Sometimes...

...religious kooks (and in this case I say that lovingly) are more interesting than annoying.

I confirmed this when I watched the Danielson documentary last night.



I have admired this group for a while now. In fact, I posted something about them a few years ago, mostly regarding the fact that they are from New Jersey, where I grew up. (It's a place usually considered annoying, and rarely considered interesting.)

Honestly, I was only dimly aware of the religious connection until I saw the documentary. Still, I came away not caring about that particular detail, except in the sense that I can respect when someone is able to believe in something -- anything -- without using that belief to browbeat another human being into submissive agreement (a habit that besets way too many modern Christians, in my humble opinion).

I excerpted a few choice comments -- the first two made by fans of the group, and the last by Daniel Smith (the group leader and songwriter) -- below:

I'm really kinda freaked out by 'em, and I'm in a metal band, and they fucking freak me out. They scare me. So, they're doing something right, because of that, I guess.

Yeah, I listen to music about taking drugs -- I don't take drugs. I listen to music about taking Christ -- I don't take Christ. But I like the music, I like the sincerity of the message, I like that someone sincerely thinks that taking lots of ecstasy will make this a happy world, or that taking lots of Jesus will make this a happy better world.

Getting myself out of the way of these songs being made, so the lord can construct them himself -- that's the goal. I'm involved, but I try to remain humble and keep my ego, you know, out of the way. So in that sense I think it's the most natural way to create. But it's also humbling. But I think it's the most exciting way as well, because you're just watching things happen. Instead of trying to, you know, pretend you know better. [...] and I do struggle with that, of course. I go in there and say "Okay, this thing could go with this," and I do that sometimes, but it doesn't work. It just doesn't work for me. It's best to just kind of wait, and watch things point to each other.

That last bit seems kinda Zen to me. Take out the old-dude-in-the-sky reference, and it's not unlike the sort of thing most composers / improvisers say about their own process.

Attention must be paid

More words picked out from my recent Fellini addiction:

Since music has the power to condition subliminally, I prefer to avoid it whenever I am not listening consciously, as with my work. Music is too important to be relegated to the status of background noise. If I enter a restaurant or an apartment where recorded music is being played, as politely as I can, I request that it be turned off, much as I would ask someone to please stop smoking in close quarters. I resent being a captive listener, a captive inhaler, a captive anything. I don't understand how people can eat, drink, talk, drive, read, even make love while listening to music. Imagine having to chew faster to keep up with the beat. And the situation is getting ever worse. Unwanted music is becoming as pervasive as pollution. In New York, I heard music on the telephone, music in the elevators, music even in the toilets, where the ultimate captive audience is to be found.

I haven't ever thought of it that way, but second-hand smoke really is a perfect metaphor for the music that is forced upon us as we innocently try to go about our lives.

[Photo credit: Dominic's Pics]

Brick logic

I am old enough to remember the American Bicentennial, which was celebrated in 1976. I was in second grade at the time, and I clearly recall being forced to learn how to dance a minuet. I think there is a picture of me somewhere wearing a tri-corner hat over a white wig, and some big black shoes with those awkward Revolutionary buckles. (No, I will not scan or post it.)

How could I possibly have known back then that someday I'd see a variation on this very same outfit worn by grown men at political rallies?

There is of course a subtle message behind the imagery of the "Tea Party" movement, and it has nothing to do with patriotism. When your costume is more than two centuries old, you are, on some level, saying "I sure wish things could be the way they used to be." And I suspect that, for people of my generation, you are siding with your elementary school self (because, you know, we all had to do that Bicentennial minuet, in one way or another). Which probably also means that you're still into KISS.

Most revolutions happen in response to an actual event, imposition or injustice. There are usually concrete causative agents -- physical abuses, documented affronts against human dignity, and other longstanding grievances. Revolutions do not usually happen in response to the possibility of such causative agents.

The Tea Partiers (the artists formerly known as "Tea-baggers") are changing all that. They like to think they are spearheading a new revolution in American politics. But the truth is more complicated. Just as American right-wing politicians once perfected the notion of "preventive war," their Tea-Party base is now perfecting the notion of a preventive revolution. They are, in effect, rebelling against a new law before they even know whether it will work. And in the process, they are throwing out the social contract / common good baby with the no-new-taxes bathwater.

Theirs is a world in which PR exists for the sake of PR, and in which ideas do not deserve to be tested on their merits, but rather on how emotionally they are framed. Because, after all, if the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is such a bad move for America, why not simply let it fail? Let its failure be spectacularly self-evident. November is not that far away. Victory would be all but assured. Wait patiently for a few months, and all your prayers could be answered.

The fact that you are now picking up bricks suggests that you're starting to become cognizant of the idea that the horrors you see in this law are not even remotely self-evident to reasonable people. Worse: they may be complete and utter bullshit on your part.

[Photo credit: a1mega]

What passes for scholarship these days: Chapter three, part two

So in another life, ages ago, I wrote this thing called a dissertation, in support of a doctoral degree that I currently get approximately zero material use out of.

Here is the ninth installment of a series that will finally get the whole damned thing out there for public consumption. I'm going to present it verbatim, though I'm sure my thinking has changed in some ways since I originally wrote it (between 1998 and 2004).

Enjoy, if you can!

PREVIOUSLY:

Introduction, part one
Introduction, part two
Chapter one, part one
Chapter one, part two
Chapter two, part one
Chapter two, part two
Chapter two, part three
Chapter three, part one

* * * * *

Decomposition: A Critique of Musical Authorship and Authenticity

Chapter Three: Authenticity and Written Music (part two)

Definitions and History

As pervasive as the rhetoric of genius is, it does not operate independently, but rather, as I suggested in the introduction of this book, is supported by the concept of musical authenticity. As it is used more and more loosely, this latter term has arguably lost much of its original meaning, and functions instead as a determinant of aesthetic value: to call something "authentic" is shorthand for praising it in some way (similarly, "inauthentic" works are assumed to be fundamentally corrupt and therefore not "good art"). Of course, this shorthand is related to the reification of art I described earlier. But on a deeper level the linguistic use of "authenticity" now seems to speak to a sense of anxiety about modern life, and in particular the question of how to exist in a world in which the very idea of meaning is constantly in play.

One source of the currency of "authenticity" is the so-called "early music movement"; a sub-genre of classical music which focuses, as the name suggests, on the resurrection and re-performance of earlier (usually much earlier) forms of music from the western art tradition. The synonym of "historically-informed performance" gives something more of the flavor of what this movement is actually about, however: rather than merely revisiting old works, practitioners of early music are typically concerned with historical accuracy. This means that in the case of performing Renaissance music, for instance, period instruments are used, contemporary performance practices are observed, historical context is provided, attention is paid to a composer’s intentions, and so on. Interestingly, however, while the idea of performing older works is not a new phenomenon (Bach is known to have performed Palestrina, for instance), the conviction that such performances could or should be "authentic" is arguably quite recent. In fact it is not really until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that the idea of authenticity began to take hold as a cultural phenomenon within classical music (Brown 34). The developing stress on authenticity at this time was likely reinforced in complex ways by parallel developments in European and American history: the increasing importance of nationalist movements (particularly the political unification of Germany and Italy in the late 1800s), the growth of disciplines like musicology and music history, and the eventual importance of recording as an archival and analytical medium.

