims ostensibly opposed to nineteenth century decadence. In the case of Der Schwan, however, Hindemith's reference to storytelling in a musical space creates a paradox of temporalities: at once the performer acts as Author reconstituting that which has already occurred through his/her performing body while also engaging in a performative act, the "here and now."

3. Ornament, Asceticism and The Modern. As intimated in the preceding text, for the Moderns (that is to say, the fin-de-siecle Vienna intelligentsia), art ought to be imbued with both austerity and spirituality resulting in an asceticism that traces its progenitor to--surprisingly enough--Kantian aesthetics. Through explications on excerpts from Schoenberg's Style and Idea, Hermann Bahr's essay The Modern, and Weininger's Sex and Character I will elucidate the bondage of modernity to a intrinsically masculine spirituality that seeks to humiliate artistic "flesh" as a means to achieve aesthetic purity.

4. Anna Morandi Manzolini's Oeuvre in the "Century of Looking." A wax anatomist devalued by her contemporaries and subsequently the art historical canon, Morandi Manzolini provides, in her life and work, a lens through which to view a culture obsessed with looking. Although numerous feminist scholars have sought to reclaim and subsequently valorize Morandi Manzolini as a scientist and artist, more efficacious is the utilization of her work as a means by which to illuminate the eighteenth century urge to order, observe and control the body.

5. Performing Bodies, Objects in Motion. I read this passage from Feminine Endings and couldn't help but formulate a few thoughts. McClary writes:

For women’s bodies in Western culture have almost always been viewed as objects of display. Women have rarely been permitted agency in art, but instead have been restricted to enacting—upon and through their bodies—the theatrical, musical, cinematic, and dance scenarios concocted by male artists. Centuries of this traditional sexual division of cultural labor bear down upon…any woman performer…when she performs, always threatening to convert her once again into yet another body set in motion for the pleasure of the masculine gaze. It may be possible for men in the music profession to forget these issues, but no woman who has ever been on a stage, or even in front of a classroom, can escape them. [2]

The performing musician confronts the aforesaid crisis daily. Western art music is inextricably bound not only to a culture of insidiously subtle oppression but also within a web of Foucauldian force relations. As performers, listeners and scholars we participate in musical systems of inequity wherein our own bodies and those of our colleagues, students and teachers move perilously (and sadly, often aimlessly) through a minefield of subjugating gazes, historically conditioned responses, and unwittingly discriminatory discourses.

Excited?

1. Roland Barthes, Image, music, text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977). 145
2. Susan McClary, Feminine endings : music, gender, and sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). 138

the joy of feldman

Tomorrow night I will perform Feldman's The Viola in My Life (3). The piece took a little getting used to and quite a bit more practicing than I ever expected for something with a tempo marking "extremely slow and quiet," but tonight--the eve of my recital--I couldn't be more excited to perform it. Below is an excerpt from my program notes for tomorrow.

Described by author and New Yorker columnist Alex Ross as “one of the major composers of the twentieth century” and “a sovereign artist who opened up vast, quiet, agonizingly beautiful worlds of sound” Morton Feldman has been sadly neglected from contemporary concert programs. Ross, a tireless proponent of Feldman, also notes the composer's near-instant friendship with so-called American Maverick, John Cage: not surprisingly, the two bonded over a performance of Second Viennese School composer Anton Webern. In contrast to Cage, Feldman was brusque and imposing, boasting a six-foot, three hundred pound frame; one would hardly expect that the soul behind such a countenance was responsible for music that can only be described as a static ethereal soundscape dotted by forests of melancholic memories.

Shameless plug: Viola Recital: Clare Harmon, viola with Luke Foster, piano and Sarah Foster, violin | Thursday, August 19; 7:30pm | First Lutheran Church of New Richmond 258 N. 3rd Street, New Richmond WI

yoko, oh no!

The great thing about having your own music festival is that you can entertain ideas like programming Ono's Cut Piece. For our immediate future, this is completely not feasible. Let us all take a moment to imagine what it would be like if I performed Cut Piece--wherein the audience cuts off the performer's clothing until she/he is naked (or nearly so)--at First Lutheran Church of New Richmond. Right. It basically goes without saying that this would not be an option. However, I like the idea of programming some of Ono's works (how very conceptual of me!). Until recently, I'd been largely (though admittedly unjustifiably) an Ono naysayer, but taking an open and unbiased look at Cut Piece and the rest of her Fluxus-era oeuvre has completely turned me around. There are a few common themes running through much of her work that fit neatly with our mission statement, the most pertinent being the concept of the gift and the idea of audience participation. There is quite a bit more to say about Cut Piece and the rest of Ono's continually expanding oeuvre, for now I'll just include a video of the 1965 Carnegie Hall performance...

