Recently, I had the opportunity to read Backlash and The Beauty Myth in close succession. Worse (or better, perhaps) yet, I chose to reread The Transparency of Evil and The History of Sexuality in concert with Faludi and Wolf. The result, as those close to me will attest, was an overabundance of conversations centered on sentiments such as “the world is going to hell” and “I’m so angry about the culture of the nineties.” Indeed, Faludi and Wolf created a haunting picture of the world into which the women of my generation were born. Below I have written some preliminary thoughts on my experience and reactions to the aforementioned texts. However, more than just the feelings of anger and hopelessness Wolf and Faludi stirred within me, their accounts of the third-wave woman’s complex condition inspired several avenues for musical and cultural research--avenues I look forward to exploring over the next several weeks.
I would encourage everyone to engage with these texts, difficult and uncomfortable though they may be. A wise man once said, “you can never be truly free until you understand your conditioning.” Go. Read!
Cognizant only of image, commodity, and base sensations, we drift through a gray peril punctuated by unsettling sameness. Our experience has flattened and spread. Although once noble, the present condition of humanity represents a toxic leak contaminating the sacred, the pristine and the immaculate. Where the child was once a capsule of potentiality and hope, she is now, since the most recent fin-de-siecle, disfigured, grotesque. Like the prodigious birth, like the sixteenth-century horror, like the aberration of unmitigated otherness, late twentieth-century youth entered a world of hostile categories vigorously enforced by a virtual reality and a subtle violence.
We learned that being alive was being abused. We learned that to suffer for beauty was a kind of perverted noblesse oblige. To be thin was to be virtuous and extremes of asceticism and hedonism were strict poles by which we were to model our lives. The uncompromising binary was queen; we were taught that the ideal woman existed in constant conflict: at once living the second-wave dream while yearning for the mystique of feminine docility and domesticity. We learned that to be a woman was to maintain a tenuous balance and willingly endure its pain. We learned to expect violence.
I’ve been ruminating on these two texts for some time, trying to make sense of them within the context of my own socialization, but also within the realm of musical practice. To be a musician is to enjoy a similarly paradoxical relationship with sacrifice, violence and victimization. We inflict the invasive violence of sound upon our spectator while instigating simultaneous symbolic self-immolation. Articulating the phenomenology of music-making is something best left to the experts (Turino! Peirce!), however the body emblazoned by performance constitutes one facet of a complex force-relationship. While we perform music we perform a cycle of violence: our frustrations, our woes, our years of practice transmute into an act of assault; we violate our audience as we have been violated.
Showing posts with label violence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label violence. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
Monday, March 14, 2011
music + violence (part ii: torture)
As you know, I've been thinking about this quite a bit. My current project involves understanding classical music as a product of eighteenth century socio-cultural machinations that constructed the body as a primary locus for the transmission of “culture,” class, and power. In varying guises, physical conditioning and observation were utilized to formulate an ideal, “docile” body.
A good deal of this is inspired by Foucault (here! here!) and McClary (go! read it!), but recent exposure to The Beauty Myth has inspired further thought on the violent effect of disciplinary practices. I've referenced Wolff before, however in light of my current project on the subversive, sinister underpinnings of eighteenth century music, I would like to reference and reflect upon her description of the Iron Maiden and its contemporary analogue, the "modern hallucination" in which we (women) are currently entrapped.
Wolff describes the aesthetic duplicity, formal simplicity, and functional complexity of the Iron Maiden writing: "The original Iron Maiden was a medieval German instrument of torture, a body-shaped casket painted with the limbs and features of a lovely, smiling young woman. The unlucky victim was slowly enclosed inside her; the lid fell shut to immobilize the victim, who died either of starvation or, less cruelly, of the metal spikes embedded in her interior" [1]. Although Wolff likens the device to the very condition (and indeed conditioning) of women in the late twentieth century West [2], the analogy can--I believe--also be applied to eighteenth century music.
Indeed, aesthetic duplicity and formal simplicity provide apt descriptors for the music of Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven (and yes, Stamitz). The wise and wonderful Arthur Schnabel once said, "Mozart is too easy for children, but too difficult for professionals." The equally wise and wonderful Alfred Brendel explains this stating that potential performers of Mozart's keyboard works "...either don't see the complications and think the pieces are too easy, or they do see the complications and find them too difficult." [3] Both Schnabel and Brendel articulate the expressive difficulties of eighteenth century music, however I would go further to say that it is this very aesthetic deception that contributes to disciplinary function.
