Constant Lambert—Music Ho! (ii)

Constant Lambert
Music Ho! A Study of Music In Decline
(1934)

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[201]
(g) The Spirit of Jazz

By jazz, of course, I mean the whole movement roughly designated as such, and not merely that section of it known as Afro-American, or more familiarly as 'Harlem'. The negro once enjoyed a monopoly of jazz, just as England once enjoyed a monopoly of the industrial revolution, but for the negroes to imagine that all jazz is their native province is as if an Englishman were to imagine that all locomotives were built by his compatriots. Even the Harlem section of jazz is by no means so African as might be supposed.

...

[202] ... The European's enthusiasm for so-called negro music is in equal ratio to the negro's appropriation of European devices, and the more the European tries to imagine himself 'down on the Delta' the more the negro tries to imagine himself in an aristocratic salon. In this connection, it is amusing to recall the situation that arose recently when a well-known negro-dance arranger

[203]

was called in to produce a ballet for a highbrow company trained in the classical tradition. While all the Europeans flung aside their carefully won training to indulge in an orgy of pseudo-Charlestons the negro himself was moved to tears, not by his own work but by the classic elegance of Lac des Cygnes.

...

[205] ... The phrase 'barber-shop chord'—which denotes a chord of unusual succulence—dates back to the days when a guitar hung in every negro barber's shop, and a client who was waiting would vamp about on the instrument until at a lucky trouvaile everyone would shout 'Hold that chord'. It need hardly be pointed out that this type of harmonic experiment is as sophisticated in its method as that of the contemporary composers who—deny it hotly though they may—compose 'at the piano'.

...

The superiority of American jazz lies in the fact that the negroes there are in touch not so much with specifically barbaric elements as with sophisticated elements. ...

[206]

The sudden post-war efflorescence of jazz was due largely to the adoption as raw material of the harmonic richness and orchestral subtlety of the Debussy-Delius period of highbrow music. ...

... Though popularly regarded as being a barbaric art, it is to its sophistication that jazz owes its real force. It is the first dance music to bridge the gap between highbrow and lowbrow successfully. The valse has received august patronage from Beethoven onwards, it is true, but the valses of the nineteenth-century composers are either

[207]

definite examples of unbending or definite examples of sophistication—sometimes both. ... In the nineteenth century the split between the classical and popular came between a follower of Liszt, let us say, and a follower of Gungl. Today the split occurs between a composer like Kurt Weill and a composer like Jarnach—both of them pupils of Busoni.

The same rapprochement between highbrow and lowbrow—both meeting in an emotional terrain vague—can be seen in literature. [e.g. Eliot] ...

[208]

The words of jazz songs mark the first popularization of that well-known modern vice—the Inferiority Complex. Until recently a certain exuberant self-confidence has usually formed the spiritual background of a popular tune. ... A general air of physical attractiveness, sexual bounce and financial independence is naturally assumed by the writers of pre-war song hits. ...

In modern songs it is taken for granted that one is poor, unsuccessful, and either sex-starved or unable to hold the affections of such partner as one may have had the luck to pick up. ... For the most part...the heroes and heroines of modern songs meet with the rebuffs they deserve and take refuge in the unmute reproach of 'Ain't misbehavin' ', and 'Mean to Me',...

[208]

... The other side of the medal, the series of crazy words, crazy tune numbers, with their assumed galvanic energy has an equally neurasthenic basis. The so-called 'hot' songs are as depressing as the so-called 'sweet'; they spring from no genuine gaiety such as inspires the marches of Sousa, the sardanas of Bou and the valses of Waldteufel—they are a desperate attempt to hide an underlying boredom and malaise.

Well, one does wonder if the author has not badly misjudged all of this simply for ignorance of The Blues as a major tributary.

Bibliographilia—Lasch's LeWitt

Here is the Sol LeWitt article referred to by Lasch in Chapter IV of The Minimal Self.

