"A Form That's Already Replaced You": Against Kenny Goldsmith

This short piece will argue against Kenny Goldsmith’s post-‘death of the author’, post-Warhol celebration of unoriginality, of banality, in which the statement of the individual artist is fed through and spat out by the images and discourses of advertising, celebrity, spectacle; it will argue that Goldsmith’s position is, at best, politically naïve, and at worst, grotesquely complicit with the exploitative modes of techno-capitalism. Goldsmith’s most recent theoretical statement is entitled ‘Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age’ (Columbia University Press, 2011) – note that telling ‘managing’ in the title, as if poetry had been delivered entirely into the hands of institutional apparatus, of some management consultancy model; and note the final chapter, with its call for writers to be secretary-pirates, appropriating that whole digital piracy thang from Hakim Bey (a usage which was fairly empty in the first place) and incorporating it into some ghastly bland celebration of office space as neutral or even as some good. Goldsmith, in both his theoretical work and those texts in which he puts these ideas into practice, would seem to celebrate the swamping of the human by technological processes bigger, better, brighter than the human – all this trendy talk of ‘the cloud’, digital networks, cyborgs – and thus, ultimately, to fetishize the endless proliferation of modes of digital technology in a manner which overlooks the very real, physical, and non-digital modes of labour exploitation and oppression (the outsourcing of the proletariat) on which these modes depend. For example, how’d you like them apples™? We await Kenny G’s text based on transcripts from the foxconn factory, but that’s not gonna happen (in terms of using sources that take the text from out of the author’s sole domain, a more interesting, and more politically-engaged model might be that of Mark Nowak).

((Well OK, no doubt the same applies to the laptop on which I’m typing this, to the institution in which I’m permitted the time to write this, right down to the clothes I eat and the food I wear, but what I’m arguing is not that I can escape the tacit hypocrisy of which Goldmsith is tactically unaware, but that an awareness of this hypocrisy and complicity is at least some grounds towards a mobilisation that would begin to desire to resist and change that situation. And I’m not going for some Luddism either, some anarcho-primitivism, some model of little tribal farming communities close to the earth yada yada yada – technology mobilised against power structures is also a necessary part of resistance, even if the role of social media in recent revolutionary movements (Arab Spring et al) too easily translates, at least over here in the relative comfort of where I am, as mere slacktivism, constructing a persona of righteous outrage on that facebook screen through which we mediate and create our selves in any case – a digital ‘signature’ as the agglomeration of photos, wall posts, statuses, links, identity parade, self sold through spectacle spectacles and even back to ourselves, so that we don’t realise this construction as anything other than what we ‘really are.’))

Goldsmith’s model of feeding texts through html coding processes, regurgitating traffic reports, or re-typing Jack Kerouac’s ‘On the Road’ on a blog – or, for that matter, the ‘flarf’ poets’ re-combinations of internet spam texts as ironic parody / celebration of a kind of virtual spectacle in which all discourses are equivalent – might appear similar to the collapse of specialisation and separation into a collage of discourse in much modernist poetry – from Pound’s or Olson’s mytho-historical projects to the ‘rubbish theory’ of J.H. Prynne, in which the language of high finance comes up against the other languages it conceals: discourses of pain, hurt, environmental despoilage, wounds and damage. But these poetries involve criteria of judgement and thought very different from Goldsmith’s jocular / boring ease. William Burroughs believed that, by cutting up the discourses of power (political speeches, manuals, etc), these discourses would reveal their true messages, their true nonsense and inanity (cf. Sean Bonney’s ‘Tony Blair Speech’ for a more recent example of this). Goldsmith, by contrast, finds found material, or material that has already been cut-up by bots (the endless linguistic detritus of spam emails and web pages) fun and kooky. Pound, Olson, and the early Prynne aim for a philological project that seeks alternative and revitalising histories in language as a measure of where we now are and where we have come from, while the later Prynne sees a radical lack of innocence within language, a lack of innocence that must be reproduced, questioned, distorted, exaggerated and dialectically worked through. Goldsmith, in his post-modern celebration of the failure of such grand historical projects, and his happy-go-lucky lack of concern for issues of innocence or guilt or moral responsibility, could give a (virtual) shit. In ‘Uncreative Writing’, he excitedly proclaims that, though he’s come late to the techno-party, he thinks it’s, gee, just great–sort of,‘I’m older than y’all, y’know, but goddamm it I dig this stuff as much as you do.’

Essentially, what he wants to celebrate is that info-panopticon decried in Kevin Davies’ ‘Lateral Argument’ – “a young-adult global / civilization, a meta-literate culture with time on its / prosthetic tentacles, at this point slightly more silicon / than carbon, blinking vulnerably in the light of its own / radiant connectedness”. This is a panopticon that maintains the notion of the self and its signature just so that we still feel that little bit in control – there is “a special area, a little rectangle, for you to add your own comments.” I can see everyone on the google-ized globe and they can see me, and they can see me being my ‘own’ self, which is near-exactly the same as all the other selves constructed through advertising and all the other forms of propaganda all the more insidious because they pose so often as ‘non-ideological’; which is exactly the same as all the other selves because it is constructed by and through the gaze of the others. Thus mediated, melded, shaped, surrounded by surveillance even in sleep, they can go and make their point on twitter, their raised middle finger, make their point at the base of the news article, at the base of the youtube video, spewing hate at whichever racial or gendered or national group, and this is how to express ‘individuality’, this is a signature, imagine if all the books you wrote were the conglomeration of all those comments and posts, digital ether, information-propagation, self-duplication, endlessly patterned out, the presence of very real hate speech and keyboard-spat bile, hardly innocent, hardly democratic digital wonderland.

As Davies again puts it, it’s “easier to fill out a form that's already replaced you. Information / wants to be me. O / K.” And here the ‘information’ that wanted to be ‘free’ – that slogan of the post-hippie S. Jobs generation which was against totalitarianism in its obvious apparatus, against the visible violence force of oppression and for a deterritorialisation which ended up simply concealing those same, essentially unchanged means and ends of oppression and exploitation – has become so free (like that ‘freest’ of things, the free market) that it possesses me in my continuing and actual unfreedom. Freedom for markets, for info. Free for the price of a cable, a battery, an LED light, a screen. Motherboard confection. Sign on the dotted line: type it, because it doesn’t have to be your hand now, physical registration of yr presence, disembodied virtually yr identity / it cd be assumed by anyone. (Identity theft is merely the most obvious manifestation of this manipulation). And so Davies’ gesture at the end of these lines is tiny but crucial – the line-break that splits the ‘O’ and the ‘K’ re-invests that banalized word, ‘ok’, with a measure of emotion, however conventionalized and poeticised, through the ‘O’ that slips out of the human mouth of the de-humanised subject – that cry, at once de-personalized because ‘universal’ (the cry of pain or sorrow or anguish) and felt at the deepest core of my feeling being. It’s not as if this cry is being posited as something that will succeed against or even be heard through the white noise of free-running info, the ‘form’ that forms you, that fills you out, that uses you up – but to register that cry, that human note is still some recognition at least against total blind indifference. Douglas Kahn, in ‘Noise Water Meat’ (p.345): “Screams demand urgent or empathetic responses and thereby create a concentrated social space bounded by their audibility[…]They are resolutely communicative and meant for others…”

Of course this cry, as it occurs in Davies’ poem, could in turn be (is already?) fetishized, the scream reduced to a sound and fury that does signify nothing, standing in, in its inarticulacy, for a meaning it does not have but pretends to (‘O’ as mark of ‘profundity’). Indeed, cries / screams already do signify nothing, or nothing precisely, in that they are not language as such: their meaning is generalized signal more than fully-developed idea (though arguably this is little different to much of language per se, at least as it exists in the actual exchange of words between humans, w/ all the attendant paralinguistic edges to that field). Yet that signification of nothing registers as a refusal of ventriloquising ‘meaningful’ banalities and as a revealing of the inarticulate rage and pain and non-compatiblity at the hurt heart of the alienated subject – not John Cage’s ‘nothing to say and saying it’, but wanting (desiring) to say something and not being able to say it, communicating the failure to communicate as a means to (inarticulate) communication.

((I should state here that I’m always a little suspicious of the surely limited and ultimately defeatist stress on ‘inarticulacy’, stammering, etc, as some kind of resistant strategy, that we find, for example, in a recent article by Judith Butler – “at that point it may well be that we are silenced by existing authorities, but we have also become, paradoxically, subjects whose muteness and political stammering come to define a mode of being." (Butler, ‘Critique, Dissent, Disciplinarity’ (Critical Inquiry / Summer 2009)) Perhaps what I mean is that inarticulacy, the scream, stammering etc are all fine as critical tropes in relation to the kind of art that explicitly explores those kind of areas – the screams of Yoko Ono, Diamanda Galas, Patty Waters, and Ami Yoshida, for example – but that when they’re transferred to a sphere half-way between the political and the academy-critical (as in Butler’s article), their limits start to show. So I’d stress the limits of this approach – but in the context of Davies’ poem, I’ll let the point stand.))

At the back of all this seems to lie the notion that conventionalized forms of utterance, such as ‘O’, cannot be personally meaningful, cannot be imbued with signature – yet the most ‘personal’ moments of music in particular are very often those which use tropes for the expression of the personal – imperfection, slippage, true, the cracks in Billie Holiday’s voice, Charlie Parker playing ‘Lover Man’ with less than technical perfection but with a feted emotional honesty.

“The popular singer adopts many levels of conventional utterance-structures in order to communicate with an audience. It is usually assumed, however[…]that at some level the singer is not ‘acting’, that the conventionalisation stops and that the singer is presenting his or her personal utterance. […]Often such personal utterances will be expressed through widely-known popular and often totemic song-structures. This is taken to an extreme in the case of the blues, where an almost claustrophobically rigid structure of music and text is used as a vehicle for sophisticated gestural expression. This is akin to the highly articulate gestural articulation of ‘stock phrases’ in vernacular speech where the linguistic content can be the least significant communicative element.”

