An other time, locale, air – for a change of scene as befits the first weeks jutting as if a promontory into this new year, a few points of interest beckoned and brought me to Barcelona. Some works of art, music, architecture figured on this brief trip’s agenda, although on the spur of the moment others were also encountered. And on both scores, as the days transpired, bright coastal light in most eyes, brisk gusts of wind circling the city’s wider streets, the visit did not disappoint.
One destination especially recommended itself: the complex housing a museum, conservatory, and performance venues known simply by the name of L’Auditori. It, a wide horizontal construction in the manner of an older brutalist architecture, built of concrete and steel, in part raised on pillars, sheltering somewhat at least one semi-inner courtyard, the whole edifice looking more weathered than its real age, appears to deem itself a portal towards the barrio just beyond, Poblenou, which arose in the nineteenth century as an industrial town in its own right and then was subsumed by the city, metamorphosed over recent years into an area as though tailor-made to harbour facilities in the cultural sector and artists’ studios, with all these in turn finding themselves more and more in the shadows of some larger hotels and the offices of high-technology enterprises, as the district runs through a scenario of development by now predictable, even if this one’s situation, its own beach facing the sea unencumbered and so popular even in winter that figures traced in the sand would vanish before long, suggests the countervailing urban forces here in play, such that observers whether visitors or residents have grounds to surmise how the outcome might not be a foregone conclusion. Some city neighbourhoods remain more typically themselves than do others, after all. –
Trains of thought such as this kept me busy during the pauses while ambling about Poblenou, as my main destination that afternoon and evening had virtually invited me to do in the meantime; then, when the afternoon gave way to evening, I turned back towards it. And once there, what a discovery! – the Museu de la Música. Although a statement of its purpose as a repository of documents, including scores, a library of recordings, and a storehouse of instruments is available, I had not been prepared for the exhibition spaces themselves, so thoughtfully set up, nor for the items on display, such seems the level of quality that has guided the selection, and the care taken with their presentation. Entering its galleries prompted a thought that some piano case well-appointed on its inside with red felt had furnished inspiration for this interior, wherein the objects themselves were arrayed in a succession of vitrines, some cylindrical, free-standing, offering their contents for viewing in the round, others rectangular and even at times grouped into enclaves with three or four walls, forming semi-secluded rooms within the rooms, giving a cue to the visitor that these devices especially warranted lengthier consideration.
Amidst this staging the instruments’ visual profile was not slighted, and so it came as no surprise to find, amongst the catalogues available at the entrance, one issued around ten years ago for an exhibition of “musical sculptures” from the collection of another institution, the Fundación La Fontana.* In those works (the term “instrument” seems inapt), to judge by the publication, visitors may surmise the eye asserts itself above the ear, perhaps in keeping with what seems evident, an aim of propitiation. If, in a ritual context, such figured amongst their purposes, then the artifice, craft, skill put into them was tendered with respect in the mode of an offering, and hence an object of this sort would have been elaborate above all visually. The greater the attention paid the visual aspect, the further did its sound devolve into a minor consideration; often those artefacts sprang out of an acoustic zone which then was eclipsed by the optical. Hence, for want of suitable functional instruments, development of music as a higher endeavour of art did falter.
* Elena Martínez-Jacquet (editor), Escultures musicals: Instruments
d’Àfrica, Àsia, Oceania i Amèrica de la Fundació La Fontana
As now shown the permanent collection has an abundant share of musical objects which seem to be cultic in nature.* Yet if amongst these too the physiognomy is the most striking thing, even so a prospective visitor need not fear that they have been handled either in the overtly didactic manner of some ethnological museums, or with the dull indifference at times encountered amidst overstocked art institutions. Between individual pieces enough distance is interposed that they do not jostle or detract from one another. And thus some exceptional items come into their own – prompting a greater curiosity that a space like this can foster: the desire to learn what they would sound like when played. For, in these cases, the work performed upon their appearance does not finally overshadow an interest in what the music might be which they could emit.
