words on musik

Essays. Literature. Journalism. Poetry. Philosophy. All about music and sound. All bite-sized.

[wordsonmusik]

Lorde, 2013

"...apart from songs, [short fiction] is my favourite thing to write. I think that was the thing that really helped me with songwriting because a short story is similar to a song in that you have to really build something up, and really tell something, and make it feel big in such a short space of time."

Lorde's articulate response in this absolutely bonkers interview. HT @jesshopp.

P.S. Her cover of "Swingin' Party" -- yes, that one.

[wordsonmusik]

Koestenbaum, 2011

"I call my alliance with this Brahms phrase an affinity because it fell short of love. [...] I developed an instant crush on that phrase, and smack in the crush's central seam I understood that the infatuation was implausible, a crush I had no right to feel, a crush that would not win me friends or sympathizers; by announcing to myself that I felt affinity with that phrase, I was destroying other pacts, other possibilities of sociability, belonging, conformity, communicability. [...] I decided: I'll side with what I can't understand in Brahms's phrase; I'll side with the possible rottenness of an object I might one day love."

Brahms struggled to compose his first piano concerto, writing in 1857 that he had "no judgment about this piece anymore, nor any control over it." Intimidated by his own ambition, haunted by Schumann's fatal melancholia, and desiring of Schumann's widow, he was, in no small way, tortured. The piece finally premiered to hisses; no one applauded. Dejected, he didn't premiere another concerto for two decades. History lauded it a great work, but a century later, in the 1960s, it was again at the center of a public disagreement, Gould and Bernstein arguing over tempi in what became the anecdotal touchstone for whether soloists or conductors have greater sway.

When cultural critic Wayne Koestenbaum reflects on first hearing the piece as a teenager, he recalls a deep "affinity for the ugliness." The concerto opened with neither kindness nor melody, nothing expected nor pleasing. It refuted an insufferable morality and capitalism and represented all the "dominant magnetisms (musical, visual, aromatic, tactile, syntactical)" he'd seek instead. On the one hand, protest. On the other, desiring the sublime. __________ "Notes on Affinity" was published in 2011 (in full here) and reprinted in Kostenbaum's recent collection My 1980s & Other Essays (New York: FSG, 2013).

[wordsonmusik]

Tucker, 1998

"Having people view a certain image of you is always hard to deal with. It makes you really self-conscious. Part of Cadallaca is creating identities for ourselves, and telling stories, and different people that you can be during a song, and different people you've been in the past. Being the writer of that is an answer to people saying, 'This is describing you' over and over again. I think the best way to be represented is to represent yourself."

Corin Tucker in an interview with Tizzy Asher published in The Rocket, a now-folded Northwest local music rag. Here's four minutes of "Oh Chenilla" at a late 90s birthday party for...wait for it...Miranda July.

[wordsonmusik]

Markson, 1988

     "None of which has answered the question as to how one can have one piece of music in mind and be hearing a different piece of music entirely, meanwhile.      When I say one can be hearing a different piece of music entirely, by the way, I scarcely mean that one will hear the entire piece of music. What I mean is that one hears an entirely different composition, obviously.      Possibly I did not need to make that explanation.      At any rate what is now in my head is that painting by Jan Vermeer again.      Although what I am more exactly thinking about is the sentence I typed just a few pages ago, in which I said that the young woman is asleep in the Metropolitan Museum."

Names, works, remembered, misremembered. A novel dedicated to the proposition of solipsism. A novel dedicated to the proposition.

Markson was surprised that his work elicited "some of the most old-fashioned sorts of fictional response," but we're constantly making sense of non-sense. We hold two contradictions to be true. We hear two things at once. From later in the novel: "One can hardly put down everything that exists in one's head."

David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress (Champaign: Dalkey Archive Press, 1988), made famous upon recommendation by David Foster Wallace.

[wordsonmusik]

Isacoff, 2001

"Along with painters and composers, musical performers aspired to greater heights of virtuosity and cultivated their skills as improvisers, often peppering the plain melodies they encountered with ornate filigree culled from manuals on the art of embellishment. This, too, could provoke opposition. Josquin, on hearing a singer ornament his music beyond recognition, once flew into a rage. 'You ass,' he cried. 'If you wish to improve on finished compositions, make your own, but leave mine unimproved.'"

Everyone started trying so hard! We're talking just after the Middle Ages, sometime 16th-century-ish, give or take years on either side of inventing the printing press. It was theoretically possible to divide an octave into twelve equal parts, but composers kept things tame since listeners thought equal temperament came straight from hell. You also had this "Beethoven of the Renaissance," ruining the fun and making demands.

Stuart Isacoff, Temperament: How Music Became a Battleground for the Great Minds of Western Civilization (New York: Vintage, 2001).