(Trevor Wishart, ‘Utterance’, from ‘On Sonic Art’, p.259)

And OK, so Davies’ ‘O’ does not function in the same way as a slurred or bent note from Miles Davis or a pitch slide from a blues singer might function – as personal expression / signature through at least partially conventionalized formal trope. (Perhaps there is more scope in music than in poetic language for this kind of manoeuvre.) Indeed, its use would seem essentially pessimistic: by anticipatorily ironizing that ‘O’, as merely half of the banal ‘OK’, and essentially turning it into a joke, Davies recognizes its conventionalized usefulness (used-up-ness) – recuperated into a discourse which mutes it, as merely another particle of a language that will not register the realness of hurt. Yet one might also argue that, precisely through the mimetic reproduction of this recuperation, Davies enables us to move beyond that recuperation, into a discourse where that scream could be attended to, not mediated by the distance of the screen, the TV’s mute button, the acceptance of trauma as mere background noise. Indeed, the wrongness (to use Keston Sutherland’s term) of the ‘O/K’ joke is precisely what might restore that ‘O’ as something with agency, with an urgent desire towards meaning or the registration, at least, of the presence of the other through the ‘signature’ of voice (see Adriana Cavarero’s ‘For More than One Voice’ on this).

Back, then, again, to Goldsmith, and KG’s attempt to escape the notion of ‘signature’ is, like John Cage’s, a false and a de-politicising escape from the responsibility that comes with the notion of self, and of self’s translation into image, sound, text. (This apparently insubstantial attack on Cage is developed at greater length in a forthcoming essay, so I won’t reproduce the arguments here.) But if Cage’s attempt to transcend self is informed by queered cultural climates and by a certain anarchistic model of community that is increasingly posited in political terms, Goldsmith’s a-political abdication is an overexcited and uncritical facebook/ twitter/ myspace/ youtube/ linkedin mashup-celebration of technologies which are humanly and historically harmful – both in terms of the exploitation that enables us to believe that ‘we’ve never had it so good’ (& fuck everyone else), the mysticised concealment of means of production, and in terms of the environmental damage that, whatever its consequences for some romanticised ‘mother nature’ is, let’s face it, of human impact also. To remove and diffuse the self into the ‘electronic arms’ of Laurie Anderson’s ‘O Superman’, all watched over by Richard Brautigan’s ‘machines of loving grace’ is to ignore the way in that self still acts within systems which are, OK, intimidatingly large, institutionally-bulked, capital-soaked, backed by guns and cops and private ‘security’ forces – but this kind of religious trust in a system bigger than one is not predicated on any real idea of solidarity or of communities of justice and reciprocal relation. I get my laptop and my dinky html-coded-poetry-play or the found sources I can make a decent dollar off (‘hey! so humble, I lost my ego!’), thus bulking up my institutional / critical cred as a famous author while simultaneously and supposedly celebrating the death of the author, the fact that we’re all creators, man. It is the choric participation of bodies and minds (which aren’t separate, ok) in consensus and dissensus and collective action that changes things and that enables us to get out of situations of systematic injustice – and that choric participation is the collective signature of all our individual signatures, all our individual selves – as Benjamin puts it, “the collective is a body too.” [“Only when […] all revolutionary tension becomes bodily collective innervation, and all the bodily innervations of the collective become revolutionary discharge has reality transcended itself to the extent demanded by the Communist Manifesto.” (Benjamin, ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intellegentsia’)] The de-personalized machine-self or diffusion into realms of neutralized ‘text’, suspension of judgement, endless allowed and luxurious play (turning out, it must be said, texts that are singularly non-joyful, dull, repetitive, blank banalities) shudders us into no sense of the inadequacy of our present mode of existence, the desire for self-(and thus collective-)realisation that is entirely necessary if we are to do more than celebrate what we have as we hurtle towards the real end of what we have. Wake up and smell the meltdown.

Being Ensemble :: Frey / Malfatti / Davies / Lash / Hughes / Kilymis // St Columbus Church, Oxford, 28/06/2012

Jürg Frey: clarinet // Radu Malfatti: trombone // Angharad Davies: violin // Dominic Lash: double bass // Sarah Hughes: zither // Kostis Kilymis: electronics

"The being ensemble, or together, does not merely depend on the accuracy with which each reads his part, but in the intelligence with which he feels its peculiar character and connexion with the whole; whether in the exactitude of phraseology, the precision of the movements, or seizing the instant and degree of pianos and fortes..." // The London Encyclopaedia, Or Universal Dictionary Of Science, Art, Literature And Practical Mechanics, Comprising A Popular View Of The Present State of Knowledge. (In Twenty-Two Volumes. Vol. VIII. 1829.)

But this is part of the hierarchical model of (musical) ensemble: later in the same passage we read, “It belongs to the masters, conductors, and leaders of an orchestra, to guide, check, or accelerate individual performers, and to keep them together.” Now the model of musicians reading from a score, guided by composer and by conductor, is not something that one must necessarily reject in its totality, as was vigorously asserted some of the more vehement statements from that generation of free improvisers who first began to formulate their methods in the 1960s; of course not. But note the term “masters,” the assumption that ensemble, or chorus, implies subordination to a leading, guiding light, the masses under their king, their judge, their chief of police, the ultimate arbiter of taste. Leadership within the improvised ensemble is crucial within African-American improvised musics departing (following on from) jazz: no one challenges the leading roles of Cecil Taylor, or Sun Ra, or Anthony Braxton, within their ensembles, as dictatorial imposition. Yet might we not also (‘also’, rather than ‘instead of’, because no model is absolute), find some mode of accommodation between composition and improvisation, the following of a score and the space for the individual interpretation of a particular line, in a leader-less mode of ensemble-being, or being-ensemble, which follows on from the enacted anarchy of John Cage’s late ‘number pieces’?

Such questions pertain very much to the concert held, on June 28th, at St Columbus Church in Oxford, organized by Richard Pinnell, and featuring a sextet of musicians in composed and improvised work falling somewhere within the territory marked out as ‘Wandelweiser’ music. Before entering the write-up proper, I should thank Richard for putting on this event, and for the clear effort of thought and care expounded in its presentation. One got the sense that the occasion as a whole – and the printed programme which accompanied it in particular – was his attempt to work through concerns latent in the critical reception of this work over the past couple of years, but not often explicitly made the exclusive focus of discussion – and consequently, despite the relatively poor audience turn-out (as, sadly, is to be expected), that it was an enterprise of some importance. Thus, the short essay entitled ‘Wandelweiser and Improvisation’ (available in the PDF version of the programme here) was subtitled ‘The Dangers of Reverence’, and the programme’s placing on the church seats as a kind of hymn-book parodied that ‘reverence,’ even as the essay itself thoughtfully considered the importance that reverence, restraint, and a quietness of communal attention (qualities perhaps associated with certain forms of religious experience, church-based or not) might possess. Pinnell’s points with regard to the drawing in of audience as active participants in listening, and the restraint of improvisational excess through compositional framework that yet, in its looseness, also restricts the ego-mania of a controlling composer figure, are ones very close to the way that my own thinking has developed on this topic. In relation to this, if the sparse audience was spread out through the church, rather than banded together in close or obviously communal quarters, and if many of them might have had their eyes closed for at least half of the music, that was the result of a feeling of ease and comfort within the surroundings – not the comfort of complacency or an unproblematic wallowing in beauty, but, as Pinnell again notes, a mood or mode of listening that may also be fraught with tension, the mechanics of close mental attention, and, to me at least, in the composed pieces by Jürg Frey and Radu Malfatti that made up around half the concert, feelings of austere yet wrenching melancholy and sadness.

Sarah Hughes and Kostis Kilymis are, as a duo, perhaps something of an unknown quantity – this was, I believe, only their second public appearance in this configuration (I’m sure they’ll correct me if I’m wrong). Though they appear as part of a quartet with Patrick Farmer and Stephen Cornford on the Another Timbre release ‘No Islands’, and are both involved in the running of improvised music labels – respectively, Compost and Height (co-run by Hughes and Farmer) and Organized Music from Thessaloniki – their presence as improvising musicians is less established, and one gets the sense that their work is at a stage of development perhaps further back than that of, say, the ever-present and enormously experienced Lash, or of Angharad Davies. I think, though, that this is precisely what made their set of interest, for me – its sometimes hesitant reticence, the logics or non-logics of its unfolding rough-edged in non-predictable ways that didn’t always seem intentional or even, quite, to work, but which roused the listening ear out of slumber and into a focussed following of trajectories and pathways taken or not taken.

I’m not sure if this is exactly the way to phrase it, but there was a simultaneous sense of the musicians being both rigorously in control, and of suddenly, and unexpectedly, having the rug pulled out from under their feet – after a long section in which Hughes rhythmically rubbed a bow up and down the side of the zither, she abruptly stopped to leave both musicians suddenly silent and sitting still, as if the performance was about to end. There followed a few seconds, not quite silent, in which Hughes might either have been performatively packing up, or continuing the musical endeavour, as she began removing mini clothes pegs which she had previously attached, as preparations, to the zither strings. It was a while before continuity re-asserted itself, before we were sure that the performance was definitely still under way -- and perhaps this is what I find valuable, and rare, in a mode of music-making, that, despite its methodological openness to and embracing of risk, all too easily falls into established pattern: that moment of uncertainty, the truly improvised moment, where one’s every move, one’s every gesture, will have a bearing on the course, the success or failure, of that particular section, even of the piece as a whole (for once a thread is lost, it’s hard to pick up again).