* vide Josep Dolcet, et al., Un sol món, músiques diverses:
Guia del Museu de la Música de Barcelona
Unfulfilled and thus active as that wish, that interest do remain in the instances of two very unusual and fascinating instruments, thanks to this museum’s catalogue (available to consult online) both these works of better craftsmen are documented, also for those who have no opportunity (or not yet any) to make the trip in person.
There is, firstly, a double guitar, inscribed with the initials “J. M. Ch.,” date of origin in the period between 1850 and 1940.* Never do I recall having seen anything like its duplication of structural constituents for an anthropomorphic, even histrionic effect, if such a practical purpose may be imputed: though one might have doubts on this point, still, at least regarded from some angles, the thing resembles the mask someone might wear on stage, or at a ludic gathering such as a carnival.
photograph courtesy of the Museu de la Música, Barcelona
Nor does this anthropomorphism stop at the likeness of a face; the semblance also is striking of two outstretched arms and even of two human hands, all four in an emphatic, harmonious posture. Here too viewers may note a dash of humour, the more prominent for its sheer anonymity: to whomever built this instrument, not merely song but laughter and alegría de vivir/alegria de viure as well were most probably no strangers.
* object no. MDMB 440, collection Folch i Torres – Baget
(acquired January 1, 1947)
Secondly, the collection includes one example of an instrument largely forgotten now, a contrabass sarrusophone.* The firm of August Heinrich Rott made this specimen during the second half of the nineteenth century, in Prague; in Valencia a certain Salvador Prosper perhaps acquired it subsequently; decades later the instrument was donated to the museum.
photograph courtesy of the Museu de la Música
Sarrusophones enjoyed a small musical vogue circa 1900, but were soon démodés; and yet this one, its probable date of manufacture disregarded, seems to typify a visual style prominent decades later, the streamlined art deco of the 1940s, indeed doing so superlatively. Observing this illustration in advance, one might think that not only does the whole dimension of sound comprise anticipations par excellence of things to come, but at times the visual aspect of sonic instruments also embodies an announcement of futurity. Keenness is needed to apprehend it, and both ears and eyes must elevate themselves if one wants them capable of being its portals. This perceptive faculty can be raised in stages; trained at first on this or that item of the past in relation to that which was its future, once a certain level has been reached the power may be turned on those in one’s own present vis-à-vis theirs. – Such ideally is the exercise’s goal. (Forgetting that the undertaking was a pastime and finding out it mistook itself, however, would be only the first error in a series.)
* object no. MDMB 823, collection Amics dels Museus de Catalunya
(acquired September 30, 1963)
Beyond these two instruments, on display there were others whose appearance catches the eye, and perhaps one day I shall recur to some of them. But for my present purposes it suffices to mention only this pair. –
Even if acoustic objects can, in a literal sense of the word, predict things to come, to so great a degree that their visual aspect begins to shimmer with the presentiment too, the suggestion they offer of these futurities could not possibly represent a fixed quantum in terms of human history or nature. If any item’s character of being a harbinger would vary in its strength and its apportionment, where better to test this idea than amidst the large numbers of new instruments like the sarrusophone which the nineteenth century’s rapid technical and industrial advance allowed to be devised – that is, in a context where all these musical inventions had to contend with each other in a veritable struggle for existence? Not many of their inventors could expect them to claim the victory: found worthy henceforth as instruments for which composers wrote (a stature won notably by the saxophone). Exerted by such conditions the pressure was great, and under it an anticipatory rapport of present to future, the presages – foreshadowings and foresoundings – latent variously in the acoustic’s several zones, would more readily find expression.