[wordsonmusik]

Anday, 2012

"It was the sound of an historical wrist, of resistance Of capering cars, of embracing horses. I watched it, as blue as a carnation cooling in the sun As beautiful as the pencil behind a construction worker’s ear" From "Voice." Melih Cevdet Anday (1915-2002), trans. from the Turkish by Sidney Wade & Efe Murad. In full from Guernica here.

[wordsonmusik]

Bertoia, 1972

"[In my sculptures] we know that the sound is emanating from that unit and that unit has been put together by man, therefore it should be an artificial sound, but the echoes in my mind refer back to nature. [...] I always tend to reproduce sounds which I may relate to natural formations. Even though they are invented sounds, still the idea is to see how close I can get to what appears to me another farther reality or a reality which has not yet come within my senses."

Italian artist Harry Bertoia fashioned the Eames's wedding bands, designed this infamous mid-century modern chair, and then dedicated himself to sound sculpture, reconstructing alloys, shapes, and space to quite literally echo the world. He shied from labels like “musician” and “sculptor” since his formal training was in design, explaining, “I really don’t care much one way or the other as far as classification goes, because all along in my life I don’t think I fitted into a very specific mode anyway.” He’d “burst out” if he did.

Here’s a ten-minute short on a recent installation as well as a clip of the sculptures, played as they were recorded on his Sonambient LPs. It’s like voicing wind.

________

Credit: Oral history interview with Harry Bertoia, June 20, 1972, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. See.

[wordsonmusik]

Pink, 2006

"I can’t foresee myself not recording. That’s just the facts. But I could stop at any time. That’s the way I feel. I wouldn’t be worse for it, if that’s what I wanted to do. But I also have a lot of respect for what I think is the vital element in the music that I love, which is something that I think is fleeting in every artist. It’s like a stage in their development. Not at the beginning, but two or three steps away from the beginning and everything after is shit; it’s like the song-and-dance routine. So I’m very skeptical about proceeding if I don’t have that element of not knowing, of the innocence you have when you first start doing stuff."

Ariel Pink in a February 2006 interview with Discorder. Here's a clip of John Maus rambling wonderfully, throwing out something about Pink's The Doldrums and the "aesthetic trajectory of pop" before ending abruptly in a weird gimmick. Aren't you curious where Maus was going with that?

First track off that album: "Good Kids Make Bad Grown Ups."

[wordsonmusik]

Everett, 2008

"'Hi, E. Nice to meet you,' Neil said, shaking my hand.      I was extremely nervous. My mouth was dry. I was in some kind of hyperreality state. My voice cracked, 'I like your beard!'      I like your beard? That’s what I said to Neil Young."

Writing a memoir as EELS frontman “E,” you’ll remember your Nina-Simone-loving, Bob-Dylan-hating wife who “put ketchup on French toast and mayonnaise on burritos.” You’ll recall calling the mastering lab to sneak extra seconds before a bonus track the label mandated, despite your protests.

There will be the tragedy of losing your father, mother, and sister to a roulette of sorrow, cancer, and suicide. You’ll admit hating the doctor for demanding an emergency contact when there's no one left to list.

It will be beautiful, lonely, and give weight to the line, “It seems like whenever I'm not working on new music I start to wither and die.” It will be about remembering people. __________ Memoir: Mark Oliver Everett, Things the Grandchildren Should Know (New York: Picador, 2008).

P.S. Cover cameo in the "That Look You Give That Guy" video (the one with Padma Lakshmi).

[wordsonmusik]

Small, 1998

“If we think about music primarily as action rather than as thing and about the action as concerned with relationships, then we see that whatever meaning a musical work has lies in the relationships that are brought into existence when the piece is performed.” i. There are relationships among the sounds themselves--the intervalic play between notes, how symphonic sections relate--and those reflect certain conventions about our narrative culture. The way you tell a story tells everything.

ii. There are, perhaps with greater significance, the relationships among the people taking part in a performance: players, owners, managers, paying audience members. This might have transformed the modern concert hall into "that other contemporary leisure phenomenon, the theme park, whose archetype is the various Disneylands," but while you go to the park to be merely amused, you go to a performance to be refreshed and restored. It both includes and transcends capitalist power dynamics.

iii. The embedded expectations of modern musical culture are a gestural, ceremonial practice that "affirms, explores, and celebrates" a larger set of relationships that both contain and supersede the ones above. As in all art, they are a ritual, and that ritual is actualized metaphor. And what is metaphor but our translation of myth, our articulation of identity?

          Myth --> metaphor --> metaphorical action --> ritual --> art. iv. And so it is that music as action--“musicking”--is about “relationships, not so much those that actually exist in our lives, as about those that we desire to exist and long to experience.”