Something of the ideological flavor of the inchoate early music movement is evident in Harold Mayer Brown’s essay on its history. (1) Brown argues that the genre can be traced to the Austro-German musical tradition -- and in particular to the founding of Collegia Musica in German Universities in the first part of the twentieth century (34), as well as the nostalgia among many German music lovers for music of "a simpler past, and [for] a life at one with nature or with God" (36). I don’t have the space here to attempt to make stronger connections between these developments and more sinister trends within contemporary German culture (and in fairness it should be pointed out that the interest in early music developed simultaneously in other areas of Europe as well) -- despite my own sense that at its worst the pursuit of authenticity evokes a kind of musical fascism. Perhaps it is at least worth quoting Brown’s observation that "[t]he appeal to nationalism and the German past left some of these movements open, of course, to being pre-empted by the Nazis when they came to power in the 1930s" (36-7) (note how the Nazis too celebrated a "simpler past," for instance).

In any case, the metaphor of fascism does provide a way to distinguish between a casual interest in and a more extreme quest for musical authenticity. Over the last one hundred years, the latter attitude -- which I distinguish with the label "authenticism" -- has increasingly been found in multiple genres and audiences (e.g. classical music, jazz, folk, "new" music (recall the EAR Unit example)). The subcultures associated with these genres distinguish themselves from the mainstream by a terminology obsessed with the tension between realness and artificiality: "hip," "square," "underground," "poser," "wannabe." Such obsessions are characteristic of the mainstream too, as we will see. In each case, "authenticism" has become a worldview or lifestyle (consider Charles Rosen’s point that "[a] large number of the most radical seekers after authenticity as late as the 1950s were amateur musicians, for whom Early Music was part of a style of life that included playing the recorder, eating brown rice and whole wheat bread, and making their own clothes" (Critical Entertainments 214)). It is often marked by a limited scope (i.e., a narrowly-defined original that an individual or a work aspires to be authentic to), and is typically supported by a kind of moral conviction, which lends its advocates a demeanor of high seriousness. (2) This latter point explains why debates over the question of aesthetic truthfulness can become fierce and emotional.

The moral fervor (to put it one way) of the authenticist position may be due to the relationship between authenticity and modern life. Robert P. Morgan argues that authenticity is propelled by a broad cultural attitude of "insecurity, uncertainty, and self-doubt -- in a word, by anxiety" (57). Historian William Howland Kenney, paraphrasing T. J. Jackson Lears, traces this attitude to early-twentieth-century America, and consumer susceptibility to the marketing campaigns of recording industry pioneers:

Many Americans experienced an inner emptiness and a sense of unreality in a swiftly industrializing and urbanizing society; they longed to be “liberated” from sterile repression and hungered for an “intense experience” of “radiant, wholesome living.” The business elite in general and Eldridge Johnson [of the Victor recording company] in particular seized upon this shared pattern of emotions and, in a movement that has not been sufficiently appreciated, offered in the experiences of phonographs […] a spiritual transcendence of the sterility of modern life (56).

According to this description, the costs of missing out on the kind of authenticity purportedly offered by recordings -- a denial of “spiritual transcendence,” no less -- were rather high. Miles Orvell, in a study of the nineteenth century fascination with repetition, makes a similar argument about the origins of what I am calling the authenticist view: “One might imagine that the concept of authenticity begins in any society when the possibility of fraud arises, and that fraud is at least possible whenever transactions -- whether social, political, commercial, or aesthetic -- routinely occur, especially when the society becomes so large that one usually deals with strangers, not neighbors” (The Real Thing, xvii). The threat of fraud leads individuals living in such an environment to seek out what is “real,” what can be understood and analyzed, or what is dependable.

Interestingly, however, Orvell suggests that in contrast to this “attitude of the authentic,” which he attributes to the nineteenth century, the current age is characterized by a “culture of the factitious.” He argues that “[w]e have a hunger for something like authenticity, but we are easily satisfied by an ersatz facsimile” (xxiii), and refers to the oft-cited notion that postmodernity demonstrates “a willingness to take style seriously (or, should I say, playfully) without worrying about deeper significance” (xxiii). To illustrate his argument, Orvell points to a number of cultural moments so patently fake that it seems unlikely anyone would value them for their veracity (for instance: a Disney World scene of “automated Indians eternally pounding corn along the banks of a man-made river” (xxiii)).

Yet, insightful as it is, Orvell’s assessment of the relationship between contemporary society and authenticity overlooks a number of recent musical trends. Close examination of “postmodern” discourses in music suggests that, as with the traditional western conception of artistic genius, the authenticist position is alive and well in this art form. Such discourses lack the sort of irony that usually characterizes “postmodern playfulness” -- but more importantly, they tend to be motivated by the authenticist’s moral conviction and narrow scope. We have already considered the Zappa example -- here are a few others:

Arguably, the 1990s resurgence of swing music (complete with revived fashions, attitudes, and language) is, for its core audience, no less the realization of what Orvell calls the “appetite for the authentic” than was the original swing period of the 30s and 40s -- despite the fact that half a century has elapsed. Of the original swing movement, historian William Howland Kenney writes that “[c]ollecting [swing] records became an enduring passion, an intellectual preoccupation, and a way of life” (18); Andre Millard adds that swing’s proponents were “‘hepcats’ who followed their favorite band with a devotion unknown since the golden age of the silent cinema in the 1920s” (184). The more recent version of this movement typically functions in a similar way, and is quite lacking in self-consciousness. For instance, when writing of the rivalry between coastal schools of the genre, the NY-based label Skully Records claims that

East Coast Swing is more of a purer, faster, real Savoy Ballroom type of swing, while the West Coast Swing Style is a sultrier, slower variation of the Savoy Lindy Hop. The East Coast Swingers find West Coast overly sexual, while West Coast aficionados find New York’s traditional Lindy as too wild. There is some bad blood flowing between the two styles because each fears losing dancers to the other side.

There is an urgency in the language here that undercuts the possibility of camp; the seriousness attached to competing interpretations of the genre, made more earnest by the threat of “bad blood” (3) indicate that, for some of its proponents, swing is more than a mere weekend diversion -- and certainly not the easy satisfaction of an “ersatz facsimile.” Later in this same essay the writer explains that “[s]wing offers a joyous alternative to a generation that came of age during the AIDS crisis, and a time when sexuality was hidden under grunge”; according to this interpretation, swing is a lifestyle. The idea that swing is a response to an environment of exigency undercuts Orvell’s idea that postmodern approaches to authenticity are unconcerned with “deeper significance”; it is arguably historical weightiness that the writer seems to be striving for when, for instance, he or she capitalizes the first letters of the different swing movements and dances (“East Coast Swing,” “Savoy Lindy Hop”).

