Houben / Oliveros / Mitchener / Thomas

(Some thoughts on three recent concerts as spring gradually emerges...)

Claire Chase presents Pauline Oliveros, part of SoundState, Queen Elizabeth Hall Foyer, 3rd April 2022

(Image by the Southbank Centre's music director, Gillian Moore) 

This free concert in the foyer of the Queen Elizabeth Hall paid tribute to the late Pauline Oliveros, exemplifying the social, and sonic pleasures of the late composer’s work. Playing an array of flutes and whistles, Claire Chase was accompanied by Senem Pirler, working with the electronic ‘Expanded Instrument System’, a “computer-controlled sound interface” Oliveros first designed in 1963. For the first piece, ‘Sounds from Childhood’ (1992), Chase instructed the audience to remember a time in childhood “when it was a lot of fun to make sounds”, and then to make those sounds. The collective texture—raspberries, sighs, groans, ululations—was then played back through the EIS as a chorus at once disjointed and with the pleasures of togetherness; memory taken forward into the present and, via the EIS, the futuristic. For the text score ‘13 Changes’ (1988), Chase read out each of the textual prompts before interpreting them for an array of flutes. The titles thus served as entities in themselves, by terms pithy, humorous, and thought-provoking, from ‘Songs of ancient mothers among awesome rocks’ to ‘Rollicking monkeys landing on Mars’. The EIS gave the resultant whirling of breath and air an edge sometimes mechanical, sometimes digital, the pieces rendered something like epic bagatelles, condensed but imaginatively vast and expansive.

The duo concluded with the most substantial work on the programme, ‘Intensity 20.15, Grace Chase’ (2015). Oliveros wrote the piece for Chase’s enormous bass flute—or ‘Bertha’, as she dubs it—but with the kicker that the flute would only be deployed briefly at the end. For the rest of the piece, Chase would have to find other sound-producing means. After extended discussion, Oliveros and Chase hit upon the idea of using texts by Chase’s grandmother, Grace. Diagnosed as schizophrenic in her 20s and subjected to electroshock, Grace had self-medicated through art, writing unclassifiable texts in hundreds of notebooks, their inveterate punning subverting linguistic and patriarchal authority.

“In adulthood I have taken up a load of childlike things”, Chase proclaimed, neatly inverting the Biblical declaration of maturity. She proceeded to unload carrier bags of notebooks, bells, whistles, and percussion instruments, turning the stage into a kind of children’s music workshop run riot. This was music as dispersed play rather than concentrated training, un-learning the hierarchies embedded in the world of ‘classical’ music. A linguistic riff—“And I step on you and you and you”—saw Chase using countless pairs of shoes as percussion instruments, ultimately striking a giant bass drum with a high heel in a neatly subversive feminist gesture. The piece ended with an extended bass flute drone, a meditation that eased us back into the present. Throughout, the legacies of the women Chase described as her spiritual grandmother (Oliveros) and her biological grandmother (Grace) provided a non-essentialist model of feminist energies, accessible to all: airing what was unaired in order to bring in new airs for us to breathe together.

A few minutes in, I overheard a small child in the row behind me whisper: “this is cool, I’d actually like to stay”. The ‘avant-garde’ or ‘experimental’ here is accessible, not despite, but precisely because of its experimentation, the particular openings it offers onto the world—to childhood and adulthood, to suppressed memories and lost histories—and above all, to the sheer pleasure in sound-making as participatory endeavour. Oliveros would have been proud.

Eva-Maria Houben / GBSR Duo, Together on the Way', Southbank Centre, 3rd April 2022

(Image again by Gillian Moore)

Immediately preceding the Oliveros concert in the foyer, the QEH's inner concert hall saw a performance by the composer and the GBSR Duo, of Eva-Maria Houben's Together on the Way for organ, piano, and percussion, premiered at Huddersfield in 2021, a performance recently released on Another Timbre. Whereas that performance took place in a small church, the expanded space of the QEH allowed the work to breathe in a new way, even as so much of Houben's music is about doing away with hierarchies of vast auditoriums, prosceniums, scale as a performance of cultural legitimacy: a case outlined in her book Musical Practice as a Form of Life and elsewhere, which might in part be about returning to a pre-19th century way of thinking--the tradition of the local church organist, say (Houben's first professional job in music was as a 12-year old church organist), a different relation between composer, performer, and listening community than that of the giant concert hall--as well as elements of 19th-century Romanticism that might be reclaimed beyond the idea of the Romantic composer as an isolated, bourgeois "political bonehead".  Breathing in a new way, cast in a different light.

Today, bathed in a resplendently subtle light show, Houben was playing the QEH organ that literally rises from underneath the stage (sadly not a spectacle the audience got to witness): emergence from the depths not so much as cthonic grandiosity (Phantoms of the Opera), nor the portentous religiosity that horror film aesthetic builds off, but a more modest inhabiting of environment, of space: what's not there, hidden in the corners, the barely there, that which will disappear again. (Houben's ever-present concern with the paradox a sound that exists in its disappearance, with the "presque rien" indications on Berlioz's scores.) For though, to say it again, the organ has reputation as grandiose, enormous cathedral spectacular, in fact Houben reveals it as a wheezing, mechanical instruments of stops and clicks and wheezes ("the organ is for me a Hoffmanesque instrument", as she says in an interview about the piece here), and at the same time a delicate, airy instrument of breath, of near-silence, sustaining a kind of cloud of sound that hangs in, through and as air, through pipes and stops and keys, at once intangible, evanescent, and weighted, heavy, with freighted tradition, with its un- and re-making...

