"Why is the spirituality of the musician in "High" cultures so often a low-down spirituality?
In India, for example, the musician belongs to a caste so low it hovers on the verge of untouchability. This lowness relates, in popular attitudes, to the musician's invariable use of forbidden intoxicants.
In Ireland the musician shared the same Indo-European reputation for lowness. The bards or poets ranked with aristocrats and even royalty, but musicians were merely the servants of the bards. In Dumezil's tripartite structure of Indo-European society, as reflected in Ireland, music seems to occupy an ambiguous fourth zone, symbolized by the fourth province of Munster, the "south". Music is thus associated with "dark" druidism, sexual license, gluttony, nomadry and other outsider phenomena.
In all these cases the music itself represents the highest spirituality of the culture. Music itself being "bodiless" and metalinguistic (or metasemantic) is always (metaphorically or actually) the supreme expression of pure imagination as vehicle for the spirit. The lowness of the musician is connected to the perceived danger of music, its ambiguity, its elusive quality, its manifestation as lowness as well as highness -- as pleasure.
Music as pleasure is not connected to the mind (or purified elements of spirit) but to the body. Music rises from the (inarticulate) body and is received by the body (as vibration, as sexuality). Chant is music which sublimates the body.
Paradox: -- that which is "holy" is "forbidden" As Bataille points out, sanctity and transgression both arise from the fracturing of the "order of intimacy", the separation of the "human" from "nature". The "original" expression of this violent break is undoubtedly musical. Subsequent to this "first" expression, a further separation begins to appear: -- the musician remains involved in the "violence" of the break with the intimate order in a special way, and so is seen as an uncanny person (like the witch, or the metallurgist).
The musician emerges as a specialist within a still non-hierarchic society of hunter/gatherers, and the musician begins to take on the sign of the taboo to the extent that the tribe's undivided culture or "collective self" is affronted by this separation or transformation. The undivided culture (like the Mbutu) knows no "musician" in this sense, but only music. As division, and then hierarchy, begin to appear in society, the position of the musician becomes problematic. Like "primitive" society, these hierarchic "traditional" societies also wish to preserve something unbroken at the heart of their culture. If society is "many", culture will preserve a counter-balancing cohesiveness which is the sign of the original sacred order of intimacy, prolonged into the deepest spiritual meanings of the society, and thus preserved. So much for music -- but what about the musician?
Hierarchic society permits itself to remain relatively undivided by sacralizing the specializations. Music, inasmuch as it is bodiless, can be the sign of the upper caste (its "spirituality") -- but inasmuch as music arises from the body (it is sublimed -- it "rises"), the musician (originator/origin of the music) must be symbolized by the body and hence must be "low". Music is spiritual -- the musician is corporeal. The spirituality of the musician is low but also ambiguous in its production of highness. (Drugs substitute for the priest's ritual highness to make the musician high enough to produce aesthetic highness.)
The musician is not just low but uncanny -- not just low but "outside". The power of the musician in society is like the power of the magician -- the excluded shaman -- in its relation to wildness. And yet it is precisely these hierarchic societies which create "seamless" cultures -- including music. This is true even after the break -- in the western tradition -- between the "oneness" of melody and the "doubleness" of harmony.
The ambiguity of music allows it to drift between high and low and yet remain undivided. This is "tradition". It includes the subversive by excluding the musician (and the artist generally) and yet granting them power.
Thus for example the lowly musician Tansen attained the equivalent of aristocratic status in the art-intoxicated Mughal court; and Zeami (the great dramatist of the Noh theater of Japan, a form of opera), although he belonged to the untouchable caste of actors and musicians, rose to great heights of refinement because the Shogun fell in love with him when he was 13; to the Court's horror, the Shogun shared food with Zeami and granted courtly status to the Noh.
For the musician the power of inspiration can be transmuted into the power of power. Consider for example the Turkish Janisseries, the Ottoman Imperial Guard, who all belonged to the heterodox (wine-drinking) Bektashi Sufi Order, and who invented military marching bands. Judging by European accounts of Janissery bands, which always speak of the sheer terror they induced, these musicians discovered a kind of psychological warfare which certainly bestowed prestige on this very ambiguous group, made up of slaves of the Sultan.
Traditional music always remains satisfactory (even when not "inspired") because it remains unbroken -- both the high tradition and the low are the same "thing". Indian brass bands -- Mozart -- the same universe. In Mozart's own character (reflected in his "servant" characters like Leparello) we again discern the figure of the outsider, the gypsy-wunderkind, the toy of aristocrats, with a strong link to the low culture of beer-gardens and peasant clog-dances, and a fondness for bohemian excess.
The musician is a kind of "grotesque" -- disobedient servant, drunk, nomadic, brilliant. For the musician the perfect moment is that of the festival, the world turned upside down, the saturnalia, when servants and masters change places for a day. The festival is nothing without the musician, who presides over the momentary reversal -- and thus the reconciliation -- of all separated functions and forces in traditional society. Music is the perfect sign of the festal, and thereby of the "material bodily principle" celebrated by Bakhtin. In the intoxication of conviviality in the carneval, music emerges as a kind of utopian structure or shaping force -- music becomes the very "order of intimacy".
Next morning, however, the broken order resumes its sway. Dialectics alone (if not "History") demonstrate that undivided culture is not an unmixed "good", in that it rests on a divided society. Where hierarchy has not appeared there is no music separate from the rest of experience. Once music becomes a category (along with the categorization of society), it has already begun to be alienated -- hence the appearance of the specialist, the musician, and the taboo on the musician.
Since it is impossible to tell whether the musician is sacred or profane (this being the perceived nature of the social split) this taboo serves to fill up the crack (and preserve the "unbrokenness" of tradition) by considering the musician as both sacred and profane. In effect the hierarchical society metes out punishments to all castes/classes for their shared guilt in the violation of the order of intimacy. Priests and kings are surrounded by taboos -- chastity, or the sacrifice of the (vegetal) king, etc. The artist's punishment is to be a kind of outcaste paradoxically attached to the highest functions in society. [Note that the poet is not an "artist" in this sense and can retain caste because poetry is logos, akin to revelation. Poetry pertains to the "aristocratic" in traditional societies (e.g. Ireland). Interestingly the modern world has reversed this polarity in terms of money, so that the "low-caste" painter and musician are now wealthy and thus "higher" than the unrewarded poet.]
The "injustice" of the categorization of music is its separation from "the tribe", the whole people, including each and every individual. For inasmuch as the musician is excluded, music is excluded, inaccessible. But this injustice does not become apparent until the separations and alienations within society itself become so exacerbated and exaggerated that a split is perceived in culture. High and low are now out of touch -- no reciprocity. The aristos never hear the music of the folk, and vice versa. Reciprocity of high and low traditions ceases -- and thus cross-fertilization and cultural renewal within the "unbroken" tradition.
In the western world this exacerbation of separation occurs roughly with industrialization and commodity capitalism -- but it has "pre-echoes" in the cultural sphere. Bach adapted a "rational" mathematical form of well-temperedness over the older more "organic" systems of tuning. In a subtle sense a break has occurred within the unbroken tradition -- others will follow. Powerful "inspiration" is released by this "break with tradition", titanic genius, touched to some extent with morbidity.
For the "first time" so to speak the question arises: -- whether one says yes or no to life itself. Bach's anguished spirituality (the "paranoia" of the Pietist gambling on Faith alone) was sometimes resolved with a "romantic" effusion of darkness. These impulses are "revolutionary" in respect to a tradition which suffers almost-unbearable contradictions. Their very nay-saying opens up the possibility of a whole new "yes". Despite its tremendous inner tension, Bach's music is "healing" because he had to heal himself in order to create it in the first place. Healing -- but not un-wounded. Bach as wounded healer.
It's not surprising that people preferred Telemann. Telemann was also a genius -- as in his "Water Music" -- but his genius remained at home within the unbroken tradition. If Bach is the first modern, he is the last ancient. If Bach is healing, Telemann is healed, already whole. His yes is the unspoken yes of sacred custom -- naturally, of course, one has never thought otherwise. Telemann is still -- supremely -- our servant. This kind of "health" is exemplified in only a few composers after Telemann -- Mendelsohn, for instance. One might call it "Pindaric", and one might defend it even against "intelligence".
The bohemian life of the modern artist, so "alienated from society", is nothing but the old low-down spirituality of the musician and artisan castes, recontextualized in an economy of commodities. Baudelaire (as Benjamin argued) had no economic function in the 19th century society -- his low-down spirituality turned inward and became self-destructive, because it had lost its functionality in the social. Villon was just as much a bohemian, but at least he still had a role in the economy -- as a thief! The artist's privilege -- to be drunk, to be insouciant -- has now become the artist's curse. The artist is no longer a servant -- refuses to serve -- except as unacknowledged legislator. As revolutionary. The artist now claims, like Beethoven, either a vanguard position, or -- like Baudelaire -- complete exile. The musician no longer accepts low caste, but must be either Brahmin or untouchable.