An authenticist perspective also informs jazz as a whole; here the debate takes the form of an aesthetic and rhetorical tension -- particularly observable in the last few decades -- between the concepts of “tradition” and “innovation.” Jazz traditionalists espouse an already-established, “authentic” manifestation of the music, while jazz innovators ostensibly strive for something new (although many in the latter category are actually just as concerned with their own version of authenticity). Although a relatively new art form, jazz -- perhaps because it developed in the twentieth century, and was invigorated by recording technology -- has already gone through at least two “revival” periods. In the 30s and 40s, one group of musicians undertook a “dixieland revival” -- a resurrection of early New Orleans jazz from the beginning of the century, and soon perceived as a reaction to the (then) provocative and aggressive new stance of bebop. Ironically, in the 1980s and 90s, bebop itself become a repertory style (perhaps even more ironically, it earned the allegiance of many younger jazz musicians, often referred to as the “young lions”). Leading proponents of what came to be known as “neoclassical” or (depending on the labeler’s own biases) “neoconservative” jazz appeared to emphasize the importance of “tradition” -- which for many of them would eventually include all jazz forms up through the late 50s, but not beyond -- and framed this emphasis in terms of their understanding of “authentic” generic qualities.

This emphasis on authenticity is evident, for instance, in the writing of critic Tom Piazza, one of the neotraditionalists’ strongest supporters. In an essay entitled “The Shock of the Old” -- a discussion of the Classical Jazz at Lincoln Center series (one of the best known jazz repertory programs) -- Piazza describes a “new” (1990) performance of Duke Ellington’s “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue”:

For the second year running, twenty-three-year-old tenorist Todd Williams, who plays with Wynton Marsalis’s septet, hit the ball out of the park on a Paul Gonsalves feature. Last year, Williams took on Gonsalves’ role in the series’s performance of “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue.” Gonsalves caused an uproar at the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival by playing 27 blues choruses on tenor at a rocking medium tempo in the middle of the extended piece. At Classical Jazz last year, Williams truly recreated the moment -- not by playing Gonsalves’ solo note for note, but by playing something original that fit idiomatically with what Gonsalves had done. As a result, he generated the same kind of excitement Gonsalves had. Williams did it again this year, on the “Ready, Go” section of Toot Suite […] (162).

Recall that the authenticist perspective is defined in part by a limited scope. Although Piazza ostensibly recognizes Williams’ “originality” here, the burden of a specific recreation is striking. For as Stanley Dance points out in the liner notes to Ellington at Newport, the 1956 “Diminuendo” performance was not the sole version in which Gonsalves took a lengthy solo, but only the most famous. Dance writes that “one night at Birdland in 1951 [thus five years before Newport], Ellington told the band to get out 107 and 108” -- the numbers for the first and second half of “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue.” He goes on:

When the band finished the first part, Paul Gonsalves leaned over to his leader at the piano and asked to take a few choruses. “Go ahead,” Ellington replied. By the time he got through, more than 20 choruses later, the tenor player had the customers standing on their chairs and screaming. Ellington remembered that night five years afterwards at Newport and asked Gonsalves to blow as long as he liked after the diminuendo section (4).

After the famous performance at Newport, Gonsalves would be asked to perform the Diminuendo solo, according to Dance, “by audiences everywhere for the rest of his life” (5).

Given the existence of what might be called a “Diminuendo solo tradition,” then, why does Piazza expect that Williams’ improvisation on the tune should reference Gonsalves’ 1956 Newport solo specifically? One likely explanation is that the fame of the Newport performance / recording has, in the view of most jazz critics, raised it to the level of an “authoritative” version. Thus when Piazza argues that what Williams played fit “idiomatically,” he is being misleading; “idiom” refers to a general style, while Piazza clearly means that Williams matched the spirit and ideas of a specific recording of a specific solo -- regardless of the possibility that Gonsalves himself may have played the solo differently during other performances. Piazza thus succeeds in setting up an extremely narrow standard for Williams’ recreation -- ironically, given that Piazza is discussing an improvisation. Nor is this an unusual paradox: critic Francis Davis, in describing a 1988 performance of the Mingus Big Band -- a repertory group dedicated to jazz composer / bassist Charles Mingus (who had died nearly a decade earlier) and at the time largely comprised of former Mingus sidemen -- wrote with disappointment that “it was painful to watch the great [pianist] Jaki Byard tentatively reading passages that he probably made up from scratch (at the composer’s angry urging) twenty-five years earlier” (Outcats, 206) .

Later in “The Shock of the Old,” Piazza attempts to justify the neotraditionalist stance:

[…] is newness really a value in its own right? Maybe for stockbrokers who make unnecessary trades to generate more money in commissions, but for music lovers? Reviewers have this much in common with stockbrokers and racetrack touts: Without a hot tip of the day, they go hungry.
Maybe the reviewers who are addicted to the new have bought more heavily than they realize into the values of an advertising culture they usually decry. There’s no more sense in being opposed to change in the abstract than there is in being in favor of change in the abstract. Change happens whether you want it to or not. But what is needed isn’t so much a change in the music as a change in the quality of attention paid to it. By casting new light on what has endured in jazz, Classical Jazz creates an environment in which musicians, listeners, and even reviewers can all grow -- deeper, not just faster. (165-6)

Piazza’s specific call for “depth” once again undercuts Orvell’s assumption that post-moderns are unconcerned with “deeper significance.” But note too Piazza’s association of “the new” (i.e., innovation) with stockbrokers and advertising culture. These comparisons tell us a great deal about the neotraditional concern for authenticity: Wall Street and Madison Avenue are easy metaphors for the impure, the ungenuine, and the unreal in American culture. In truth, of course, jazz has historically been fueled (both aesthetically and economically) by “the new,” (4) and (arguably) sustained not by advertising or the stock market but by youth culture, as Kenney points out:

Many younger Americans of different ethnic backgrounds treated jazz records as invitations to daring open-ended experiences and reveled in their bright, swaggering musical language, one that seemed to defy traditional conventions of both popular and concert hall performance. Labeled as “vulgar,” “illicit,” and “out-of-control” by the gatekeepers of traditional musical culture, jazz records for that very reason appealed all the more to significant numbers of young Americans. As a result, from 1917 to 1945, jazz, blues, and hot social dance records contributed mightily to the process of creating new popular music cultures (14)

Kenney adds that jazz’s association with innovation and newness was also used, particularly by European listeners, as a form of metaphorical resistance to authority -- and resistance specifically to extreme traditionalist movements like fascism (18). (Note how we are back once again to the political associations with which we began this essay.)