Technology with the transformations it precipitates was amongst the topics at the back of my mind during the evening concert which took me to the venue to begin with, a one-off performance of that very significant piece of music written in 1964 by Terry Riley, “In C.” It was a main source from which the current of musical minimalism began to flow; yet not merely did its consequences bespeak, rather by its own character this single work spoke to and expressed the times better than other contemporaneous art-events and artefacts had shown themselves able to do, whether they were the Happenings mounted on the fly in cities, the more outré films of the underground cinema, or the most iconic productions of the nascent Pop Art. Its prowess in this respect stems from the contemporaneity which music may evince to a higher degree than can the other forms of art, just on account of how intertwined it is with technical considerations: hardly an insignificant nexus in any epoch, and especially not at the moment, circa 1960, when the generation* began to come of age whose members’ entire lives had taken shape, from the first years of the 1940s onwards, amidst terrible demonstrations of what could be done with the means offered by recent technologies.
* This term is used reluctantly, for want of a better: in an earlier essay its usage and limitations were addressed at some length.
New technical possibilities, for classical music even before the Second World War and especially in its aftermath, posed some serious challenges, even conundrums. While many composers felt that they had come to stand on the borderline between two civilisations (à la frontière de deux civilisations),* espying ahead and rushing towards theirs, the one still extant, a successor in which new devices, instruments, techniques would supplant the conventional arrangements, affecting the largest matters in composition, performance, recording, etc., all the way to, e. g., the tiniest details of an orchestra’s disposition within a concert-hall, at the same time they also doubted that the difficulties bearing down could be handled satisfactorily. Compositional techniques are getting so complex that only a very small number of those actively involved in music can master them (les techniques de composition sont devenues si complexes que, seuls, un très petit nombre de musiciens les possèdent), and when faced with the ensuing problems academic instruction is shown to be more and more insufficient (l’enseignement académique se révèle de plus en plus insuffisant), falling ever more behind these techniques’ current state (s’accroît son retard sur l’état réel de ces techniques).** Furthermore, requisite in the training of musicians there is some voluntary suffering, a choice the incipient technologism scorned, eschewing musical endeavour’s past history, negating the music that only appears at the pinnacle of an edifice built by many generations of effort, testifying perhaps to a hardship the new civilisation claims specifically to obviate for mankind (elle ne peut apparaître qu’au plus haut d’un édifice construit par l’effort de plusieurs générations et témoignant peut-être d’une souffrance que précisément ces civilisations nouvelles prétendent éviter à l’homme).*** Whether then one could really expect better music would soon be created or made at all, or might in future lead a half-life longer than the famous fifteen minutes if it were – such did become actual questions rather than mere rhetorical exercises, queries uttered almost as refrains in the pensive song concerning technology altogether.
* André Hodeir, La Musique depuis Debussy, Introduction, “Musique et civilisation”
** Conclusion *** Conclusion, “L’Art des arts”
How or even if the tradition of classical music might continue, amidst the post-war circumstances, was not the least significant of the refrains. At all times it is so easy for anyone to lose his inheritance by dint of wanting to keep it (perd sa fortune pour avoir voulu la garder) – and by what he does or does not do on behalf of his wish. Where technologism had come to hold sway, the stakes of this general challenge were heightened greatly. Older ideas, whose over-use did reduce them almost to banality, such as the assertions that every acquisition is paid for by some destruction (toute acquisition se paie d’une destruction) or that true culture harbours in its core the necessity of surpassing itself (la véritable culture contient en soi la nécessité de se dépasser), were catalysed into emitting an ominous sound (once more?) – could the pursuit of music again become a risk? Novel technologies fomented upheaval within the process of handing-down that undergirds or even is tradition, and this change brought an exigency into the realm of classical music. Were the endeavour ever still to flourish, circa 1960, its audience had to realise that works apparently the most faithful to the tradition (les œuvres en apparence les plus fidèles à la tradition) are those which most assuredly betray it (sont celles qui trahissent le plus sûrement la tradition).