Wagner -- and Nietzsche, when he was propagandizing for Wagner -- conceived of a musical revolution against the broken order in the cause of a new and higher (conscious) form of the order of intimacy: -- integral Dionysian culture viewed as the revolutionary goal of romanticism. The outsider as king. Opera is the utopia of music (as Charles Fourier also realized). In opera music appropriates the logos and thus challenges revelation's monopoly on meaning.
If opera failed as revolution -- as Nietzsche came to realize -- it was because the audience had refused to go away. The opera of Wagner or Fourier can only succeed as the social if it becomes the social -- by eliminating the category of art, of music, as anything separate from life. The audience must become the opera. Instead -- the opera became . . . just another commodity. A public ritual celebrating post-sacred social values of consumption and sentiment -- the sacralization of the secular. A step along the road to the spectacle.
The commodification of music measures precisely the failure of the romantic revolution of music -- its mummification in the repertoire, the Canon -- the recuperation of its dissidence as the rhetoric of liberalism, "culture and taste". Wave after wave of the "avant-garde" attempted to transcend civilization -- a process which is only now coming to an end in the apotheosis of commodification, its "final ecstasy."
To argue that music itself, like language, is a form of alienation, however, would seem to demand an "impossible" return to a Paleolithic that is nearly pre-"human". But perhaps the stone Age is not somewhere else, distant and nearly inaccessible, but rather (in some sense) present. Perhaps we shall experience not a return to the Stone Age, but a return of the Stone Age (symbolized, in fact, by the very discovery of the Paleolithic, which occurred only recently). A few decades ago civilized ears literally could not hear "primitive" music except as noise; Europeans could not even hear the non-harmonic traditional classical music of India or China except as meaningless rubbish. The same held true for Paleolithic art, for instance -- no one noticed the cave paintings till the late 19th century, even though they'd been "discovered" many times already.
Civilization was defined by rational consciousness, rationality was defined as civilized consciousness -- outside this totality only chaos and sheer unintelligibility could exist. But now things have changed -- suddenly, just as the "primitive" and the "traditional" seem on the verge of disappearance, we can hear them. How? Why?
Is there actually a problem with the commodification of music? Why should we assume an "elitist" position now, even as new technology makes possible a "mass" participation in music through the virtual infinity of choice, and the "electric democracy" of musical synthesis? Why complain about the degradation of the aura of the "work of art" in the age of mechanical reproduction, as if art could or should still be defended as a category of high value?
But it's not "Western Civilization" we're defending here, and it's not the sanctity of aesthetic production either. We maintain that participation in the commodity can only amount to a commodification of participation, a simulation of aesthetic democracy. A higher synthesis of the Old Con, promising "The Real Thing now" but delivering only another betrayal of hope. The problem of music remains the same problem -- that of alienation, of the separation of consumers from producers. Despite positive possibilities brought into being by the sheer multiplication of resources made accessible through reproduction technology, the overwhelming complex of alienation outweighs all subversive counterforces working for utopian ends.
As we reach out to touch music it recedes from our grasp like a mirage. Everywhere, in every restaurant, shop, public space, we undergo the "noise pollution" of music -- its very ubiquity measures our impotence, our lack of participation, of "choice". And what music! A venal and venial counterfeit of all the "revolutionary" music of the past, the throbbing sexualized music that once sounded like the death knell of Western Civilization, now becomes the sonic wallpaper hiding a facade of cracks, rifts, absences, fears, the anodyne for despair and anomie -- elevator music, waiting room music, pulsing to the 4/4 beat, the old "square" rhythm of European rationalism, flavored with a homeopathic tinge of African heat or Asian spirituality -- the utopian trace -- memories of youth betrayed and transformed into the aural equivalent of Prozac and Colt 45.
And still each new generation of youth claims this "revolution" as its own, adding or subtracting a note or beat here or there, pushing the "transgressive" envelope a bit further, and calling it "new music" -- and each generation in turn becomes simply a statistical mass of consumersbusily creating the airport music of its own future, mourning the "sell-outs", wondering what went wrong.
Western classical music has become the sign of bourgeois power -- but it is an empty sign inasmuch as its period of primary production is over. There are no more symphonies to be written in C major.
Music reminds us of one of those cinematic-vampire-victims, already so drained of life as to be almost one of the Undead -- shall we abandon her?
Music is the most border-permeating of all arts -- perhaps not the "universal language", but only because it is in fact not a language at all, unless perhaps a "language of the birds". The "universal" appeal of music lies in its direct link to utopian emotion, or desire, and beyond that to the utopian imagination. By its interpenetration of time and pleasure, music expresses and evokes a "perfect" time (purged of boredom and fear) and "perfect" pleasure (purged of all regret). Music is bodiless, yet it is from the body and it is for the body -- and this too makes it utopian in nature. For utopia is "no place", and yet utopia concerns the body above all.
As a "complete art-work" the opera will involve music and words, dance, painting, poetry -- in a system based on "analogies" or occult correspondences between the senses and their objects. For instance, the 12 tones in music correspond to the 12 Passions (desires or emotions), the 12 colors, and the 12 basic Series of the Phalanx or utopian community, etc.
By orchestrating these correspondences, Harmonian operas will far exceed the paltry music-dramas of Civilization in beauty, luxury, inspiration, not to mention sheer scope. They will utilize the hieroglyphic science of Harmonian art to provide education, propaganda, entertainment, artistic transcendence, and erotic fulfillment -- all at once. Sound, sight, intellect, all the senses will respond to the complex multi-dimensional emblems of the opera, made up of words and music, reason and emotion, and perhaps even touch and smell.
From our point of view we can now say that the music is ours -- not someone else's -- not the musician's, not the record company's, not the radio station's, not the shopkeeper's, not the MUZAK company's not the devil's -- but ours.
Music will never lose its holy unholiness; it will always contain the trace of the violence of sacrifice. How then could the "blues" ever come to an end -- that orgone indigo utopian melancholy caress of sound, that little-bit-too-much, that difference? The low caste of the musician will of course be dissolved in utopia -- but somehow a certain untouchability will linger, a certain dandyism, a pride. The one tragedy that this Harmonian Blues will never lament is the loss of the blues of itself, its appropriation, its alienation, its betrayal, its demonic possession. This is the "utopian minimum", the money-back guarantee, the sine qua non -- the music is ours." [Hakim Bey, The Utopian Blues]
All creativity is rooted in an absence, a need. The most profound artistic expressions are expressions of deep pain and suffering.
In the case of music it is a form of spiritual flight; a fleeing form the worldly where the need/suffering is rooted and the most perfect representation of existence: a succession of sonar notes which fade but are replaced by others in a continuum that slowly fades but does not go away.
It is natural that from the lowest stratum of a social hierarchy art will be produced with some value, particularly when it is also a form of entertainment and so, as was noted, the musician is a bard, a sort of court performer trying to tap into the deepest recesses of his lord's soul.
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Recidivist
Gender : Posts : 435 Join date : 2012-04-30 Age : 48 Location : Exile
Post your examples of Western culture being degraded by the forces of neo-liberalism and its sympathizers.
Here Bobby McFerrin makes a mockery of Bach to the delight of the simpleton crowd, who see in his performance a validation of the modern need to pour scorn on anything traditional or sophisticated.
One can only imagine people from Bach's era reacting with shock and sadness as to how far their culture has fallen; a performance that would be more at home in a circus or comedy show than a Bach festival.
_________________ “During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” - - George Orwell
Recidivist
Gender : Posts : 435 Join date : 2012-04-30 Age : 48 Location : Exile
Derek Walcott, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, 1991:
Walcott is one of the few blacks that didn't win a noble prize for peace, hence his contribution to Western culture should come under particular scrutiny. Walcott treads between great European poets carefully, paying homage to each, Joyce, Homer, Dante, Virgil, Eliot are all copied, none are rejected. Walcott builds a traditional epic poem - Omeros - around imitating their work. Of course, the history of slavery and colonialism is treated at length, as it must be in order to achieve his goals, and Walcott is suitably humble about his poem, stating that it is not an epic. This is simply another strategy of black thinkers attempting to gain entry to the Western canon. He has been successful.
Here are some quotes from reviewers:
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Postcolonial Homer Walcott confidently feels his way into epic form, borrowing the blind eyes of Homer and tropes from Homer's tales.
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...there is a fictional plot set on St. Lucia, where the poor black fishermen Achilles and Hector fight over the beautiful Helen. They are joined by a supporting cast of other fishermen and residents of St. Lucia's shantytowns, as well as by British retirees Dennis and Maud Plunkett.
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This richly allusive poem is an exploration of the colonial experience, primarily from the viewpoint of the dispossessed.
The poem itself is an effort to reconcile both the European tradition with the experience of dispossession and enslavement.
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The second strand is the itinerant academic Walcott's own wanderings over the globe and his relationship with his poetic forebears. He dwells on the pre-contact inhabitants of the Caribbean, the African slave trade and the inequalities of the 18th-century colonial empires. This poetry is of sometimes hermetic or confessional nature, and contains outright imitation of T.S. Eliot, Dante, Homer and others.
Here is an example of the verse. In my opinion Walcotts themes and metaphors are overly transparent, reeking of complacent liberal sympathy, and simplistically handled.