While jazz might be considered a subculture, the authenticist position is also apparent in American music at large. It was surely revealed with a vengeance when in 1990 Rob Pilatus and Fabrice Morvan of the pop group Milli Vanilli were forced to give back their “best new artist” Grammy because they did not actually sing on their first album, Girl You Know It’s True. Importantly, Milli Vanilli’s “inauthentic” status did not quite register until after the official demand to return the award -- despite the fact that evidence that they were not singers existed beforehand. (For instance, in one performance antedating the scandal, the accompanying tape recording got stuck, skipping on a single musical phrase instead of continuing with the current song. Video footage of the event reveals the obvious disruption that resulted, as Pilatus runs off stage in chagrin. But at the time no one else seemed to notice or care about the sync problem.) When the truth about the making of Girl You Know It’s True had officially been revealed, Pilatus responded to charges of audience betrayal by calling the agreement to use other singers “a pact with the devil”; he later died in what may have been a suicide.

The almost universal condemnation of Milli Vanilli was not typical of a society that has accepted “play” as an aesthetic value; in fact, Pilatus and Morvan actually attempted to use play as a damage control device, making fun of themselves in a chewing gum commercial shortly after the Grammy incident -- to no avail. At least two lawsuits were filed on behalf of “deceived record buyers” (Time, Dec. 3 1990), and former fans who had bought the album were prompted to send in for a rebate. A New Jersey congressman proposed “a law banning unannounced lip-synching at concerts” (Friedman). Milli Vanilli songs were completely removed from radio playlists, and a generally scornful attitude prevailed in popular commentary on the incident. Consider for instance the following after-the-fact entry in the Rolling Stone Album Guide: “According to producer Frank Farian, Pilatus and Morvan were hired only for their looks, which he felt would add street-level credibility to the music. Apparently, the street he had in mind was Sesame Street, since only a listener with the approximate intelligence of Big Bird could have fallen for such a contrived attempt at rap and funk” (quoted by Ron Gerber).

Although ostensibly motivated by a concern for the fair treatment of musicians (another famous incident the following year would involve dance group C&C Music Factory, whose video for their number one hit, “Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now),” did not feature lead singer Martha Wash, but rather replaced her with the more model-like Zelma Davis), the Milli Vanilli situation provided a springboard for a broad expression of the authenticist position. For instance, it arguably served as the catalyst for the 90s resurgence of “acoustic” music -- a combination of the folk and singer-songwriter traditions that was manifested in programs like MTV’s Unplugged series, in which artists who were associated with “electric” music (Rod Stewart, Bon Jovi, and others) performed versions of their best-known material, but on “acoustic” instruments. Unplugged in fact neatly encapsulates the problem of authenticity in pop: the show’s title was somewhat misleading, as, regardless of the instruments used, these performances still required amplification. Instruments and vocals were miked, and despite the presence of a small live audience, most listeners could only experience the music through the speakers on their (plugged-in) television sets (and later in CD releases of the same material). The coexistence of the Unplugged phenomenon (the show premiered in 1989) and the Milli Vanilli backlash recalls the hypocrisy of the 1960s folk movement, whose audiences booed Bob Dylan for bringing electric guitar into his set at the Newport folk festival, and yet had previously accepted the electrical recording process as a way for Dylan to disseminate his repertoire. (5)

What Ted Friedman calls the “scapegoating” of Milli Vanilli ignored the fact that in the modern music industry, the group’s failure to sing on Girl You Know It’s True is merely one example of the kind of deceptions recording technology makes possible; as Friedman points out, Milli Vanilli “were the recording industry’s sacrifice meant to improve the integrity of the rest of their product -- as if the music marketed under the names U2 or Janet Jackson WEREN’T every bit as constructed and mediated, just because the voices on the records matched the faces in the videos” (1, emphasis in original). Aside from Milli Vanilli producer Frank Farian’s statement that “what happened [in the making of Girl You Know It’s True] is common procedure in the music business” (Craig Rosen, Billboard Book of Number One Albums), anecdotal evidence suggests that many popular artists do not actually sing when they are performing live (many of the dance moves being too stressful to allow for simultaneous and accurate singing), and that many of these same artists frequently employ digital editing procedures in studio (e.g. pitch-correction techniques that “fix” lines that may have been sung out of tune during a recording session). But far more routine practices that are similarly “deceptive” have long gained acceptance among popular music audiences. As Glenn Gould pointed out in 1966, for instance, “the great majority of present-day recordings consist of a collection of tape segments varying in duration upwards from one twentieth of a second” -- referring to the practice of splicing and inserting, a practice arguably even more popular today, with the option of digital editing. Of course, music editing was once considered repugnant as well; recall the uproar that followed the revelation that Elizabeth Scwarzkopf had sung a high “C” for Kirsten Flagstad on a 1951 recording of Tristan und Isolde (6). But over time, while popular audiences seem to have accepted these sorts of “fakeries” as the norm, the condemnation of Milli Vanilli has become the stuff of pop music legend.

The Milli Vanilli example (7) suggests that the authenticist worldview is not merely a phenomenon of subcultures. Arguably, the broad popularity of entertainment trends like “reality TV” and the Matrix film series -- both of which are unreal advocates of authenticity -- also suggest that “ersatz facsimile” is no longer enough for many Americans. My concern, of course, is with the music industry. It is my contention that this industry gets a great deal of use out of the concept of authenticism. For while the rhetoric of genius reifies composition, authenticity reifies music itself, transforming it from a process or experience into a commodity: “the score,” “the transcription,” “the recording,” “the performance.” My critique of this phenomenon will unfold in two parts: in the next chapter I’ll be addressing the pursuit of authenticity in live and recorded performance. But first I will focus on how the same pursuit informs written music -- by which I mean music that has expression via some kind of written document. To this end I will look at both transcriptions (documents created after a performance, as a written record of that performance), and scores (documents preceding a performance, created as, to use Zappa’s term, the written “recipe” for that performance). Taken together, both chapters will support the idea that musical authenticity is an untenable goal -- the more we zoom in on what we believe to be the authentic work, the more that work actually disappears.



* * * * *

Notes for this section

1. “Pedantry or Liberation?”, in Authenticity and Early Music, edited by Nicholas Kenyon (1988).

2. Note that this can be contrasted with Peter Kivy’s more complex point, in Authenticities, that a work can be “authentic” in different ways.

3. One wonders what would really be the harm of losing dancers “to the other side”? (Surely others would come along at some point?)

4. Note that in the twentieth century, jazz seemed to change form with each decade.

5. And as David Buxton puts it, “The later folk purists were mistaken in the belief that with the use of nonelectric technology, they were somehow less compromised with monopoly capitalism and its advanced technology: folk music was a commodity on the mass market and no less ‘commercial’ than the rock and roll they criticized” (qtd. in Frith and Goodwin, 428).

6. In “The Prospects of Recording” (published in High Fidelity in 1966), Glenn Gould criticizes the anti-splicing camp for being defenders of “aesthetic morality,” substantiating his point by referring to the Tristan recording: “Elisabeth Schwarzkopf appends a missing high C to a tape of Tristan otherwise featuring Kirsten Flagstad, and indignant purists, for whom music is the last blood sport, howl her down, furious at being deprived a kill.”

