Music, Violence, Truth

Ben Watson
Music, Violence, Truth
Ben Watson
After the devastation in Manhattan on 11
September 2001, what can radical music
mean? Einstürzende Neubauten - whose
name translates, prophetically, Collapsing
New Buildings - earned their avantgarde
stripes in Britain by applying pneumatic
drills to a stress-bearing beam at the
Institute of Contemporary Arts.
After 11 September, such transgressions
surely pale into insignificance. Indeed,
any comparison might seem offensive. At
No Future, an academic conference on
Punk held in Wolverhampton in late
September 2001, an American delegate
announced that after 9-11 the relationship
of music to violence and shock needed
to be rethought. The whole Punk and
Noise ‘transgressive’ aesthetic, one he'd
subscribed to throughout his youth,
needed revision. Like watching the late
Linda Lovelace, born-again and demure,
denouncing porn and sex-before-marriage
on a TV chat show, such reversals in ideology
cannot be taken at face value. These
rifts and contradictions indicate a clash of
tectonic plates at a more fundamental
level, something violently mismatched in
the relationship of music to truth and
conscience.
Musically, America responded to the pain
and loss of 9-11 with a fund-raising telethon
which drew on the sombre substratum of
hymn-singing which underlies corporate
pop, and which unites country, soul and
reggae. Music written for church performance
- unmediated, involving, communal and
local - inevitably became kitsch and false
when delivered by top-selling super-stars
for international broadcast. These songs
are made for internal reflection, not personal
adulation. The economics were hypocritical
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too: the artists may have waived their fees,
but as with Live Aid, it's obvious that the
global exposure they're achieving is worth
more than any fee. However, in such a
context of harmonic maturity and low-key
sentiment, the concept of ‘audio terrorism’
does appear silly and adolescent. Should
the noisy end of the avantgarde shut up,
and confess its misdemeanours were all
a ruse?
You didn’t need to
repeat the images in
your head, TV did nothing
else for days
The avantgarde registered its own
peculiar response to the disaster. Rushing
in where angels fear to tread, Karlheinz
Stockhausen voiced what some may
have felt in the instant, but none dared
say. For him, the crashing planes and
collapsing towers felt like art: "What
happened there is - now you must re-adjust
your brain - the greatest work of art
imaginable for the whole cosmos. Minds
achieving in a single act what we in music
can only dream of, people rehearsing like
mad for ten years, preparing fanatically
for a concert, and then dying. You have
people who are that focused on a performance
and then 5,000 people who are dispatched
to the afterlife, in a single moment. I
couldn't match it. Against that, we - as
composers - are nothing." Surely the guy
is crazy? In Stockhausen's defence, he did
go on to admit the attack was a crime,
because part of the ‘audience’were ‘not
consenting’. This demur didn't soften
Gyorgy Ligeti's retort: "Stockhausen
should be locked up in a psychiatric
hospital".
A comment by one TV reporter - that
the image of the planes crashing into the
towers "repeated in the memory like a
nightmare loop" - was distinctly strange.
You didn't need to repeat the images in
your head, TV did nothing else for days
on end. As usual, the mass media materially
create the psychic conditions which they
then proceed to moralise. But what should
artists do when reality outdoes them?
Stay quiet? Admit anti-art destructivism
was just a tease? Confess that these
tumultous, apocalyptical events we call
‘radical’ were really just conjury with lutes
and viols, a luxury product ornamented
with frissons of phony danger?
Heavenly universality
sounds like hell to
closed-in ears
Such evasions smack of the brittle
repression of married couples who banish
their teenage metal and pop albums to
the attic and call their yen for music a
‘passing phase’. For us, giving up on
extreme music can't be the answer.
Quite the opposite: it's by paying closer
attention to the internal structure of radical
music - ‘violence’and all - that its historical
and social meaning might be decoded.
Stockhausen's equation of art and terror
- "this leap from security, from what's
ordinary, from life" - may be poor consolation
for inhabitants of Manhattan who have
lost loved ones, or now feel desperately
insecure. However, his weird outburst did
touch on something deep. Why is it that,
since the modernist revolts of the early
twentieth century, composers and improvisors
have continually shouted noise, crisis
and violence?
The crucial point is that art is an attempt
to tell the truth about the world, the whole
world, not simply to provide baubles for
those in the comfort-zone of privilege.
The economic pressures and national
conflicts that create world wars and mass
starvation and genocide are still in operation.
The operations of global capitalism, and
its political face-savers, those blue-suited
bastards Bush and Blair and Berlusconi,
mean that the inhabitants of Burundi,
Beirut, Belfast and Baghdad (I use alliter-
ation to limit the list) have long suffered
the terror and chaos which the suicide
hijackers brought to Manhattan. Edgard
Varèse brought the noise of sirens and
bombs into music in the 1920s, a