Quote :
All that Greek manure under the green bananas . . . glazed by the transparent page of what I had read. What I had read and rewritten till literature was guilty as History. When would the sails drop from my eyes . . . When would my head shake off its echoes like a horse shaking off a wreath of flies? . . . But it was mine to make what I wanted of it, or What I thought was wanted.
Derek Walcott, Omeros (LIV.iii, pp. 271–72)
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It is not hard to see that Ireland is important to Omeros. The figure of Joyce is staged unmistakably at significant moments, the Irish landscape is powerfully evoked—particularly literary Dublin with Joyce's Howth and the Martello Tower, and Glen-da-Lough, the ancient spiritual center—and Maud Plunkett is given an Irish identity.
Quote :
In a 1977 interview with Edward Hirsch, Derek Walcott explained his affinities with Irish culture and poets. Asked about the influence of Synge and Yeats on his dramatic work, Walcott explained, “The whole Irish influence was for me a very intimate one. . . . I’ve always felt some kind of intimacy with the Irish poets because one realized that they were also colonials with the same kind of problems that existed in the Caribbean. They were the niggers of Britain”
Read the full article if you can stomach it (not surprisingly Maud has a large sexual appetite, her English husband more repressed):
Walcott's simplistic appraisal of the Irish as the niggers of Britain is only an excuse to affiliate his work with their tradition. But who elses coat tails is Walcott going to hang onto, no other group of European outsiders have such a rich cultural and intellectual history.
And why does Walcott not use the work of African cultures, if his goal is a critique of European hegemony? Because he is seeking access to the European canon, he knows African culture will not cut it, being so childish and naive, so he must borrow and imitate, like a good house-nigger, and not be overly critical.
Then he will get his banana.
.
_________________ “During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” - - George Orwell
Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37196 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
The interesting thing is that amongst certain circles the Greeks are also called the Niggers of Europe. I do not want to flatter you but I've always felt an affinity to Irish culture...and love Irish women. Celtic music is riveting...the tradition of singing and drinking at a funeral is, if true, admirable. I like the idea of it so much that I wish to include it in my Will and Testament as my last desire, leaving an appropriate sum of money towards this end.
Peoples who have produces great culture have always had this undercurrent of nostalgia and sadness to them; a joyful fatalism.
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apaosha Daeva
Gender : Posts : 1849 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 37 Location : Ireland
I can understand why the irish would be considered niggers of europe... we've been downtrodden for so long and as a country and people have accomplished little.
Though, most of the irish that are accomplished have either emigrated or been influenced. The Irish Americans and Anglo-Irish in particular. There is a peasant mentality here that has survived for centuries and will probably persist for centuries to come. It stems from the repeated invasions, the repeated destruction of our aristocracy and it's replacement with foreigners. As well as the Catholic church.
If I am at all accomplished at anything it is because I too have been influenced; by the germans, greeks, japanese, americans, etc. With respect to my own heritage, one would have to go back to the pre-christian era to find any worthwhile influence. 1500+ years ago.
I was at a funeral last week. The practice is to get drunk and merry afterwards in order to remember the deceased. The day before the funeral, the open coffin is displayed in a relative's house and people recite the rosary. During the night there's sometimes a vigil over the body. I think that's called a Wake. I didn't take part in most of that, though I was one of the coffin Bearers.
_________________ "I do not exhort you to work but to battle; I do not exhort you to peace but to victory. May your work be a battle; may your peace be a victory." -TSZ
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
"Ragtime is the musical expression of an attitude toward life only too familiar to us all, an attitude shallow, restless, avid of excitement, incapable of sustained attention, skimming the surface of everything, finding nowhere satisfaction, realization, or repose. It is a meaningless stirabout, a commotion without purpose, an epilepsy stimulating controlled musical action. It is a musical counterpart of the sterile cleverness we find in so much of our contemporary conversation, as well as in our theater and our books. No candid observer could deny the prominence in our American life of this restlessness of which ragtime is one expression."
-Daniel Gregory Mason, March 1918, New Music Review
“Popular music,” argued Farwell, “is not forced upon the people; it is created out of their own spirit…what right has the man of culture to pass judgment upon the goodness or badness of ragtime, of popular music as a whole – in short, to make out a case against the popular song?” (24). Disagreeing, his critics pronounced ragtime unequivocally “bad;” for them, popular music was a consequence of America’s ever more disparate distribution of resources. Money-grubbing capitalists, they argued, forced popular music down the throats of an ignorant and exhausted proletariat. Rudolph Bismarck Von Liebich, replying to Farwell’s assertion that popular music represented the needs and desires of its consumers, wrote:
With the advent of the machine age, when the giant tools of production (machines, factories, railroads) are owned by the few for their private gain and the worker is compelled to beg for work, which may at any time be denied him, he has no heart for song. Music as a spontaneous means of self-expression is no longer for him. He accepts songs like his clothes, made for one reason only – profit; and songs and clothes alike are shoddy, to his dire and tragic impoverishment. (26)
... Jazz originally was the accompaniment of the voodoo dancer, stimulating the half-crazed barbarians to the vilest deeds. The weird chant, accompanied by the syncopated rhythm of the voodoo invokers, has been employed by other barbaric people to stimulate brutality and sensuality” (Faulkner 16). The ever-growing popularity of this music alarmed those who feared the growing influence of cultural forms associated with African-Americans. By 1913, the prevalence of popular music in American consciousness seemed so widespread as to prompt this letter to the editor of the Musical Courier:
SIR – Can it be said that America is falling prey to the collective soul of the Negro through the influence of what is popularly known as “rag time” music? Some sociological writers of prominence believe so; all psychologists are of the opinion. One thing is infallibly certain: if there is any tendency toward such a national disaster, it should be definitely pointed out and extreme measures taken to inhibit the influence and avert the increasing danger – if it has not already gone too far. (Kenilworth 22)
Interestingly, bourgeois critics did not condemn all “black” music. African-American “folk” music (spirituals and plantation chants) was often approved of and accorded a guarded acceptance alongside the cherished masterworks of Beethoven, Mozart, and Brahms (among others). It is likely that many white critics deemed African-American folk music “safe” because it represented a time when Blacks “knew their place” at the bottom of the social hierarchy under slavery; they likewise approved of the oft-religious themes.
As a critic patiently explained, Americans, in their enthusiasm for “manufactured” popular music, failed to appreciate “the wealth and beauty of the true Negro songs” from the antebellum era. Indeed, she went on to argue that
Side by side with the too highly civilized white race the Negro must in time have eliminated from him all his God-given best instincts and so fail utterly. For are they not already ashamed of their old African music? They should be taught that slavery, with its occasional abuses, was simply a valuable training in their evolution from savagery, and not look upon their bondage and their slave music with shame. (Murphy 1730)
The middle class African-American response to such racial discourse was complex. African-Americans were integral to the formation and expansion of both ragtime and early jazz, yet their relationship to American popular music was ambivalent and contested. While white critics readily assigned an African origin to the popular music they so despised, black writers sought to complicate such assumptions. “I do not see why this music should be put upon the shoulders of the Negro solely,” argued the editor of the Negro Music Journal, “for it does not portray his nature, nor is its rhythm distinctly characteristic of our race” (“Our Musical Condition” 138).
Popular music in all its permutations was often subject to sweeping condemnations by these arbiters of Black middle-class propriety. As Kevin Gaines argues, “Virtually all but the most unchurched and bohemian black elites were unable to distinguish the aesthetically ambitious ragtime piano compositions of, for example, Scott Joplin, from humiliating coon songs and minstrel characters” (76). Instead, critics struggled to maintain a strict separation between classical music, with its connotations of learning and respectability, and popular forms associated, unfairly or not, with demeaning racial stereotypes.
... Both agreed that the irresistibly syncopated rhythms of popular music, bypassing one’s mental faculties and moral sensibilities, left listeners “powerless” to resist the appeals it made to the body. Although the earliest published accounts of ragtime often focused on professional entertainers, recounting “a distinct rhythm and mode, so to speak, throughout the Negro melodies… [which] lend themselves to the dance which usually accompanies the popular song when sung on the stage,” writers soon began to describe the dramatic (and often unsettling) effects of popular music on its listeners (“Music Halls” 536). In 1903, a music professor intending to dispassionately observe ragtime music at a masquerade ball instead found himself caught up in the energy:
Suddenly I discovered that my legs were in a condition of great excitement. They twitched as though charged with electricity and betrayed a considerable and rather dangerous desire to jerk me from my seat. The rhythm of the music, which had seemed so unnatural at first, was beginning to exert its influence over me.