* Otherwise there would be a choice between an orchestra museum definitively consigned to perpetuate the classical masterpieces (l’orchestre-musée, définitivement voué à la perpétuation des chefs-d’œuvre classiques)** and those experimentalists in New York (les expérimentateurs new yorkais) whose aim it was to position themselves outside of any tradition (se placer hors de toute tradition)*** like Edgard Varèse and John Cage, with seemingly very little to nothing of any worth available by way of a third option. Underscoring the starkness of this alternative even further, in the same year as “In C” there came a cautionary tale from a field closely adjacent, the visual arts, of which the moral bore on what the result could be when technology intervened in them – to actualise their technical reproducibility, which by then had already become proverbial. A rather simple but quite remunerative result, as it turned out! For, after decades of relative disinterest in art, at least in his public persona, Marcel Duchamp relented and did allow some of his ready-mades to be re-created as multiples in limited lucrative editions, in conjunction with a gallery in Milan; two years later, speaking in New York with an art critic, on the occasion of his retrospective exhibition in London, impishly or/and sheepishly he circumvented the decision’s seeming incongruity with what had once been his stringent and even puritanical rejection of artistry. Expressing a certain insouciance perhaps reserved for his old age, he defended but also mocked himself, saying the reproductions added what he called “light meaning”**** to the earlier works, whereby – this may have been the main point – in the end it was technology’s imprimatur which sufficed to persuade him that thus created anew they could licitly be handed over into the care of something like tradition. –
* La Musique depuis Debussy, the text in italics just before the Conclusion
** pt. ii, ch. vii, “La Stéréophonie” *** ch. vii, “L’Objet sonore”
**** Dore Ashton, “An interview with Marcel Duchamp”
Servie ou non par les techniques électro-acoustiques, la musique sérielle ne peut être que plus artificielle et abstraite encore que les œuvres les plus abstraites et artificielles qui en sont à l’origine ; et par-là peut-elle prétendre à atteindre plus profondément l’âme humaine qu’aucune autre forme d’art ne l’a fait dans le passé. […] Ainsi la musique court-elle le risque de se tuer elle-même, non pas par excès de conformisme, […] mais pour avoir visé infiniment haut. […]
La conception sérielle suppose un univers dans lequel nul compromis n’est plus possible. […] [L]’ironie même semble bannie d’un monde où elle ne trouverait plus sa raison d’être puisqu’elle ne saurait s’y exercer sur quoi que ce soit. L’œuvre sérielle ne peut être que pure musique tendue vers l’expression d’une beauté difficile et secrète.— La Musique depuis Debussy, Conclusion, “L’Art des arts”
Remarkably, over against all such resonances which tradition began to emit once made into a musical dilemma by technology, as I listened to “In C,” now in its own sixtieth year, the music’s original circumstances came to mind – a rather different context, comprising other pitfalls, other troubles than those which likely shadowed the minds of Parisians or even New Yorkers of that era, not to mention the more doubtful answers for them which were at times entertained.
Set at a rather pronounced distance from those environs, instead the piece seems to centre on the novel experiences offered by the nascent pop music of those years, as fleshed out in concerts held in stadiums, unprecedented in scale and number of attendees, events in whose realisation the new technology had a large share; while it seeks within its given constraints to outdo their excitement, the set of thrills they delivered, and thereby perhaps, subsequently, to move individuals in its audience towards thinking about it all. Rustling through the interstices of this composition, keen ears may note a wind that might blow all it touches clean.
What this wind does touch, where, when, whence, why, wither: for answers the piece is strewn with formal indices which a good musicologist could draw out in an analysis, by way of phenomenological preliminary, but this is not the place to broach any such project.* Nor for a divertissement or dérive around the sinuous dialectic of fidelity and infidelity to the musical tradition (those who sound least faithful to it prove the most, the most the least, and so on by turns, in movements very soon describing spirals), ventured principally with the hope of anticipating the form its next appearance might take. – No, here neither of those options is fit for purpose. And anyhow, in situ the breath of something else was palpable.
* Moreover, inexpert as I am, never would it be really a task for me.