7. Another example of how an authenticist view occurs in pop music with results that are quite serious (undercutting the notion that postmodern authenticity is about play) occurs with the “tribute band” phenomenon. As Steve Appleford points out, tribute bands play the music and copy the performance style of a given famous pop group—often “classic rock” groups like the Beatles, KISS, Boston. While discussing Sticky Fingers, a Rolling Stones tribute group, Appleford points out that the lead singer (whose stage name, Dick Swagger, would seem to signal an attitude of camp) “has become an involuntary object of obsession. He receives desperate, hand-written, 17-page letters. His voice mail is flooded. Gigs are occasionally disrupted by what Swagger calls (without elaboration) ‘strange behavior’ in the crowd” (54). Note that the group markets itself as “The Best of the Rolling Stones Live,” so that it is not immediately apparent that it is a tribute band (www.stickyfingerslive.com).



Photo credits:

"World's Greatest Fake," by Cliff1066

"Photographic Proof NASA Faked the Moon Landing," by woodleywonderworks

I See Hawks in LA

Here is something of a dirty secret about me: I love country music. And I'm not ashamed to admit it.

In fact, I feel that I can, with at least a little authority, proclaim that one of the best country bands in California (hell, in the world) is I See Hawks in LA, co-led by my friend Rob Waller (the band's lead singer, rhythm guitarist, and contributing songwriter). Waller and I met in grad school, where we both taught in USC's freshman writing program. We started our respective groups at roughly the same time, and even played a quirky double-bill together at Hollywood's version of the Knitting Factory (referenced in the discussion that ensues below). Later, occasional Hawks collaborator Joe Berardi played in the IJG for a short time (long enough to hold down the drumming duties for our Industrial Jazz a Go Go! album).

After I left USC, Waller and I stopped running into each other regularly (except for that one time our two bands, heading in opposite directions through the heart of California, happened to stop, mid-tour, at the same rest-stop on the 5 freeway). But with social media, none of us are ever really out of touch, I guess. At least, that was how I learned that the Hawks had released their fifth album, Shoulda Been Gold -- a "best of" compilation, but one that also included several new tracks (as well as a few rarities). I thought the occasion was a perfect opportunity to have an email conversation about this great band, and music in general.

If you've never heard the Hawks, here's a good place to start.

* * * * *

Durkin: Though at first blush it probably appears to the outsider that there could not be two genres more divergent than jazz and country, we've joked in the past about possible points of resonance too. A music historian might mention the existence of folks like Bob Wills, or the musical roots of someone like Charlie Haden, or even Sonny Rollins' cover for the Way Out West album. But I'm thinking too of deeper connections.

For instance: anyone playing jazz today has to deal somehow with the notion of authenticity. The music now has a history, a “tradition,” and a scholarship, and it is understood that each new generation of artists has to respond to that in one way or another (by fulfilling, tweaking, or rejecting certain expectations).

I could be wrong, but it seems like modern country musicians are faced with a similar dilemma. The music’s conventions are so well established that it must be hard for a young artist to maneuver without seeming to be derivative, or else too self-consciously “weird.” Plus, with country, you have that whole “Heartland of America” image to contend with. (Am I wrong in assuming that some audiences take that very seriously?)

Is this minefield real for you? Is it a minefield at all? And if so, how have the Hawks navigated it so elegantly?

RW: Ah, yes. "Jazz and Country, Together Again." I remember our Jazz and Country night at the Knitting Factory in LA some years back. If I remember correctly it went pretty well, our crowds weren't as divergent as we might've expected. But then we worked together and had some of the same friends. But yes, on to your question.

Authenticity is a major goal for us. It's something we aim at. The problem is that it's a moving target. Or, perhaps we're the ones who are moving and the target is getting farther away. I have a suspicion that it is getting more difficult to make authentic music today in any genre precisely because of the accumulation of recorded music (not to mention all the scholarship, 'zines, websites, listeners, authorities, etc.). There's so much music to listen to and be influenced by it's more difficult to just play it and feel it spontaneously, light-heartedly.

We've had the ability to record and reproduce music now for a little more than one hundred years. That's really not that long compared to the history of music. I imagine that if you stumbled upon some band playing music in 1850 you would be thrilled, you'd grab your friends and bring them over, you'd sit dumbfounded and delighted as you watched and listened to them play. But now music is everywhere, in the elevator, on the radio, at the grocery store, stacked in gigabytes in your computer. Its value has shrunk to zero, basically. Music is now free because it's everywhere and there's no need to actually pay for it. This is a real problem for musicians who take years to develop their craft.

Oh shit, I've gotten away from the question and headed into a bitter rant against technology once again. Sorry, let me get back to your question....

Yes. The answer is yes, it is a minefield but a minefield is only dangerous if you walk into it. And pretty much we haven't. It's more like, "Hey, there's a nasty minefield over there. Fuck it. Let's go in the opposite direction." Luckily we've had a group of people who has been interested and supportive of going with us. We take the things we love from the tradition, vocal harmonies, song structure, melodies, a connection to the earth, freak or outsider status (yes, even that is part of the tradition) and ignored the rest (bogus patriotism, xenophobia, trucks, mama).

Durkin: As one who is interested in freak / outsider status, I'd love to hear more about the freaks and outsiders of country music. Because that's not really part of the general perception of country music, as far as I can tell.

RW: One of my favorite aspects of country/folk music is precisely that freak, outsider, drunk perspective. My favorite country artists (Merle Haggard, George Jones, Johnny Cash, Stanley Brothers, Louvin Brothers) are always flaunting their flaws. Whether it's alcohol or being poor or being a criminal or turning your back on Jesus, the theme is often confessional and by association outsider. Here is who I am, here is what I've done, who I've killed, etc. I am guilty!

I first started getting into this music when I started dating my future wife. At the beginning of our relationship she made me a tape of murder ballads. Songs like "Katie Dear" or "Knoxville Girl" by the Louvin Brothers or "Pretty Polly" by whoever wrote that. These songs really got me and that's when I started writing in this tradition. David Allen Coe and Johnny Cash played shows in prisons and related to prisoners because they had been prisoners. It was a genuine connection. When you listen to Live at Folsom Prison, Johnny is one of them. He's not patronizing or clowning, he really feels for their circumstance and knows he might end up back there. He's a freak and a fuck-up too.

To me, classic country and folk often maintained a legitimate connection to real people and real problems. Of course, that's all pretty much gone from mainstream country now. It's mostly about the girls getting wild on Saturday night, kicking Osama's ass, and bullshit nostalgia for calculated, phony family values. It's not just the connection to real people that's been lost but the people themselves have become disconnected from their own reality. We're a nation in denial of how bad we have it, how bad we feel. We can't even properly imagine our own lack of freedom, our own cultural poverty, our own pain. We don't have the words for it. We can't even describe the pickle we're in. In much of the heartland including Minnesota where I grew up, any hint of dissatisfaction is somehow unpatriotic, whiny, and liberal.

Durkin: As a fellow leader-of-a-ten-year-old-band-sans-hits, I'd love to know more about the Hawks' adventures in the modern music industry. Ten years ago I seem to recall all sorts of exciting predictions about how we were entering a new age, in which independent musicians would use the tools of the digital era to storm the corrupt citadels of the music business. (Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating a little.) Looking back, having survived the decade with a working band, what did you learn about how things actually went down? And where do you fall on the despair / hope continuum when it comes to the future of music? Is Twitter going to save us all?