Kilymis’ electronic set-up was seemingly more capacious than Hughes’ simple amplified zither, consisting as it did of what appeared to be a couple of fans or motors, a selection of pedals, and a no-input mixing board, yet if anything he was the more reticent of the pair, seemingly hardly to touch much of the equipment on his desk. Indeed, at times he made Hughes seem almost busily active, note following note in, if not rapid succession, then enough speed to form what might be described as semi-melodic shapes – though her occasional exploration of the gentle, harp-like thrum of a plucked open string was reined in enough to avoid seeming merely ‘atmospheric.’ Similarly, while drones (with their propensity to fill, or to alter the space) are a fairly stable and staple element of much music of this kind, the pair tended to avoid such fixed stretches, with only one section provoking the imperceptibly slow head nod accompanying such sustained aural washes. The set ended with the barest continuing tick, left running without intervention by Kilymis – he, Hughes, we the audience, all sitting listening there to the machines’ insect heart, beating just within audible range. Here one might recall the paragraph from Pinnell’s essay in which he comments on the way in which the audience are drawn in as participants in a close listening of the kind required from, and demanded by and of, the musicians themselves. Whereas in the composed, or semi-composed music of the Wandelweiser Group, this implies a participation in structural process – anticipating, working out, revelling in the at least partially pre-determined manner in which a piece unfolds – in the case of Kilymis’ and Hughes’ improvised performance, it also seemed to mean a kind of detachment from the act of producing sounds themselves, the occasional moment – such as that ending – in which the musicians seemed as removed from, or puzzled by what was being heard as the audience. I am certainly over-egging the rhetorical pudding here: all the way through, the duo were making active decisions, thinking hard about what to play – witness Kilymis’ frequent half-glances up at the audience – even if Hughes’ demeanour can at times seem casual-tense, as if she were simply playing in private, displaying a certain un-weightiness of gesture. But I do want to stress the way in which, not only in this duo set, the collective sound that is created is a genuine collaboration between those who make it and those who experience it, the two indeed crossing over at points: to hear the music is indeed to sound it in a particular way, to allow it the space to breathe or to be itself. It is not only about the way the music sounds, but about how you sound, to paraphrase Amiri Baraka – how you sound, and how the venue sounds, or allows sounds to be heard, how everything in that situation sounds and is sounded, whether through the smallest bowed whisp or whisper on the zither, or through the generation of an almost ecstatic sleep strum through the tiniest of tinnitus tones, whether through the gurgle of a stomach, the compressed hiss of steady breathing, or the muffled sounds of the quiet city outside.

Following that opening set, Jürg Frey’s ‘Time, Intent, Memory’, a piece composed especially for the concert and performed by the full sextet of Hughes, Kilymis, Dominic Lash, Angharad Davies, Radu Malfatti and Frey himself. If Wandelweiser music is often thought of as austere or minimal in the extreme – Radu Malfatti’s more stripped-down, smaller ensemble work, Manfred Werder’s gnomic text instructions –Frey’s pieces seem somehow fuller, despite their similar economy of means; seem to distill certain harmonic aspects of twentieth-century classical music to a transformed essence, like drops wrung out of a cloth, exploring the simplest of harmonic or rhythm notions and worrying away at those single ideas, through repetition and incremental transformation (in the tradition of minimalism, of course), through an unashamed delight in the creation of beautiful sound – even as that sound, to the non-initiated, may seem to embrace, or at least not to shy away from, the occasional harshness or clash, discord not refused for imposed blandness of total accord. The notion of a whole tradition of music stripped down or back to a shorn, ghost-canvas is, of course, not an unfamiliar one – I’m thinking of pieces I’ve recently witnessed by Helmut Lachenmann and Luigi Nono; of Luciano Berio’s (in)completion of an unfinished Schubert manuscript, ‘Rendering’; and also of the ghost-romantic music of Russian composers such as Valentin Silvestrov. And for sure it’s there in dub and dub-step, in hip-hop’s stretching out over fragments and shards from records that sound out of the past, whether in celebrated nostalgia or détourned, mocking irony. Yet Frey’s filtration of musical history – the intense accumulation and concentration found in a single note, a single chord; indeed, the ‘time, intent, memory’ packed within it – would seem less overtly to present itself as a dialogue with, or haunting by the past; even as elements go back to the very basics of folk traditions – the sounding of particular drone-based formations, the ‘imperfection’ of a sounded tone – even as there always seems a read-in referentiality to each sound and silence (there are times when a melody spins off in my head as I listen, a line taken for a walk from the single point which in actuality is being sounded at that moment). Indeed, it is these very points of ‘referentiality’, or suggestiveness, that are also the most purely moving or beautiful parts of the music (no need here, I think, for scare-quotes around those words).

Despite its conceptual-philosophical title, then, the piece heard tonight had its impact primarily through subdued, non-manipulative emotional pull, centring, or so it seemed to me at least, around a mournful melodic phrase that was broken, or extended, in, round and with silence. Ensemble as unison, clear lines in simple harmonizing. Pick up and echo, like lines starting and stopping at different points on canvas blankness. Instrumental timbre in echo, Malfatti’s trombone, Lash’s sonorously low bass, Hughes and Kilymis held e-bow’d and electronic tones in background merge, Davies and Frey the melodic movers, Frey’s clarinet here by far the most silvery, straightforwardly beautiful of all the sounds. A pigeon, coos (on the roof?). Laughter, dimmed, passing. Bruno Guastalla’s breathing, 2nd row. The scratch of my pen nib, writing this. Violins’ held note in waver. Malfatti, a trombone sound so soft it seems sub even the distant traffic rumble, granite strings and clarinet in, now the cavernous effect of Malfatti’s muted instrument, almost but not quite beating frequencies, the ensemble texture not ‘doomy’ exactly, nor serene (two default modes for much minimal experimental music these days), but its measure is grave and slow and sad. Simon Reynell’s extended stomach whistle.

The piece’s formal architecture, as it appears on first experience: two notes, generally, sounded by clarinet or violin, then other instruments coming in, it overlaps, goes on, with breathing sections, say one minute of silence (waiting / pause / rest) in between. Davies’ trembled high string and Frey’s clarinet in desolate throatache, clarinet call, those low moans, not loquacious enough for song, tho it’s all contained, formal, is not inarticulacy. Yet at times this is what it seems, constantly reaching towards, failing to reach, starting back at the beginning again to reach towards, full articulacy, loquacity – towards that ‘gabbiness’, perhaps, that Radu Malfatti so descries. Put it another way: this is saying the same statement over and over, beginning it again, reiterating or -writing, or -scribing or –speaking, it; for a point of comparison, think maybe those repeating parallel elements in Charles Ives’ ‘The Unanswered Question’, as referenced in Evan-Maria Houben’s ‘Druids and Questions’ – the questions those pieces raise with regard to time / memory / change. It take time to iterate. Yet it’s all done, set out, transparent, pretty much on first statement. That simultaneous clarity and complexity of idea, intent. Or in passing those acoustic effect / events / coincidences ‘exterior’ to the music (of course, as any one with even the most fleeting acquaintance with Wandelweiser knows, nothing in the environment can really be ‘exterior’ to the music, the music expanding out to capaciously include that environment, however fragile and easily-disturbed such a balance or encompassing might in experienced actuality be). The church bell sounding the hour, first as background tintinnabulation, in the ensemble spread out, then as an explicit reminder of passing time, punching out the seconds as punctuation to silence, Frey acknowledging its explicitness and appropriateness with a little smile. And now his breath clarinet becoming a dialogue with it, a counterpoint, held ground / extension set against the small sounds of repetition, repeated. The ensemble sets out now what seems almost a resolution-chord, with sorrow still imbued, and still the bell, tolls.

A third page of the score, collectively turned. Rustle. More space fragmented melodic in what seems to be a recontextualisation of previous material from the other sections of the piece. Ending with the most amazing ensemble chord in granite contour, like the sound you hear as all slips out, the final mourning song or breath for the end of the world, and the most intense silence after, probably shorter than it seemed, inhabited and filled by the swelling, receding ghost of that chord, afterglow swims over horizon, sinks. Clap clap.

Afterwards I discover the actual formal structure of the piece, beyond speculative or effusive conjecture. Chords and pitches are all written out, individual notes placed in columns, over several pages, with chords at the bottom of those pages, yet each musician is allowed to make their way through the score at their own pace, at a vaguely-agreed root temp of 40bpm. Thus the previously noted overlapping of lines, and thus the fact that any unison that occurs is the result of simultaneous decisions made by different musicians: ensemble as the collectively-decided and negotiated sounding together of separate lines, rather than imposed, homogenous mass. The restraint of this particular group of musicians, their un-showy, un-fussy approach to the score, is thus central to its successful rendition: one must pay attention to the way in which one realizes the piece, one cannot simply play the notes on the page, safe in the full indications of the composer’s pre-decisions. This is not, however, merely an opportunity for each individual to stamp the muddy foot-prints of their own ego all over the shop: and that this sextet was not in the least concerned with such manoeuvres might be indicated by the fact that all members of the group were given the possibility of playing short (notated) solos, and yet only Frey and Lash played theirs – the latter ending with a resonant thrummed pluck that, for the briefest moment, seemed to summon the ghost of Jimmy Garrison into the church.

A second improvised duo to follow: the combined strings of Lash and of Angharad Davies, Davies, sawed bowing motion in slip-string control (in which the sounds hover around a general field of semi-pitched timbre, but with numerous delicate variations around the edges), rubber-banded string pluck, just one or two notes placed exactly in almost-tandem with Lash’s bow-on-bass-body-rub, wood scritch and scratch. The most exquisite quietness at times, but also, particularly in Lash’s playing, a more obviously reactive ‘improv’ impulse (though one might ask, what was the echo / unison of lines in the Frey piece if not reactive, albeit in a different, more obviously restrained way?) – the result, it would seem from subsequent conversation, of a deliberate attempt not to play a ‘Wandelweiser-style’ improv, while remaining within the spirit of the event as a whole and keeping the gab in check.