____________

Cramming 200 pages of very worthwhile cultural studies into a paragraph--not recommended. Quote italics are my own. Read it in full: Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1998).

[wordsonmusik]

Wagner, 1849

“Counterpoint […] is Art’s artificial playing-with-itself, the mathematics of Feeling, the mechanical rhythm of egoistic Harmony. In its invention, abstract Tone indulged her whim to pass as the sole and only self-supporting Art—as that art which owes its being, its absolute and godlike nature, to no human Need soever, but purely to itself. […] It is certain that to her own caprice alone could Music thank her self-sufficient airs, for that mechanical, contrapuntal artifice was quite incapable of answering any soul-need."

This passage from Wagner’s “The Art-Work of the Future" is hyperbolic, vitriolic, melodramatic—in fact, not unlike Wagner himself. A manifesto for pursuing the gesamtkunstwerk ("total work of art"), he vehemently calls for unifying music, dance, and poetry in a way that supersedes gimmicky affectations and responds to our “soul-needs." If we jump 100 years, Terrence Malick comes to mind.

While the feeble instruments of counterpoint’s heyday can’t touch the overwhelming emotional exhaustion of something like the Ring, it’s unfair to dismiss the style’s own emotional potential on account of its structure (or its narcissism, a precious irony given Wagner’s own arrogance). Shortly after college, I returned to The Well-Tempered Clavier, focusing on fugues I’d never studied. It started as a way to structure my time, but it quickly turned into an obsession. I lived for the moment when learning technique gave way to listening. After hours, or sometimes days, or sometimes even the distance of a week, it would always come: the moment when it was no longer about aligning points, but about listening to something with the richness of any orchestra, a dialogue as meaningful as the tentative whispers upon meeting someone you’ll remember the rest of your life. Mere counterpoint, not so mere.

Sorry, Wagner.

__________

Richard Wagner, "Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (The Art-Work of the Future)" (Wigand of Leipzig: 1849). Trans. William Ashton Ellis, 1895.

***No one breaks down counterpoint better than Anthony Tommasini, but if you only have a few minutes, I’d recommend something else: "Hit Me Baby One More Time," Counterpoint Edition.

[wordsonmusik]

Patchett, 2001

"'The piano is very good. I can play a little but not to accompany myself. I somehow doubt they'd go out and kidnap a new accompanist for me.' Then she spoke directly to Mr. Hosokawa. 'I don't know what to do with myself when I'm not singing. I don't have any talent for vacations."'

If you take a prima donna hostage, she will want to practice.

Ann Patchett, Bel Canto (New York: Perennial, 2001).

[wordsonmusik]

Wilson, 2007

"You can only feel all these sorts of love if you’re uncowed by the question of whether a song will stand the 'test of time,' which implies that to pass away, to die, is to fail (and that taste is about making predictions). You can't feel them if you're looking for the one record you would take to a desert island, a scenario designed to strip the conviviality from the aesthetic imagination. When all these varieties of love are allowed, taste can seem less like a bunch of high-school cliques or a global conspiracy of privilege and more like a fantasy world in which we get to romance or at least fool around with many strangers."

What sorts of love? Wilson lists loving a song for its datedness, sentimentality, foreignness, exemplarity, popularity, or "meaningful unoriginality" (an Ann Powers phrase), and that's just the beginning. It's about risking the significance (and signifying) of your preferences to something it would be "safer" to ignore. It calls to mind Alain Badiou's In Praise of Love: "[Love] cannot be a defensive action simply to maintain the status quo. The world is full of new developments and love must also be something that innovates. Risk and adventures must be re-invented against safety and comfort." He's imploring philosophy to defend the passion of romantic love against efficiency and inescapable neoliberal forces, but it speaks to all the ways we account for our passions, friends, and (to use Wilson's language) tastes.

If you're into dissecting the twisted vanities of choosing music to love, I can't recommend this 33 1/3 book highly enough: Carl Wilson, Celine Dion's Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste (New York: Continuum, 2007).

[wordsonmusik]

Kuti, 2011

"When I'm recording in Paris, it's very difficult to psych myself. I have electricity, a good hotel, good studio, and then I'm singing about poverty in Africa. That's difficult. Now, when I'm in Lagos doing this, it's like I'm there, right there. So as we're recording, the electricity cuts out. See what I'm talking about? You get angry. You can put that anger--you can put all the emotions--on the album. We have to think of security, there's no running water...so it's like being there, fighting with the music."

There's urgency and agitation when Nigerian Femi Kuti describes the vastly different recording conditions of our first and third worlds. It's an edge that might have hardened him if he didn't play, if he didn't sing, if he wasn't the son of Fela Kuti, the Afrobeat and activist legend who passed away in 1997.