RW: No, we are not going to be saved by Twitter. We are all going to die. But this is not a hopeless statement. It should be a galvanizing one. We are going to die! We are most likely not going to be rich or famous or even have health insurance. But so what? Everyone on the planet is going to die, the vast majority of them poor and unknown. And all of us are going to attempt to create meaning in our lives. By having families, jobs, growing plants, going to church, doing yoga, eating well, whatever. One of the main ways I create meaning in my life is by making music that I think is good according to my own twisted aesthetics. Ultimately, it's a spiritual practice. I do it with daily regularity to sustain meaning, to keep going back to that place where the muse lives, to avoid loneliness, isolation, CNN. But I don't want to minimize it and make it sound like a hobby. It's not. God, I hope music is never my hobby! It's my spiritual practice, identity, source of inspiration and meaning.

Durkin: That's great. I completely relate. It's interesting that most of the people I admire in music these days have some sort of "second job" to support what they do -- but I also think most of us aspire to be able to play music without having to worry about that distraction. And yet maybe making music into your "career" would kill the very things that attracted you to it (spiritual practice, etc.).

RW: Yes, the tension between day job and music career is ongoing. In that same spirit of contradiction, they do often each make the other possible. I suspect that if I quit my day job altogether, I might be more likely to make more mainstream music, or play more covers, or play more weddings, or be more concerned with being timely and hip. The fact that I keep a day job which provides for me and my family also helps to maintain artistic freedom and integrity, I think (hope). My family's next meal does not depend on the song I'm writing.

Or maybe it just makes me lazy. I also wonder if the day job allows me to be too complacent, too comfortable being a freak, an outsider, an obscure toiling artist. Maybe I'd write better songs, more urgent songs, if I didn't have any safety net whatsoever. It's difficult to know the answer precisely.

Durkin: What was the selection process for including the previously released material on the new album? Were there any hard choices? Did you feel like anything got left out?

RW: Okay, an easy one. We went to the iTunes store and sorted all our songs by popularity then picked the tops ten songs. We wanted to let the fans decide and also avoid having a big band fight. We then added 5 new tunes, and a couple of curiosities for our die hard fans. If I had decided the list myself it would've been different but not that different. We do plan on a SBG: Volume Two down the road so there will be another opportunity to gather some of the left out tunes.



Durkin: The new album, from the title on down, is steeped in metaphors and images of despair, missed possibilities, promises broken. And yet you keep coming back to hope too. The upbeat protagonist in “Raised by Hippies,” the salvation of someone like Robert Byrd, the beautiful melodies and harmonies of “Laissez Les Bontemps Roulet,” all suggest an underlying belief in the possibility of redemption and happiness, even if bittersweet. Is there a coherent philosophy tying these extremes together? Or: as a thoughtful person making thoughtful music in a thoughtless age, how do you cope?

RW: I'm not sure how coherent the philosophy is but there is one. Even our band name is a metaphor. Here in Los Angeles, this concrete metropolis of monoculture, there is still wildlife (hawks, coyotes, skunks, possums, hummingbirds, the occasional condor) there are are still strange country rock bands like ours even though we don't get the kind of attention that say, Britney Spears or some other pop star gets. Yes, on a grand scale things are a bit hopeless. The earth really is headed for an environmental catastrophe. The political system and the economy really have been hijacked by the obscenely wealthy. These are troubling times and the problems are so big it's overwhelming.

But life goes on. Children are born and they shine some light in, some optimism. The hopelessness and the optimism exist side by side. I take some refuge in my own personal contradictions. I'm an environmentalist but I drive a GMC Yukon. I'm a country rock musician and lead singer who wears flashy outfits onstage but I'm also a mild-mannered writing instructor at a university (a job I compare to working in a convent, fashion and other-wise). I'm a parent but I'm still fairly reckless at times when it comes to money and planning for the future. I guess the thing that holds it all together is a belief in the grand life cycle of it all. Things will be born, hopefully thrive for some period, then die. Then something else will be born. In this way, I welcome the coming apocalypse.

Durkin: We're both dads, and in our art, if not our lives, we're both a little wry. I don't think either of us is predisposed to sugar-coating. And yet children, to some extent at least, inevitably require at least a little sugar-coating in their initial understanding of the world.

How do you reconcile these things? How does fatherhood coexist with the hint of nihilism, the vaguely apocalyptic strain that runs through your music? Do you play your music for your kids?

RW: Yes, I sure do play my music for my kids. They also know lots of the songs and sing along. My daughter Zola (5) came on the road with us to Scotland at one and a half. She still likes to sleep in my guitar case. For about six months she listened to one of our albums (Hallowed Ground) every night as she fell asleep. She knows the songs inside out. We recently played a show in Santa Barbara at a coffee house type place and there was a couch on stage behind the drums. Both Zola and her brother Henry (almost 2) danced around for a while then passed out on the couch for the rest of the show, sleeping right there on stage. That's how it's gone. Some of our tunes are fairly dark and require some censorship or explanation but overall there is a great deal of joyfulness present in music and the act of making the music that children pick up on the most. We'll see how it all turns out as they get older. But I do see a real creative spirit in both of them that I take some credit for and that I think will continue to develop. I'd be surprised if they ended up as nihilistic and apocalyptic as their old man just because their lives and experiences are inevitably going to be so much different than mine. Again, I guess I see the apocalypse as a good time!



Cross-eyed hawks: it's too bad they don't have a sense of humor.

Durkin: What is the unlikeliest thing (musical or otherwise) you have been inspired or influenced by?

RW: I think my wife's cooking has really influenced me as an artist. She's an amazing cook. She develops new techniques, explores unusual ingredients, takes her time and develops her craft but it is all done in a loving way that's about nurturing and feeding her family. I hope I can do the same with my music. Often, the dough I do make at gigs, etc goes right to the grocery store and turns into breakfast, lunch, and dinner. That's a good feeling.

Durkin: Can music be effectively "political" (i.e., can it really matter, politically) in 2010, with its 24-hour hyper-media-with-a-vengeance vibe? Do you want the Hawks' music to be political? And if so, how do you know the difference between offending somebody (I'm thinking of the dropped line from "Humboldt") and educating them? [Editor's note: "Humboldt" originally ended with the line "You can have your September 11 / I'm heading off to a Stoney Heaven." According to the liner notes for Shoulda Been Gold, "when we sang the line in summer 2002 at Galapogos club in Brooklyn and the Knitting Factory only a stone's throw from the twin towers site, we could see a moment of hurt bewilderment sweep through the audience like a slap in the face. We dropped the line."]

RW: Hmm, not sure I have a good answer to this one. I guess music can be sort of political but I don't really expect it to change anything in any direct way. So, not too effective. I think the Hawks are a political band in many respects (particularly with regards to the environment) despite the fact that as a band we have diverging view points.