Notice the disturbing pace at which the piece progresses; the carelessness of the audience. There is something deeply unsettling about the performer/participant dynamic: something violent, disrespectful, and crass. Indeed, much more to say...

jottings, chiefly on visual + musical egalitarianism*

So I'm working on a short little flurry of a paper about what I'm calling "visual egalitarianism" in Jackson Pollock and his Abstract Expressionist colleagues. Thinking critically about the lack of a focal point or any sort of representation** in their work brings me back to this idea of equality and absolutism expressed in artistic forms. Considering the former, a few examples come to mind: Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School, Kandinsky, the AbEx'ists, Boulez, and Cage. With regards to the latter, I'm thinking of the First Viennese School, and the general "academic" style of Western Europe (anyone from Michelangelo to Titian to David, even Gerome).

Indeed, before we get to Kandinsky and the Second Viennese School [of Rock] and their descendants (Boulez/Pollock et al), we have to first look at their predecessors: the First Viennese School [of Rock]. The musical forms and aesthetic of the eighteenth century really offer a fantastic aural analogue to the socio-political milieu of the era. I'm specifically thinking about the disparity between the aristocracy/ruling class and everyone else. Essentially, musical hierarchies in the form of tonality (ie the tonic, dominant, and leading tone are the "important" scale degrees. An oversimplification, but you get the idea) mirror social structures (class). I'd really like to know a whole lot more about the French Revolution, but for now I'll just say that it is completely compelling the way that strict musical forms and harmonic structure begin to erode around the beginning of the nineteenth century, following various political upheavals (the French Revolution being just one example). Beethoven's Eroica is actually a great example of this in that the sonata form of the first movement is, well, jumbled. By reorganizing a then-familiar form, the composer challenges our expectations, thus subtly implying social change. Maybe. This is all pretty speculative.

So with this in mind, Schoenberg's Pan-Tonality (that is what he said) takes on a new social meaning. When he literally refers to it as an emancipation--how can we not read a kind of "liberation narrative" into the work? Considering also what we know about fin-de-siecle Vienna, Schoenberg's musical freedom-fight gains more complexity. At once, the composer is a member of the political minority (Christian socialist Lueger is in power) while also participating in a (sometimes violent) patriarchy. That is not to say that he was a misogynist (as far as I know, he wasn't), only to note the often complex relationship of minority to majority(ies). In a very real sense, the emancipation represents not only a break from the musical past, but also implies a kind of Utopian ideal--not surprising given Schoenberg's own biography and what I can imagine would be a hell of a time living in Vienna around 1900.

With regards to the visual arts, I'd like to discuss Kandinsky and the AbEx'ists. Taking the example of Kandinsky, we can notice a break down of visual hierarchy, something like Composition IV (1911) is tottering on the brink of non-representational art.

Figure non-representational: Kandinsky's Composition IV

Although that is a sort of "well, duh" analysis, the aforesaid connection between abstraction and equality is what makes this sort of thing compelling. Recently, I was speaking with one of my mum's friends (a visual artist) about Schoenberg and this idea of pantonality as a representation of equality; being an awfully sharp tac, she brought up Kandinsky's work--for her, the musical analogue in that when art is non-representational, all shapes, colors and lines are equal. This conversation still fresh in my mind, I began to mull over the notion of representation as being inherently unequal with regards to the AbEx'ists.

These guys were, in my mind, both ideological and stylistic descendants of Kandinsky. Similarities abound, the most obvious being the non-representational style and a sort of spiritual relationship between artist, canvas, and material (the material being much more important for the AbEx'ists). However, more intriguing is the American public's reaction to Pollock and his pals. Upheld as arbiters of a quintessential American art, their works and personae were used as a cultural weapon in the cold war: they were celebrated as visual symbols of democracy. Certainly, you can discuss the movement of the avant-garde from Paris to New York; the American adoration of the "new," but from my perspective the notion of visual egalitarianism is the most "American" aspect of their work.

Figure visual egalitarianism: Pollock's Autumn Rhythm

*that is a little Aristotle jokey-joke(!) Yay Poetics!
**I'm thinking here about formal hierarchy: there is an inherent value judgment in notions of foreground versus background. Indeed, one might argue that a line that implicates contour is more important (valuable) than one that participates in say, a cross hatch. The main idea being that in representational art, one line can have more meaning than another.