On stage, Houben was flanked by the two members of the GBSR Duo, Siwan Rhys's piano gently prepared with horsehair, but more often played in a series of unadorned notes, melody reduced to its simplest means--one note, two notes, a few notes that almost, but don't quite, build up a scale or an octave transposition--or gently struck dissonances, reverberating in the sustain pedal and a finger-dampened string; George Barton's huge array of percussion played as a series of barely-audible taps, synchronised and overlapping piano and percussion entries over a single organ chord, sustained over the course of the entire work, not so much as a "drone" as a near-transparent texture, wheezing, breathing, enormous yet transparent, what Houben calls a "shelter" or a kind of sounding silence in which the players can each occupy their separate spaces, spread out on the stage; rather than Cage, for whom it's de rigueur to compare Wandelweiser music, I kept thinking of Nono, Houben's image of "the way" and his borrowing of Machado in the "no hay caminos..."  motto that suffuses his late work, or the interplay of the piano and its outsides, its surrounding echoes and silences in "...sofferte onde serene", of the creation of sound as an environment, a way of remaking the space it's in.

Nono: "It is the inaudible, the unheard that does not fill the space but discovers the space, uncovers the space as if we too have become part of sound and we were sounding ourselves".

Houben: "all together are rather more listening than playing. 

all together become aware of the different ways their sounds decay."

At one point the breathing of someone in the row above me was louder than the music coming from the stage, but there was almost no "actual" silence: a veil, a representation, a mediation. Somewhere in all of this a meditation on decay, on the anxieties of environment as not simply a "natural" space but a contested terrain of despoliation and the imminent ending of life--Houben's programme notes nodding to the anthropocene--or the histories closer to home, the current conflicts and conjunctures that seep into a place that doesn't, as the cliche goes, close itself off from them in a cocoon, but lets them enter and disappear. This is a historical music, a music maybe at the end of something, with the melancholy that implies, but also with the possibility of remaking and rethinking ("when the chord is unfolded, it sounds for a while, then the process of deconstruction begins"...)--spread out, as the performers were on stage, over large distance, chasms, yet with a kind of intimacy, a human scale, the possibilities of bodies in space, the possibilities of hearing as a mode of relation: a music that models eternity or infinity, as per Cage's ASLSP, its centuries-long sounding organ, yet which is in itself concerned with the material of decay, with a focused materialism. After an hour or so--just under or just over--the work ends, signalled with uncharacteristic drama or force by an inexorable, regular set of drum taps, one after the other, over and over: I didn't count exactly, but perhaps as many as fifteen times, a regular, barely reverberating stroke, flatly thudding, inexorably placed. A host of associations invoked: Beethoven's fate, Wagner's forge, yet the taps here also remove drama, ostentation, military forthrightness: and while those connotations can never render this a gesture "purely" formal or abstract, the context of the work as a whole, the manner of its delivery, lend this conclusion a non-forced materiality, at once transparent clarity and a refusal to be reductively read, rendered symbol.

Afterwards, Houben remarked that the piece, which exists in a different configuration each time it's performed, and is thus in essence never the same piece twice, might be considered as still sounding, still being performed. More to write and think about this...

Pat Thomas/Elaine Mitchener--Cafe Oto, 10th April 2022

(Image by David Laskowski)

This was the first time Mitchener and Thomas had performed as a duo, though they appear with Orphy Robinson and the visiting duo of William Parker and Hamid Drake on the expansive Some Good News album, also recorded live at Cafe Oto a few years ago, on which Mitchener is essentially the guest--and entirely at home--with two established duos, that of Robinson/Thomas and Parker/Drake. No prerequisites or expectations as to 'genre' here, this Sunday afternoon in early April; either musician could go anyway, together or separately. It's playing as listening, improvising, holding a line or--more often--knowing when to let it drop and hold back; Mitchener stepping to the side of the stage to listen to Thomas, solo, or vice versa. Both supplemented the complex 'basics' of piano and voice: Thomas with two i-pads functioning as kaoss-pads--an updated version of his earlier rougher, analogue electronics and tapes of the 90s, where he'd deploy tapes recorded off the TV, lo-fi musique concrete cut-ups and blarts of noise, but nonetheless treated with the same expert capacity for a kind of brusque disruption, a refusal to use electronics to coast or provide ambient texture; Mitchener with objects on a table, selectively deployed--a couple of whistles, a thumb piano, some rattles and shakers, used for specific and precise textures at particular points. No prerequisites, no expectations--and the opening five or ten minutes in particular all about finding ways into listening: Thomas scraping or stroking the piano's inside strings, Mitchener's quiet articulations, sometimes the amplifier buzz louder than the sounds they made; audience quiet and focused, this warm spring afternoon, so much lighter and more lifted than the lockdown of two years ago, a social space open to be whatever it might be, the openness of matinees like this, where the music can just be open and relaxed in its exploration, in its unforced listening.

 
Both Mitcher and Thomas have a penchant for intensity and volume: Thomas' electronic walls or, on piano, trademark thick chords, often clusters played with palms, the piano at once treated in its harmonic richness and rhythmically, as drum; Mitchener's virtuosity, her to turn any note into a series of gasps or rhythmic stutters, gargles, fluid yodels, effects for which the term "extended techniques" will have to substitute for a more precise technical designation--ululations reminiscent of transmuted marketplace or muezzin cry or folk music buzz, echoes of jazz--though almost never 'scat'--occasional avant-classical high pitches, pure and biting like laser beams, sirens, piercing through. But this was not a showcase of techniques, a kind of masterclass or workshop in displaying virtuosity; those impulses initially, and often throughout, kept muted, finding their way in, not forcing the music. 