Keyed in from the outset, as the music’s arrangements began to register viscerally, I started to hear the ticking. Urgency pervading them, was no arbitrary choice on the composer’s part; it did bespeak the experience of those who were coming of age contemporaneously, early in the 1960s. How to typify that experience? – this posed an often-heard question, one raised largely on account of a trait more and more in evidence throughout the course of the decade, namely, the generation’s collective penchant for action, even if the growing hunger for it met with incomprehension on the part of those who do not know, or refuse to face, things as they really are.*
* Hannah Arendt, On Violence, i
Today the future is like a time-bomb buried, but ticking away, in the present. Time-bomb is no mere metaphor, for it is literally the Bomb which is, literally, the future buried in the present. It is also, literally, the younger generation, the generation of those children who are already the population explosion, as they will find when they have grown up.
So the young generation is not so much a ‘gap,’ as an overlapping of the future, burdened with problems, which to the old seem abstract, but which are built into the flesh and blood of the young.— Stephen Spender, The Year of the Young Rebels,
“The University as Agora,” “Participation and Politics”
Obvious everywhere and at every time was the threat under which those coming of age in the half-decade after 1960 had lived their whole lives, they who had been born from the early to the late 1940s, roughly speaking: annihilation by atomic bombs. That danger “ticked” constantly in keen ears; when later they joined together and were taking action, it also made them “tick.”
Some of these flesh-and-blood problems and their insistent replies to them, “In C” translated into sound, not least by dint of the metronomic élan vital imbued in it.
Many decades and iterations of the unprecedented attitude later, today one finds it easy to miss what was involved in the debut of a generation whose members were in doubt whether any would have a future at all. Futurity no longer hovered ahead of them but loomed already right in their midst (unfuturity?), where it had more of a presence than did even presentness itself, now located at the centre of times full with their own destruction. Then, if the future buried in the present could detonate at any point, even the possibility would foster amongst the young, they who had never known any other condition, a mindset at odds with those of earlier periods.*
* Some thinkers in previous decades did perhaps wonder what a way of life would be like where present awareness was widespread of future time’s pre-imminence. This one may glean if notions in existential philosophy such as horizon (Horizont) and limit-situation (Grenzsituation) are recalled, or a thought-image drawn by one sui generis writer, of which I’ll give a loose English paraphrase, human visages that do not stop ringing as though they were alarm-clocks wound up too tightly, is mulled over. Yet without the post-war experience to help pinpoint them, for none of these presages would an observer have at the ready much of a handbook, then or now.
Because it related at the outset to an experience individuals underwent separately, the grave fear, namely, their still unspoken suspicion that the future might actually be an unfuture sited explosively within the core of the present, entered into and manifested itself in the public realm gradually. Most patently it did so as the youth assembled from around 1960 onwards in the universities, that institution dedicated at least in theory to a pursuit other than the material interests, conventions, forms reigning in society, where once matriculated they began to address their situation. Speaking out with increasing force about their situation and against their society, very soon they came to know what it meant to adopt in opposition the peculiar pronoun “we.” Boldness of utterance quickly became a criterion for them.
To say that this meta-context is the Society (with a capital “S”) is to hypostatize the whole over and above the parts. But this hypostatization takes place in reality, is the reality […]. Society is indeed the whole which exercises its independent power over the individuals, and this Society is no unidentifiable “ghost.”
— Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man,
“One-Dimensional Thought,” ch. 7
For reasons which need not be enumerated here, in California and particularly Berkeley the idea had greater cachet at that time than elsewhere that society yielded the most general of contexts, needful to consider also when anyone sought to assess “ordinary language” and/or “speech-acts.”
From all this one may infer that the term “society,” or better, “Society” denoted an immense power, albeit one difficult to pinpoint exactly, which influenced and did more than influence all that was said and even done within the whole range of contexts in political, private, and indeed everyday life. To speak this word could actually be to utter something like an impersonal pronoun, by way of diverting responsibility from oneself as an individual, with the ploy’s consequences, in an atmosphere of denunciation and investigation by committee,* recalling those notable before 1933 back in Germany, during stretches of idle talk where, not excepting the university, “das Man” it was that emitted the last and often the first words too.