Some choice cuts:

Karen Kurczynski—Aesthetics Make an Appearance

Kurczynski, The Art and Politics of Asger Jorn

p. 105—on the Statsgymnasium in Aarhus

Rational, ordered, rectilinear, Apollonian, the building stands for everything Asger Jorn critiqued in architecture: geometries so harmonious and restrained that they became almost lifeless; the aesthetic celebration of structure and engineering that rejects almost anything decorative, organic, or irregular.

Here is a quite curious and loaded usage of "aesthetic;" or perhaps it is the usage of "decorative" in opposition to it which is the curiosity. The implication in any case is clearly of self-referentiality, formalism, and the specialist intellect run amok; that is, of a panoply of traits which I at least would consider to comprise one of the foremost ANTI-aesthetics, or perhaps non-aesthetics, as in that which does not engage with the senses in their basest form. Indeed, it seems (not only here) that the classbound conception of Aesthetics per se has gradually overtaken its literal/historical meaning: the word doesn't just denote the highbrow, it is highbrow; there is then no term left (or not one with wide circulation/currency) for the much simpler (but NOT therefore also Lower) question of sensation, perhaps not even for the sensation-intellect synapse, which is where we NEED this word most. Customarily this interface becomes a brick wall; so it is here, to the extent that a yet larger, more glaring slippage of concepts manifests: "aesthetic" opposed to "decorative."

[from a notebook, 2018]

[Now: this note itself is a hot mess in the usage department. I'm sure it was late after work. But you get the idea.]

Exchange with Milo Fine (v): "the wherewithal to examine it ruthlessly"

[Previously: Foreword – (i) – (ii) – (iii) – (iv)]

[SK] You're absolutely correct that versatility has been co-opted, and in quite a counterproductive way. I have sat through many a guest artist lecture during which the purely practical value of a wide ranging musical skill set has been expounded. There is, potentially, one minor positive aspect to this as musical academia continues hurtling down the "hire education" abyss, which is that it pokes a nice big hole in the narrow focus (too narrow for its own good, probably, even for the sake of true believers) that has traditionally prevailed there. Being driven by pragmatism and only negligibly by artistic concerns, however, undermines from the start what little hope this development brings with it.

[MF] Yes, in order to remain viable, the academy has to take in, analyze, dilute and regurgitate; even as much of what it vomits up pursuant to something like art in the purest sense doesn't have a practical application, and thus is at odds with what has become the academy's primary function. This would, in part, explain why the possibilities touched on by early free jazz musicians (or, earlier, Dadaists) were inevitably jettisoned, not only by the academy, but by musicians and listeners too. I'm talking about exploring pathways into the music that weren't dependent upon established approaches/dogma. But, what has happened, of course, is that these stylings were essentially dismissed as second-rate when unfairly and unreasonably compared to the inevitable emphasis on traditional virtuosity (extending into extended techniques [wordplay intended]). Of course, that hasn't prevented some of us from heading down those barely lit paths anyway. (As an example, I was delighted when, several years ago, friend and colleague Charles Gillett -- who is a highly accomplished autodidact in his own right -- turned me on to the band Aerosol Pike [Philip Mann/Ryan Reber/Rick Ness] with whom we've both collaborated. As I've said to you and others, these guys sound like they were lifted from the late 60s free jazz scene and transplanted here and now; like listening to a living ESP-Disk. But what's amazing, and I think gives their work a hearty resonance, is the fact that while free jazz influenced them, they didn't study and mimic autodidact players from that era. Rather, as I understand it, their music naturally evolved from an avant-garde rock based aesthetic. Not surprisingly, there was *no* issue with you, an academy-trained musician, being able to find common ground with them; or Charles for that matter. And this speaks to the notion of an openness to embrace another, equally valid point of view.) Curiously, however, having, I think, much to do with my focus and determination, I have, on occasion in reviews, nonetheless been termed a virtuoso.

Actually, I believe one can see rather clearly the seed of music's outright destruction as a post-secondary academic subject contained in the inability of any one musician, scholar, or institution to adequately deal with the full range of currently academically acceptable musics, to say nothing of the outliers. Gradually, I think we are having to accept that the needs of all of these students are too different from each other, and that there isn't really any core curriculum of a manageable size which can unify them. Not that people won't try, but it's only going to keep looking more and more ridiculous. Eventually, even the trustees, donors, and administrators will be people who didn't necessarily grow up believing that nineteenth century orchestral music deserves to be prioritized over all other forms.