What was performed, with the interruption of a brief set break, was essentially one long piece divided into natural, unplanned episodes and pauses--though occasionally the audience broke in with applause to 'end' a section. Absent of a score, Mitchener used a series of texts--a Cecil Taylor poem on the elements and on creation("thrice water in air..."), Mingus and Jeanne Lee quotations on creativity, and, the most extended, poems by N.H. Pritchard, mainly from his second book, EECCHHOOEESS--which she moved through, improvising on or off, a word revealing itself gradually, cohesively broken down; the text not so much as a script but as a repository to give the voice shape, as texture and also as a space, a placeholder, a holding place for thought, for suggestion, for image. Pritchard in particular, who she's worked with before, formed the basis for the most extended (re)articulations of the set--the ecstatic yelling of the word "FR/OG" that closed the first set with aplomb, the poem of that name taken up again in the second half, Pritchard's splitting of words, so that "echoing" is reversed, mimesis of the aural effect rendered visually and then resounded--"ing echo", Thomas picking up on that echoic play with a rare melodic echo of Mitchener's pitched tones. An echo is one mode of relation, between the sounding and the sound, the semantic and the 'purely' sonic, the intentional and the unintended, the spoken and the spoken-for. Another--language's connecting words, the way they tie and fry, they fray: the spoken-sung recitation of Pritchard's mediation on and with the simile, "as a / as a / as a / hoo hooz", the call of an owl or the questioning of possession or colour gradation, "whose", "hue", words slipping and sliding, nature imitation, night birds or crickets, Thoreau's loon, nocturnes, clouds forming, faces in the sky, ("VISAGE / BLACK CLOUDBANK / FORMING/ ELSE WHERE") a kind of mystic-material inquiry rooted in (perhaps) American Transcendentalism, the reading of nature's hieroglyph as Emerson put it--letters, sounds, transparent eyeballs, bells--or theosophy, Toomer's Gurdjieff, his sound poems ("vor cosma saga [...] vor shalmer raga"), or a (post)structuralist enquiry into language--metaphysics or metaphor, any number of enquiries..."As a" as a repeated loop between speech and song, Thomas sometimes picking up with piano figurations that offered rhythmic support of staggered dance, more often with electronics on the i-pad that fed in insectoid cracklings or multi-layered clouds sustained then dying away.

(Pages from N.H. Pritchard's EECCHHOOEESS performed by Mitchener/Thomas)

I had a thought, but it was more a feeling, transmitted in the performance's vibrations, its sensations of tone, that this was all above all about material, about the piano as material, as object, as percussion, as an instrument with an inside and an outside, about how Thomas' performance "outside" on keyboard and "inside" on strings activated both, refusing distinctions between them; and how Mitchener too articulated inside and outside, clicks from the back of the throat while singing, the way the entire palette and throat is drawn into and made visible as articulation. It's about time, too, and poise, how listening gets articulated visually as well as sonically, in the way Thomas would hover over a chord, fingers in position, decide not to repeat it, move instead to the inside of the piano or the i-pad; the way both he and Mitchener insistently and unforcedly avoided the cliches of 'responsive' improv (echoing, playing 'together' in too obvious ways, as if that were the only way to play were to overcompensate by demonstrating you were 'listening' by imitation--which is not really listening at all, just a kind of language-learning game, a preliminary to the real listening that never really happens). Often Mitchener channeled an entire band in rhythm and lead parts herself, accompanying doubled vocal lines with a shaker, with a rhythmic articulation that supplemented and separated and merged from a melodic line (like an avant-garde Bobby McFerrin, occasionally); Thomas instead responding with a series of tranquil dissonant chords, or silence, or an electronic crackle, or in one delightful moment, a sudden burst of club music that faded in and out like the ghost of a different sociality, invoked with (im)perfect humour and (im)perfect ting, art brut, joyously knowing. Only at the end did he join or lead in a jazz-tinged series of chords that channelled a host of optimistically rueful medium-tempo solos exemplified by the solo Monk playing over the sound system when I entered the venue, and that maybe aurally echoed in his playing, that lent itself to song-like song-line close on Jeanne Lee's words on the experience of life as process, on life as living: not stasis, not object; and on those words, those chords, that song, synchronous, asynchronous, warmly to end.

March News

I have a new prose pamphlet out from Phil Baber's The Last Books, in the Yellow Papers series: Five Essays taken from a longer MS called Present Continuous, the full version of which will be published by Pamenar Press later in the year). Phil makes beautiful books, and his care with typesetting and design, as well as his attentiveness to the text itself, doesn't go unnoticed. You can buy the book here, and I'll be launching it in London on April 1st.

In the virtual world, a long interview with Dave Burrell is now up up at Point of Departure, taking in Mr. Burrell's astonishing, decades-long career. Along the way: the Berklee College of Music, working with Giuseppi Logan and with Sonny and Linda Sharrock, the Pan-African Festival in Algiers, the 360 Degree Music Experience, the little-known duo record Questions and Answers with Stanley Cowell (pictured above), his remarkable--and still unproduced--opera Windward Passages and his recent historical pieces on the American Civil War. Many thanks to Dave, Monika Larsson, and Bill Shoemaker (and wishing Bill a swift recovery from surgery).

Also virtually present: a piece on Michael Finnissy's recent Hammerklavier, as performed by Zubin Kanga at the Royal Academy of Music at the tail end of January, is up at Artforum. (Thanks to Zack Haber and Chloe Wyma.) The performance followed up on the concert premiere a few months ago of Finnissy's wonderful--and quite different--piece for solo harp, 'Our Proximity to Gothic', also at the RAM; Finnissy's output, as anyone with the scantest acquaintance with his work will know, is prodigious, each piece a world of detail, of historical reference points and of an exquisite handling of form, timbre, texture, structure, and these new works further evidence--if any were needed--of his importance in the contemporary music landscape (even as their temporal range makes terms like "contemporary music" seem inadequate).

Finally, a longer piece on the Julius Eastman revival of the past few years (following up on previous writing on Eastman on this blog) is up at 032c. (Thanks to Shane Anderson.) It was a particular pleasure while writing this to explore the recent interpretations and recordings that have begun to emerge some of Eastman's more obscure late work. Julian Terrell Otis' beautiful rendition of Eastman's 'Our Father' encapsulates what's so striking about the music Eastman went on to write (or, in many cases, to perform without score) after the more famous pieces for which he's now known: a condensation, a reduction, a focus stark and haunting. I made a YouTube playlist of some of the available performances as part of the research--you can find that embedded below.