Finally, an interval preparing us for the concert’s closing piece: Radu Malfatti’s ‘Darenootodesuka’, the title a Japanese phrase meaning ‘whose sound is it?’ (perhaps a quotation from that important Malfatti collaborator Taku Sugimoto?), the ramifications with regard to the ‘ownership’ of sounds, the fostering of collectivity, the activity of listeners and of environment elevated alongside the activity of musicians, and so on, already discussed at various points above. As in the Frey, mutating ensemble chords seemed to be ‘lead’, or pre-empted, by Davies’ violin. At first, the silences that had permeated ‘Time, Intent, Memory’ were largely absent, continuity not felt as pulse, but gradually changing organic drone, Frey’s clarinet meshing with Hughes’ e-bow’d zither and Kilymis’ laptop, Malfatti and Lash low-blending, Davies again alternating two or so desolate notes, more, an entire tone row, as melody, ascending and descending the stave in simple figure; simple, again, a limited actual number of notes, but in varied combinations, re-iterations, permutations; and again this interest in mournful almost-melody, in the sound of the ensemble, its timbre, its textures, and in the relation of parts together but in parallel not-quite unison, overlapping rather than entirely coinciding. Like the Frey, perhaps even more so, it was quietly devastating at times, as darkness outside the church in dark blue falling. The first section, 12 minutes – for the first eleven of these, each musician playing the melody one to five times, with breaks in between, then sounding, in the final minute, an ensemble chord; a timed silence; section two. Once held note. Shorter silence. Now Lash leading, others coming in. Frey and Davies, held notes with patient semitone descent, each voice stating the melody again descent and over, taking it up, holding, leaving. (Club-bass-boom from outside pub creeps in as brief minor disturbance. After the concert was over, as everyone left, an off-key karaoke rendition of ‘My Way’ spilling out of the door.) Simplicity of the materials, their patient not-elaboration, not-development, not-‘unfolding’ (as that word implies the other two), making the statement in the time it needs, over and over, in ensemble repeating, turning up then down and not leaving, descending and rising and not leaving. The ground, pitched together drifting apart and back, how long can a voice hold (a note), instrument in wood and breath, electronic, each part heard and distinct and together ensemble announcing, constituting, not with tension fraught as slow emerging – always emergent, always there, in that initial transparency revealing, and then revealing, and revealing, in material re-sounding, lay this out and you hear it, it’s not a complexity game, you can contain the information, here, in your hand, in your head, in your ear, it’s on the surface, you’re in the surface. The descent / ascent as it whoosh-slides with the laptop sine // in the surface rocking, maybe, sadly cradled, or quite still, breath and closed eye // the lowing of Malfatti’s trombone, as if in hollows and mists muted, veiled. Longish silence // the unison sound, refreshed, shortly sounded, slight silence, almost, not quite silent, still the air resounding, stating chord as knell, as almost spoken utterance, twice, of one word. Silence. Again ensemble, differing (not violin (now violin. The descending part of the melody again in play // longish section of all that again. In cycles, encycled, the line, the tail spins on itself it turns, the trail encircling, encircled. And utterance stops. It starts. In continuum, holding, just overlap morphing. In silence it stops. Again it starts. The musicians, had paused, put down, now take up their instruments. The sound is new each time the pause – the full silence – refreshes. “do i cease to exist in between waves of sound?” (The rhetorical question, from Francis Brown, appended to the CD release of a previous performance of this composition, on Malfatti’s B-Boim Records). The answer is no. Again shortly stated. And ending, the piece, on that tail whisper. The echoed fragment as final reminder, cut statement, stated, end. Fading with the darkness. Intensity. The scores’ instruction: to play each note as if finding it for the first time. ‘Rather timidly’. All sounds calm and very quiet. Might one not recall here Miles Davis’ instructions to John McLaughlin during the recording of ‘In a Silent Way’: “Play as if you don’t know how to play guitar”?

“do i cease to exist in between waves of sound?” I do not cease to exist but my existence is altered by those between-states, as it is altered by those waves of sound. ‘Between’, that word inevitably now recalling the 2006 Rowe / Nakamura collaboration on Erstwhile. In other definitions: ‘in the space separating’ // ‘in portions for each’ // ‘among.’ What it is between is between individuals, between notes, between audience and performer, between both groups and between the sounded and sounding environment: the points are dual, it is dialogue, to be between things there must be two, or more – multiple, ensemble.

How Long Is This? [The Theatre of Will Stuart] -- Judith E Wilson Drama Studio, Cambridge :: Friday 27th April 2012

Though he is ostensibly the Judith E Wilson dramatist in residence for the duration of the academic year, this day of works by, and responding to the theatre of Will Stuart, marked his first public appearance in Cambridge during that year: perhaps, after the reported extravaganza of pieces presented at the 2011 Miscellaneous Festival, he needed a breather. The day opened at 11AM with his greatest hit – premiered, I believe, at the 2009 Misc. Fest., on which occasion the lead role was memorably ‘played’ by Justin Katko (tho’ the notion of playing roles is of course very much complicated in and by Stuart’s practice). Said ‘hit’ is the half-hour or so theatre piece ‘Transfigurations’ – and while the elements out of whose fabric it is woven (this probably not being the best metaphor) are fairly easy to describe, their ramifications and dynamics take a lot longer to fully grapple with (I’m still doing it; since I first saw it, three years ago, it will occasionally pop into my head as an unsolved conundrum, a source of thought usefully generated from the frictive frustration and strangeness inherent in any engagement with its deceptively ‘clear’ surface). The play’s contents then, in brief: one participant (I’m not sure the word ‘actor’ is really appropriate here – by which I don’t mean to denigrate those who actually performed, but to highlight the ways in which Stuart’s is a very different proposition from the usual theatrical models) runs at full-tilt, back and forth across the breadth of the performance space, yelling ‘THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE ARE COMING’; another stands at the back of that space, mute and unmoving (apart from the inevitable suppressed laughter, which almost seems to be an anticipated, tho’ unwritten part of the role), holding a placard adorned with the single word ‘AROUSED’; a third, the main focus, sits centre stage, beginning by reciting a portion of Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, complete with knee-rug, before switching into a portion of Aileen Wuornos’ court testimony, in which she describes killing the man who has been torturing and raping her; the performer (on this occasion, female, tho’ the role appears to be gender-neutral) then stands to recite the lyrics to JLS’ ‘One Shot’ in some sort of sync with the sound of the song itself, blaring out in its fully glory, or otherwise. All fall silent as the Intermezzo from Mascagni’s ‘Cavalleria Rusticana’ is p(l)ayed in full; the apocalyptic messenger steps to the front and recites the words to an advert for Lindt chocolate, and the play ends.

That artifice plays a role here should not be in doubt; this being further highlighted by Stuart’s presence at the back of the stage, handing out props and giving cues, and by the fact that many lines were recited from visible scripts. This is not necessarily a ‘bad’ artifice, an artifice that draws critical attention to its own insincerity (tho’, in the case of the Lindt advert, of course, it might be): for instance, the afore-mentioned interchangeability of gender, both in terms of the Pinter / Wuornos / JLS figure and the silently aroused guard (both male in the 2009 production; both female in the 2012 afternoon performance (and I believe, male and female in the evening rendition)), would seem to be at once a move away from gendered stereotyping and a critical engagement with such stereotyping, with questions of vulnerability and victimhood and of what it means to voice the testimony of another, to appropriate another’s language of pain for ostensible purposes of parodic de-contextualisation. (Consider further: what difference does it make that it’s a solo female performer who rehearses the arm pain of ‘In Despite?’)

These questions of artifice and de- or re-contextualisation were central to Ian Heames’ paper on ‘Transfigurations’, originally presented at a conference on literature and pop music, and focussing specifically on Stuart’s use of JLS, understood adamantly not as parody of capitalist pop or those equally ‘stupid’ recipients who uncritically swallow it whole. Such a position would be a quasi-Adornian critique that risks sliding over into mere class contempt: while the ignorant masses lap up X-Factor or Britain’s Got Talent or the barely-now-remembered Pop Idol, we can dig our Boulez, and ironically laugh at their poor taste (tho’ of course to attribute X-Factor love to the entire working class is equally contemptuous – much of the most vital avant-popular music of the previous century emerges precisely from a working class base – and to criticise the banalization of emotion and the smoothing over of difficulty or struggle or contradiction into the shinily-packaged, the quick-burst affirmation or melancholic pleading of yet another identikit chart single, is a perhaps necessary, though difficult task (and, furthermore, one that’s not often attempted beyond more than a simple affirmation of what we’re all supposed instinctively to know: that this type of pop is bad and nefarious and contemptible and all the rest of it)). For Heames, then, Stuart’s deployment of ‘One Shot’ is a means of asking what ‘sympathy’ we could actually muster for the feelings the song, and other songs like it, rouse so differently in different individuals, notwithstanding the criticism that pop songs of a certain type homogenize felt response into predictable pattern(ing), aspirations within the capitalist frame of allowed leisure or love, or their attendant impossible celebrity aspiration syndrome (the kind of dream that is, indeed, encouraged by precisely those sorts of talent shows which propelled JLS to their moment of spotlit fame and influence: a notion of a kind of heaven on earth that you could have now, without radical social transformation – capitalism’s utopic cod-promise, forever deferred into pop’s exhortation or yearning to take what you want, because, even if “you’ve only got one shot,” you can have it, whether thru lottery luck or meritocratic striving). This point would seem similar to Marx’s take on religion in ‘The German Ideology’: the aim is to liberate society so that the needs to which religion gives expression are met without the need for their subsumption into a comforting and compensatory religious framework. Neither religion’s nor pop songs’ expressed urges are exactly falsely expressed within the frame of religion or pop, then, but are part of both forms’ very structure, their formal structures of desire and ‘feeling’, and in this light, Stuart’s work seems far more than the initial cheap joke it could seem, far more a serious engagement with, again, that ‘sympathy’ we could have for or with those urges.

Tho’ the advertised ‘discussions’ at the end of each section most often turned into breaks for food or coffee or intermission chat, J.H. Prynne (in a day-long attendance that is a mark of the interest and serious intent locally generated by Stuart’s work) did start a mini-debate as he queried Heames’ use of the phrase ‘deeper logic’ w/r/t pop music, Heames agreeing that this might suggest a false separation between surface and ‘depth’, or sincerity: pop, as it is used in Stuart’s play, is more of a feedback loop, where in is also out, where sincerity and depth cannot be easily entangled from each other, if at all. There is no detached, elevated authorial ‘deployment’ of the material; though the audience’s laughter contains ironic recognition, that recognition second-guesses an intended irony on the part of Stuart that is not present in his own usage. Evi Heinz’ earnest or faux-earnest spoken-karaoke delivery of ‘One Shot’s’ lyrics, with its slight stumbles and halts and missed-timings (at least, in the afternoon performance of the play which I witnessed), was not so much the appearance of real, felt spontaneity; rather, it added imperfection to JLS’ auto-tuned sheen: the imperfection, perhaps, that the listener brings to the perfect product, which imperfection is precisely where any of the ‘sympathy’ that Heames identified might lie – though to describe this as attributable ‘sincerity’ on the part of Stuart or Heinz would, of course be stupid. Maybe the feedback loop is dependent on room-mood and audience biography – the complex interweaving, perhaps clashing network of expectation and social background and felt engagement that they might bring to the performance: and here, alongside Transfiguration’s use of JLS, we might place the time-trial task set in Heinz’ CorresponDANCES, in which performer and audience attempt to blow-up a giant inflatable dinosaur before an extended recording of the Jurassic Park theme tune, and variations thereof, came to its close. Is this actually participation as a kind of communality? The elation and party game panic that the dinosaur challenge infectiously rouse(d) in those participating was in some sense real (witness Heames’ face reddening with effort, or James MacNamara causing his own lip to bleed), even as the piece satirized any ‘togetherness’, that ironization perhaps the condition for this togetherness to be real, to be glimpsed without the cloying cover of a false hippy all-in-this-togetherness, man…And it is laughter that draws one in, a kind of glee mixed with anxiety at the accomplishment of what is accepted as a ridiculous task, but whose accomplishment suddenly comes, in that moment, to seem almost desperately important, the laughter arising from a recognition of the sheer delirious and somehow utterly joyful absurdity of that emotional charge: well, maybe this is no more than what happens in the party games you might play with your friends (certainly before you reach your teens, and sporadically after, tho’ drinking games don’t engender the same kind of innocent, or ‘innocent’ solidarity). But how often does that kind of emotional register ever even enter theatre? Perhaps it could only happen here because the audience at that stage was so small, the interaction occurring on a manageable level, that separation between the elect few on stage and the select or willy-nilly audience mass less apparent than it might otherwise have been: there might then be a readiness to participate less tinged by feelings of embarrassment or the risk of public foolishness (leave that to the actors) – because, after all, the audience always performs itself, to a certain extent (like the clubber checking themselves out in the mirror; cast a quick glance over your fellow theatre attendees to see if they’re laughing as much as you, to see how the cool kids are reacting), and the kind of performance or participation that Heinz asked of it, by placing that performance on the surface, and by transforming it into something joyful and open, rather than furtive, unconscious, or closed, was a liberation of this desire, as well as a questioning of how far it might really be taken. Well, in any case, watching J.H. Prynne blow up almost an entire four-foot inflatable dinosaur was a nigh-on unsurpassed public event.