response to the terrors of World War I.
His Hyperprism predicted the Nazi strategy of
the Blitz, when civilian populations first
became long-distant targets of military
hardware. Unlike his ‘objectivist’ follower
Iannis Xenakis, Varèse bent the shapes
he heard into organic ovaloids which
speak for the suffering ear. This is why,
of all the pre-war orchestral composers,
only Varèse has a non-salon, yet humanist
ruggedness: a realism that moves the
blood and shakes the entrails. Sonically,
Varèse can stand comparison to Coltrane
and Hendrix, who provided lasting testi-
monials to a different noise: a struggle
against racial oppression in America and
genocidal war in Vietnam.
These moments of musical truth weren't
easy to achieve, nor were they facile,
attention-seeking stabs at ugliness or
excess. They were not the sound of George
Antheil seeking to be a ‘bad boy’ of the
avantgarde by slamming his fists on the
pianoforte keyboard, or of the japanese
Noise artist Merzbow producing fashionably
catatonia-inducing, all-enveloping drones
(to steal a name from Kurt Schwitters’
Merzbau and then recycle the shocks of
a degraded surrealism deserves some
kind of critique). According to his wife
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Naima (talking to C.O. Simpkins, his best
biographer), John Coltrane systematically
studied scales from all over the world,
and tried to pack every musical system
into his music. If the results sound ugly,
that is because you are too wedded to
your partial musical identity, to your comfort-
blanket of familiar harmony: heavenly
universality sounds like hell to closed-in
ears. For his part, Hendrix was intensely
loyal to classmates who had been drafted
and to 101st Airborne, the regiment he'd
served in. Eric Burdon was amazed at
his rightwing stance on the Vietnamese
war when he reached England in 1967.
Music journalist Karl Dallas challenged
him in print. Reaching an anti-US position
was painful and slow, yet by Machine
Gun, it happened. Hendrix's rainbows of
audio-feedback revelled in spaces which
brought pain to the repressed and rigid:
in the ears of GIs, they were incitements
to immediate pleasure, to disrespect for
authority, and to outright mutiny (‘fragging’).
Coltrane and Hendrix did not invent this
dialectic between musical shock and
political liberation. It had been the major
theme for Beethoven and his followers.
Romantic music was a call to revolution
that now languishes under the idiot term
‘classical’. The exhilarating allegri of the
symphony - the hoofbeats, the jangling
bridles, the crack of loading muskets -
are not about hunting, as Roger Scruton
fondly imagines. They are about bourgeois
revolution - "to arms, citizens!" - discovering
common aims, seizing the castle keep,
liberating the prisoners, letting in the light
of reason, sweeping away the cobwebs
of feudal reaction. After 1848, when the
bourgeois class made its historic pact
with state power and landed interests, the
excitement turned sour. In March 1871,
the French state slaughtered the Communards
in tens of thousands, and drove the voice
of universal truth and reason underground.
In Wagner, massive chromatic transitions
invoke myth and fate: surrender to the
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madness of the stock market as to a natural
force. By Mahler, the revolutionary allegri are
hollowed-out, febrile, a nostalgic memory
that relates to erotics rather than history.
But this radical subjectivity had consequences.
Noise organised for
extraction of surplus
value isn't noise, but
silence at high volume
By rationalising the brain-bending
chromaticism of Wagner and Mahler,
Schoenberg and Webern forged a music
whose freedom of note combination
rejected the respectable, bourgeois world
of repression and exchange. Their negation
of tonality in Twelve Tone, born through
logic, is painful; its parallel in the Blues,
itself born through pain, is alluring. These
twin attacks on the tempered key system
stalked each other through the twentieth-
century, fighting, aiding and abetting, fusing
and swapping places (see Muhal Abrams,
Frank Zappa, James Blood Ulmer, Derek
Bailey). The struggle for authentic music
resembled political resistance to war and
inequality and mass starvation. Its history
is likewise fugitive and unofficial: stark
glimpses of a different order in a black
night of violence and lies. When Mark
Sinker, writing in The Wire (no 211, September
2001), worried that the offensive volume of
rock can be mobilised to confirm conservatism,
he needed to pay more attention to the
music's economic base. Noise organised
for extraction of surplus value isn't noise,
but silence at high volume: rock as spectacle
blocks its liberating essence, its democratic
release and insurrectionary energy
(hence the necessity of Punk etc.) As
usual in bourgeois thought, idealism links
to positivism: Sinker's decibel-counting cannot
handle the fact that ‘noise’ in music is an
aesthetic fact concerning collective human
experience and individual response, not
a quantitative measure.
Take the example of Cecil Taylor. In
carrying out zappologist Marco Maurizi's
dictum that the dialectic of Modern Art is
"mediation criticised by immediacy", Taylor
explodes the meaning of the piano - that
prime embodiment of bourgeois tonality -
from within, seemingly bending notes
which the machine was designed to deliver
straight and even, transforming pianistic