Fanfares from the Abyss: Bill Dixon's Late Style

(Bill Dixon/ Aaron Siegel / Ben Hall --Weight/Counterweight (Brokenresearch, 2009))

Last night I dreamed that I had to organize a concert for the late Bill Dixon: but, on the day of the supposed performance, without access to a venue, publicity, or any other means of communication, time was running out. Dixon had sent a message that I was supposed to let Wynton Marsalis and Lincoln Centre know about the gig, via the cryptic means of a packet of kielbasa (I think); I was worried that I'd have to host the whole performance in my living room, and my failure to publicize the concert was in being denounced as elitist in various music magazines even as my laptop refused to function in order to spread the word. Meanwhile, Fascists were attacking buses which had been covered with flowerpots for completely ineffective protection, the wrecked vehicles lurching round the corner, their windows covered in tarpaulin, as enormous grey factories were being built by the side of the road, the fate of these vehicles apparently subject to the unstable whims of Conservative government housing policy. I'd found my way to a building that might have served as a venue, but as a university turned out to be a hospital--with the map outside showing a church--and staircases led to dead ends, elevators to sheer drops, and corridors back to the rooms in which they'd started, the typical low-level anxiety of the dream-maze seemed unlikely to reach any kind of resolution.

The night before, I'd fallen asleep watching a projection of the video below: a Dixon quartet performance, with Alan Silva, Mario Pavone, and Laurence Cook, from 1981. That experience--Dixon's choked flurries, whispers and screams and the deep, double double-bass line-up making their way through the mists of sleep--was made all the stranger by the presence of the announcer who, superimposed in his swivel chair at the bottom of the screen, speaks over several minutes of the performance, or again, live-translating over Dixon's interview (I don't speak Italian). Layers on top of layers, wheels within wheels, weights and counterweights failing to balance; it's all there, as much as it'd be a mistake to mistake whatever the manifest for the latent content within what any dreams does in rearranging the building blocks of the conscious mind. Whatever the case of this particular dream, in the first weeks of the year, I've had late Dixon on as a kind of tolling and turning: that sombre declivity or trough that is the arbitrary turning of one year into the next. Time, then, to get some of it down it writing, to purge my subconscious and to move into the year.

Bill Dixon's is a music which has to be heard, focused and concentrated on, or any sense of its momentum, development, and propulsive stasis is lost. His recorded history as a leader can be divided into several broad areas: the orchestral music of Intents and Purposes, his major recorded statement; the solo and small-to-medium size group work of the 1970s and 1980s documented on the solo box-set Odyssey and on his recordings for the Italian Black Saint/Soul Note label with the likes of Alan Silva, Tony Oxley, Laurence Cook; and a return to orchestral music in the 21st century, most notably 17 Musicians in a Search of a Sound-Darfur (2007), the mesmerising Tapestries for Small Orchestra (2008), with its five-trumpet line-up (about which I wrote a somewhat underdeveloped note of enthusiasm on its release), and his final album, recorded live by the Tapestries ensemble weeks before his death, and aptly-titled Envoi (2010). Dixon's 'late style'--as we might expect from late style in general--digs deeper than ever, marked, not only by the luminosity of music made at the end and the edge (reconciliation, harmonious resolution, etc), but, as Edward Said famously puts it, by "intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction". 

Indeed, if one were searching for an example of a late style that could be said to have refused incorporation and recuperation, Dixon's would be as good as any. On the music of his final decade, Dixon's music, which had always been profoundly introspective, became a subtle criss-crossing of textures and shades for which the analogies with painting--reflecting his own visual arts practices--are particularly apt: a chiaroscuro type of sound, taking place in a barely-lit interior or an indeterminate nocturnal outside, or the massed forces of blocks of sound made up of intricate and intimate detail that only reveals itself on a second or third listening. The music is invariably slow, even glacial, though there are bursts of energy that develop slowly, like magma or miasma (to mix natural metaphors). Let's mix some more. It's vaporous, rocky, aquatic. It's earthy and it's evanescent. It's almost always spacious, giving the quality of silence even when there's no actual silence. As Taylor Ho Bynum recounts in the 30-minute documentary included with Tapestries for Small Orchestra, Dixon once announced to the participants in a rehearsal: "Listen to the space in the room. If you can't do something more beautiful than that, shut the fuck up.” That belligerent, almost aggressive pursuit of beauty is what characterises all his music, which refuses a programme and insists on abstraction. But, as Dixon tells the players on Tapestries, while "people think of abstract art as mumbo-jumbo", in fact, "anything abstract, anything that is abstracted from something is the essence of that something. It is taking those things that shape and define it, stripping away the filigree. So that's what you're doing--you're going to the centre". And so too in Dixon's music abstraction is only the core or essence of something once everything else has been stripped away: not absence, emptiness, or vapidity, but a centre, a point of focus, a burning flame.

You can stand in one spot and blow a mountain down. You can dance around everything and not move a butterfly. It's the concentration of the energy: singular, and when it's compressed within the confines of the group. And that's when the excitement happens that enables you to create that aura, so when you want to play something delicate, it seems even more fragile. 

(Dixon, in 'Going to the Center') 

The power of Dixon's late works lies as much in his compositions and their realisation by improvising players as in his own playing. Never one to foreground himself as a virtuosic 'soloist'--though he worked perhaps more extensively than any other trumpeter in developing a solo music, as Odyssey attests--Dixon's approach was collaborative, a contribution to the collective texture of the music, and, in his final recordings, it became starker and more stripped down than at any point. Dixon had been working with electronic modifications to his trumpet--principally, reverb and delay effects--for decades, as can be heard on tracks from Odyssey dating back to as early as 1972, but it was around the turn of the millenium that he began to incorporate these as a key part of his (late) style, on recordings like Berlin Abbozzi (2000) and the trio recording Cecil Taylor / Bill Dixon / Tony Oxley (2002)  These effects were not always well understood by free jazz critics or audiences who, as Charles Wilson suggests in a review of the latter disc, might be "as conservative in their tastes and expectations as the audience for, say, the current Rolling Stones tour. Those who complain that Cecil Taylor isn't playing "fast and loud" on this disc are no different than those at a Stones concert who would complain that they didn't play 'Satisfaction'. [They] prefer to approach Free Jazz and Free Improvisation as genres with sharply defined boundaries”. (Eric Lewis' (French-language) discussion of Dixon's contentious press conference at the Victoriaville festival in advance of the performance further unpacks the (often racialized) critical assumptions behind such judgements.) For his part, Dixon stated that year that the electronics helped to bring out hidden resonances and added dimensions of the higher harmonics he favoured, "mak[ing] what is almost audible to the ear, audible". They also worked with a style that had changed as his body aged--he increasingly concentrated, for instance, on his distinctive, pedal register low notes, rather than the higher ones found alongside them in his earlier playing. In the liner notes to Tapestries, Stephen Haynes notes:

It is worth noting that all of this new work is framed within/arises from the context/effect of age/longevity on physicality coupled with stored experience, sustained study and daily experimentation. Just as one hears a timbral shift in the late work of singers (the past ten years of Abby Lincoln’s work) or wind players (compare/contrast Ben Webster as ‘rabbit’ with twenties Ellington to his ballad work with Art Tatum at the Patio Lounge in 1956: air as tone/note) that simultaneously evidences un-invited/welcome limitation while opening a doorway to new musical pathways, Dixon’s currently decreased employment of upper register multiphonics reflects organic change and the artist’s use of what is available to create new work.

On Berlin Abbozzi, we hear Dixon alternate between electronically-treated work--the basis for much of the lengthy centrepiece, 'Open quiet/the orange bell'--and untreated work for muted trumpet. It’s hard to know which sounds more fragile (a favourite Dixon word): on the final track, ‘Acrolithes’, both the electronically-reinforced delay work, with its emphasis on extended silence and on texture (popping, blasting, gusting, whispering) over melody or even ‘note’ as such, and the more traditionally lyrical muted timbre of the acoustic trumpet, heard ruminating aloud about a third of the way through, seem to bring out different aspects of Dixon’s playing within each other, not so much as mutually reinforcing balance (weight/counterweight) as constantly morphing dialectic. And so, even as Dixon's playing, in his final recordings, moved further and further away from the (acoustic) note/melody approach to that of (electronic) tone/sound/noise, you can hear the ghosts of the former in the latter. 

The work is silent when it is left behind, and turns its emptiness outward.

Showers of breaths, whispers, grunts, sudden blarts and blasts of noise, at once vocalic and machine-like, an aeolian series of gusts, eddies, and other airborne movements and a focused study in extension, decay and the perception of time. As Dixon remarked in a 2002 interview: "There is a feeling tone that has propulsion and the ambience of an enclosure that permits being inside the enclosure or riding the crest of it. It is hard to explain. One has to listen and try to get inside of the sound." The use of the term abbozzi provides one way in, referring as it does to the underpainting whose monochromatic base provides definition for the colour values in layers painted over it. Dixon again:

I like to do multiple layers. If it is done right, I can play three lines simultaneously. There is no trick to it. If I place the delay properly and long enough, I can play something against that, and something against that. That is my interest at this particular point. Reverberation takes the dryness out of the tone. I use three mikes: one for delay, one for reverberation, and a clear mike.

With Dixon's use of reverb and delay, every sound has its double, nothing dies away straight away: the sounds seem to fight off the effects of time and the weight of mortality and, if only temporarily, to win out a kind of floating, suspended space--part purgatory, part paradise--in which a process of reckoning and acceptance can be staged. In his concentration on extended techniques, his compression of the most minute gestures of lip and breath and valve, Dixon--as is commonplace to remark--made the trumpet sound nothing like a trumpet. But of course, this was really more trumpet like than ever, part of the dialectic of instrument and instrumentalist that has characterised Black music in America from the start. Over the ears, Dixon's approach reinvented the idea of the trumpet--the playing of younger musicians like Axel Dörner, Birgit Ulher, and Nate Woolley, or of his Tapestries collaborators Rob Mazurek, Taylor Ho Bynum, Graham Haynes, and his student Stephen Haynes, is perhaps unimaginable without him. 

Weight/Counterweight, recorded in 2008 with two young percussionists--composer Aaron Siegel and Ben Hall, a student of Milford Graves and Jumma Santos--was released in a limited vinyl edition with no liner notes and only the barest of information, and thus received less attention than others in his final batch of recordings. But, of all these, it provides the most extended opportunity to hear Dixon as player from his late work. Working in a freely improvised context--though Dixon eschewed the division between composition and improvisation, insisting that he wanted even completely improvised recordings to sound as if they might have been composed (and vice versa)--Siegel and Hall are heard as much on tuned percussion (gongs, dowels, bowed cymbals, vibraphone, glockenspiel) as on drums, giving the music a floating, meditative quality punctuated by bursts of slowed-down drama, like a quiet, suppressed explosion. Meanwhile, Dixon as the only 'lead' instrument--though any distinction between 'lead' and 'support', 'leader' or 'rhythm section', 'soloist' or 'ensemble', figure or ground, is soon eradicated--can be heard without the dense textural weave of bassoons, saxophones, contrabass clarinets, cellos, and trumpets into which he inserts himself on the orchestral recordings: unadorned, vitally present.

In producing the album without liner notes--in contrast, for instance, to the extended essays by Stephen Haynes and Bynum on Tapestries, and its release alongside Robert O'Haire's 30-minute documentary filmed at the recording sessions--Dixon more than ever seeks to focus attention on the sound alone. Given this, the words above feel so much preamble to an event that they can never hope to capture. It's hard to give the music a chronological summary, given its meditative refusal of narrative, programme, or anything but the quiet intensity of its moment of unfolding. Perhaps it's architectural--the title to the first piece, named for Le Corbusier's studio, suggests so; or perhaps it's painterly--as per the title to the third, 'Contrapposto'. Or perhaps, as Dixon has himself admitted, the titles are a kind of poetic extension that comes after the fact rather than the determining shape of the piece.