Interval. Films, by Heames (the script a monologue by Stuart, delivered by poet Peter Gizzi) and by Stuart (sock-puppet unemployment more-than-whimsicalities), unfortunately projected from a laptop with live spoken subtitles, rather than in full-screen glory, due to technical issues. I somehow neglected to take notes on these during the train journey in which I took notes on everything else; so, apologies, no more here will be said.

The notes resume. There follows another Interval. Kat Griffiths then performs a ‘Performed Love Poem’, a monologue of a very different sort to Heinz’ ‘CorresponDANCES’: in a variety of accents, some sort of story would seem to emerge about love failure, in a staged drunken haze which involves dancing that ranged from the wildly enthusiastic to the despairing, eating coffee granules washed down with wine, breaking an egg, telling an absurd-desperate anecdote about masturbating against a lamp-post on the way home from a party after yr love interest gets a boyfriend, and a final reading of the love poem in question; all this an intense, even performance-art-tinged ‘baring all’ coming up against artifice in aware, maybe even dialectical, interplay – as in Stuart, those elements of real or imagined or apparent ‘sincerity’ both lending the work its power and being satirized, ironized. (Those words don’t, of course, really fit; this theatre wants a new vocabulary for its negotiations which for the moment I’m not quite sure how to construct.)

Now Ollie Evans’ first performance, a variant on a short piece I’d first seen him deliver a couple of weeks ago at the ‘Now, Microtheatres’ evening in London’s Five Years Gallery. Evans lies down on the stage, covered by a rug, and with a copy of Finnegans Wake as a pillow, while a tape plays his voice meta-speculating on the live situation, the potential dynamics of the then-future performance, the ethics of this enterprise, &c., while considering art as work, or not work (‘how to scab your own strike’). (Given that F.W. is the subject of Evans’ Ph.D thesis, its unobtrusive pillow-deployment allows a further element to creep in, relevant, no doubt, to all us academy-encrusted students and teachers of ‘radical’ literature, our safety note, the status of our work as work or as isolated, cocooned play.) The apparent spontaneity (I apologize for constantly having banal resource to these tired and inadequate deskriptors: I’ll try to do better next time) of the tape here negated by its deployment as an almost automatically de-humanized pre-recording to which the audience are held in thrall; so, again, that push and pull with and between expectation and frustration and meta-anticipation that is so central to Stuart’s work.

‘In Despite’, the second Stuart piece, playing on pain and boredom with meticulously stringent manipulativeness. Evi Heinz clutches her arm and complains about the pain or ache shooting up it which she just can’t get ride of; for nigh-on fifteen minutes, with the word ‘ow’ punctuating every other sentence, and sometimes, it seems, every other phrase. Irritation, cod-sincerity, restriction, taken to a real extreme of challenging apparent banality. And the entry of quasi-theology at the end, probably not entirely as parody (meditations on infinity, what it would mean, after the end of the universe as we know, for things or people or selves to still be in existence; and the singing of ‘Silent Night’). Pain here is not the one tragic event, but the extended (non-)event of continued and non-ignorable suffering: now here a whole discourse of Levinasian attentiveness, even anti-Imperialist in dimension, opens itself up, but I’m not sure that to extrapolate further would further the play’s cause or really do more than smooth over its jagged irritations (which, in their own way, are perhaps more of a challenge than Transfiguration’s).

So onto Ollie Evans’ third performance (to skip the chronologic for a moment). Preparation and starting, or not starting. A completely improvised, blank-state beginning (this of course a misnomer, as Evans wd realize, for it itself is a concept subject to some sort of pre-cognition): Evans moving around, as if enacting last-minute set- and check-up details, before the performance proper can begin. Which of course it both does and doesn’t; these are already the constitutive elements of the performance. Evans finally asking Stuart, from performer to audience, about his practice. Stuart’s reply: that he is aiming towards a Keston Sutherland-esque obsession (w/r/t to three essays in which K.S. (re)works (around) the same idea consecutively, consumingly). (This section might, I suppose, have been construed as the advertised ‘discussion’ sections of the day in the end making it onto the stage.) Here I get to thinking (again) about the Drama Studio as a space, prompted by Evans’ movement in and out of doors with various paraphernalia (chairs, a microphone and stand, coats and props), the back-stage both back- and on-stage, as tends to happen, In The Studio. This performative non-performance also perhaps a parody of Evans’ familiarity, With The Studio. I ask: to what extent is the power I feel in much of this work (both on Will Stuart Day and in previous Days and Events in the studio) to do with having cultivated a space where the questions the work addresses can be allowed to build and develop, performance to performance, not as an accumulated ‘body of works’, or the diverse bodies of work of the various performers who perform there (& tho’ these bodies of work, whether enacted there or elsewhere, are no doubt enabled or influenced by the space itself), but as questions you feel you can ask, that the audience or the space give you permission to ask, and that they have been, or might be, thinking about? Which is also perhaps constriction; at some point don’t you have to break out of what has become the cocoon of a safe-(lab-experiment)-space, to inform your interaction in the outer and upper world with it? Or do you always need that separate space for experimental testings, like the performer’s magic circle (derived from originally-medieval, now Lecoquian French buffon practice) that Stewart Lee describes in his (essential) book ‘How I Escaped My Certain Fate’? Except here the whole play is about the lack of that kind of delineated safe cut-off, even if it is always circumscribed within a particular room: what does it mean, then, to talk of ‘risk’ here? How far can risk go before it turns merely into a strategy-board-game in which the pieces are moved around in familiar frisson? How many more questions? But yet, the Drama Studio’s programme is diverse: not just theatre-makers, but poets, musicians, film-makers. This isn’t a trendy inter-disciplinarity, but emerges out of particular work (or play; or plays), not from arts-council-funding schematics, plots, diagramm’d pre-anatomies draining out the live blood of living encounter. So Cage or Adorno of Keston Sutherland or Prynne can all be brought within the frame of reference, that frame expanded out to include them, and to include JLS and hymns and toy helicopters (see below): again, not as a trendy or uncritical togetherness, but because these things are all in the performers’ and the audiences’ lives and minds, of which this work is one textural element (and even vice versa).

The notes dribble and drabble out (I’m not here working to a conclusion, I can’t muster the required energy at the moment). Alors, finalement: The Remains of the Day. Evans’ second performance, the repeated variation of a line from Finnegans Wake (“I can do as I like with what’s me own”), turned into Minton- or MacCaffrey-esque sound poetry, stretched and multiplied and humorously twisted. ‘Iphigenia’, which finds Stuart reading a letter from JH Prynne to John Wilkinson, regarding Wilkinson’s poem of the same name: the figure of the helicopter recurring as trope in that letter, Stuart’s reading ‘accompanied’ by Heames’ flying of remote-controlled toy helicopters around the space and at the reader. Some sort of dizzying height-reach when the helicopter (literally) hits the roof of the Drama Studio arousing temporary mild vertiginous feelings, tho’ this effect may have been localized to no one else in the audience. Heames’ poem ‘For Will Stuart’, the last thing I caught before I had to leave, written after receiving the news of Osama Bin Laden’s death thru Stuart’s poem on that topic: what it might mean for poetry to be the news, with full affect and difficulty built in beyond bland fronting and evasion. “After the United States the United States.”

And after Will Stuart?