I think here we have to examine the agendas of everyone involved; most of which have little to do with the essence of what is termed "art". Granted there are professors and students who retain the semblance of a resonant core, using the academic setting to further their individual quest, and more power to them! Glean something from the material itself and fuck the faux value system which surrounds it.

Probably the thing I was most curious about leading up to the Improvised Music workshop we co-led for WBSM was how you would position yourself, so to speak, seeing that there is a certain pluralistic aspect to how you work, but that you also have very high standards, the latter implying a role for judgment/taste/
determinacy/willfulness that more than a few improvisors of your generation (in)famously dispensed with. I laughed pretty hard to myself when you said that a certain pattern got "obnoxious" after a period of time; it was a pointed but diplomatic way of expressing an aesthetic position.

Well, that was "true" for that moment, that context, and also pursuant to the, what?, feeling behind what was being played. (Again, one can develop a sensibility to hone in on such things. Not that one is, thankfully, ever 100% correct, but, enough to provide insight into what might lie behind the work.) So, at another moment, another context, and with a different feeling, I wouldn't have made such an observation. (And, in any case, I would always be open to being challenged on any assessment!)

And yet...so many musicians are pattern/groove players. In pure pluralism, that's what they'd bring to a collaboration.

Which, even while painfully predictable, is not necessarily a counterproductive thing. The problem is that it's a default, a habit, and thus serves to prevent creativity coming to the fore.

The issue is whether one can recognize and challenge such defaults; phrasing them differently, breaking them up, shutting the fuck up, abandoning them, etc. But this takes conscious effort/thought, and, as we've touched on here, too many musicians don't see that as a vital aspect of free improvisation. And, even if they do, don't have the wherewithal to examine it ruthlessly and get out of their comfort zone. (And, perhaps return to it at some point from a different and more creative perspective.)

For me, being an "inside" musician quite a lot of the time, I tend to give a different reason why I don't like to attempt ensemble improvisations of songforms, vamps, or functional harmonies, which is that it more or less requires everyone in the group to be a mind reader.

Well, I would define those as more ad lib than improvising situations. And, I don't know that one would have to be a mind reader. Remember that a good amount, if not a lot of early free jazz attempted by boppers inevitably ended up as a blues.

When I hear bebop, I want to hear harmonic agreement; when I hear Beethoven, I want to hear right notes; and when I hear Improvised Music, I want to hear something akin to the approach you've carved out. But I suppose that brings us back to compartmentalization…

Yes, but from there, and with your restless, fertile mind, can come a (natural) synthesis; a conjoining not rooted in marketable eclecticism.

To go along with all of that, your response to the tradition question makes me realize that there is a parallel question, perhaps more to the point, about aesthetics and anti-aesthetics. For me, aestheticism is a first principle of sorts; I tend to feel that intentionally working against it is like cutting off your whole leg because of a blister on your foot. In any case, it seems to me that the notion of undermining the status quo becomes quite a bit muddier here, i.e. in light of the difference between striving to make "beautiful" work out of novel sounds/methods and making intentionally "ugly" work for whatever reason.

Ah, but there you're getting into our wiring; our cultural values based on conditioning. Ultimately, aestheticism and anti-aestheticism are the same thing, though aspects of each come to the fore based on what one is feeling at any given moment; thus impacting both musical decision-making and perception. This attempt to accept, embrace and utilize every/anything on some level forms a (not *the*) basis for free improvisation; at least for me.

Hearing Modernity (iii)

Olivia Lucas on Jonathan Sterne’s MP3: Meaning of a Format:

The approach to history here is never teleological; instead, it emphasizes the contingency of all events and artifacts. The book addresses the fact that the mp3 could have been invented thirty years earlier than it was, and uses this fact to interrogate the assumption that technological capability alone leads to invention. The emergence of the mp3 in 1993 was the result of a long history of people, institutions and technologies.