...Although traditionalist discourses condemned ragtime and jazz for their relentless assault upon the American body, critics also argued that the damage inflicted by popular music went far beyond the dance madness denounced from the bench as “a series of snakelike gyrations and weird contortions of seemingly agonized bodies and limbs” (“Judge Rails” 15). Some critics preached that ragtime and jazz ultimately produced mental degeneration or hysteria in their listeners. Popular music not only made Americans lose control of their bodies and their better judgment on the dance floor, but it actually rendered them mentally unstable. The earliest denunciations of popular music had characterized it as a “dangerous epidemic,” and by the twentieth century’s second decade it was increasingly associated with the degeneration of mental health. Critics tied the appeal of popular music and its relentless, hypnotic beat to the increasingly frenetic rhythm of modern American life. A 1911 article in the New York Times approvingly quoted a visiting German music professor’s opinion that ragtime would “eventually stagnate the brain cells and wreck the nervous system” (“Music in America” 10), while in a 1913 article entitled “Ragtime: The New Tarantism” (the original tarantism being a wild dancing mania, prevalent in thirteenth-century western Europe and supposedly incited by the bite of a tarantula), Francis Toye opined, “I believe that it [ragtime] is a direct encouragement to hysteria…in a society where the social needs and restraints of modern civilized life unite with subtle hereditary nervous defects to make hysteria as common as it is’” (Toye 654-655).
... For those who embraced America’s consumerist promise of unlimited abundance and liberatory technology, the frenetic liveliness of ragtime and early jazz provided an apt metaphor. Despite its earlier appropriation of “plantation” and “darkie” images, ragtime was not often associated with the quiet repose of rural retirement or contemplation. Instead, it was “the perfect expression of the American city, with its restless bustle and motion, its multitude of unrelated details, and its underlying rhythmic progress toward a vague Somewhere” (“Great American” 317). As The Ragtime Review claimed in December of 1914:
[Ragtime] is the music of the hustler, of the feverishly active speculator; of the “skyscraper” and the “grain elevator.” Nor can there be any doubt about its vigor – vigor which is, perhaps, empty sometimes and meaningless, but, in the hands of competent interpreters, brimming over with life. (“Why Ragtime” )
...Describing a stroll through Manhattan in search of immoral jazz dens, John R. McMahon wrote, with Beat-like intensity, “We walked up Broadway encompassed with a fierce jazz of light, barbaric in color, savage in gyrating motion, stupefying the optic nerves and conveying to the brain confused messages of underwear, chewing gum, and automobile parts. It seemed an appropriate vestibule to the temple of the modern dance” (“Back To Pre-War Morals” 13)."
"There is [a] particular area worth paying attention to, because it reflects some typical processes of the epoch, and examining it will lead us on to some general phenomena of contemporary life. I am speaking of music.
It is obvious that, unlike what is proper to a "civilization of being," the music of a "civilization of becoming," which is unquestionably the modern one, must have developed in a peculiar way to enable us to speak of it as a Western demon of music. The processes of dissociation behind all modern art naturally play a part here, so that in the latest phases of music we find self-dissolving situations...
It is no oversimplification to say that the most modern Western music has been characterized by an ever more distinct separation from its origin, whether in melodramatic, melodious, pretentious, heroic romanticism (most recently in the line represented by Wagnerism), or in tragic pathos (we need only refer to Beethoven's usual ideas). This separation has been realized through two developments, only apparently opposed.
The first is intellectualization, in which the cerebral element prevails, with an interest focused on harmony, often leading to a technical radicalism to the detriment of immediacy and sentiment ("human contents"), resulting in abstract rhythmic-harmonic constructs that often seem to be the ends in themselves. The extreme case of this is recent twelve-tone music and strict serialism.
The second is the physical character found in the most recent music. This term has already been used for a music, mostly symphonic and descriptive, that returns in a certain sense to nature, removing itself from the subjective world of pathos, and is inclined to draw its principal inspiration from the world of things, actions, and elementary impulses. Here the process is similar to the intolerance for intimist, academic studio painting during the rise of early impressionism and plein air painting. This second musical tendency has already begun with the Russian school and the French impressionists, having as its limit compositions such as Honegger's Pacific 231 and Mossolov's The Iron Foundry. When the second, physical current met with the first, super-intellectualized one, this meeting came to define a most interesting situation in recent music. One need only think of early [Igor] Stravinsky, where an intellectualism of pure, overelaborated rhythmic constructions blossomed into the evocation of something pertaining less to psychology, or to the passionate, romantic, and expressionistic world, than to the substratum of natural forces. One can see The Rite of Spring as the conclusion of this stage. It represents the almost complete triumph over nineteenth-century bourgeois music; music becomes pure rhythm, an intensity of a sonorous and tonal dynamism in action. It is "pure music," but with an additional Dionysian element, hence the particular reference to dance. The predominance of dance music over vocal and emotional music has also characterized this current.
Up to this point, such a process of liberating dissolution in the realm of music might have a positive aspect from our point of view. One could well approve of a revolution that has caused Italian operatic music of the early nineteenth century, and German as well, to appear out of phase, heavy, and false, and likewise even symphonic music with high "humanist" pretentions. The fact is, however, that, at least in the field of "serious" concert music, the next phase after the revolutionary stage...consisted of abstract forms dominated by technical virtuosity: forms whose inner meaning recalls what I have interpreted as an existential refusal or diversion, taking it beyond the plane of dangerous intensity.
Here one can refer to Stravinsky's second period, where dance music gave way to a formal music that was sometimes parodistic, sometimes neoclassically inspired, or else characterized by a pure, dissociated sonorous arithmetic that had begun to appear in the preceeding period, producing a timeless spatialization of sounds. One also thinks of Schoenberg, considering his development from free atonal music, often in the service of an exasperated, existential expressionism (the existential revolt being expressed here as the atonal revolt against the "common chord," a symbol of bourgeois idealism), to a phase of dodecaphony (twelve-tone system). This development in itself is very significant for the terminal crisis of modern music. After the chromatic limit had been reached, from a technical point of view, step-by-step from post-Wagnerian music to that of Richard Strauss and Alexander Scriabin, atonal music abandoned the traditional tonal system, the basis of all preceding music, transporting, so to speak, the sound to a pure and free state, almost as if it were an active musical nihilism. After that, with all twelve tones of the chromatic scale taken without hierarchical distinction and in all their unlimited possibilities of direct combination, the twelve-tone system sought to impose a new abstract law, beyond the formulae of common-practice harmony. Recently, music has experimented with sounds created by electronic technology, which transcend traditional orchestral means of production. This new territory also also incurs the problem of finding an abstract law to apply to electronic music.
One can see in the extremes of dodecaphony reached in Anton von Webern's compositions that the trend can go no further. While Adorno could state in his Philosophy of Modern Music: "The twelve-tone technique is our destiny," others have justly spoken of a musical "ice age." We have arrived at compositions whose extreme rarefaction and formal abstraction depict worlds similar to that of modern physics with its pure algebraic entities or, on the other hand, that of some surrealists. The very sounds are freed from traditional structures and propelled into a convoluted system where the complete dissolution into the formless, with skeletal and atomically dissociated timbres, is contained only by machine technology, the technical perfection and force of these new musical resources is accompanied by the same emptiness, soullessness, spectrality, or chaos. It is inconceivable that the new twelve-tone and post-serial language, with its foundation of inner devastation, could express contents similar to those of earlier music. At most, this language can be conducive to exasperated, existential expressionistic contents such as surface in Alban Berg's works. The limit is crossed by the so-called musique concrete of Pierre Schaeffer, with its "organization of noises" and "montage" of environmental and orchestral sounds. A typical case is that of John Cage, a musician who declares explicitly that his compositions are no longer music. Going beyond the disintegrations of traditional structures through serial music and leaving behind Webern and his school, Cage mixes music with pure noise, electronic sound effects, long pauses, random insertions, even spoken ones such as radio transmissions. The goal is to produce disorientation in the listener in the same way as Dadaism, so that one is hurled toward unexpected horizons, beyond the realm of music, and even of art in general.
If we look instead for the continuing role of dance music, we shall not find it in the "classical" symphonic genre but in modern dance music, specifically in jazz. It is with good reason that the present epoch, besides being called the "age of the emergence of the masses," the "age of the economy," and "the age of omnipotent technology," has been called the "Jazz Age." This shows that the extension of the trend in question now goes beyond esoteric musical circles and saturates our contemporaries' general manner of listening. Jazz reflects the same tendency as early Stravinsky, in terms of the pure rhythmic or syncopated element; apart from its elements of song, it is a "physical" music that does not stop at the soul, but directly arouses and stirs the body. This is quite different from the earlier European dance music; in fact the very gracefulness, impetus, movement, and sensuality permeating those dances--for example, the Viennese or English waltz, and even the tango--are substituted in jazz by something mechanical, disjointed, altogether primitively ecstatic, and even paroxysmal through the use of constant repitition. This elemental content cannot be lost on anyone who finds himself in great European and American metropolitan dance halls, amidst the atmosphere of hundreds of couples shaking themselves to the syncopation and driving energy of this music.