There is no special way to view or see or hear. Make up stories if it makes you more comfortable. Find the music programmatic, but know it wasn't done that way. The music and the dance are what they are. There are no stories, no symbols. One day we won't even have titles--or our titles will be poems in their own right. 

(Dixon, quoted in the liner notes to Intents and Purposes)

For me, the album concentrates the most into the twelve minutes of the second track, 'Hirado'. The piece leads off from a typical Dixon melody--three notes, spaced out and cracking round the edges--extended and delivered with such gravity and ferocious single-mindedness of tone that the minimal becomes maximal, a world contained in the progression from tone to tone, semitone to semitone. Feldman's work with the simplest of melodies in pieces like 'For Philip Guston' comes to mind--though their approaches are very different--here amplified by Siegel and Hall's use of resonant, chiming vibraphone like something directly out of late Feldman (and specifically, the Guston piece). Unlike Feldman, however, the concern isn't so much with interlocking series of melodic lines--an interlocking carpet-weave of patterns--but with a more constantly morphing texture. Gently, the three players seem to chase each other, become their own ghosts, echoing and spiralling out and giving the effect of additional players; or the trio concentrate down to seem like one spectral voice; and at any point, they seem conscious that they might as well shut up if they have nothing more beautiful to say than the silence around them. On a series of deep notes that push deeper and deeper, foghorn through the fog, dungchen from the mountaintop, the music transitions into flurries of activity, rolling glockenspiel and rolling drums that have picked up a clattery thing or two from Dixon's long-term collaborator, Tony Oxley. A succession of deep notes and breaths take things suddenly out: the sudden recession of the wind, the stilling of eddies on the waters, a cloud moving out of sight.

 

'Contrapposto' is whispers from the edge of consciousness, rumours from the sky; fanfares from the abyss, ram's horn blasts from beneath the earth. The title, referring, as so often in Dixon's work, to the tradition of Italian visual art he loved so deeply, implies dynamism and relaxation, mathematical proportion: yet this isn't about a flattened field of idealized beauty. Recall that contrapposto, counterpoise, provides a means of artistic balance through temporary dis-balance--the figure with weight on one foot, the other slightly bent. (Or, weight / counterweight, as per the record's overall title.) In this pose, the figure temporarily rests from movement, or prepares to take another step, caught between coming and going, frozen into the stasis of the artwork: movement in stasis, stasis in movement. Music, time-based and immaterial rather than plastic and fixed, refuses this balance--or, couldn't achieve it even if it wanted. And, if we've learned anything from the revolutions in sound ushered in by the New Thing musicians of the 1960s--Dixon not least amongst them--it's that the Greco-European Renaissance conception of harmony is, at worst inadequate, and at times complicit with, the racialized orders that form what, in his often-overlooked The Mask of Art, Clyde Taylor called "the aesthetic contract": what Sean Bonney calls "a hierarchy built on scalar realities that justifies social conditions on earth, where everybody is in their place, and nobody is able to question the beauty and perfection of these relationships."

What kind of a conception of beauty, or balance, inheres in Dixon's late work? Writing of the insistence on talking about Beethoven's late work in terms of death and ageing, "mak[ing] reference to biography and fate", Adorno wrote: "It is as if, confronted by the dignity of human death, the theory of art were to divest itself of its rights and abdicate in favor of reality". According to this account, 'reality breaks through' into art and gives it especial clarity that's supposed to be clear-eyed but ends up becoming, if anything, more mythologized than the artistic screen through which, like the rending of the temple vein after the crucifixion, it's supposed to break. By contrast, as Said summarises Adorno: "Lateness is a kind of self-imposed exile from what is generally acceptable, coming after it, and surviving beyond it". "Episodic, fragmentary, riven with absences and silences", "lateness is the idea of surviving beyond what is acceptable and normal. In addition, lateness includes the idea that one cannot really go beyond lateness at all, cannot transcend or lift oneself out of lateness, but can only deepen the lateness. There is no transcendence or unity".  While "death is imposed only on created beings, not on works of art", the artist--aware of their impending death--places their artwork in ironic or allegorical relation to their death. As Adorno puts it, late works "do not surrender themselves to mere delectation". Dixon's use of electronics, and his years of study in developing a personal vocabulary of extended techniques, amplifies and abstracts the sounds of human breathing and vocalised noise--cries, whispers, sighs, reverberant moans--via the mechanical prosthesis of the trumpet and the ever-present extension and falling away of the delay effect, not as a facile analogy with death and cessation, but nonetheless, as Said puts it, as part of "the predicament of ending without illusory hope or manufactured resignation". 

'The Red and the Black'--does it title refer to Stendhal's novel, with its motif of the titular card game, rouge et noir, and its combination of game-playing, chance, and the individual's negotiation of forms of order?--opens like a funeral march, rolling toms and a vibraphone melody--abstracted--with Dixon blowing spaced-out, single notes. To my ears at least, so much of Dixon's work--and again, it should be stressed, is purely the personal whimsy of one listener--seems to build on Miles Davis' solo on 'Saeta' from Sketches of Spain as the basis for an entire aesthetic--taking that depth, that maximalism of the minimal, that's only hinted at in Davis' performance, and building it into an entire world. And so, here, Dixon alone (with just the fainted bowed cymbal like the sound of the room around him), around six minutes in, like Davis as the solo voice of mourning on 'Saeta'; but whereas Davis, playing a part in Gil Evans' Spanish-oriented drama, declaims to the backdrop of a public procession, a noisy street band, Dixon whispers to himself, to whoever will still themselves enough to hear: what remains after the parade passed by, the stillness at the core of its activity, the abstraction to the centre. Over pitched percussion trills Dixon speaks out two final notes: melody reduced to its essence, "taking those things that shape and define it, stripping away the filigree"; a series of notes rising and falling, the placement of sounds in time and their cessation, moving, pausing, and then gone.