The Humboldt line change was an interesting phenomena. We definitely lost a few fans and one writer in particular who had written glowingly about us before really turned on us because of it. Part of the reason the line was changed (which we didn't mention in the liner notes) was I thought it might date the song too much to include September 11th. I don't know if I was right about that since 9/11 has become a permanent thing, also we kept the Bush line which also dates it but I just didn't have a good substitute for that one. "I quit my job at the 7/11" also seemed to fit the narrative of the song a bit better. Mostly, I think for myself as the the lead singer (the one singing the line) I didn't want to reflect on that event over and over every time we played that song. The song is kind of our big closer and it's a pot anthem that's mostly just about rocking out and having fun. The political element seemed out of place, somewhat. It also seemed cold and unfeeling to those who really did suffer on that day. Also, our libertarian bass player never said anything about it but I knew it was eating at him. His son is in the Air Force in the desert. The personal outweighed the political in that sense and that also lead to the line change. Who knows, maybe it was big mistake.

Raw art in two parts

Part one

Last Friday, I played a funeral for a 95 year-old woman I did not know (or, perhaps more accurately, for her family, who I also did not know). I've been doing this sort of gig regularly for two years now. (Someday, I suppose, I will provide you with a better idea of what it's like to be an agnostic who makes a good portion of his living providing live music for religious services. Hint: it's not a strange as I thought it would be, though of course I have a high tolerance for strangeness.)

Sometimes it's hard to tell ahead of time whether a particular hymn, sung by the church congregation, is going to "work," musically. After all, most of the congregants are in their 70s and 80s. Some of them are hard of hearing. Some possess what could only be called a "delayed" sense of rhythm. And at the funerals, anyway, there is no choir to help guide everybody else's singing. Add to that the fact that I'm playing the organ, from the choir loft -- so the sound is more diaphanous than focused -- and the chances that we're all actually going to be together on any given piece are, I would say, about 50/50.

This is true even for a well-known tune like "Amazing Grace," which was one of the hymns included in Friday's service. And since the deceased was 95, I stupidly assumed that her family had been well-prepared for her death, and that their grief, however genuine, would be pretty muted as a result. In other words, I wasn't expecting a terribly moving performance.

I was wrong. I'm not sure if it was the gloominess of the day, or the tearful eulogy delivered by one of the grandchildren, or the fact that I had been listening to DM Stith on the way in to work, or the possibility that I am basically a big sap -- but I discovered, after a few notes into that morning's rendition of "Amazing Grace," that sometimes beautiful things can happen in a church. It was quite moving, to hear those untrained voices singing strongly, with sad acceptance, and a palpable recognition of the mystery that afflicts us all. I know I am guilty of reading into the sounds I heard, based on my own physical and philosophical vantage point -- but I could swear I detected more poignant uncertainty in that piece than ever before. More importantly, it seemed to me to be vital in a way that I haven't heard in live music for awhile. And not at all because of the organ player.

Part two

One of the cooler features of my daughter's school is that students are encouraged to use drama and performance as a tool with which to understand history. They refer to it as a "living history curriculum." We went to one of the student productions last night.

The show had the typical middle-school flaws -- actors who struggled to enunciate, cheap costumes, the student's tendency to overact, the educator's tendency to over-direct -- and yet there were some beautiful moments. One came halfway through, with a little cotillion interlude that took place in the aisles created by the arrangement of audience folding chairs. The auditorium lights were off, but several spotlights awkwardly followed the student dancers as they moved in procession around the room.

There was something terribly strange and wonderful about this dance, as watched by us "grown-ups" (who, it seems to me, were middle schoolers ourselves only yesterday) -- some of us with our own kids, not yet old enough to be in the play. The music was typical Ken Burns-ish Civil War banjo and dulcimer stuff. Maudlin in any other setting, but somehow, at this moment, in the midst of this very obvious display of the various (fleeting) stages of human existence -- somehow it worked, and was, again, beautiful, vital.

Question

Today I found myself wondering: how can a professional ever hope to make art with the raw directness and vitality of an amateur?

[Photo credit: Jakob Montrasio]

Speaking of birds

This, from David Ocker:



Wonderful.

My favorite part is when the speckled guy comes in (at roughly the 40 second mark).

You get what you get and you don't get upset

A very good friend recently sent me a link to the transcript of a set of health insurance reform interviews Bill Moyers did last week. The whole thing is interesting and worth a read, but for me, this commentary, from Marcia Angell, positively leapt off the screen:

I think the problem is this, Bill. If this plan is passed, and I think there's real doubt as to whether it will be, and there's even more doubt as to whether it would ever be fully implemented, but let's say that it's passed. It will begin to unravel almost immediately. And then what will people do? Well, they'll say, "We tried health reform, and it didn't work. Better not try that anymore."

It'll be like what happened after the Clinton plan failed. There'll be another 16 years before anybody comes up with the courage to try that again. People say, "Too expensive. Just can't have universal care. Tried that, did that, didn't work, good-bye." Whereas if the bill dies now, people can say, "This bill died because it was a bad bill." And the problem is still on the front burner. And then one can hope that we get some version of Medicare for all. And that we don't have to wait 16 years.

Moyers asks exactly what I would have asked: "What makes you think it would come back in 16 years or more? What makes you think it will ever be back on the table?" To which Angell responds:

Oh, I think it has to be. I mean, I think that this system is unraveling so fast, doing nothing or doing the Obama plan, so fast, that something will have to be done. Unless we want to, you know, explicitly be a third world country. So I don't think it's going to wait. But if we pass this plan, it's going to delay.

This whole exchange strikes me as absurd.

Maybe folks like Dennis Kucinich are right, and "the bill" as it currently stands won't address the underlying problems in our health care system. But if the thing goes down, know this. Health insurance reform will not stay on the "front burner" -- at least not by any conceivable definition of "front burner" that I can imagine.

Can I extend the kitchen metaphor? Okay, how's this: like a cooking experiment gone horribly awry, health insurance reform will promptly go into the trash. And we will all need to adjust to the fact that we'll be having something else for dinner. (Sorry, I think I took that too far.)

Note how Angell compares the hypothetical success of the Obama bill to the failure of the Clinton plan. Get it? Since Clinton failed, and since that failure prevented us from revisiting the issue for nearly two decades... the success of Obama will produce the same result.

Call me crazy, but that seems to betray a fundamental misunderstanding of political behavior. "Failure," especially when bombastically proclaimed as such by the media, will lead not to more action but to inertia. I mean, consider the headache it has been to keep the issue on the front burner this year alone -- even though, by some estimations, we are already well on the way to third world status.

"Success" of the bill may not exactly bring "success" as Angell would define it (or, hell, as I would define it), but it will bring momentum. Some people will get a glimpse of a better life. Again, the fixes may not address the underlying problem, but a certain amount of desperation will be removed from the equation. All this birther, deather, Obama-as-Hitler bullshit we've had to put up with over the last year, and which has prevented any sort of reasonable dialogue on the subject at hand? That is mostly derived from desperation. You can't think rationally when you are treading water.