Ostensibly innocuous, music of the classical period reflects those facets of human experience so valued by eighteenth century culture: pleasure, nature, facility, subversive control. Operating similarly to the Iron Maiden, these aspects of classical style pacify potential victims. Circumscribed by perfect proportions, golden means, and symmetrical sameness, both interpreters and listeners are entrapped and subsequently suffocated by an artform that valorizes an intrinsically unattainable ideal. Like the victims of the Iron Maiden, classical performers find a horrific end. It is the deception articulated by Brendel and Schnabel that so effectively ensnares performers and listeners. Fooled by a pleasing facade (the proverbial Iron Maiden), we become unwittingly implicated in and controlled by centuries-old disciplinary practices. We are tortured, contained, and insidiously transformed into instruments of control. Slowly--and indeed painfully--we acquiesce to hegemonic normative practices that reinforce hierarchical social structures based upon class, gender, and ethnicity.
However, where the Iron Maiden operates with relative swiftness, music of the classical era erodes its victims and their surrounding milieu over time. Insidious, its contemporary performance--as a violent practice--is indicative of our age of illusion. The repetition integrated in musical text and integral to effective performance (read: hours spent practicing) divorces the interpreter from musical meaning. Furthermore, the proliferation of recordings of every stripe dehumanize, decorporealize the act of music making. We are instruments in our own virtual deconstruction.
Thus, like victims of the most elegant medieval torture devices our flesh erodes slowly, we are left to vanish piece-meal into the ether: rotting piles of putrid matter.
[1] Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used against Women. New York: W. Morrow, 1991. 17
[2] Ibid. "The modern hallucination in which women are trapped or trap themselves is similarly rigid, cruel, and euphemistically painted. Contemporary culture directs attention to imagery of the Iron Maiden, while censoring real women's faces and bodies."
[3] http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4845085
A good deal of this is inspired by Foucault (here! here!) and McClary (go! read it!), but recent exposure to The Beauty Myth has inspired further thought on the violent effect of disciplinary practices. I've referenced Wolff before, however in light of my current project on the subversive, sinister underpinnings of eighteenth century music, I would like to reference and reflect upon her description of the Iron Maiden and its contemporary analogue, the "modern hallucination" in which we (women) are currently entrapped.
Wolff describes the aesthetic duplicity, formal simplicity, and functional complexity of the Iron Maiden writing: "The original Iron Maiden was a medieval German instrument of torture, a body-shaped casket painted with the limbs and features of a lovely, smiling young woman. The unlucky victim was slowly enclosed inside her; the lid fell shut to immobilize the victim, who died either of starvation or, less cruelly, of the metal spikes embedded in her interior" [1]. Although Wolff likens the device to the very condition (and indeed conditioning) of women in the late twentieth century West [2], the analogy can--I believe--also be applied to eighteenth century music.
Indeed, aesthetic duplicity and formal simplicity provide apt descriptors for the music of Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven (and yes, Stamitz). The wise and wonderful Arthur Schnabel once said, "Mozart is too easy for children, but too difficult for professionals." The equally wise and wonderful Alfred Brendel explains this stating that potential performers of Mozart's keyboard works "...either don't see the complications and think the pieces are too easy, or they do see the complications and find them too difficult." [3] Both Schnabel and Brendel articulate the expressive difficulties of eighteenth century music, however I would go further to say that it is this very aesthetic deception that contributes to disciplinary function.
Ostensibly innocuous, music of the classical period reflects those facets of human experience so valued by eighteenth century culture: pleasure, nature, facility, subversive control. Operating similarly to the Iron Maiden, these aspects of classical style pacify potential victims. Circumscribed by perfect proportions, golden means, and symmetrical sameness, both interpreters and listeners are entrapped and subsequently suffocated by an artform that valorizes an intrinsically unattainable ideal. Like the victims of the Iron Maiden, classical performers find a horrific end. It is the deception articulated by Brendel and Schnabel that so effectively ensnares performers and listeners. Fooled by a pleasing facade (the proverbial Iron Maiden), we become unwittingly implicated in and controlled by centuries-old disciplinary practices. We are tortured, contained, and insidiously transformed into instruments of control. Slowly--and indeed painfully--we acquiesce to hegemonic normative practices that reinforce hierarchical social structures based upon class, gender, and ethnicity.
However, where the Iron Maiden operates with relative swiftness, music of the classical era erodes its victims and their surrounding milieu over time. Insidious, its contemporary performance--as a violent practice--is indicative of our age of illusion. The repetition integrated in musical text and integral to effective performance (read: hours spent practicing) divorces the interpreter from musical meaning. Furthermore, the proliferation of recordings of every stripe dehumanize, decorporealize the act of music making. We are instruments in our own virtual deconstruction.
Thus, like victims of the most elegant medieval torture devices our flesh erodes slowly, we are left to vanish piece-meal into the ether: rotting piles of putrid matter.
[1] Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used against Women. New York: W. Morrow, 1991. 17
[2] Ibid. "The modern hallucination in which women are trapped or trap themselves is similarly rigid, cruel, and euphemistically painted. Contemporary culture directs attention to imagery of the Iron Maiden, while censoring real women's faces and bodies."
[3] http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4845085
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
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.
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