 

To Start the Year

I've never been one for New Year's resolutions, but here are some plans for 2022, noted down here for myself as much as anything. Needless to say: pandemic permitting.  In his book on Faulkner, Eduoard Glissant calls lists "inventories of the magnified universal", though they can seem to compress in even as they balloon out into unreachability (or unreadability). But with the past couple of years we've had, and their suspension or erasure of various kinds of future, their conditions of congealed impossible mourning, of warped realism, prediction or prophecy, lists like these are perhaps different ways of clinging onto a future. Either way, consider the list below as some sort of placeholder, as we all continue to literally and metaphorically hold our breath. 

• To finish drafts of two in-progress manuscripts: one, called Never By Itself Alone, on queer poetry in Boston and San Francisco / the Bay Area (under contract from OUP), the other, which I'm calling Survival Music, on free jazz. This work was supposed to involve research trips to the US since 2019--I'm more than glad that I was able to make it over for a week in fall that year to attend the Cecil Taylor conference, and to hang out with Ammiel Alcalay, Billy Joe Harris, etc--and the longer trip will hopefully manifest providing things remain relatively 'stable' travel-wise and in terms of the general pandemic situation. I'm particularly excited about the possibility of looking at archival material relating to Steve Abbott and Karen Brodine, and--perhaps--of consulting the series of recorded interviews Frank Kofsky gave with many of the first/second wave New Thing musicians in the mid-late sixties, and which have never been published.

(Above: One of Robert Wade's photographs of Archie Shepp's group (Sunny Murray, Grachan Moncur III, Clifford Thornton, Alan Silva, Dave Burrell) performing at the 1969 PanAfrican Festival in Algiers, subject of this week's research...)

• Time permitting, to work on another manuscript, (I'm calling it Working Notes because that's what it is), collecting various miscellaneous writings on contemporary poetry from the past ten years or so and telling some disjointed story about some of the currents therein. Which also means a story about friendship and 'community' and the adequacy of terms like community, how politics gets lived through lives and words, what poetry has done and continue to do in the specific and the general. This isn't a story the book can possibly hope to tell properly or with adequate measure, but it will at least--provided I actually force myself to work on it--be an opportunity to force myself to sit down and properly articulate my thoughts on writers whose work I've wanted to for a while now. Currently top of the list are Tim Thornton, Lisa Jeschke, J.H. Prynne (especially Parkland and the array of thought around Kazoo Dreamboats), and Linda Kemp (the excellently rigorous Lease Prise Redux, which I think about almost every time I pass the gigantic thanatotic skyscrapers currently rising high above Lewisham DLR station).

• To put finishing touches on a book of pandemic prose called Present Continuous, written over the last two years in and around the shadows of those skyscrapers and coming out from Pamenar Press; to work on a couple more 'creative' manuscripts swirling around in more or less tangible and intangible drafts and states.

• With Materials / Materialien, to bring out new books from James Goodwin (whose reading for the 87 Press at the only in-person reading I went to last year was more than excellent), Nat Raha, and Janani Ambikapathy, plus English-language translations of an anti-fascist novel by Gunther Anders (a major author whose importance is belied by the unavailability of his most of his work in English) and of work by Ronald M. Schernikau (who should be a radical gay icon but whose work is similarly scarce), and a potentially enormous anthology of out-of-print work to mark ten years since Lisa Jeschke and I started the press from a photocopier and a series of laid and mislaid plans...

• To see the printing of the Selected Poems of Calvin C. Hernton, the manuscript of which Lauri Scheyer and I submitted to the press a few months ago; to continue working with Tonya Foster and Jean-Philippe Marcoux on Umbra-related adventures (our Zoom discussions over the past couple of years have been enlivening in the best way, even as Covid has ensure the three of us haven't yet met in person...); no doubt to get sidetracked along the way, to swim (reasonably) regularly, to accidentally cause the death of several house plants, to see if I can make it to the performance of Morton Feldman's six-hour string quartet, to listen to the entirety of the Bill Dixon Black Saint/Soul Note box set, to hope that the latest round of diminishing returns on the academic job market might resolve into something with a little more long-term security (i.e. to be able to pay the rent)...

Blog Posts in 2021

Rob Halpern's Hieroglyphs of the Inverted World (December 2021)
December (Update Post) (December 2021)

Ligeti in November (November 2021)

"May as well be a rainbow": Moran and McBride at the Wigmore Hall (October 2021)
Dominic Lash Ensembles at Cafe Oto (October 2021)

Autumn (Update Post, includes obituary for Maryanne Raphael) (September 2021)

Summer (Update post, includes obituary for Callie Gardner) (July 2021)
"The Last Octave": Variations on Frederic Rzewski (July 2021)

Histoire(s) du Cinéma: Viewing Notes (June 2021)
Two Silences (On Theo Angelopoulos & Marleen Gorris) (June 2021)
Recent Writing (June) (Update Post) (June 2021)
Lord Shango (1975) (June 2021)

February Papers (Recent Writing) (Updated Post) (February 2021)

John Russell (1954-2021) (January 2021)
"Real life is a reign of terror": Le Pont du Nord (1980) (January 2021)
Bobby Few (1935-2021) (January 2021)

Rob Halpern's Hieroglyphs of the Inverted World (Kenning Editions, 2021)

Between around 2012 and 2017, Rob Halpern was in the UK every summer, and during this time he gave an extraordinary series of readings, in Brighton, Cambridge, London, whose echoes still sometimes crash off the walls with a kind of plangent whisper.  Lisa Jeschke memorably characterised one of these readings as lasting so long that it felt as if if it still hadn't ended. “In some ways it still hasn’t”, she observed, and this wasn’t really a joke. The reading in question took place at the Sussex Poetry Festival in summer 2013, held in the upstairs room of a pub next to Brighton station, where the shutters could be closed so that none of the sunlight from outside entered into the room, a kind of all-day poetry cocoon. Lisa Robertston read—I think—the whole of Cinema of the Present and Rob read a substantial portion of Music for Porn (or perhaps it was Common Place): two very different poetries, two entire worlds, poetics that engage with a kind of world-building, an attempt to map a totality—in the case of Cinema of the Present, in a luxuriant, sentence-based structure, in that of Music for Porn, a mixture of poetry and prose that curls in on itself with an agonised and painful rigour that at once collapses and extends the distances and costs of the so-called War on Terror. Though they were the ‘headliners’, both poets read well beyond the expected length, around an hour each; it was excessive, too long, too much—and it was thus precisely right for each of the projects and the way they move into and out of the world, pushing at the limits of what we can hear. Like Lisa J said, the reading still hasn’t ended.