mastery into a battlefield of physical tensions
and clashes. Taylor has reduced pianism
to lightning rhythmic nuance and bounding
sonic volume. Encyclopedic harmonic
knowledge is balanced like an inverted
pyramid on the nose-tip of the moment,
causing a frictive density and horrid
power which make lovers of civilised tinkling
flee the room.
Taylor’s intent is to
inject the spontaneity of
the instant into the
frozen monolith
Why this cataclysm at the heart of
musical creativity? Because the reputation
of the classical ‘masterpiece’, this civili-
sation, is the accumulation of the sweat-
ed labour of legions of composers, musi-
cians, concert organisers and concert-hall
builders, all those who have worked to
make these moments possible. Taylor's
intent is to inject the spontaneity of the
instant - his actual presence at this
moment in front of you now in this particular
hall - into the frozen monolith, to explode
the tempered key system into a million
scintillating fragments, to make the
process of playing the point of us gathering,
and not the congealed kudos of the past.
Taylor is the most refined and gentlest of
people - to underline the point, he even
recites poetry and wears pink fluffy slippers
at recitals - yet ears trained by radio and
film musics, used to music which fails to
address the listener directly, shout "Violence!
Violence!! Violence!!!" every time they
hear it.
A recent performance at the Barbican
(13 May 2002) is a case in point. Invited
to write a concert piece for performance
by Bang On A Can All-Stars ("a fiercely
aggressive group, combining the power
and punch of a rock band with the precision
and clarity of a chamber ensemble"
according to the New York Times, who
appear to have swapped genuine music
criticism for promotional falafel), Cecil
Taylor questioned the fetish of the written
masterpiece by appearing in person with
the group. His ‘score’was an A4 photocopy
of some derisory doodles containing randomly
scattered letters and musical signs. His
‘rehearsal’ consisted of a thirty-minute
seance at which the musicians were
instructed to make “no sound” while Taylor
explored the limits of the auditorium by
slowly moving up the aisle (the pianist
tinkles some notes and is admonished,
leading to a backstage war in which she
is finally banished from the performance).
Then the musicians were themselves
sent into the auditorium to test the space,
exhale air and pronounce a word. When
they turn this into a clever improvised
event, cooing and chirping at each other
(as they do ‘downtown’), Taylor upbraids
them and tells them to slow the tempo to
near silence. Worse even than gagging
the All-Stars, he imports drummer Tony
Oxley, insisting Oxley is "the best drummer
on the planet" (thus bouleversing decades
of careful negotiation between Black
Nationalism and American patriotic hard
sell to make ’Jazz’a global cultural hegemon).
In their performance, Taylor and Oxley
upset any notion of received harmony or
rhythm, forcing the three members of
Bang On A Can who dared show up to
improvise what they are rather than what
they know. The improvisation tore spaces
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in the fabric of ‘community’, and created
a genuinely new and unheralded musical
construction with the materials to hand.
Like a John Cage piece performed in the
midst of a set of new minimalist hack-
works, Taylor and Oxley proved that all
the careful notations by Tan Dun, Hermeto
Pascoal and Don Byron (pieces which
had occupied the first half) were so much
tepid filmscore twaddle, trivial evasions
of what playing music in front of people
really is.
The rhythmic relationship of Taylor and
Oxley brought in something vocal and
authentic that was completely lacking in
Bang On A Can's finicky reproduction of
strategies from Henry Cow, Curlew and
the Mike Post Coalition. The fusion of
‘rock power’and‘chamber clarity’ promised
by the New York Times proved to be
ersatz class-reconciliation, a postmodernist
sales pitch indicating a consummation
devoutly to be wished by harrassed arts
promoters (ie ‘bums-on-seats’ plus ‘high-
class tone’), but nothing at all in terms of
musical micro-substance in the hearing.
Bang On A Can's clumsy attempts at
rock and samba were exceedingly ugly,
notes as illustrations of the idea rather
than the thing-for-itself, cluttered and
awkward. Their performance revealed the
absolutely empty character of academic
musical values: all the music said was
"we can play these dots", there was no
motive force, no message to the bowels,
no meaning.
For musicians to deliver "the word with
its theme intact, the word permeated with
confident and categorical social value
judgment," they must also provide the
next term in V.N. Voloshinov's argument:
"the word that really means and takes
responsibility for what it says" (these are
the closing words of Marxism and the
Philosophy of Language, 1929). This
means developing a personal voice on
your instrument which sheds the chameleon-
like pseudo-universality of the competent
6.
orchestral interpreter - the musical equivalent
of the polite dinner-party chatter which
pretends to talk freely of anything, but
remains scared witless by economic or
sexual reality - and risks genuine expression:
what Leroi Jones called the ‘stance’ which
defines the authentic jazz saxophonist.
Taylor and Oxley provided ‘stance’in such
abundance that their presence felt like a