* One-Dimensional Man, ch. 7
Berkeley in 1964, if not the precise locale, was at any rate very nearly where “In C” came to completion, and by what seems rather more than a mere co-incidence its university provided the stage for the young to congregate into a quite vocal and active “we” opposed to “society,” under the rubric of the Free Speech Movement. When they began to speak freely, alongside the content it was also the manner which they thought important: age-old frank speaking (παρρησία), boldness of speech quite possibly animated some of them, admixed also with a quotient of righteous words, not so surprising a tendency coming from those who, frequently in any case, acted almost exclusively from moral motives* – and yet observers often took note of the inarticulacy of certain spokesmen, along with the predilection of others, especially as the decade wore on, for varieties of double-talk or worse, not to mention the disconcerting inclination to borrow phrases, notions, epithets from theories and texts they treated as classics. At times the sound rather than the sense of what they said or wanted to say seemed to guide them, and on just this point a comparison flashes up: amidst the insistent rhythms of “In C” one feels now and again that the aim was to build up a music where purely aural exhilaration, while its spell lasts, waits for a violence so great that rhetoric no longer would be necessary (édifier une musique où l’ivresse purement auditive attendrait, dans l’incantation, à une violence si grande qu’aucune rhétorique ne serait plus nécessaire)** – this assessment cuts both ways. (Although the summary pertains to another composer’s music, it does warrant transposition to these Californian condestructions of 1964.) Both the music and the speech-acts, on closer study, do gesture here and there as if expectantly: but what then is the “violence” each may have been waiting for?
* Arendt, “Thoughts on Politics and Revolution”
** La Musique depuis Debussy, pt. ii, ch. vii, “L’Objet sonore”
Existentially the attitude of youth who heard a universal unfuture ticking away at the heart of their times, is a curious thing: how ever could it not warrant, indeed provoke closer examination. A free-speaking “we” which arose in response to the danger, moved into action in order to avert it, to any extent possible; while the example which the students in Berkeley set did provide almost immediately a vital source of inspiration to their counterparts elsewhere, in New York probably, and abroad, as attested by some of the participants, in Paris, West Berlin, and even Prague.* (At least in some locales, from the start of the 1960s onwards this young generation was emergent also on the other side of the Cold War.) Yet as things happened its initial doubt was not borne out, nor could one plausibly have said at the time, let alone later on, that this result stemmed even indirectly from the action it undertook. Against expectation a future materialised for this generation as it matured, especially once it had graduated; for these young people the passage of only a few years commenced to falsify the existential posture with which they had entered the world to begin with. But rather than vanish, subsequently it persisted and continued largely to define their existence from within, as an identifiable and very demanding cohort now fully entered into society, where, accordingly, one started to note that they collectively indeed embodied the population explosion, much as the re-coiner of that evocative phrase had slyly seemed to predict. Within the meta-context called “Society,” two, three, many time-bombs now tick away at the core of the present, as if in a mechanical recital. Vive la société du spectacle ! –
* vide Daniel and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit, Le Gauchisme, ch. i, a, i,
and Spender, The Year of the Young Rebels, passim
Here my aim is not to spin atonal variations on old themes,* reprising with irony the discordant notes of what befell those young people as they settled into their age, no, not at all; the point is to underscore how unprecedented was those youths’ existential attitude. Awareness or indeed anticipation of its consequences may well be attributed to them; the possibility that they would have a future had to register, even early on. Perhaps it is not far-fetched to note on their part some realisation that this would be so: think of their common practice, which observers often found striking, of applying techniques of provocation in altercations with the authorities. With those duplicitous tactics, did they not despite themselves admit that the “we” into which action joined them together, in order that the imperilment of the future might be opposed, came as a most tenuous dispensation? – a pronoun needing to be shored up again and again by augmenting its more active phases by others wherein it would be beset, acted upon, cast back upon itself, as an “us.” Revelling as they did in these language-games, they themselves affirmed even while denying it that they would have a future, or that some future would have them, or that the future would be theirs, or . . . In any event, this play with the first- and third-person plural pronouns did rather belie the utter doubt each had expressed at the start.