Okay, okay, I get it. I mean, not really, but kind of. No musical style or technique is universally applicable anymore, but everyone in a society lives under the same set of social, political, and economic conditions, and the better we understand them, the better equipped we are to make and consume sound/music. The idea of replacing music theory with acoustics in the core curriculum actually has always kind of appealed to me for the same reason: we all live under the same physical laws, even if our Musical traditions are vastly different and irreconcilable. Why not go all the way? Isn't embracing "the contingency of all events and artifacts" going to do more for more students of sound and music alike than sweating out the gory details of how "a minority of aesthetes" chose to spend their putrid little lives?

I honestly am not sure. It seems we will find out in due time. I do wonder, though, just to belabor the point a bit more, what becomes of the last thousand years of willfulness in Western music? Are we to behave as if it never happened? Today, given enough data from which to extrapolate, computers can spit out convincing sound-alikes in the style of virtually any classical composer; and yet simply by virtue of being first, the original works themselves tell us so much more about the world we live in and how it got to be that way. Sociology, meanwhile, can explain or excuse the work, but it can't perform or compose it. The former are ideal academic pursuits; the latter never fit quite so well. Perhaps it's better, then, that academia do Sound Studies rather than Sound Making; that it focus on what it's good at and leave the creative, subjective work that it never really knew how to properly approach or nurture to be done outside its walls. Isn't that what people like me have been saying for a long time? And yet it was the academics' unhealthy distance from real live musical practice that prompted those complaints in the first place. Seen in that light, instituting a yet further distance suddenly becomes a lot less appealing, and the very point of doing so rather unclear. That's my main problem here. As long as there has been music, practitioners have always already been analysts, historians, and most of all, teachers and mentors. That aspect of music predates modern academia and promises to outlive it. The story of the academic perversion of the time-honored mentor-disciple relationship is one of increasing distance from musical practice; of enforced insularity as an inevitable product of a particular kind of hierarchical structure in the organization of such institutions; and of people with no particular interest in or ability for teaching or mentorship half-assing their way through it in exchange for a much-needed paycheck when the society they live in presents them with no alternative income source. The strongest backlash against this monstrosity was bound to come from far enough beyond its walls to ensure that those leading it didn't entirely understand or appreciate the value of a properly functioning version; they simply wanted their own demands met, their own self-importance validated, by whichever institutions they happened to be looking at after being shot with Cupid's envy arrow, and where such things were not immediately forthcoming, they set about burning the whole thing to the ground. Ergo, Sound Studies, the new and improved, politically correct version of Sound Making, where everybody gets a trophy, no one has to practice, and the only prerequisite is fluency in a coded language of five-dollar words. In all seriousness, there is undoubtedly important work to be done here should its exponents demonstrate the ability to learn from the history of the institutions they've worked so hard to penetrate; it so often seems, however, that this history has simply been dismissed as a dark age without being fully digested, the very notion of aesthetic contemplation considered beyond redemption, and our nose thus cut off very much in spite of our face. There are other questions, too, like what becomes of the "music makes kids smart" narrative after every last piece of physical and mental exercise inherent in the traditional Western musical experience has been decolonialized right out of it, and anything less than a Partchian mania for first principles is pathologized as reactionary propaganda? It is not for nothing that Christopher Small, The People's Deconstructionist, builds his widely-read book "Musicking" around the notion that music is something people do; it would seem rather obvious, though, that art which anyone can make, which requires no specialized knowledge or skills, is inherently non-transformative, art with zero "extrinsic" benefits, if you will. Who cares, then, how many people it reaches?

The 21st century postmodernists have let the 20th century musico-academic terrorists win. Distrusting the power of beauty to elicit irrational behavior, or perhaps possessing no ear for it themselves, they can't seem to understand why anyone else would have use of it; and so the play of contingencies and constructivisms is supposed to fellate our minds the way music once did our ears. I'm a smart guy, so...almost. But not quite. I have ears, not ice, where my heart should be.