The enormous and spontaneous spread of jazz in the modern world shows that meanings no different from those of the physico-cerebral "classical" music, which superseded nineteenth-century bourgeois melodrama and pathos, have in fact thoroughly penetrated the younger generation. But there are two sides to this phenomenon. Those who once went crazy for the waltz or delighted in the treacherous and conventional pathos of melodrama, now find themselves at ease surrounded by the convulsive-mechanical or abstract rhythms of recent Jazz, both "Hot" and "Cool," which we must consider as more than a deviant, superficial vogue. We are facing a rapid and central transformation of the manner of listening, which is an integral part of that complex that defines the nature of the present. Jazz is undeniably an aspect of the resurfacing of the elemental in the modern world, bringing the bourgeois epoch to its dissolution. Naturally, the young men and women who like to dance to jazz today do so simply "for fun" and are not concerned with this; yet the change exists, its reality unprejudiced by its lack of recognition, since its true meaning and possibilities could only be noted from the particular point of view employed by [we radical traditionalists] in all of our analyses.
Some have included jazz among the forms of compensation that today's man resorts to when faced with his practical, arid, and mechanical existence; jazz is supposed to provide him with raw contents of rhythm and elemental vitality. If there is any truth in this idea, we must consider the fact that to arrive at this, Western man did not create original forms, nor utilize elements of European folk music, which, for example in the rhythms of southeastern Europe (Romanian or Hungarian), has a fascination and an intensity compromising not only rhythm but also authentic dynamics. He instead looked for inspiration in the patrimony of the lower and more exotic races, the Negroes and mulattoes of the tropical and subtropical zones.
According to one of the scholars of Afro-Cuban music, Fernando Ortiz, all the primary elements of modern [popular music] actually have these origins, including those whose origins are obscured by the fact that they have come through Latin America. One can deduce that modern man, especially North American man, has regressed to primitivism in choosing, assimilating, and developing a music of such primitive qualities as Negro music, which was even originally associated with dark forms of ecstasy.
In fact, it is known that African music, the origin of the principal rhythms of modern [pop music], has been one of the major techniques used to open people up to ecstasy and possession. Both Alfons Dauer and Ortiz have rightly seen the characteristic of this music as its polyrhythmic structure, developed in such a way that the static [on-beat] accents that mark the rhythm constantly act as ecstatic [off-beat] accents; hence the special rhythmic figures that generate a tension intended to "feed an uninterrupted ecstasy." The same structure has been preserved in all so-called syncopated jazz. These syncopations are like delays that tend to liberate energy or generate an impulse: a technique used in African rites to induce possession of the dancers by certain entities, the Orisha of the Yoruba or the Loa of the Voodoo of Haiti, who took over their personalities and "rode" them. This ecstatic potential still exists in jazz. But even here there is a process of dissociation, of abstract development of rhythmic forms separated from the whole to which they originally belonged. Thus, given the desacralization of the environment and the nonexistence of any institutional framework or corresponding ritual tradition, any suitable atmosphere or appropriate attitude, one cannot expect the specific effects of authentic African music with its evocative function; the effect always remains a diffuse and formless possession, primitive and collective in character.
This is very apparent in the latest forms, such as the music of the so-called beat groups. Here the obsessive reiteration of a rhythm prevails (similar to the use of the African tom-tom), causing paroxysmal contortions of the body an inarticulate in the performers, while the mass of the listeners join in, hysterically shrieking and throwing themselves around, creating a collective climate similar to that of the possessions of savage ritual and certain Dervish sects, or the Macumba...
The frequent use of drugs both by performers of this music and by the enraptured young people is also significant, causing a true, frenetic "crowd mentality," as in beat or hippie sessions in California involving [hundreds] of both sexes.
Here we are no longer concerned with the specific compensation that one can find in syncopated dance music as the popular counterpart and extension of the extremes reached, but not maintained, by modern symphonic music; we are concerned with the semi-ecstatic and hysterical beginnings of a formless, convoluted escapism, empty of content, a beginning and end in itself. Hence, it is completely inappropriate when some compare it to certain frenetic, collective, ancient rites, because the latter always had a sacred background.
Quite apart from similar extreme and aberrant forms, one can still consider the general problem of all these methods that provide elemental, ecstatic possibilities, which the differentiated man, not the masses, can use in order to feed that particular intoxication...which is the only nourishment he can existentially draw from an epoch of dissolution. The processes of recent times tend precisely toward these extremes; and whereas some of the present youth merely seek to dull their senses and to use certain experiences merely for extreme sensations, others can use such situations as a challenge that demands the right response: a reaction that arises from "being.""
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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]
"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]
"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]
*Become clean, my friends.*
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
"Jazz is a form of manneristic interpretation. As with fashions what is important is show, not the thing itself... Jazz, like everything else in the culture industry, gratifies desires only to frustrate them at the same time." [Adorno, Perennial Fashion]
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"Anyone who allows the growing respectability of mass culture to seduce him into equating a popular song with modern art because of a few false notes squeaked by a clarinet; anyone who mistakes a triad studded with 'dirty notes' for atonality, has already capitulated to barbarism. Art which has degenerated to culture pays the price of being all the more readily confused with its own waste-products as its aberrant influence grows." [Adorno, Perennial Fashion]
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"The aim of jazz is the mechanical reproduction of a regressive moment, a castration symbolism. 'Give up your masculinity, let yourself be castrated,' the eunuchlike sound of the jazz band both mocks and proclaims, 'and you will be rewarded, accepted into a fraternity which shares the mystery of impotence with you, a mystery revealed at the moment of the initiation rite." [Adorno, Perennial Fashion - Jazz; Prisms]
Quote :
"The objective sound is embellished by a subjective expression, which is unable to dominate it and therefore exerts a fundamentally ridiculous and heart-rending effect. The elements of the comical, the grotesque and the anal which are inherent in jazz can therefore never be separated from the sentimental elements. They characterize a subjectivity that revolts against a collective power which it itself is; for this reason its revolt seems ridiculous and is beaten down by the drum just as syncopation is by the beat." [Adorno 1989-68]
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"The manufacture of jazz is also an urban phenomenon, and the skin of the black man functions as much as a coloristic effect as does the silver of the saxophone… there is nothing archaic in jazz but that which is engendered out of modernity through the mechanism of suppression. It is not old and repressed instincts that are freed in the form of standardized rhythms and standardized explosive outbursts; it is new repressed and mutilated instincts that have stiffened into the masks of those in the distant past. Even yesterday's music must first be rendered harmless by jazz, must be released from its historical element, before it is ready for the market." [Adorno 1989, 59-60]
"Underlying all his work in the area was his contention that "popular art becomes the mere exponent of society, rather than a catalyst for change in society."(44) He believed American authoritarianism had a different facade than the typical European forms. Instead, it was characterized by a disguised and gentle conformist enforcement rather than blatant terrorist coercion. The American totalitarianism was spread by the culture industry which Adorno saw as undemocratic, reified, and phony: "individualistic tendencies are liquidated and flawlessly arranged pieces of music are perfectly performed, sounding more like phonograph records than vital artistic displays."(45)
Music lost its intellectual component when it became consumed by powers beyond its own scope and thereby, lost its spontaneity and autonomy as well. Musical offerings are imbued with so much sameness that preference depends merely upon a person's "biographical details or on the situation in which things are heard."(46) Recognition of the music was the preoccupation of the industry which promoted interchangeable parts for use in songs to facilitate this end. In On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening, Adorno writes: "the familiarity of a piece is a surrogate for the quality ascribed to it. To like it is almost the same thing as to recognize it."(47) In addition, whatever is most familiar becomes very successful and for this reason, causes it to be played continually.
Adorno perceived a lack of authentic talent in the popular forms of music which equated singers with the ability to speak and their capacity for performing in front of audiences. The prima donnas and the castrati, with their artistic virtuosity belonged to an earlier epoch and no longer had a place in the music industry. Likewise, Adorno saw a change in the music connoisseur whose reason for attending concerts was the cultural importance of being seen at the 'right' performance rather than the pleasure of listening the musical event was transformed into a means. The fact the price of the ticket could be afforded was far more important and constituted a worshiping of status, over and above the joy and privilege of attending a musical event.(48) Does music even entertain anymore? Adorno certainly believed it no longer had the ability and instead, merely complemented the death of expressive speech and humanity's tendency towards non-communication.(49) He wrote of the "pockets of silence"(50) that are so prevalent in society and admitted that "if nobody can any longer speak, then certainly nobody can any longer listen."(51)
This 'regression of listening' was a major concern for Adorno because for him, it was synonymous with the incapability of most people to participate in concentrated listening. The musical audience resign themselves to whatever is offered, rejecting freedom of choice and the responsibility for intellectual perception of the songs. Therefore, a 'regression of listening' among consumers means needs are being manipulated by outside forces. Adorno states: "regressive listening is tied to production by the machinery of distribution, and particularly, by advertising."(52) He says that consumers of popular music...