* The Year of the Young Rebels, “The Columbia Happenings”
Even the famous policy of provocation – provoking the authorities to behave worse than you do in order to “unmask” them – had something passive about it. […] Moreover the policy of provocation – based on the assumption that the police and other authorities always, if attacked, behave worse than their attackers (this is what unmasks them!) had the effect of putting the originators of the provocation in the position of being victims.
— The Year of the Young Rebels,
“The Columbia Happenings,” “Black Tactics”
If their future was not as radically doubtful as they believed it to be at first, the problem this posed to the rebels’ sense of themselves could be bypassed through provocation, some practical analogue to the old retort, “Let’s see about that, shall we?” – In short: could they really live if violence did not come at them from the others?
An unstable existential attitude, manifest as they vacillated self-consciously between active and passive options in their approach to the means of action, ran several risks. Suffice it to mention, firstly, a key element in the trouble with violence, the ease of the equivocal speech in which the provocateur is playing at one and the same time the role of assailant and victim,* double-talk of which a specimen was published (phrased ironically or mischievously?) by a less youthful counterpart of the young rebels, in 1968: we must not let ourselves be tricked into violence even by the violence of our opposition.** – Pause at the ambiguity of that sentence! – And, secondly, the strange exasperating embrace of prevarication as a device with which to obliterate all negotiations from within, the gambit of constantly extending your demands against those who are trying to negotiate with you, so that the original demands are lost sight of and replaced by new and unexpected ones,*** or else the pure whim of improvising which placed them in new situations for its own sake, where they discovered that they had new demands,**** and so on, even indefinitely. – All these pirouettes show how rapid and deft could be the shifting back and forth in action between “we” and “us.”
* The Year of the Young Rebels, “The Berlin Youth Model”
** David McReynolds, We Have Been Invaded by the 21st Century,
“Notes on Another Death – and Our Shadowed Future”
*** “The Columbia Happenings,” “The Process of Radicalisation”
**** “The Columbia Happenings,” “Black Tactics”
Turning to “In C” again, what does the mobile architecture of its rhythms render present before the ears and eyes of the audience, if not action? Of action’s tones had its choral structures been made, while the varied modes of action and their manifold interplay* can live once more when it is fleshed out in the performance. And in the joyous version delivered in L’Auditori it did overflow with action! Just on this score the circumstances sprang to mind wherein the music gestated and was born; the free movements of its arrangements then begin to speak afresh of their origins, though not exactly like genealogists, with a “reference” which I’ve sought to trace and transcribe. – Let me hope the attempt proves not too repetitive!
Sans âme et sans transcendance, matérielle et relationnelle, la musique est l’activité la plus raisonnable de l’homme. La musique fait et nous fait faire le mouvement. Elle assure notre voisinage, et le peuple de singularités. Elle nous rappelle que la raison n’a pas pour fonction de représenter, mais d’actualiser la puissance, c’est-à-dire d’instaurer des rapports humains dans une matière (sonore).
— Gilles Deleuze, Périclès et Verdi
* All are several: even with “active” and “passive” alone how much there is to be done! – I leave untouched as a main question whether it is “we” who initiate action to begin with, either actively or passively, or if perhaps “action” it is which initiates “us” from the outset, both in the one mode and in the other.
Repetition in the most auspicious case will remain a prerogative of music. There, carefully fostered, raised into a principle, it can do more than turn an auditor’s attention towards a past, whether the latter is simply past or continues somehow to live in the present. Futurity also may be discerned, if indeed something of it is already here, inconspicuous yet perceptible to keen ears. Whether the sounds of it “tick” or don other shapes, its imminence marks at least some portions of “In C.”