[Check this write-up for clear-sighted summary trimmed of the above's excessive verbiage]

‘Belabouring in Vain’: Scattered Notes on Michael Haslam

Let’s start with the introduction Haslam pens to the volume around which these notes will flip and flap (‘A Cure for Woodness’, the concluding part of his ‘Music’ trilogy). There at first is posited an apparent desire to get away from that soundplay, that rhyming rhythmic jingle-jangle (which John Wilkinson would term a schizoid ‘clang association’ (viz. his analysis of John Wieners’ work)) in which H. has so often revelled, arcane etymological connections not as language’s historical sedimentation (viz. Adorno), but as sidetracks, the eccentric investigations, almost, of a Victorian leisured gentleman (tho’ rougher-shod, and informed by a life of labour): locality and quaintness, amateur histories (some of which spirit, now I think of it, does hover round certain of the ‘English Intelligencer’ prose that’s recently been put out by Mountain Press, particularly Peter Riley’s various investigations of Britain’s stone age past – though there things are more tempered by (a) academic temperament and (b) a sometimes crushingly Olsonian grand project to reclaim origin and to re-write history thru what I guess one might call ‘investigative verse’). In part, of course (and as the succeeding poems in actuality prove) H. actually wants to defend that laboured-leisured sense of non-academic play, often within Nature (we’ll let the generalized term stand, as place-holder, for now) as refreshment for melancholy or ‘woodness’, as a consolation not Romantic-regressive but necessary: “the birds and mammals, streams and flowers and trees, the web of all living life and the pleroma of physical forces, with humanity de-centred”; even without the “religious cause,” in which Nature, however ‘fallen’, still revealed something of God (to the monks on Skellig Michael, for instance, or to St Francis, exhibiting humility and openness in a non-anthropocentric universe), “there are probably good evolutionary reasons for our being enlivened by the beauty of our sustaining ecology” (but note a total lack of sentimental earth-mother piety in this (tho’ the earth as feminine fecundity trope does crop out with a fair frequency in the following verses): “It’s marvellous how consoling the cruelties of nature can be”) – in any case, (inter-)dependence rather than just Brute (Social) Darwinism, the fittest survival; the role of co-operation, yes? But still this worry that the language sound-play and often blatant use of rhyme into which H’s verse has moved functions as regression and narrative from his earlier ‘languescope’ of impersonal undirection and non-paraphrasability, in which the question of “whether the results divulged merely my own so-called ‘Unconscious’ or the truth of the world would be for the world to judge.” Yet the “grand abstract vision” (viz. Hart Crane’s Bridge as abstract synthesis in poetry of that which in life remains messily separate and clashing (as Atlantis, eternity, “one song” which “devoutly binds,” “in single chrysalsis the many twain”)) can’t be accomplished, even in verse: the fall instead is into plot and soundplay – not as (fortunate?) Fall but as “waves & cycles of personal emotional happenstance” – despondence, confidence, elation, tragedy, etc – which aren’t exactly specific in the narrative fixity they impose on the poem; rather, “personal, but common enough” – not as exact specific biography, the poem as confession, ‘authenticated’ by its status as document of inner struggle (and thus elevating the role of the author as one who feels ‘more’, or ‘better’, than us ordinary mortals, and whose documented feelings thus deserve more attention or respect more than those of non-artists). The aim is to avoid being falsely ‘universal’, un-historically/-socially specific in a disingenuous, metaphysical, escapist sense of unchanging essence, whilst simultaneously acknowledging and highlighting personal contingency, even a certain capriciousness. Such capriciousness is central to Haslam’s persona, and is what perhaps enables the free-flowing (though of course, exquisitely controlled and skilful) Delight of his poetry – drawing attention to a certain sonic materiality, sensuous sound-patterning and excited jibber-jabber prized over a previous investment in what H. describes as a certain modernist absence, a near-religious worship of the void (the 'languescope': “There was a time when I was strongly drawn to the lure of an idea of absence. How can Emptiness shine like a tin can? The siren idea I drew from a concept formed from what I might call post-Symbolist French poetry. I remember hearing and reading such stuff in the 1970s. So much whiteness, nothingness, void, and silence, absolute silence. There was something almost mystical in the absence of God: you could almost worship the blankness.”) Instead of such abstracted paring-down, we have here instead an associative play that is almost out of control, that takes one out of oneself, or that takes one outside a structuring sense of one’s self as a stable and rounded entity, instead focussing the sharp or blurred edges of moment-to-moment existence as experienced and lived in its non-schematic minutiae. It’s a little like watching a Stan Brakhage film, where Brakhage’s field of activity and wandering attention is on the play of light and movement, its forms of organization super-fast and contingent. (One could take any number of the painstakingly hand-painted and hand-scratched frames of those brief but highly, highly concentrated, flitteringly dense films from the latter part of his career, and present them as miniature paintings in themselves, but their cumulative power is very much meant to be, and indeed is, in their total effect, their combination into the moving ream: film as mitigating against the permanence (and thus the commercialization and elitist museum-bound segregation) of the art object, as a liberation of perception into temporal flux and flow). Similarly, any one of Haslam’s phrases might cause one to trip and pause on its delicious sonic effect (he could easily have made a fine sound poet), causing one to have to go back and re-read the line, and maybe the line before that, to get back into the ‘sense’ of it – it’s what makes reading Haslam such an exhausting pleasure, such a capacious joy: not because of difficulty of allusion, the kind of stringency demanded by certain forms of late modernist poetry, but because of sheer glorious density. Such density is, of course, a density of allusion and of multiplying potential meanings, cross-connections, associations, etc, as much as it is a density of sound, and the two are, I’d argue, closely connected: sound patternings spark sense connections that would not occur to the ‘rational’ mind, even if afterwards they are rationalized, placed in argumentative order, saying something rather than merely playing with nice vocalized jingle-jangles. (The process, in fact, is not that far off, in general methodology, if not in impact or real practical similarity, to the work J.H. Prynne was writing in the 90s and 2000s (‘Kazoo Dreamboats’ of course being a different proposition altogether, moving through tough and extended argument rather than the building up of thematic area by the build-up of quick-jump fragments and associative build-up)). The difference to Brakhage, of course, is that Haslam is working with language, packed full of signification and allusion, whereas Brakhage, particularly in those abstracted films, can move from visual signification to the creation of new forms that have no exact parallel in what we might see in the world itself (the closest analogy, and one he frequently made, being to ‘closed-eye vision’, that delicate patterning of light synapses when one closes one’s eyes (or, as D. Oliver puts it in ‘The Harmless Building’, “the ever-present background of combinational probability laws that were a more-modern hesistance of the swarm towards pattern, a swirling and sparkling”). Of course, H. could have moved into sound poetry proper, and that he did not suggests that his project is still very much invested in meaning – not the ‘liberated’ meaning of a grunt or growl (viz. Burroughs’ oft-cited statement that “words are an arbitrary communication system and any sound could do as well. An exquisite sonnet could be conveyed in bestial snarls and grunts.” Without overlooking the importance formed by language's non-verbal semantic elements – those qualities of voice (timbre, rhythm, pitch, etc) which are not so much formalized codes (though they contain recognizable features that allow them to be 'read') as individualized modes of conscious or unconscious expression – it would seem foolish to prioritize non-linguistic communication units as something 'better than language'; and, allowing for rhetorical overstatement, the valorization of a kind of 'primitive' animality (why "bestial snarls and grunts" rather than, say, the 'motherease' with which an infant is lulled? well, I guess Burroughs' misogyny would answer that question...) seems a little problematic. By this, of course, I don’t mean to suggest that poems should be all lulling sweetness and light…); OK, so not that ‘animal liberation’ thru sound, access to one’s inner spirit-man, one’s inner lion (a la McClure) (however parodically and delightfully ridiculous this is made to seem by Cobbing, his tongue firmly popping in his cheek), but a negotiation with the fact of mouthing words through tongue and teeth and spittle, a kind of muttering musical complex inside the head which one could become stuck inside, and which poetry’s delicate task is to pick its way through, using that near-schizoid sound to sound out new meanings, new association complexes, to combat language’s bureaucratized or war-mongering straitjacketing without falling into a lulling sonic cocoon of regressive rhyming chiming nonsense:

“The polymorphous parts / of sorry sores and soothing phoney story sorts” (‘A Bunch of Tales’).

Which seems to suggest that any chiming stories that are told are fakes, tho’ elsewhere, as we’ll see, the figure of wounds or bruises, blemish and waste and mess, stand more for a kind of down-to-earthness, a literal materialism that is multiple and, yes, poly-morphous (and poly-tonal, -phonic?), which H. wd most certainly endorse, and wish to participate within, in that self-description. And, let’s think about this: sound and stories have their linkage, in oral epic, the sounded refrain (refrain as both to sound again, and not to do so, to ‘refrain from’ – that dialectic in origin (as the original sensed of the word ‘rhythm’ clash between blockage and flow; as the Dogon word for ‘to open’ and ‘to lcose’ is the same): refrain, then, might be both affirmative action and negative inaction, refusal of action, excess and decorum.) And stories as sorting, arranging of multiple experience into one followed trajectory, one strand of narrative, akin (again I quote) to Hart Crane’s “one song devoutly bind[ing],” his “many twain[ing][…]in single chrysalis.” “Erosis” – giving over to eros (“woodness” as madness, including sexual elation, self-forgetting (madmens’ selves multiply, are forgot, become archetypical (Poor Tom, the generic crazed vagrant), also as erosion (of self? of land? of boundaries?) – the play in this section on ‘so’ sounds and on wounds, s’s and o’s, decay as painful wound (the "worm returning", penetrating in, as in Blake’s Sick Rose) and as ecstatic, tho’ “sickly bliss” – the holy fool, the blessed disease. A particularly striking conceit: clowns as nude weatherpeople (forecasters? rain dancers? the shamanic function sleeping right at the back of that most gleaming of regularized TV banality-bulletins, the weather report). And, ah, stars, as in Bunting’s ‘Briggflats’, that distance – “with starry gaps / of high renown.” A “cry” as birdsong, lyric O (not I) utterance, both the utterly personal and the inarticulate unperson’d, “sounding out of the depths of being” (Nietzsche), ‘O’ as folksong collective utterance at that moment of most personal pain (Prynne’s ‘English Poetry & Emphatical Language’), as danger/pain signal and as ‘music’ (birdsong – nature as decoration, no: “The cry might sound alarming. Clear enough. / It’s nothing personal. It could be couched / and may be decorated with birds.”)