...have key points in common with the man who must kill time because he has nothing else on which to vent his aggression, and with the casual laborer. To make oneself a jazz expert or hang over the radio all day, one must have much free time and little freedom.(53) The radio was another area of concern for him since he saw it as a diversionary tool of mass culture, believing it to be as fascist as the Reformation's printing press. Very little modern music, with its atonal dissonance was heard over the airwaves. Instead, music which conveyed the need to conform was given priority because listening to it was not an effort and could even be done unconsciously. Ernst Krenek said the radio destroyed what Benjamin called the 'aura of artwork' by simulating the experience. Attendance was no longer required at a performance to hear the music, but he believed it took away the aesthetic experience of it, and therefore, its ability to promote praxis.(54)
Jazz presented the same problem for Adorno because it was seen by him to be basically dance or background music. It was not music that would be listened to intensely for its intellectual value, and he believed it to primarily be a corruption of traditional music. His main concern was with the heavily-commercialized Tin Pan Alley jazz with its standardized and repetitious forms; all spontaneity was rigorously excluded from the music.(55) Adorno viewed jazz as a static music whose deviations were "as standardized as the standards,"(56) but the monotony never bothered its fans who perceived the songs as new and exciting. In Perennial Fashion-Jazz, Adorno writes:
"Considered as a whole, the perennial sameness of jazz consists not in a basic organization of the material within which the imagination can roam freely and without inhabitation, as within an articulate language, but rather in the utilization of certain well-defined tricks, formulas, and clichés to the exclusion of everything else." (57)
The presence of some advanced elements such as montage, shock, and technological production techniques, did not validate jazz for Adorno.(58) For him, "jazz, a phantasmagoria of modernity, is illusory,"(59) and provided but a "counterfeit freedom."(60)
"Jazz music, for Adorno, is nothing more than the embodiment of commercial manipulation. In his essay,' Perennial Fashion—Jazz' (Prisms-83), he tells us that Jazz has remained static in its essence:
"…the displacement of the basic rhythm through deletions (the Charleston), slurring (Ragtime); "false" rhythm - more or less a treatment of common time as a result of three and three and two eighth-notes, with the accent always on the first note of the group which stands out as a "false" beat from the principal rhythm; finally, the break, a cadence which is similar to an improvisation, mostly at the end of the middle part, two beats before the repetition of the principal part of the refrain." [Adorno 1989]
It is a form of manneristic interpretation and like fashion, what is important is show and not the thing itself. Its regular 4/4 beat, its collective practices of dance and ritual-all are synonymous with its monotonous attraction. Instead of Jazz music being 'composed' light music, Adorno asserts that what has been dressed up is its most dismal products of the popular song industry. Therefore, the perennial sameness of jazz music lies in the limitations placed on metre, harmony and its form and ends up routine without any spontaneity or improvisational features which are merely frills. They, the mere frills, are carefully planned out in advance as well –defined tricks to the exclusion of everything else."
The Cowboy and the Dandy: Rock n Roll and the convergence of Afro- and Anglo- America.
Quote :
"The nineteenth century supposedly produced two very different kinds of drama on each side of the Atlantic. In America, Westward expansion dominated Romantic imagination. In England and on the Continent, inward expansion dominated, as bohemianism followed Romanticism, aestheticism followed bohemianism, and modernism was heir to them all. To the customary notion that American expansionism had little to do with the East or with Europe — a wish-fulfillment in its own right, the reply is that New York's sky-scrapers, complete with their canyon effects, were built, however unconsciously, in the belated image of the West. A reciprocity attends the presumably unrelated cultural histories of nineteenth-century America and nineteenth- century England. As different as they may seem to be, these twins of High Romanticism—American expansion and aesthetic inwardness — are versions of one another and tell an uncannily similar story as the century unfolds.
Why and how did Anglo-America and Afro-America find a common ground in rock and roll? What in each tradition's history predetermined this decisive relation? What links Romanticismand blues tradition? The answer is simple. What links cowboy and dandy is the Romantic preoccupation with boundaries. It is also what links them both with the culture of Afro-America. If cowboy and dandy are the extreme nineteenth-century devolutions in America and England, respectively, of the High Romantic paradoxes of circumscribed strength and ironic freedom — Shelley's Prometheus comes to mind, or Byron's Cain — they have an exact counterpart in the preoccupation with boundaries in African-American culture, particularly the boundary or dialectic between country and city that structures black American imagination in the twentieth century. From World War I to 1970, millions of black Americans moved from South to North, much as, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, millions of white Americans moved from East to West. Two geogra- phies of mind replace two geographies of place. Country and city, cowboy and dandy, are, structurally, mirror images of one another and behave in strikingly similar ways. Each is a paradigm that re- doubles the others in a different categorical key: for the cowboy, the boundary or opposition between East and West, settlement and frontier; for the dandy, the boundary or opposition between self and world, inside and outside; for country and city, the boundary or op- position between North and South, urban and folk.
When cowboy and dandy come together overtly, as they eventually do in the fashion and iconography of Romantic culture by the 19605, they produce the fluidity of relation between urban and out- door that we readily associate with white or Romantic rock culture and rock music each alike. The combination of cowboy and dandy is everywhere: blue jeans and blazers, lipstick and leather, flannel shirts and electric guitars. The early Bob Dylan mixes bluegrass picking with modernist lyric; the later Elvis Presley mixes country carriage with silky dress. Even the names of bands recapitulate the blend: Guns 'N Roses, Pink Floyd, the Sex Pistols, Iron Butterfly.
But rock and roll is, in its origins and historically, at least until the 1950s, a decidedly African-American affair that, like jazz, goes on to become culturally hegemonic.
The fluidity of relation between inside and outside, urban and frontier, cowboy and dandy in later rock and roll is already prefigured by a key like development in the earlier history of African-American culture, and one for which jazz itself is the overriding sign: the invention of a black urbanity designed to resolve or accommodatethe split or difference between country and city itself. Black urbanity is a mode of compensatory imagination not unlike Romanticism's own, and a paradigm far more appropriate to black American experience than the typological one it surpasses.
From its beginnings through swing, jazz was institutionally one thing, a form of public entertainment in which virtuosity was prized. After World War II, the legacy of swing divided this history into two new branches: bop or modern jazz, emphasizing the combo rather than the orchestra or big band; and rhythm and blues, which spirited away the big band sound and turned it, through many permutations, into rock and roll.
Mastery is subdued, to use the sound-recording metaphor, by remastering, and the ego itself is subdued into ecstasy.
It is, of course, rock and roll's marriage of gospel and blues, especially gospel singing over blues rhythms, that best represents its urbane solution to the differences that country and city characteristically represent. Hence another crossing, and one that also accounts for what we think of as an originary rock and roll sound. Rock and roll is gospel, or religious, vocal phrasing over blues, or secular, rhythm sections, a fusion — and, simultaneously, an undoing — of the opposition between sacred and secular, country and city, nature and culture, a way of being in both places at the same time. Hence, too, the revisionary use of the big sound of the Hammond 8-3 organ (together with tenor saxophone and drums) in chickenshack road-houses in the religious South, a fine swerve from church organ and an emblem for the new climate that blends swing or jazz protocols with sacred ones.
If jazz comes to the city from the country, then rock and roll comes back to the country from an experience of the city. It crosses back again. The words of "I Shall Be Released" apply to city and country, cowboy and dandy alike: "I see the light come shining / From the West down to the East" (1968). Rock and roll's very belat- edness—its coming after jazz, especially after bop—is what gives it its earliness. If jazz brought the South to the North, now rock and roll brings the North back to the South, after the fact. To cross to the country from the city, from the West back to the East, is, in a manner of speaking, to dandify the cowboy, to acknowledge influence, to orchestrate an irony.
Blues voice, then, actually topples the very naturalness we ordinarily associate with it, constantly muddying the differences be- tween voice and instrument, country and city, nature and culture, primary and secondary that we otherwise take for granted in its functioning. Natural privilege is, in one fell stroke, abolished. Here music's chief activity is riffing and grooving far more than it is the rue or joy of telling a story in operatic mode. Blues narrative is more strategic than that. Indeed, the difference between story and narra- tion gets muddied by the blues, too, since the story line as a rule tells us nothing new (we always know it beforehand), while the relation between voice and guitar, by contrast, always dramatizes something very new indeed — the guitar's stunning laceration of voice, which is never lamented, never bewailed, never even commented upon, unless in the positive, by the singer or the audience. Voice is no longer counterposed ontologically to band or orchestra as it is in what may be called operatic humanism, where even gendered voices maintain a credible difference from one another, a difference that blues tradition also undoes by using falsetto, as Waters does. In blues tradition, voice and instrument are, in fact, the same in epistemological status. Pure as they may seem to be, the waters are always already muddy. Even the formal dialogue between singers and their guitars raises more questions about who is troped as what than it is designed to settle.
Let us cast our gaze across the Atlantic, back to England. It is just after the French Revolution, and not long after the loss of the American colonies. Aristocracy is besieged. Its indifference is beginning to fail as a style, or at least to be an inappropriate response given the pressures of the age. It needs a prop, and finds it in the figure of George "Beau" Brummell, the first famous dandy. A ceremonial military officer attached to the court of George III and a favorite of the Prince of Wales, Brummell retired from his regiment in 1798 and took a house in London, spreading the influence of his languid manner and affected and elegant mode of dress until debts ruined him in 1816. Ellen Moers, in her classic study The Dandy: From Brummell to Beerbohm (1960), traces the roots of the term dandy to a song that handsomely uniformed British soldiers sang about the ragtag American troops during the Revolutionary War (1960, 11-13). Everyone knows the song — "Yankee Doodle Dandy." The term is thus "an ambiguous symbol", as Moers puts it, since it blurred the line between who was who at the very moment that the dandy British trooper aimed it, with presumable contempt, at his American counterpart.