Teju Cole has a piece on Lagos in the latest Granta. Often eager to defend his home city, he's torn after being robbed by a gunman whose glare is "so hard, so callous" that the experience doesn't seem human.

This honest nationalism--loving a place while acknowledging its culture of fear--is something that plagues Femi and has incensed his critics, but it's precisely what makes his music so electric. The music is not a mere release but a protest, every performance an act of "being there, fighting."

__________

Quote: 2011 interview with Paste Magazine.

Aside: Thom Yorke says that Amok, the debut Atoms for Peace album, was inspired by Fela.

[wordsonmusik]

Dyer, 1998

"Occasionally there were shouts from the street. There was a silence in the room. She was at the centre of the silence, he was at its edge, constantly at the brink of saying things: It’s lovely wine. It’s a lovely evening. You look lovely. If he could have thought a sentence which did not have the word ‘lovely’ in it he would have said something. Instead, he waited for her, watched her chew away the olive and then, discreetly, put the stone in a bowl. After a while, she said: It’s a lovely wine.” This is the way we exist: in a silence, at its center or edge. We give words to our experience and dismiss their conventionality. We hear them repeated back to us and realize, in the echo, their perfection.

Later: “All memories are premonitions, all premonitions are memories."

From a novel inspired by this-is-all-there-is Camus and the postwar disillusionment of The Sun Also Rises: Geoff Dyer, Paris Trance: A Romance (New York: Picador, 1998).

[wordsonmusik]

Bradley, 1986

"If you listen closely some morning, when the sun swells

Over the horizon and the world is still and still asleep,

You might hear it, a faint noise so far inside your mind

That it must come from somewhere, from light rushing to darkness,

Energy burning towards entropy, towards a peaceful solution,

Burning brilliantly, spontaneously, in the middle of nowhere,

And you, too, must make a sound that is somewhat like it,

Though that, of course, you have no way of hearing at all."

From George Bradley's 1986 poem “The Sound of the Sun," in full here.

Related: Astrophysicist Janna Levin's 2011 TED talk, "The Sound the Universe Makes," visualizing the tympanic rumbling of black holes. Although we're sure the universe isn't silent, we don't have any good recordings of it--the waves simply have too far to travel.

Levin is optimistic: "Imagine a billion years ago, two black holes collided. That song has been ringing through space for all that time. We weren't even here. It gets closer and closer -- 40,000 years ago -- we're still doing cave paintings. [...] Whatever year it will be when our detectors are finally at advanced sensitivity, we'll build them, we'll turn on the machines, and, bang, we'll catch it -- the first song from space." It seems that sound can't disappear. It's just a matter of when it will reach us, and the sounds from the start of the universe will reach Earth long after you and I are gone.

For the record, the first sound we heard from a black hole was a B-flat. Computers identified it since human ears can't pinpoint a pitch that low: 57 octaves below middle C. Amazing.

[wordsonmusik]

Verlaine, 1979

"If you read the poet Rilke, or if you really listen to Coltrane…if you're interested in inner directions, Coltrane would say you have to be able to be alone and go into yourself. It's…it's really hard for me to talk about lyrics. Some of them are like me trying to describe something so I'll know what it is, instead of letting it all go by - so you focus on something to figure out what the hell it is. It's underneath your daily awareness, so to speak." Television frontman Tom Verlaine is just so into sound. As a kid, he dug the avant-garde, saxophonic onslaughts of Roland Kirk and Albert Ayler. Nearly 20, he was seduced into rock through the Stones and the Kinks (oh my god, those screaming girls are unbearable). Nearly 60, he fell for the sounds of 12th-century nun Hildegard von Bingen and Ligeti. If this were all at once, it might be dismissed as voracious eclecticism, but its measured, long-term curiosity and his eloquence speak much more to a sincere reverence for communicating and a recognition that there are limits to language (and lyrics) that music can extend. This mutual appreciation for the sacred no doubt underlies his famed friendship with Patti Smith. Nevertheless, for him, it seems that being on stage was a sort of afterthought. In the early 70s, he was disgusted that his New York contemporaries didn't seem be "doing anything. It was all glamour," decadence. The "TV" band name itself was to honor the "visionary aspects of art, rather than the media." Gimmicky, 70s arena rock would have bored him. He's a purist, respecting music as art and art as poetry.

So, without further ado: Marquee Moon - Breakin' In My Heart - There's a Reason. If you listen to these against Rilke, they can be devastatingly sad.

__________ Quote from November 1979 article by Chip Stern, "Tom Verlaine," for Musician, Player and Listener, #21. Also see NYT 2006 interview mentioning HVB and Ligeti.