“I don’t rhyme for the sake of riddlin’” (Chuck D)

And with that on, now, to what I think’s the best poem in the book, ‘Belabouring in Vain’. Here there's play on lyric as mass/ folk / fairy (faerie?) pastoral, not as gossamer Edwardian kids at the end of the garden but as rough reverie (wood dwellers misconstrued as spirits might be outlaws, wild (green) men, Winstanley’s commune trying to eke out an arboured existence). So we have leaking, pissing, shitting, ‘wages’ recurring throughout – cash, consequences (wages of sin); we have art as (parodied) lyric (French?) delicacy –“pull faces / thinking phrases for the lyric graces, lilac cordial, vanilla curlew and so on. And hammer on / until the limb’s gone numb” – from easily-slipped dance or drink to lifted hammer, beating out the rhythm in repetitive strain  – art literally become wanking about, as in – “They say it [Art] wanks / to wage thankless assault on taste, by means of / glorious plebeian ructions” – some coarser (Anglo-Saxon?) materiality. The eruption of that rough rusticity of a peasant-pastoralised lyric, not as distanced court dalliance, rural tourism (“a cheap holiday in other people’s [idealized] misery”) but from within the place itself, or from some vantage near enough in sympathy not to render its fantasies spun too wildly into regression and lie: the people, labour, material facts, material world – as against, again, the courtly nostalgized idealisation of yer common-or-garden non-political pastoral idyll (that non-politics of course implicitly and insidiously political in its conservative claim). “There are dozens of us delving in the mass / of gross behaviour” – a kind of free love orgy (“each labourer may love / his or her next or nearest neighbour[…]dreaming nakedness, I readdress thy face”) which is partly imagined as “reverie” and dream, perhaps akin to the gender reversals and temporary madnesses in Shakespeare’s ‘green worlds’ – As You Like It’s Forest of Arden, Cymbeline’s Welsh mountains, the Tempest’s Isle, Twelfth Night’s Illyria, and most particularly, A Midsummer Night Dream’s Athenian Forest. Here we might recall RF Langley’s poem ‘Cash Point’, in which AMND leaps into the present, with a cash point as the “hole in the wall” through which Pyramus and Thisbe communicate, that hole as a point of access between a world of reality and a world of dreams (occurring explicitly in a play within a play, a parodied love story, Romeo and Juliet played for laughs) – like Bottom, those that seek to escape, say, the urban world, the world of court intrigue or brow-beating end up being turned into donkeys, literally being made an ass of. Langley suggests that both Pyramus and Thisbe’s attempt to keep their love alive through the hole (the sexual punning obvious, that hole perhaps, even, as a glory hole, anonymising and rendering almost entirely individualistic what should be an ecstatic inter-personal closeness), and a modern attempt to “cash in dreams for reality, language for things” (in Jeremy Noel-Tod’s words), are efforts doomed to failure, fictions of consoling artifice: the quasi-magical exchange of a pin number for a piece of paper which will allow one to purchase material things is a kind of ‘cashing in’ on the dreams that, say, promises of endless credit encourage –“With your last twitch you can / point at the letters that make up / the spell” – ‘spell’ referring to words as well as to magic, to the act of naming a desire that, it is hoped, produces the material effects of that desire’s presence, but which ends up as just another deferral, another consoling fiction as are the fairies in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ (a play which, for AD Nuttall (in ‘Shakespeare the Thinker’) is “not escapist; it is about escapism,” subjecting its subject to a “philosophic scrutiny of the status of love-experience” to be “maintained to the end of the comedy”). If Langley remains sceptical about the consoling power of either cash or nature (elsewhere, he draws together a territorial dispute between a beetle and a wasp and the suspicion which led to the execution and torture of numerous women during the era of witch trials – misrepresentation, the fantasy of fairies and witches, as both consoling and dangerous, leading (as does the fantasy of endless cash and credit) to immiseration and exploitation), Haslam is more like Mercutio, in whose Queen Mab speech – according to Nuttall’s account of it – “wild imagination” ends up “outrun[ning] intellect”; and, unlike Mercutio, he starts off by wishing to believe, if not in the literal existence of fairies, at least in some notion of a consoling nature, or, at least, a nature that is both curse and cure, both the cause of madness and the restoration to sanity: and this can happen in a poem, which can question its own premises, its own wildness of imaginative fancy and sound-play at the same time as revelling in precisely those qualities, constructing connections not possible in the real world, perhaps, bending time in and around on itself to create constellations of country labourers, lyric poets, poetic work and the work on the land, not ignoring the structures of oppression within either, nor valourising himself as a kind of modern-day John Clare (who’s later namechecked), but as partly-parodied “yokel local-focal,” wandering in eccentric bumbling bucolic melancholia.

‘Belabouring’s implied orgy, if it’s imagined as a kind of Green World dream, is also sex as concretion melding, as assertion of body into text rather than the virginal idealization of courtly love (L’Amour de Loin). The ‘gross’ of “gross behaviour” is an excess (viz. the talk of wages and work and counting up (archaic) coins) – ‘gros’ as Falstaffian fatness – ‘delving’ as digging into the earth (here a sexualized activity, no doubt) and as undoubtedly echoing John Ball’s famous notion of communal peasant closeness to land (“when Adam delved and Eve span, who then was the gentleman?”), that non-hierarchical commons involving a free and shared sexuality as well as labour (hopefully not in the sense of customary tribal prostitution (polygamy for men) that Marx criticises with regard to notions of ‘free love’ in a non-Communist society (the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 is yer reference here)). The poem’s title implies that reverie itself is a kind of labour, whether this be labour as birth, ripeness (“a state of ripe undress”), but still at a remove, a recall, a recoil; yet ‘reverie’, in its modern sense, only tells half the story – from the OED, we find a Dionysian ‘madess, delirium, wildness, rage, revelry, wantonness (13th cent. in Old French), incoherent thinking, wandering of the mind, foolish idea, idiocy, absurdity’ – similar indeed to that earlier traced etymology of ‘woodness’: reverie as ‘ravery’ rather than the Debussyian introspection with which one would normally be inclined to read the term). That danger of idealization, fictionalization, telling stories in sound that sound sound but that in fact deceive, taking sound as sense to take leave of one’s senses, in the woods, a mad malady, and yes, this is anticipated and satirised, or fun is poked at it, even in the midst of the most jangling-dangling bits of sound-patterning, where one might think meaning had completely run away with the fairies: thus, the anticipatory rhyme and word-prefiguring of “the butchers dress/ the tripe with cress[…]the village lads and lases[…]in states of ripe undress.” Tripe and cress, daintiness and roughness (roughage), animal / meat and vegetable / plant, the shit or piss that comes out and the food that goes in (the “lyric graces” of “lilac cordial” and “vanilla curlew” (addition, entry) turn to “a loss, a slash, a pee, a piss”, a kind of jocular “aperture” between inner and outer, self and nature into which the waste goes, defecating outside: “that’s my own / at the aperture, open flies / at the back of the shed, / the industrial wate”; where flies become both zippers and insects, organic waste paradoxically industrial, this latter reminding us, perhaps, of the human workers who enabled the, say, inhuman machine-ations of the Industrial Revolution to sprout. Read yer E.P Thompson. ‘Work’, in the poetic and the more usual physical sense, as both making (in the sense of the poetic ‘makir’), crafting, and as sweat, labour, physicality: if art is “hard at work / against vulgarity”, it is really also vulgar because of the hardness of its work, its sweat and flesh and bone (even as, at the end, Haslam drifts from what might thus seem a too-simple celebration of the Victorian work ethic into a more dreamily reveried in- or e-vocation of pastoralized haystack romping – tho’ even there, “the village lads and lasses lay about themselves with mops” – there playing into the last few lines’ play on the clean and the dirty, lyric grace and lyric grit or dirt or mirth or girth, the afore-mentioned tripe and cress, “cleaners wip[ing up] the mess.” And in such messy play of word and worth (where value is, say, meaning, in that metaphor of artistic merit in monied terms we can’t avoid, it seems (seams of “the ore raw bouse”)), ‘mess’ transl(iter)ates into the penultimate line’s ‘mass’, wehre mess is am ass of amassed meaning, hard to master, the labour forcing the pun, the point, to his master’s consternation, to the consternation of the reader reading or delving for solving or solvent clues, for --- synthesis, Haslam here substituting the synthetic for the organic, the synaesthetic (as in ‘A Bunch of Tales’’ sensual mingling – “send out an ear to look”) for the single-minded, in multiplicity, simultaneity, super-imposition, in an ecstatic equivalent of sonic jangle that points to a lighter version of (again) Brakhage’s dissolutions of overlaid image: over-laid, be-laboured, a ‘lay’ as sex and as song, laying back and going for it, energy and repose, labour and reverie, making us work in pleasure, reconciled even, as in Marx’s unalienated dream that we might so be, in the full communism of the individual free to pursue whatever course at that moment is fancied – hunter, fisherman, critic, at different times of the day. That this happens, or even can happen, only in poetry or in necessarily speculative philosophical aside does not render it simply a pipe dream, a song that drugs and dulls to stupor, but as that refreshment that H. found, in his introduction, in the woods above his home, that we might find in a notion of complete personal and political liberation (or as near as could be complete in the necessarily shifting provisionality of any apparent completeness within a non-metaphysical, dialectical understanding of the world as continuous movement, dynamism, contradiction, growth (viz. Mao Zedong, y’all)) – that refreshment necessary to go on at all, to re-invigorate the struggle, whether for continuing poetic composition (‘continuale song’) or continuing fights for the removal of oppression, the ‘green world’ not as the containment structure it assumes as temporary ritual breakout within an inherently conservative framework, but as the possibility for a real radicalism to be (whether in imagination or reality) tried, tested, worked thru, poetry’s su/staining alternative. (But there’s so much of this, in this, that I can’t take too much at one time – so much rhyme, excess, express-train-wandering all over the track (tho’ in fact, as one reads on, one realizes that the range of referenced tropes is relatively slim in recurrence across the whole scope of the book). It would be too easy to overdose, to glaze things over, to just collapse – to fall flat on your back and let it all wash over you. Or you’d go mad, get that wild woodness Haslam harps on, fall head over heels into some realm that not so much heals but hauls one unstoppably in all conceivable directions, un-homing, crazed flight. In that sense, I guess, it’s precisely the opposite of the staid stillnesses in yr common garden pastoral idyll (even Larkin (Philip)’s urban scrubland blanknesses (‘Here’)) - the ‘city’ energy of modernism exploding into a Natural riot of song and voice, bird and birth and berth, in real multiplicity that opening outside: where be-laboured reverie becomes just as much a fantastic dance as hard labour, exploding vibrancies of wired contemplation.)

More (maybe) to follow.