The existential attitude that came to prominence early in the 1960s, manifested itself in several ways as the decade advanced. An inclination towards forthright speaking, more specifically, could turn against words deemed really wrong. Never quite an unconditional commitment to “freedom of speech” in the more usual sense of the term, if one presses it hard one may witness a certain puritanical or censorious reflex, which could recoil upon the students themselves; something one observed in Paris, in May 1968, when slogans some of them put up on walls others showed themselves very good at deleting.* Nor should this come as such a surprise, given how action was viewed as a fount of personal absolution by all those who hoped private vices will be washed clean as snow by their public virtue** – then and now a treacherous pitfall. Alas, this mode of posturing, the outer expression of the attitude I’ve called for simplicity’s sake “existential” rather than the latter itself, has proved the more influential; it, not the inner attitude, furnished from that period onwards a model, and since then copies are too many to number! Sad to say, but if the student movement did actually found something like a tradition, then its choice for the histrionic stance is one main bequest, and the level tended to descend with each iteration until at last today’s abysses were reached, with campuses and like venues wedding themselves to Islamophilia and the supposed cause of “Palestine.”
* The Year of the Young Rebels, “Notes on the Sorbonne Revolution,” “The Explosion of Talk”
** “Politics of the Non-Political,” “The Moral Immoralists”
Forlorn passages can be heard during a bravura performance such as in Barcelona of “In C,” and precisely these open the portals by which futurity entered into the work probably right at its inception.* When the externalities of contemporary action mainly were the items copied subsequently, while the inward attitude that had given the impetus to it was nearly not replicated but instead either supplanted by a sense of despair or succeeded simply by a void – prefigurations of what then would befall seem to resound in these parts of the music as performed. Hence, optically and acoustically, now and again an odd but definite feeling came over me of being whisked back decades and set down to the side of people slam-dancing at a punk rock gathering, sometime in the mid-1980s: to my mind the sort of thing that is one minor station on the road from the 1960s to today. (What ever could have prompted it? Perhaps the keyboardist so frenetically bobbing up and down did elicit this déjà vu.) Or, in a similar vein, though less subjectively, around ten minutes before the finale there wafted out a phrase from one of the saxophonists (impossible to determine which) where the mélodie triste from a post-punk plaint everyone knew in 1980, “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” was already contained. (Was the band, Joy Division, ever aware of Terry Riley, let alone of his work?) Yes, more than one future was present** in this composition, and perhaps one can conclude that their peculiar co-existence helped to keep the entire thing ticking.
* Figuratively and indeed virtually speaking, of course: left unaddressed here are any intentions the composer himself may have had while assembling the piece.
** Errant Heideggerians might say: “pre-sent,” “pre-sciented,” even “pre-scented.”
To re-iterate what was said before: the music as written could be examined for formal announcements, indications, or notifications (formelle Anzeigen) of the share of futurity which already resides in the present, because if its entry* never occurs quite soundlessly, there being always some co-efficient of friction, then musical means should convey these movements of sound more perfectly than any other imaginable channels, and so, once the preliminary is finished of ascertaining the audible elements, some variant of phenomenological or even ontological inquiry might commence. Here, however, my main concern being the performance in the concert-hall (goings-on in a conservatory’s philosophy class can be left aside), those researches would lead me astray, nor do I really even qualify to undertake them.
* That the parts of time differ from each other at all, or that there cannot ever be just a sole temporalisation of temporality (Zeitigung der Zeitlichkeit) – propositions such as these also tend always towards co-positing some notion of an “entrance.”
“In C” leads me to wonderment at the things it presages or embodies in advance. Perhaps an other air, locale, time is indeed the proper setting for the encounter. But let all of that be as it may. –
Ways that the better things did degrade into the worse, later as years wore on and young fires flared out, are limned in sounds that flash up before the ears and even the eyes, mine at least, and what other impressions has anyone to go by? Questions still posed in the decade’s aftermath may be raised afresh when the worst part of the rubble strewn over them is removed, which could finally be happening since we are repealing the 60’s* – in the most auspicious case, as a prelude to a new start. At a moment like this, the repetitions of “In C” do invite the curious and concerned to muse over the best part of it, the spirit in action.
* Jack Posobiec, Tweet, January 22, 2025