Look, I like Marcia Angell. I think she's very smart. But I wish she (and others like her) understood that, at the moment, we're in a triage ward. Brain surgery will have to wait.



[Photo credits: Redvers (top); Anyaka (bottom).]

What passes for scholarship these days: Chapter three, part one

So in another life, ages ago, I wrote this thing called a dissertation, in support of a doctoral degree that I currently get approximately zero material use out of.

Here is the eighth installment (a necessarily short introduction to what is one of the longer chapters) of a series that will finally get the whole damned thing out there for public consumption. I'm going to present it verbatim, though I'm sure my thinking has changed in some ways since I originally wrote it (between 1998 and 2004).

Enjoy, if you can!

PREVIOUSLY:
Introduction, part one
Introduction, part two
Chapter one, part one
Chapter one, part two
Chapter two, part one
Chapter two, part two
Chapter two, part three

* * * * *

Decomposition: A Critique of Musical Authorship and Authenticity

Chapter Three: Authenticity and Written Music (part one)

In 1983, Art Jarvinen, composer and member of the California EAR Unit, a Los Angeles new music ensemble, commissioned a piece from composer Frank Zappa. Entitled “While You Were Art,” the piece was to be debuted as part of the Monday Evening Concert Series at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a regular haunt for the “new music” audience in Los Angeles. Once the members of the group looked over the new score, however, they concluded that it would be too difficult to learn in time for the scheduled concert. In an effort to salvage the commission, Zappa offered to provide a high-quality digital tape recording of an electronically-sequenced performance of the piece which, he suggested, could be played through the PA system while the members of the ensemble mimed “actually performing.” On the evening of the concert, to make the illusion complete, all of the trappings of a performance were put into place: wires were dangled from the instruments (as Zappa told the musicians: “Any sound the audience hears that might be deemed ‘synthesized’ will be overlooked because there’s a wire coming out of your instrument” (175, italics in original)), nonfunctioning mics and “[a] lot of useless electronic equipment” were scattered about the stage, and so on (Ocker).

David Ocker, Zappa’s copyist and assistant at the time, indicates what happened next: “As soon as they turned on the sound system I knew there was a problem. I described it as ‘a wall of hiss.’” Previously, Zappa had recorded a version of the piece to a cassette tape, which had been provided to the group as a reference -- and it was this tape, not the high quality digital recording, that was mistakenly being used for the LACMA performance. Ocker:

I slunk down in my seat, I was sure that every one in the audience would instantly know what was going on. I mentally prepared myself for a disaster [...] Much to my surprise the audience sat quietly throughout. And there was polite and extremely unenthusiastic applause afterwards. The Unit trudged out for a bow and then went right on to the next piece.

After the concert I went on-stage to talk to Art. He was standing in a small group -- one of whom was the composer Morton Subotnick -- a former teacher of mine whose music is frequently performed by the EAR Unit. I told Art “It sounded awful!” Bad-mouthing a performance directly like that is a “no-no” in the chamber music world and this comment was greeted with some surprise. When it was explained that the “awful” comment referred to the quality of tape-reproduction, it became immediately clear that the audience had not understood the pantomime quality of the performance.

Zappa’s recounting of the event is featured in his autobiography (though we should remember that Zappa did not attend the performance and thus was basing his own interpretation of what happened on second-hand evidence):

Final result? The man who ran the concert series didn’t know the difference. The two classical reviewers from the major Los Angeles newspapers didn’t notice anything either. Nobody in the audience knew, except for David Ocker, my computer assistant, who had helped prepare the materials. Nobody knew that the musicians never played a note.

It produced quite a scandal in “modern music circles.” Several members of the ensemble [Ocker mentions one: cellist Erika Duke], mortified by all the hoo-ha, swore they would never “do it again.” (Do what again? Prove to the world that nobody really knows what the fuck is going on at a contemporary music concert?) (175-6, emphases in original).

But what really was the “hoo-ha” here? Was it simply a matter of the audience having been “fooled”? Or is it assuming too much to argue that nobody in the audience had any idea what was going on? There are indications, for instance, that some people did not accept the performance entirely at face value; Ocker points out that one individual who sat nearest to the stage was overheard wondering “why there wasn’t more direct sound from the instruments themselves.” And Jarvinen notes that guitarist Steve Vai, also in attendance, “knew immediately,” complaining that the piece should have been “actually performed,” as it was not as difficult as some of the other material on the program. More importantly, there are other explanations for the fact that the audience as a whole did not explicitly comment on the performance. What was interpreted as audience ignorance may have actually been a muted expression of scorn; as Ocker indicates, the concertgoers were not really interested in Zappa’s music, and thus it is possible that they did not care enough to pay attention to what was happening. On the other hand, the Monday Evening Concert series is known as a forum for new music, and as such, the presence of electronics, tape or a performance art element would not necessarily have been considered out of place. Thus, it is quite possible that the audience did recognize that what they were experiencing was mimed performance accompanied by a tape recording, and they simply assumed this arrangement was intentional.

In the final analysis, of course, we are forced to make assumptions about the audience reaction to this event, because nobody actually did a survey of those in attendance. Nevertheless, the “While You Were Art” performance is still useful because of what it demonstrates: not the ignorance of audiences, necessarily, but the tension between opposite and morally-loaded poles of aesthetic “truthfulness” and “artificiality.” The strong emotional reactions suggest that the issue here is “authenticity” -- a slippery term that is defined in various ways but ultimately depends on an assumption that it is possible for art to be “real” (as opposed to “unreal”). In actuality, as the metaphor of transduction suggests, art is always mediated, so that instead of a single, clearly-defined work, each composition should be considered in terms of an infinite number of works. This idea of mediation / transduction will inform the critique of authenticity laid out in the next two chapters.

[photo credit: Elsie esq.]

"Very impressive, but no one is watching."

It was purely an accident (and in no way related to the untimely death of our chickens, I swear) that my wife and daughter and I ended up watching a documentary about birds tonight. It featured, in particular, the Birds of Paradise, of Papua New Guinea. If you've never seen these critters in action, they are singularly fascinating:



My question: is what the birds do as part of their mating ritual art? Especially once you take it out of its original context, and enclose it in a frame (such as the one provided so graphically by the YouTube interface)?

If it is art, who is the author? (Note that you're not allowed to answer "god," as that would be too trite for my purposes here.) Also, is the work any good?

I'm completely serious, of course.

[photo credit: Zorilla]

Blinders

Michael Faraday, who had little mathematics and no formal schooling beyond the primary grades, is celebrated as an experimenter who discovered the induction of electricity. He was one of the great founders of modern physics. It is generally acknowledged that Faraday's ignorance of mathematics contributed to his inspiration, that it compelled him to develop a simple, nonmathematical concept when he looked for an explanation of his electrical and magnetic phenomena. Faraday had two qualities that more than made up for his lack of education: fantastic intuition and independence and originality of mind.

-- Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage

I love this paradox: sometimes ignorance can lead to insight, and even brilliance.

And yet it has to be the right kind of ignorance, doesn't it?

[photo credit: schizoform]