Aisha Orazbayeva: The Traces of Sound

Works by Lachenmann // Feldman // Boulez // Nono
King's Place, London, Monday 23rd April 2012 

Aisha Orazbayeva's recital of works for solo violin played to a smallish room, an attentive audience who knew what they were in for, and there was narry a cough or an ill-judged (boogie-stop) shuffle to be heard – apart, that is, from a strategically placed throat-clearing whopper (or so it felt) at the very end, seemingly demanding that applause break the heavy hush that had settled at the end of Luigi Nono's 'La Lontananza Nostalgica Utopica Futura'. Likely, half the audience didn't know the piece had finished, or only half-suspected as such, given that their eyes were shut in contemplative concentration (the heavier breathing that accompanies such poses a curious sonic side-effect which, in its own way, took on the irritant status usually occupied by the cough). My eyes were shut too, for most of the piece – though the theatrical dimension, in which the soloist moves between six music stands, each laden with a large sheet of folded manuscript paper inscribed with hand-written notation, notes and indicators sometimes scribbled and highlighted in apparent incompletion, demanded at least a little over-the-shoulder peak, now and then (heads craning and turning almost in the manner of school-children taking a look at the fascinating events occurring outside the window, when they know they should be facing the front of the class (in this case, the lit stage, with its central music stand and row of eight speakers, all turned to face the wall)). That slightly awkward dynamic is perhaps not what Nono had in mind – his description of the piece as “a madrigal for many travellers” – the generation of a group identity through multi-tracked singularity – suggests a kind of communality that, in practice, is perhaps not usually found in the concert hall; though it is also, of course, about ghost dialogue and schizophrenic uncertainty and all the rest of that uncomfortable stuff (something dealt with more explicitly in Boulez’s ‘Dialogue de l’ombre Double’), and, given this, that awkwardness might to some extent be intentionally built into the piece. Well, OK, but ‘intention’ is not really a word I like to use; I feel myself falling back into the terminology of the controlling composer almost as soon as I write about a more traditionally-composed work, it seems, and I would want to resist that urge. So, intention is less important than the actual experience of the work in performance, and it seems to me that ‘La Lontananza’s theatricality is somewhat limited, perhaps claiming more for itself, in terms of spatial experimentation, than it actually delivers: despite the distributed speakers and music stands, despite the play between live and recorded sound (partially controlled by whoever is at the mixing desk on the night, as active performer in themselves), we are still in a controlled situation, being delivered a composition – as opposed to, say, the more fluid shared dynamic of post-Cageian silences, or the rebarbatively chummy, dialogic intimacy of gnarly pub-improv. Not that listening to fluid jazz improvisation is necessarily different (though the sense of communal participation, shouted encouragement, etc, before it turned into the stale cliché of applause at the end of every solo, or on the occasion of every segue into banal riff-playing or tune-quoting, has perhaps been lost in the enshrinement of jazz as museum piece cultural exhibit, Lincoln Centre et al) – I think the problem, though, is that Nono’s piece gestures towards a kind of potentially participatory theatricality (participatory in the sense that it least causes the audience some discomforted engagement, even if it doesn’t ask them to volunteer or make their own sounds or anything that crude), without really ever doing more than making that slight gesture, a suggestion that doesn’t gestate or develop a into fully-blown realization. Then again, the whole thing seems to me almost a work in progress, despite its length (probably near on an hour, though I didn’t check the timings precisely). I don’t mean this in a derogatory way – it is, in fact, what opens it up beyond the pitfalls I’ve been outlining, what constitutes its fascination through failure, or through the risk of failure. Nono prepared the written part hastily, in time for the work's premiere (it had been commissioned by Gidon Kremer), withdrawing it to work and re-work on it after, and perhaps, as Tim Rutherford-Johnson suggests leaving it still essentially incomplete on his death a year later. Through its rather higgledy-piggledly pre-recorded tape element, it becomes a work that draws attention to the material circumstances of its construction, to the labour involved in its production (here, no doubt, Nono's Marxism coming into play) – no effortless technical ease, no glossy product removed from the roots of its making, but a fragile and sometimes rambling working through of the ghosts of technique, the particular stylings of a musician's playing personality (I can't help hearing the sawed raw lunges that spring up at various points as very Kremer-esque), a move from a nervous if-not-busyness, then un-quiet, restless flitting, to the work's still heart, a mesmerising quietude in which the tape part almost disappears, or so meshes into the live playing as to become absorbed into it, the motion of bow on strong as reminiscent of breath, whisper hush only brushed, feather-dusted or delicately tinged with pitch, timbre taking centre stage in a way that I can't now help but hear through the prism of the improvised music that followed - viz. Angharad Davies, maybe even certain elements of Wandelweiser – the sound of an instrument moving away from its history into a blended otherness of extended technique and extremes of quietude and register. But, unlike that kind of 'reductionism' (the label itself reductive), Nono is very much concerned with paying explicit homage to the instrument's history (of course, I'm not saying that the improvisers aren't aware of this - see, for instance Seymour Wright's comments on his practice as an engagement with the entire history of the saxophone, his dedications to such figures as Jimmy Lyons, Pepper Adams, Steve Lacy, etc - all of whom sound, on the surface, a million miles away from his deconstructed instrument - just that, in 'classical music' as opposed to 'free improvisation', the goal of making audible historical reference as theoretical and practical engagement may be higher on the list of priorities). OK, this is, after all, a piece whose title combines the notion of idealized nostalgic past with that of a utopic future, so history, of whatever kind, has to be in there – even if that history comes through more as a slightly jumble of manipulated studio documentation (the occasional sound of an Italian-accented voice, presumably the composer's own; various incidentals bangs and crashes, probably relating to opening and closing doors, etc; what sounds like the violinist going through various techniques in a way they might in order to demonstrate to the composer the resources the instrumental composer might deploy in their piece) than as, say, the extended bricolage of quotation, re-framing, re-working that we find in certain works of Berio and of Lachenmann. I do wonder about how structurally successful the work, ultimately, is – hearing that middle section, and making the connection, explicitly in my mind, at that point, to A. Davies, I wondered if I would prefer not to have heard a live improvisation in which that material would have been developed for perhaps twice the length of time: there were moments when it felt as if so much stuff had been gathered that it was thrown together somewhat willy-nilly (OK, I realize this is exactly the criticism most non-initiates make of improv); and while this had the effect, of say, jolting one out of reverie or trance through a sudden burst of taped noise or one of those afore-mentioned Kramer-esque bursts, it also seemed to come and go without the structural precision or concentration that one might find in the work of, say, Feldman (where detail, in itself scrupulously notated and worked out, is experienced by the listener as part of overall shape, slow change, slow, as barely-noticed pulse slip (as opposed to the more obvious syncing in and out of Steve Reich's phase patterns), not necessarily 'going somewhere' (the progress narrative of climax, development, recapitulation, etc), but working with and through material in an organically organized tightness). This was, it must be admitted, my first experience of the piece, and I'm no Nono expert; I would say, though, that 'Non Consumiamo Marx', an electronic piece using recordings of chants and slogans from May 68, along with woozy electronics, suffers the same meandering quality, tho' as fever-dream reminiscence I suppose it works well – I'm just not sure it was really intended to have that quality, more to be a report from the barricades, political noise music, the avant-garde at the front of the street battle. Orazbayeva's careful and rather whimsical pacing between the music-stand stations, as if a parody of tip-toe walking, did heighten, though, the element of fragility which what I've called, perhaps unfairly, the piece’s directionlessness does engender: her walking well-suited the work’s own processual movement, its structural disappearances into itself, only to emerge with sudden asserted re-appearances, perhaps over-asserted in a desperate attempt to make a grand flourish, a definitive statement which is, however, never completed, fading back into indefinite temporality, into indefinition, incompletion, perhaps experienced as failure (the fall of Communism, prefigured a few months before its occasion by the work), perhaps as the necessary flux of the world and of its history as non-schematized potentiality.

Enough, now, of this garbled verbiage garbage! Those, anyway, are the thoughts the Nono prompted – and I’d like to look further into it, time permitting – but there was a first half, albeit a brief one, so I’ll just briefly sketch that out before I call it a night. We were promised another work for violin and electronics, this time a premiere, by the composer Martin Matalon, but that had disappeared from the programme on the night, to be replaced by a couple of quickies from Lachenmann and Feldman, along with the advertised ‘Anthèmes I’, a Boulez soupcon). The Lachenmann ‘Toccatina’, in its complete avoidance of the rhetorical flourishes of the violin repertoire that even Nono fairly frequency referenced, felt nicely-focussed and serious in its intent – though, as with other Lachenmann pieces, I felt its workings-through of non-standard techniques to be still a little, I don’t know, schematic and repetitive, still too tied to certain tenets of classical form. This is, in fact, the criticism Radu Malfatti makes of HL in his Paris Translantic Interview, which I re-read a couple of day’s ago, so perhaps I’m being unduly influenced; what I will say is that the upwards and downwards movement of the initial string-striking (with base of bow) may have over-stretched its welcome, but the final minute or so, in which the violinist bows a different part of the instrument’s body in turn, sounded wonderful. (There’s a piece by James Saunders which takes that sound of bowed wood as its only source, and I didn’t find that too inspiring at the time, but I may be tempted to listen to that again after hearing Lachnemann’s more limited use of the same technique.) Orazbayeva, a refreshingly un-showy, focussed stage presence, moved straight onto the Feldman without a break for applause (perhaps some people thought this was part of the same piece, though I doubt anyone who possesses the slightest acquaintance with either composer’s work would make that mistake): ‘For Aaron Copland’, a five-minute piece from 1981, is like a sparser version of that closing viola melody at the close of ‘Rothko Chapel’. In its unaffected sobriety – a kind of reticent mourning – it becomes quite devastating, as I listen to it on my headphones through the medium of youtube at one o’clock in the morning, the rain outside having finally stopped. In concert, I remember being disturbed by the heavy breathing of an audience neighbour, that fuss making the five minutes seem shorter than it was (something of the, ‘O, is that it already?’ vibe stirring up, which I felt a little bad about; knowing that my (dis-)appreciation of the piece was not a result of performance or composition but of a silly momentary irritation). The Boulez ‘Anthèmes’, on the other hand, seems to me a less interesting piece in itself. Looking back on my write-up of the Boulez performances at the 2010 Aldeburgh Festival, I recollect experiencing ‘Anthèmes II,’ the extended version for violin and electronics, as somewhat glib – nice surface, but nothing particularly challenging or of lasting structural interest – and in solo iteration, there’s even less to hang on to, so that the thing felt more like a catalogue of particular techniques than anything else – not as virtuoso showcase, more as little experiments Boulez had been making and decided to turn into a fully-fledged composition. The programme note described it as ‘cold’; perhaps that’s right, though my main problem was that it felt too conventional in its violin vocabulary, in a way that the Lachenmann, with its non-standard techniques, and the Feldman, with its unadorned melodic simplicity, did not, and which the Nono for the most part did not either. Good stuff, altogether, though; and nice to hear this music on programmes and in venues that better suit it than pre- or post-chestnut Proms sandwiches…

eartrip - issue 7

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