The word's etymology recounts an even longer history of usage and, as Moers's example suggests, systematically undoes any unitary meaning it may seem to have. The first meaning of "dandy" is, of course, the elegance affected by the likes of Brummell. This usage dates from the period following Brummell's ascendancy (1813-19), although it derives from "Jack a Dandy," a Scottish border expression of the late eighteenth century meaning a "swell." It is the troubled legacy of empire that emerges in the history of the word's additional meanings, both before and after Brummell'sapparent monopoly on the term. In 1828, on the island of St. Thomas, "English Negroes," so the Oxford EnglishDictionary tells us, used the term "dandy-fever" to signify a disease called "dengue." The third meaning of the word, dating from 1685, tells us that "dandy" was an Anglo-Indian name for the boatmen of the Ganges.The historical broadcast of quite alien as- sociations, to use Pater's way of describing such semantic reverbera- tion, reveals a colonial repressed and its return on each side of the word's otherwise aristocratic connotation. The term "dandy" is, as it were, perpetually shadowed by its opposite, whether it means the British soldier and the American, the imperialist and the boatman, or a native plague and some Anglified distance from it.
How did this dubious shell of an aristocratic style become so durable? Here we must turn our attention across the Channel, to France. A belated Romanticismand a prescient aestheticism, dandy- ism—indeed, French Romanticism itself—is the major entr'acte between High British Romanticismand Pater. Barbey d'Aurevilly's biography of Brummell in 1845 was the "bridge," as Moers puts it, between English and French dandyism (1960, 257), and Barbey's "originality," she writes, "is to make dandyism available as an intel- lectual pose" (1960, 263). Barbey's serious Catholicism later in his career even presages rumors, for example, about Pater's growing interest in religion late in his own career, although in Pater's case the interest was sensory rather than theological. But while dandyism in France was at first allied, as it had been in England, with aristocratic styles seeking to reestablish some credibility after the revolution of 1830, it also became allied with the rather different project of an emergent bohemian Paris. The birth of a self-conscious bohemian Paris in 1830 combined dandyism and bohemia—what Jerrold Seigel calls "the Bohemian-dandy symbiosis" in Bohemian Paris (1986, 105) — and produced the beginnings of the search for a public style that suited its ambitions. Despite class and political differences, "bohemia" is in retrospect probably the best umbrella term, short of the more exacting term "aestheticism," to account for the variety of no- tions of what dandyism is and what it represents. Many youngsters went to Paris after 1830, setting a sturdy pattern that still exists today in Paris and in other cityscapes from New York to Seattle.
In "The Painter of Modern Life" (1859—60), Baudelaire,following in the tradition of Barbey's Brummell, collapses the difference be- tween dandyism as a style of the idle rich and dandyism as a quite different "aristocratic superiority of mind" (1859-60, 27). He then gives us an uncannily Paterian definition of the dandy as an intellectual type: "The burning need to create for oneself a personal origi- nality" (1859-60, 27), "a kind of cult of the self", "a kind of religion". All dandies, whatever their official politics, possess the same characteristic quality of "opposition and revolt". One is reminded of Marlon Brando's reply to the question "What are you kids against?" in Laslo Benedek's The Wild One(1954): "What," he asks, "have you got?" The dandy's is "a latent fire," and, at least before Pater, the dandy "chooses," in a double retrospective jest, "not to burst into flame".
Thus "Anglomania" in bohemian Paris after 1830, says Moers, "made the dandy and the romantic one and the same" (1960, 121). It should, however, also be remembered, she says, that the English High Romantics and the original world of the English dandy were themselves at odds from the point of view of social class (1960, 51), even though, by the second half of the nineteenth century, late Romantic aestheticism and dandyism are nonetheless of a piece, as the example of Wilde makes perfectly clear. The "dandy," writes Richard Pine in his revisionary account of Moers's history, and "the aesthete" are "synonymous" (1988, 31). Likewise, Seigel's distinction in Bohemian Paris between the political dandyism of Baudelaire and the aristocractic dandyism of Gautier is really a descriptive rather than an epistemological one. Gautier's absolute aestheticism in the notorious preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin (1834, 1835) eschews all politics and social concern, particularly a belief in human "perfectibility", as Gautier puts it, while Baudelaire's aestheticism, by contrast, sent him to the barricades in the Revolution of 1848 (the difference in England between Disraeli the Tory at midcentury and the dandyism of the Decadence at its close is a reverse version of this same descriptive split). Seigel also notes this very difference within Baudelairehimself—the difference between a "self-contained dandyism" (1986, 124) on the one hand and "the Bohemian need to live for the multiplication of sensation" on the other. Baudelaire's desire for a "multiplication of sensation," argues Seigel, was his "real heroism" and his route to a radical poll tics, an opening out onto the world and toward a pleasure in the "vagabond life" and a fondness for the "crowd". His "self-contained dandyism" — even the dandyism of the crowd-loving flaneur — was a more private affair.
Walter Benjamin, however, draws a more intimate relation be- tween these two impulses in "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire"(1939), suggesting an entirely aesthetic motivation to be behind them both. In "Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century" (1955), Benjamin re- marks that the flaneur — Seigel's presumably political creature — actually presents an "uncertainty" of "political function" (1955, 156). Seigel's two Baudelaires ultimately derive from the same desire for stimulation: the multiplied sensation that leads to a delight in the crowd and the "self-contained dandyism" that leads to a recoiling from the world are really the poles of a single aestheticist structure. Nor are they absolute poles, but poles in a crossing over — a structure of interdependence—that puts the boundaries between self and world into place. A brief reading of Baudelaire as poet will help to illuminate it.
In "La Vie anterieure" (1855), a sonnet included in Les Fleurs du mal (1857), interiority is, ironically, a product of anteriority or past- ness—of that which comes before. Despite the transcendentalizing impulses normally assigned to the poem (including the customary translation of the title as "Former Life"), it actually shows how one's inwardness, purportedly the realm of the personally authentic, is ac- tually a function of precursor languages that allow for — that help to make — the place of authentic, reflective selfhood to begin with. Selfhood, the "self-contained," is, ironically, a function of the historical and the social. Indeed, to have to "create an originality," as Baudelaire says in his essay, means that it is not simply there on its own. The interior life requires an anterior life that is also, by defini- tion, exterior to the self, even if it is what structures the self.
For Keats and Baudelaire alike, self-hood is itself procured by crossing over. To have an inside requires an outside from which an inside can be different, much as the self's defining sense of immediacy requires the self to have, or at least to imagine, an anteriority, a formerness, a history, a past — a series of boundaries — against or upon which its sense of the present can prop itself. Precursor languages and mythological systems are the anteri- ority that give personal interiority both a structure and a content. Here the interdependence of the "self-contained" and "multiplied sensation" is very clear indeed. Boundaries, like those of the New World, are put into place by the transgression of the very properness — of the propre, of that which is one's own — that boundaries supposedly represent.
The psychedelic is the play of boundaries that organizes the clear in relation to the chaos against which it emerges. Although the Greek noun delos means the clear or visible, its Latin permutations include the verb delilare, the root of delirium, meaning to deviate from a straight line. Thus the psychedelic, even etymologically, reflexively redoubles the shifting status of boundaries that aestheti- cism thematizes. The play of the clear in relation to chaos is a paradigm for the way opposites define one another in Pater's epistemology. The psychedelic puts the subject, him or herself, at perpetual risk as the price of his or her own experience.
Even gender assignments fluctuate under the psychedelic sublime, as Jessica R. Feldman shows in Gender on the Divide (1993), a fluctuation appar- ent, as she argues, from bohemian Paris to Willa Cather and, we should add, to Bloomsbury. This weaving and unweaving of the frontiers that zone subjects and objects alike is also Pater's profound secularization of Shelley's—and Emerson's—vision of a world. Subjects and objects are reciprocal functions one of the other in what is really an implicit theory of ideology that Wilde will go on to make explicit. Like Shelley and like Emerson, but in an even franker way, Pater's real subject is the making and unmaking of boundaries as such.
The psychedelic or semiotic sublime is a quantitative sublime, the rush that comes from disrupting normative bonds of reference and association in favor of the new and poten- tially endless associations to be had from the collision, reverberation, and recombination of old ones.
This indictment of the social by the psychedelic has a surprising implication, even though a familiar structural reason lies behind it. The social is, as it turns out, the only force that provides structure in an otherwise formless world. What coherence there is to life is the result of the organizing power of "habits," to use Pater's word, a "failure," as he calls it, from the point of view of the sublime, but an inevitability from the point of view of necessity. No wonder the psychedelic bohemia of the 1960s was torn between a personal and a political agenda—between a revolutionary politics on the one hand and a deep inwardness on the other. Such a conflict recalls the same conflict in the Parisian bohemia of Baudelaire's dandy and finds a counterpart in Pater's own double vision. This is, however, no conflict at all, but a sober interdependence. Psychedelic vision gives us, to use Pater's Heraclitean formulation, all things in flux. But this flux also reveals how sadly precious the world of social order is, since it is our only bulwark against absolute chaos. In this sense, the psyche- delic bohemia of the 1960s was also a clear chapter in the larger his- tory of the dandy, since it showed how each pole in a presumable conflict between self and society was bound to the other. Even the self is a social fiction, and even society is an inevitable invention. This is the surpassing crossing over of the dandy's bohemia.
