Cultural baggage and its musical subversion
It's pretty clear, I think, that our socialisation has a lot to do with the kind of beliefs we hold about music (this needs to be the case for any notion of 'music' to get off the ground, since not all human societies have this specific notion). As we grow up within our societies, we're taught explicitly or implicitly what music is made up of in terms of both its creation and realisation. So we learn (at least in Western society) that music is created usually by individuals through the use of a score and is then realised through certain objects called instruments when humans interact with those objects in a certain way. These ideas aren't fixed in the essence of the concept 'music'; they are socially-legitimised beliefs constituting the 'right' view of music, a collection of shared norms of (listening and creating) behaviour. So when you hear the sound of piano notes being struck, certain norms are seen to be evoked – of what it is for an object to be called a piano, of the proper technique for playing a piano, of the historical significance of the instrument and so on.
These norms have led to experimental electronic music being constantly judged in relation to a very specific and historically-contingent idea of music. Take a track like 'A Stream With Bright Fish' from the darkly beautiful Harold Budd & Brian Eno album The Pearl:
When we listen to this, there's a certain sense in which we consider the sounds that aren't coming from the piano to be non-essential; the essence of the track is in Budd's piano playing. I think all the sounds have a part to play in this conclusion. Like I said, the piano sound brings with it certain presumptions regarding a successfully-realised 'piano performance'. But the other sounds conversely seem anti-'anthroperformative': the same held chord throughout combined with timbres that can't be easily associated with a traditional instrument amounts to a certain negation of what it is to give a 'successful' musical performance. As a result, the song is seen to exist primarily in the sounds made by Budd, the 'piano line'. (It's interesting to consider what it means if, as may be the case, Budd & Eno didn't for the piano to be considered the song's essence. Does this mean that we've so far failed to properly 'listen' to the song? Hope comes from the fact that these norms of musical convention aren't fixed; we could try to subvert them precisely with our own listening.) This kind of discrimination-as-listening – between foreground and background, centre and periphery, essence and superfluity – is probably quite commonplace in our attitude to music of all shapes and sizes. What makes some of the best experimental electronic music fascinating is how it seems to play with these norms of musical preconceptions in order to disrupt our legitimised listening practices. As a random recent example, take this track 'Weeds' from Oscar McClure's new album Compost:
Until the synthy chord emerges more fully from the humid beats at about 1:10, what can we say is the main instrument in this track? How many people would it take to play this? Where and what is the 'essence' of this track – that is, what would we have to leave in the track if we started removing layers of sound in order for 'Weeds' to survive as 'Weeds'? It doesn't seem nearly as clear as did (or rather is supposed to seem within our social norms) with 'A Stream With Bright Fish'. The track doesn't, however, completely oppose or try to do away with the musical norms of its society. There's still a constant 4/4 beat throughout, and that chord does eventually emerge. Perhaps better examples of music that plays around with our conventions lie in the world of sampling and digging – grabbing musical snippets from recordings made by others and incorporating them into your own tracks. A lot of the music utilising sampling and digging share quite particular aesthetic qualities which in turn help constitute their musical identity. What's interesting to me is that these qualities can then be used by musicians to subvert those cultural norms concerning music. To demonstrate this, let's go to an underrated minor masterpiece by David Sylvian & Holger Czukay, Plight and Premonition:
The original 1988 track 'Plight (the spiralling of winter ghosts)' is here remixed and shortened significantly – I couldn't find the original to stream – but the aesthetic is pretty much the same as in the original. What certainly remains relevant to this remix are the original liner notes by Sylvian, in which he describes the composition of the piece: “We created a sound environment to work to by setting up guitar loops, tape loops, and drones, made up from, among other things, pre-recorded radio signals. We then improvised at random with whatever came to hand. Some months later, Holger took to dubbing and editing 'Plight'. The end result, because of the radical cuts made, gave the piece an unusual quality. I've described it as a filmic quality. As the re-editing remains audible, it can have the effect of producing in the visual imagination of the listener, constant shifts in perspective and/or location, wherever they appear. This is, of course, accompanied by shifts in emotional response.” The two significant things here are the use of samples, including from the radio, and the audibility of the re-editing (which I'm assuming for our purposes is still present in this 2002 version of the song). The overall feeling one gets from the piece is of different layers of sound recordings overlapping one another, moving in and out of our aural focus above a constant drone that sounds almost worn out. The audibility of the editing of these different layers such that I'm aware of their construction as I listen disrupts certain norms of listening. If I couldn't hear the editing I'd assume the piece conformed to a preconception of performer, involving string players and pianists, and I'd assume they were playing together rather than separately, thus contributing to a preconception of coherence in the piece's actualisation. With the editing placed front-and-centre, those performers are gone, as is their coherence. One could try to fall back on the performers being Sylvian & Czukay, activating their samples – but I can't hear them doing that. Really what I mean is I'm not provoked to imagine their performance of the piece; this is due to the piece's refusal to conform with shared preconceptions. There are no shared norms I can draw on regarding the 'proper performance' of a set of samples, so I can't tell if this piece is a successful performance of that kind. The piece, then, forces me to alter my listening mode in order to allow for the possibility of a different conception of a successful performance (a possibility only, since I'm not sure the piece presents an alternative conception of performance for itself). The track's use of radio samples (perhaps more pronounced in the original, but still present here) confirms the salience of cultural norms regarding music while at the same time using those norms to develop its own 'successful' aesthetic. When we hear snatches of vocal like at 2:45-2:55, or at 4:05-4:20, what comes to mind to the average Western-socialised listener is 'radio with a weak signal', or 'walkie-talkie', or some other image that presents us with a less-than-perfect technological mediator of the human voice. What's crucial is that there's nothing inherent in the aesthetic of those samples for this idea to present itself; it's not part of the natural world that certain sounds evoke mediation. The image represents a shared belief in our society about what certain sounds signify. What Sylvian & Czukay do is deliberately use this shared belief to construct an aesthetic for 'Plight' which bases the success of the track as an 'acceptable' piece of a music on its failure to conform to cultural norms. As a listener, it's intended that you recognise that these samples are from failing or degraded transmission devices. That recognition contributes to a conception of the whole track as degraded, as being made up of degraded recordings or inconsequential transmitted sounds. The success of the track becomes dependent upon the conveyance of this aesthetic. Consequently, elements of the track such as the inevitable background hiss that surrounds samples being deployed, the suddenness of samples being stopped, and the worn-out nature of the continuous drone, are now essential to the success of the song's being considered as a 'piece of music'. These 'leftover' elements, then, constitute the essence of the track! The cultural norms of music, which would probably identify the possible essence of the track in the melodic of the piano and string lines and their collective coherence, are thus subverted. It's not that the piano and strings aren't important; it's how they're important. What I think this demonstrates is that the cultural baggage that we carry with us from one listening session to another aren't insurmountable. In fact there's plenty of music throwing that baggage off in creative and satisfying ways.
Comments
Post a Comment