[sc]airquotes (v)

Instead of repeating such Western myths of the noncontingency of artworks, why not search for jazz meanings behind the music, in the life-shapes that gave rise to it and that continue to sustain it? Why not, in other words, scrutinize the interactions between our own rules of formation and those we impute to the makers of jazz as the source of our evaluations of it? Why not create a jazz pedagogy in which our construction of the varieties of black life experience takes priority, saving the music–intricately bound up with those experiences, after all–for last, construing it in light of them and resisting the aestheticizing tendency to exaggerate its differences from other manifestations of expressive culture?

...Placing the music first will always distance it from the complex and largely extramusical negotiations that made it and that sustain it. It will always privilege the European bourgeois myths of aesthetic transcendency, artistic purity untouched by function and context, and the elite status of artistic expression. (Such myths concerning the composers of the European canon badly need to be exploded, so it is all the more troubling to see them neatly transferred to African-American composers and performers.) Emphasizing the musical appreciation of jazz only transfers to the study of African-American music the formalist view that remains debilitatingly dominant in Eurocentric musicology, with its continuing emphasis on internalist music analysis." (89)

Gary Tomlinson. Cultural Dialogics and Jazz: A White Historian Signifies. Black Music Research Journal, Vol. 22, Supplement: Best of BMRJ (2002), pp. 71-105.

The Social Network as Anti-Aesthetic

It is in one sense quite odd to me, and in another not at all, that the prescription for musicians to make friends with their audience tends to go unremarked upon from a critical perspective. It wasn't that long ago that the composerly world was rocked, riven, scandalized, some would say self-imploded by the suggestion that writing music only for other specialists was a good idea. I myself have never thought it was a particularly good idea, but I will tell you why a Babbitt-ian audience comprised exclusively of colleagues appeals to me more than one comprised exclusively of friends. (They are both, it bears mentioning, social networks, which points to the absurdity of privileging one so decisively over the other.)

The socially networked audience theory takes the hackneyed pop-cultural adage that true friends are the ones who tell you the truth even when it hurts and turns it on its head. Instead, you now must make friends with as many potential listeners as possible in order to insulate yourself from judgment, since your friends will never tell you what they really think of your music as long as your show makes for a good hang. But of course these must be your true friends, since they make time to come to your shows, hence allowing you to have a career, perhaps even to make a living.

I see this dynamic as the dark matter lurking unseen behind the more visible movement, especially within the contemporary art world, towards post/anti-aesthetic art. Musicians, especially the kind most inclined toward what I am calling the socially networked audience theory, seem to me to be as a group still very much interested in aesthetics, at least as far as how their work is made. Music being "the social art," as some have called it, our "anti-aesthetic" takes hold in the public presentation of our work instead of (perhaps despite) its mode of conception.

There is also a distinctly meritocractic tinge to all of this. (And make no mistake, meritocracy is a whole category of anti-aesthetic unto itself.) Whereas the opportunity to become an aesthetic success has historically been tied to privilege (leisure time for taking up music and the money to pay for instruments and instruction), it seems more in keeping with good American values that the people with the most friends should have the privilege of making art for a living, since this would suggest that they are far more legitimately meritorious than those who had the good fortune of being born into money, and perhaps even more so than those who fought their way into music without the benefits of privilege, since a lot of those people, though we respect the heck out of them for their dedication, are jerks nonetheless.

“Overdetermination,” says the Encyclopedia of Postmodernism, "comes closer to its postmodern connotation when Althusser, a Marxist philosopher, borrows the term to describe the complex whole of a social formation as it is constituted by a multiplicity of determining contradictions." Sorry for going there, Modernists, but doesn't that describe the socially networked audience theory pretty well? In a closed musical culture with a high degree of aesthetic consensus, friends and family hardly count for an audience any more than they do for references on a job application. Conversely, in a fragmented, postmodern musical culture where one has the freedom to make and consume any of a number of different kinds of music, they do not merely become the core of one's audience by default, but in fact (and this is where you can practically smell the overdetermination) they are vociferously annointed as the necessary core of one's audience by the most prominent tastemakers and cultural theorists in the musical profession itself, the only explanation being "The world has changed! Don't be left behind!"

