Things to Avoid

I have hitherto/will hereafter use deliberately provocative and vague terms. What, for instance, do I mean when I say that ‘traditionally western discourses, by their very nature, serve the impossible task of heightening particularity to clarify with ever more precision’? In a sense, I mean an effort to explain something in firmly external, retroactively applied terminology. But this definition itself is too vague. In a sense, I am reframing Amiri Baraka’s vitriol against those who ‘attack’ the music, ‘coming at us with COOL COOL COOL (meaning “we mean to get rid of this hotness you niggers are stirring up” … we’re going to stomp those hot rhythms flat, we gonna banish the blues, we gonna create ubiquitous charts that sound like mechanical organ grinders’.[1] A dismantling or neutering the power and meaning of the music. But this, too, is too strong for my meaning and appeals to a cultural identity I cannot claim and I do not wish to racially or culturally cross-dress.

As ever, examples are beneficial. Paul Cherlin and Geurino Mazzola’s book Flow, Gesture and Spaces in Free Jazz: Towards a Theory of Collaboration epitomises the extremity of my meaning. An excerpt:

Let us now apply the theorem in the concrete musical situation of a trio, composed of a pianist, a bassist, and a drummer. The three musicians are involved in hypergestural perspectives in the following ways. [Hypergestural iterations are previously defined: ‘This hot spot is based upon the n! permutations of skeletal digraph sequences that generate the hypergesture space Γπ(1) −→@Γπ(2) −→@ ...Γπ(n) −→@X.’] In a specific hypergestural space, each musician momentarily chooses a permutation π of his/her directed graphs (relating to his/her topological space). In figure 9.3, this is graphically represented by a named symbolic figure (pianist, bassist, drummer), where a short thick arrow points to a determined height of that figure, which symbolizes the permutation pi. This choice is also a function of the musical partner, to which the attention is directed. Therefore every musician is provided with two such short thick arrows. Next, each self-perspective is taken as a starting position to point to one of the partners. This partner then is also viewed under a specific permutation of the partner’s sequence of hypergestural directed graphs.[2] 

Specificity is increased to the nth degree and conditions of conditions of conditions of conditions……

Earlier in the text, Mazzola and Cherlin construct a set of mathematical rules for free jazz. I do not mean to say that Cherlin and Mazzola have nothing to add to the conversation, but that their reliance on the esoteric and complex mathematical formulae – in an attempt to ‘explain away’ the interaction of a jazz trio – uses language extremely distant to those of the musicians themselves. By which I mean, no musician thinks about performance in this way – a continually shifting series of interdependent calculation – and as such, I believe, their input does more for the external processing of the musical interaction rather than analysing the process of the interaction. Their analysis is antithetical to their subject: meaning becomes externally regulated by retroactively applied metalinguistic and mathematical laws. The applicability of these laws relies heavily on their existence as laws before use. Legitimacy is uncovered in their enunciation as improvisation, an always-already subsequent act. Mazzola and Cherlin, simply by how their analysis is structured, verify musical formulae as the relief of determinate systems and metalanguages of theory and mathematics.      

As I have said, however, analytical languages and approaches from other fields can be emphatically useful. David Borgo’s Sync or Swarm: Improvising Music in a Complex Age effectively combines mathematics, sociology and musicology. Inspired by computer scientist Jon Kleinberg’s research, Borgo analyses models of network theory taking account of

homophily parameter, named after the sociological tendency of like to associate with like. [This] model could now begin to take account of the fact that people, in order to maximise the efficiency of their small-world searches, take account of multiple social variables at the same time[1]

Approaching the question through computer science, Borgo elucidates our notion of reciprocal determinism. Discussing power-relations and networks further, Borgo cites Duncan Watts: ‘What if there just isn’t any center? Or what if there are many “centers” that are not necessarily coordinated?’[2] Borgo builds on this sociological research by connecting it with the words of Evan Parker. The parallels and thus benefit of the discipline cross-talk is clear. In essence, Community emerges:

However much you try, in a group situation what comes out is group music and some of what comes out was not your idea, but a response to somebody else’s idea[3]

What results is an abandonment of the ideology of reification, of products, monolithic essential identities and the dominion of the OBJECT.

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I suppose I’m kind of responding to these guys on their own terms, instead of the terms of what all of us are trying to talk about. I guess what I’m trying to say is that Cherlin and Mazzola need to work on their aim. A mathematician can study boxing and get all the theory down easy, but they won’t beat Amir Khan. You can’t learn to swim by reading books.  

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My issues with ‘western’ discourse is also more specific to musicology. Academic understandings of ‘music’ follow Plato – and those before him - far too strongly, reifying the action, the process of music into an object, an abstraction of the process.[4] It is an attempt to render subjective experience academically legitimate by estranging it the individual from the experience and placing it in third person terms.[5] Musicology sits at a crossroads wherein its internal processes have been intellectually exhausted, but no real discourse exists to examine or even discuss meaning; the composite, mythologically-rooted, spiritual culture in which such meaning is readily identified no longer exists in the ‘West’.[6] Ardently, this is not to say that western (art) music (WAM) is not ‘great’ music, but that its academic primacy has come at the expense of other ‘great’ musics, and placed it – to some extent – apart from world cultures and contexts.[7] Pedagogically, WAM suffers from a fetishisation of the ‘canon’ and the ‘Great Composers’, a symptom of the cult of the Romantic Genius.[8] The criticism is a familiar one: it is over-intellectualised. WAM ‘must be viewed as a “great” music among other “great” musics’.[9] You know, Chris Small puts it much better than I could, so I’ll just let him finish up

Scholars of Western music seem to have sensed rather than understood [that music is a process]; but rather than directing their attention to the activity we call music, whose meanings have to be grasped in time as it flies and cannot be fixed on paper, they have quietly carried out a process of elision by means of which the word music becomes equated with ‘works of music in the Western tradition’.  … In addition, musicology is, almost by definition, concerned with Western classical music, while other musics, including even Western popular musics, are dealt with under the rubric of ethnomusicology … the contradiction extends to the nature of the music itself; on the one hand, it is regarded as the model and paradigm for all musical experience, as can be seen from the fact that a classical training is thought to be a fit preparation for any other kind of musical performance (a famous violinist records ‘jazz’ duets with Stéphane Grappelli, and operatic divas record songs from Broadway musicals, all without apparently hearing their own stylistic solecisms); and on the other, it is regarded as somehow unique and not to be subjected to the same modes of inquiry as other musics, especially in respect to its to its social meanings … This idea, that musical meaning resides uniquely in music objects [scores, etc], comes with a few corollaries …

[1] musical performance plays no part in the creative process …

[2] musical performance is thought of as a one-way system of communication, running from composer to individual listener through the medium of the performer …

[3] no performance can possibly be better than the work that is being performed …

[4] each musical work is autonomous, that is to say, it exists without necessary reference to any occasion, any ritual, or any particular set of religious, political or social beliefs.[10]

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My dad wanted to take my mum to see one of the BBC Proms last year – can’t remember what it was. But I remember her saying no, because she saw it performed when she was younger and didn’t want her memory of that faultless performance distorted.

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When asked what message he would choose to send to space in the Voyager, Lewis Thomas reportedly said ‘I would send the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach… But that would be boasting.’  

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