volcanic eruption of directness and
immediacy, sending the Bang On A Can
musicians into gibbering recall of adolescent
Halenesque electric-guitar (the artificiality
and fragility of the sexual equality induced
by classical training was revealed when the
two female members of Bang On A Can
failed to show up; this was a punch-up any
female free improvisor would have loved,
and shone in... fans of trombonist Gail
Brand's amazing performance at the V&A
Merz Nite riot were reduced to imagining
what she could have done in this context).
The fusion of ‘rock
power’ and ‘chamber
clarity’ proved to be
ersatz class-reconciliation
However, just because musical truth
sounds violent and unacceptable to the status
quo, it doesn't follow that literal devastation
and violence are art. Stockhausen's
enthusiasm for the Trade Center attack
could just as well be the futurist Filippo-
Tommaso Marinetti praising war ("the
world's only hygiene"). Stockhausen com-
bines Baader-Meinhof's elitist concept of
spectacular political action with neo-
Wagnerian megalomania: he doesn't
realise that art and revolution are not a
physical force, a firestorm (despite the
images currently used by halfwits to promote
‘Ecstatic Jazz’), but powers mediated via
human intellect and will. In other words,
the ‘power’of great music is its truth content,
its proposed relation to the totality of
society and the cosmos, not brute force.
Music is not real violence, but a discourse of
affective states, one that creates opportunities
for judgment about feelings. The split
between intellect and emotion is transcended.
This can't be done with a bludgeon, any
more than revolutionary seizure of the
state by the proletarian class can be
achieved by individual acts of anarchist
violence (Trotsky's critique of Narodnik
terrorism still stands).
Political violence
conceived as conflict
between national or
religious blocks is a
species of psychic
repression
Varèse and his handful of authentic
orchestral inheritors - namely James
Dillon, Simon H. Fell, Iancu Dumitrescu and
Ana-Maria Avram - make music which
short-circuits merely intellectual appreciation
(the tight clean shape of a Haydn Quartet
or a pop song), and at moments speaks
directly to the body. It maps out the flow
of blood, the rustle of nervous synapses,
the creak of bone. Yet these musics don't
neglect the intellectual thrill of graphing
such biological realities, nor twinges of
anxiety and guilt. This emotional science
steels the brainpan, giving us the resolve
to regard the world in its true colours.
The political corollary is not aesthetic
awe before the actions of suicidal hijackers,
but comprehension of the motives that
drive global conflict. Not Deleuze & Guttari's
facile and rhetorical "surrender to the primordial
Other", but Enlightenment: Freud's
"Where Id was, Ego shall be".
9-11 was not radical music, but an atrocity
inflicted by conspirators trained by the
CIA for destabilisation projects in foreign
countries. They applied what the CIA had
taught them in pursuit of their leader's
power struggle with the Bush dynasty
concerning the price of oil (Cecil Taylor
cites the fact that San Franciso's mayor
was warned not to fly on 11 September,
maintaining that Bush organised the attack
to consolidate a lost-in-fact election: you
can hear Taylor's tough, Burroughs-like
disassociation from liberal unctuousness
in every note he plays). Even if they inevitably
gain the applause of arab populations
suffering under US-backed repression,
Al-Qaeda have no plan beyond revenge,
using the civil populations of the enemy
state as targets (they're like the USSR
backed with a ‘people's bomb’ that will
wipe out the workers of the world they
should be uniting with). Al-Qaeda's actions
do not help to create an independent working-
class politics which could overthrow capitalism,
but instead invoke the logic that led to
the bombing of retreating Iraqi troops on
the road to Basrah, and deaths in tens of
thousands. Al-Qaeda are no more to be
supported than Cecil Taylor's alternative
‘axis of evil’(George Bush, Wynton Marsalis
and Philip Glass, as if you couldn't
guess).
Political violence conceived as conflict
between national or religious blocks is a
species of psychic repression, akin to
conceiving sex in terms of individual
gratification, or music in terms of a quantitative
measure (‘genius’, ‘outreach’, ‘sales’). It
fails to find any agency for saving the
human race (isn't it funny how the well-
heeled are so prone to political despair?)
It reduces history and culture to a spec-
tacle that is no longer carried out by peo-
ple capable of reason: for example, the
myth that the Arab/Israeli conflict is the
fruit of thousands of years of difference
(one peddled in a recent headline by the
supposedly progressive french newspaper,
Libération), rather than a US strategy to
put pressure on Arab states and keep
down the price of oil. Religious and national
7.
pseudo-explanations obscure the rational
dynamic of capital and its reproduction
(mangetouts from Kenya, silicon chips
from South Korea and the multi-coloured
metropolis are all highly explicable
phenomena), naturalising anglo wealth
and afghan poverty. Alice Coltrane's mil-
lionaire mysticism retains the worst part
of John Coltrane's legacy: its living part
is its global integration of musical codes,
its refusal of religious and national divisions.
Free music is the song of the New
International.