If the aes- thete or dandy sees nature as empty and culture as full, the cowboy sees nature as full and culture as empty. The cowboy's richly savage nature is a vital presence, while the dandy's pale nature is all ab- sence. The cowboy's nature is a promised land; the dandy's is, as Holmes puts it, '"hellish."' Nature's blankness or lawlessness allows the cowboy to fill it with a mythological significance derived from culture, repressing and dismissing culture in the process in order to gain a higher sense of nature. Nature's blankness allows the dandy, by contrast, to value culture's fullness by virtue of an ironic contrast, too, gaining an even higher sense of culture in the process. Between them a heightened sense of nature and culture alike becomes available, and,perhaps even more, a heightened and ironic sense of the fluctuating boundaries, the endless crossings back and forth, that put each end of the loop into place.
Of Wilson's greatest hits, "Baby Workout" (1963) is the greatest. It is, arguably, the most pivotal and exemplary rock and roll song ever. At once a swing and a rhythm and blues or soul tune — Wilson's gospel phrasing over a swing bottom makes it definitive rock and roll — it is a model of crossing over at every level of its construction. It orchestrates any series of familiar oppositions — natural and falsetto, voice and instrument, country and city, blues and gospel, secular and sacred — while also undoing the borders that keep them in place. Even the lyrics redouble our paradigm in a clear way: the song actually reflects on the uncertainty of boundaries. "Round and around and around and around we go," sings Wilson; "where we stop nobody knows." Where is the line between swing and rhythm and blues, jazz and rock and roll? Between city and country, subject and object, self and world? Like Emerson, Pater, Woolf, and Gather — and, of course, like Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry — Wilson finally meditates on form as such.
"Revolver" as a trope splits its husk, playing endlessly between two senses, the gun and the turntable, each one destabilizing the other by putting the other in place by foil or negation, much as Paul's pose as dandy both clashes and commingles with John's as cowboy. Where the interpretative revolving stops with the Beatles, nobody knows.
The best proof that the British Invasion was the return of the American repressed is Jimi Hendrix, a black American from Seattle whose proper destiny was available to him only in England. Indeed, with Hendrix, both our paradigms — the African-American one and the Romantic one overlay one another. No figure in the history of rock and roll more plainly displays the cowboy and the dandy compact both in semiotics and in music. And no figure save perhaps Miles Davis (with whom Hendrix became friends) more plainly represents black urbanity's crossings at so late a moment in blues-tradition history. Nor has any other guitarist save Chuck Berry, his anxiety of influence, had so absolute and lasting an influence upon the whole history of the medium. Once Little Richard's guitarist — and once a member of King Curtis's band (see Wexler 1993, 199) — Hendrix uses costume to enjamb cowboy and dandy and yokes them together musically by virtue of an r & b in overdrive to which the prerogatives of self-exile allowed him, like Joyce, to go.
The deep affinity between British rock and American rhythm and blues is plainest here, when an American original shares in the invention of the heavy electric guitar that is a trademark British contribution to the history of rock and roll, its manifest American sources notwithstanding (see Palmer 1992). In Hendrix, cowboy and dandy, black and white, English and American, electric and voice — all these familiar differences or oppositions—are trampled, reconstituted, reversed, blurred, crossed over. The voice — a weak but present voice not so much struggling as simply coexisting, languorously, with the heavy guitar — has become little more than a formal necessity, a bow to convention even as the conventionality that customarily situates it is being redrawn by the guitar itself.
American discourse is by definition fugitive and agonistic; otherness is the perpetual and ironic condition of its originality. To be an American means that you need an antagonist, a discursive partner with whom you can argue for the benefit of your enlightenment next to his or her monarchic pallor. Every American discourse, whether colonial or slave narrative, posits — feels — a semiotic rival against whom everything is said, done, organized, personified. This overt and enabling dialogism also underwrites the one aspect of decency that American culture has at its philosophical foundation: because its discourse is comparative, it is always artificial. America's single and singular virtue is that its ground is invented, based not upon a myth of natural right or of ethnicity as ground, the kind of foundation that one finds in European history or in world history at large, but upon groundlessness as such. Artificial is good — the only good — because it means that no one can make a claim of any kind on the basis of natural categories. No culture was ever more plainly baseless than American culture is, and that is its only moral advantage over the past, including its own. The later self-correction by means of which constitutional interpretation is by definition structured institutionally insures the perpetual advantage of the late-comer over the pioneer. American culture presumes nothing, accepting, in Ivan Karamazov's words, that "everything is possible."
The synthetic quality of America, its defining elasticity. Artificial or synthetic America—rubber-soul America in all its revolving senses — has as its real philosophical justification the fact that it has no one stable one. Crossover is the enabling precondition and ac- tive modality of American life. It is not just a hidden discursive mechanism. It is in your face. Among the jests of the Age of Exploration is that the world got severed by virtue of getting connected. People cannot be at odds without being in touch. The vivid common culture that all Americans possess is the yield of the decidedly artificial polity that America has always been even if it did not begin to know it before 1950. Cosmopolitanism was the European word for it in the nineteenth century; internationalism was Trotsky's word for it; assimilation is the old American word for it — a savingly artificial common culture. Rock and roll is the cosmopolitan culture of the second half of the twentieth century and of the century to come. The connection between politics and aesthetics is particularly obvious here, where presumably political questions turn into aesthetic ones and vice versa. America is a politics of form, a form of politics.
Like the novel in the nineteenth century, rock and roll has become a protocol of life in the late twentieth, both as pop myth and as a kind of newly canonical music taken for granted as world culture's dominant one. The modality of its study, moreover, is actually very familiar and testifies with some irony to its increasingly conservative stability as an emergent cultural norm.
One has to be careful that, in rejecting the tyranny of one culture over another, one does not also reject assimilation, the possibility — the clear and present reality — of a hybrid, shared culture assembled by any series of once-marginalized groups. Trotsky was killed for his internationalism by the nationalist Stalin, and the Soviet Union was eventually dismembered by the free expression of ethnic nationalities. With equal blindness, American conservatism misrepresents the common culture of the United States as the reflection of a fixed and eternal sphere of value, not as a consensual and historical invention. Then again, separatist multiculturalism — a nice oxymoron — does the same from an equivalent base in superannuated blood categories. When Americans grow in- fatuated with religions of nature such as ethnicity or fixed value, they are asking for trouble. The myths of ethnicity and fixity are among Europe's chief inventions of the nineteenth century. They led not only to the formation of the great nations of Germany and Italy but also to the racial logic of Auschwitz. Americans are federalist, not naturalist, but this self-knowledge is too often only implicit and needs teasing out so as to rescue us from the tacky and dangerous games of Left and Right alike. To such noxious and sloppy self-representations, we should be able to respond more adequately than our traditional political and formal vocabularies allow. Rock and roll provides a place to go instead, a place where roots are out of fashion after all, a place where one finds oneself because of uprootedness, not despite it. This is not a natural place, but it is a fertile one." [Perry Meisel, The Cowboy and the Dandy]
_________________
"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]
"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]
"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]
*Become clean, my friends.*
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
_________________ 1. "Youth, oh, youth! | of whom then, youth, art thou born? Say whose son thou art, Who in Fafnir's blood | thy bright blade reddened, And struck thy sword to my heart."
2. "The Noble Hart | my name, and I go A motherless man abroad; Father I had not, | as others have, And lonely ever I live."
Post your examples of Western culture being degraded by the forces of neo-liberalism and its sympathizers.
Here Bobby McFerrin makes a mockery of Bach to the delight of the simpleton crowd, who see in his performance a validation of the modern need to pour scorn on anything traditional or sophisticated.
One can only imagine people from Bach's era reacting with shock and sadness as to how far their culture has fallen; a performance that would be more at home in a circus or comedy show than a Bach festival.
Thought it was good for the first minute and then it turned full clown.
perpetualburn
Gender : Posts : 955 Join date : 2013-01-04 Location : MA
_________________ And here we always meet, at the station of our heart / Looking at each other as if we were in a dream /Seeing for the first time different eyes so supreme / That bright flames burst into vision, keeping us apart.
Side by side with the too highly civilized white race the Negro must in time have eliminated from him all his God-given best instincts and so fail utterly. For are they not already ashamed of their old African music? They should be taught that slavery, with its occasional abuses, was simply a valuable training in their evolution from savagery, and not look upon their bondage and their slave music with shame. (Murphy 1730)
If slavery was a tool of evolutionary learning, why cut off their fingers for reading books?
Well, America was never big on common sense or educational infrastructure.
Hrodeberto
Gender : Posts : 1318 Join date : 2014-07-14 Age : 37 Location : Spaces