There is a too-obvious, if not entirely incorrect, interpretation to be made here, namely that as times have gotten tougher for musicians, we have merely stooped lower and lower just to get by, and that only once the downturn had touched everyone more or less equally (even the fat cats) did it become socially acceptable to avowedly rely on friends and family for an audience, and indeed to advocate openly for doing so from positions of respect and/or authority. If that were the whole story, however, I believe we would nonetheless detect no small amount of regret in these proclamations, and also that it would be malcontents like me more so than those occupying said "positions of respect and/or authority" who would be glumly relating our plight to an imaginary readership. What in fact we have are commentators in high places who, to the extent it is possible to ascertain as much through a written medium, can barely contain their glee.

Many (myself occasionally included) have lamented the low standing of the arts in contemporary American society. And yet the present discussion makes clear how destructive the ongoing excessive romanticization of the arts remains to the arts themselves. It is this romanticization which provides the elusive other half of the primary "determining contradiction" in the social pathway to a post/anti-aesthetic. Or, in plain English, we recognize that art is in one sense a right and in another a privilege. The socially networked audience theory is one futile attempt among many to square these two realizations with each other when in fact both are permanent and irreconcilable, a good old fashioned dialectic which the postmodern revolution only thinks it has resolved.

When We Listen To How Much of What, and Why

"...but would you rather listen to Bach or Vivaldi after a long day at work?"

Um...is this a trick question?

My name is Stefan and I have a problem. I listen the most to the music that is most important to me. Parties are not welcome respites from talking about music, but in fact welcome opportunities to talk about the music I really want to talk about. I've been known to "chill" at the end of a long day with my friends Shostakovich and Lutoslawski. Like everyone else, when I have leisure time, I do what I want; unlike everyone else, what I want to do most of the time is hear/read/write/contemplate that which gives my life purpose.

I'm struck by some recent comments and events here at school implying that there's something wrong or unusual about this. It's not the first time, but it still gets under my skin. If you almost never listen to a style of music, it is not "important" to you, no matter what you say. If certain "heavy" composers are set aside only for special occasions and rare states of consciousness, those are not your favorite composers, no matter what you say. The music that is important to you is your daily nourishment, not a delicacy to be ascetically reserved for special occasions. The things in life that are important to you are the things you confide in your friends, not those which you hide from them for fear of coming off a square. (Or are they your friends after all?)

Everyone needs a break. Even I retreat to the basketball court or the Scrabble board from time to time. Maybe it'd be nice if the rest of y'all that I have to live and work with didn't look quite so eager to get away? Maybe just humor that guy at the party who won't leave music behind when he leaves campus? Be yourself, of course, but dare I say maybe don't be quite so openly proud for not being like that guy if you really think this is what you want to do with your life?

How peculiar this all looks to someone of my sensibilities, accustomed as I am to being bludgeoned over the head with the insistence that art and life must be joined at the hip; that Art without Culture is just gymnastics; that "making pretty things" for their own sake is merely an adolescent phase; that the most important thing about art is its social message; that beauty and craft are merely Trojan Horses, used by elitist ideologues to seduce, hypnotize and disenfranchise the common folk; that silly white musicians err in treating their sound as an external "artifact" where they might more properly seek a "voice"; that music "matters" because it makes kids smart; in other words, that autonomous art is degenerate art, specifically because "autonomy" means severing the work from all of the things which make it "relevant" (if not always "beautiful," which is of course is strictly optional).

Having thus shoehorned Art into Life, Life does the Dosey Do! What a drag! Of course you don't talk about anti-aesthetic art any more than you have to! Of course you need a break from it twice a day! Of course you put on something else when your friends are over! You made it to be life, but not your life! You made it to teach society a lesson you were born knowing! Let them sort out your dogpile while you enjoy your teeny-bop techno music and totally epic wall hangings! Real life is, like, totally important to who you are as an artist, but it's not like anyone is going to live it all the time!

One of my favorite ambiguous statements is one I first heard uttered earnestly: "The only reason to do music for a living is that you can't do anything else." I ask any musician reading this to stop for a moment and consider which, if either, sense of this statement applies to you.