Free music is the song

of the New International

By facing the horrors of an unbalanced

world, by making us experience its terror
and violence and sorrow, radical music
offers the satisfaction of truth rather than
the blandishments of comfort. It arms the
psyche for reality. This will become
increasingly necessary as the weaponry
and trade-deals sold by the First and ex-
Communist Worlds to the Third send us
their refugees, their anger and their
despair. The grief-stricken of Manhattan
should be allowed to bury their dead in
whatever manner they wish, but sombre
hymns and TV-studio candles are not the
final word: only a courageous assessment
of global realities - musical and political -
will allow us to shape a future worth
hearing.

May 2002

8.
This piece was originally commissioned by Rob
Young at The Wire in the aftermath of the Twin
Towers suicide attack on 11 September 2001. It was
deemed "not to fit" with other contributions (The
Wire, no 213, November 2001 ). After Young voiced
the opinion that US bombing had created "a happier
Afghanistan ... music and song are returning to that
devastated land" (editorial, The Wire, no 214,
December 2001), it seemed unlikely that the anti-
imperialist sentiments voiced above would find
favour, so it was placed on Esther Leslie's website
(www.militantesthetix.co.uk). The current publishers
found it there and decided to issue it in pamphlet
form: it was expanded for that purpose in May 2002
(hence the inclusion of a Taylor/Oxley/Bang-On-A-
Can concert review). Thanks to Harry Gilonis for the
quotes from Julia Spinola's article ‘Monstrous Art’
from Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 18 September
2001.
This piece was proposed to Rob Young at The Wire
in the aftermath of the Twin Towers suicide attack on
11 September 2001. Unfortunately, it did not fit with
other contributions to a special issue (no 213,
November 2001): it was too long, and all the rest
were on-the-spot responses by local New Yorkers. In
the next issue, Young voiced the opinion that the top-
pling of the Taliban seemed to have created "a hap-
pier Afghanistan ... music and song are returning to
that devastated land" (Editorial, The Wire, no 214). I
concluded that the anti-imperialist thrust of the essay
would never find favour, and so published it at
www.militantesthetix.com. In May 2002, Andy Wilson
and Ian Land found it there and offered to issue it in
pamphlet form. When the launch of Music, Violence,
Truth (at the Dolphin pub in Mare Street, Hackney,
on Tuesday 25 June) was posted to The Wire dis-
cussion board on Yahoo, Young e-mailed me to point
out that, far from censoring left viewpoints, he'd
made his own anti-Bush remarks in his editorial for
January 2002 - an anti-imperialist stand for which he
took "a hell of a lot of personal abuse from American
readers". It was outrageous to portray Young as
hawk and censor simply because he didn't care to
print my personal musings on 9/11. I apologise to
Rob for misrepresenting him, and hope this makes
everything clear.
ben Watson
June 2002
9.
Copyright: Ben Watson, 2002
contact www.militantesthetix.co.uk

Published: Ian Land and Andy Wilson

The Dolphin Pub, Hackney, London, 2002
contact andyw@dircon.co.uk