During this time, Rob was working through the project encompassing Common Place, Music for Porn, and their refraction in the UK collection Placeholder: a difficult project which is a work of mourning—for the victims of US neo-imperialism after 9/11, for the loss of a lover that the work can barely begin itself to articulate—a ritualistic, repetitive, masturbatory one conducted through an eroticized register that, in the wake of Genet, Whitman, and New Narrative writing, drags us through the contemporary necropolis with a tenderness that’s at once deliberately repulsive and full of loving care. In their ability to convey a kind of ambient, immersive detail in the minutiae of horrific documents of the abuses of power, combined with a devastating queer erotics of mourning and loss, along with Rob's patient, slow, careful, sometimes agonising delivery, those readings were a vitalizing force—at once rigorously Marxist, queer, and committed, through a verse line sometimes knottily prosaic in its unfolding and a prose line verse-like in its lyrical concatenations, its devotional circulations. (The impact of that work on a transatlantic poetic community—or, perhaps more accurately, several intersecting communities--can be illustrated by the special Crisis Inquiry volume of Damn the Caesars that Richard Owens edited around this time, jointly dedicated to the work of Halpern and Keston Sutherland). Since Placeholder, Rob’s work has moved on, even as the formal features and many of the thematic concerns remain: in 2017, a veer pamphlet called Touching Voids in Sense came out with little fanfare, but was, for me, one of Halpern’s finest achievements, its amped-up play with sound, a rhyming insistence sometimes deliberately verging on doggerel, suffusing a painful reckoning with that personal loss the previous work had skirted around, via meditations on a photography by Mike Kelley reproduced on the cover; and then last year (though written earlier), came Fertility, published by Sara Crangle and Sam Ladkin’s Sancho Panzo press, a set of love poems with the characteristic reflexive torque of Halpern’s verse, but with a lighter tone—one might almost call them charming, something that could hardly be said of the preceding Music for Porn-Common Place Inferno.

Now comes Halpern’s latest. The 28 poems that make up Hieroglphys of the Inverted World, none longer than two pages, were written, as Halpern notes in the book’s long afterword, in the atmosphere of the far right rallies at Charlottesville in 2017, through the period extending into the moment of corona crisis in 2020. As such, they function as something of a failed daybook, a stop-start diary full of gaps, ellipses pauses or smoothed-over transitions, like the rub of imperfectly-sanded wood, the visible superglue on broken plastic or metal, the Polyfilla on the crack in the wall. The book’s title, and its explanation in the afterword, ‘For a Hieroglyphic Poetics’, refigure such fractured “calendrics” through a kind of after-the-fact schematisation by which discrete lyrics are joined into the coherent incoherence of a book. Both the hieroglyphs and the inverted world are Marx’s terms for the operations of capital, the structural prism in and through which the world is viewed upside down, the most ‘unnatural’ and distorted of social relations enshrined as the norm. 

Value, therefore, does not stalk about with a label describing what it is. It is value, rather, that converts every product into a social hieroglyphic. Later on, we try to decipher the hieroglyphic, to get behind the secret of our own social products; for to stamp an object of utility as a value, is just as much a social product as language.

(In today’s climate this process gets once more concealed under that murderously snappy slogan “the new normal”; but it is better understood as what Adorno, half-a-century before, called “the heritage of the ancient spell—the new form of the myth of the ever-same”.)

A poem is, Halpern suggests, both a good and a bad place to figure “the narrow path of the totality”. Within the frame of the poem, and if one is not Zukofsky attempting to set Marx to Cavalcanti, poems have tendency to evade their concepts, either too light or too blunt a hammer for the task; and if, as per Marx, the Hegelian dialectic must in turn be “inverted”, turned right side up, the rush of blood streaming down the body when one spends too long standing on one’s head risks its own kind of hallucinatory distortion. Yet it is this impulse that, as Césaire observed of Lautréamont, that also gives poetry is particular brand of (sur)realism in chronicling that “inverted world”; and in the past few years of imperial afterlives as much as the era of 19th century imperialism, such distortions more than match the distorted world around. Consequently, a real Baudelarian spleen, new to Halpern’s work, suffuses the anti-Fascist fury of some of the earlier poems: “in my tongue-torqued tuna-slag the fascists are totally fucked / They puke their boiled prawns on my dream of corn & fat” (13) writes Halpern, insisting on his right “to smother / [fascists] in their own puke” while sarcastically observing “they fashion the worst haircuts too” (22). Later poems become less gleeful, more mournful, as Halpern (re)turns to the bloody viscera  familiar from his earlier work: the victims of bombings and torture spread out across a landscape at once real and imagined, in which “common sense” and “common place” are distorted echoes as akin to black sites where torture, erasure and incarceration underwrite whatever script’s read out on the evening news or the propaganda of official verse, official statistic, official silence. Here Halpern reiterates the concerns of his previous work with deliberate obsessiveness for which rhyme’s absurd recurrence forms a useful figure (more on that presently): homonationalism, the war on terror, the unspeakable trauma of the AIDS crisis, personal loss, the rising inequalities of a hometown—San Francisco—in which the tech boom, the opioid crisis, homelessness, the radical alteration of the city’s social landscape index the changing structure through which the wealthier realms of the ‘western world’ view life as such—the screens of social media, their bases a few miles away from where Halpern might write the poem. 

Building on Halpern’s tutelary immersion in New Narrative writing, much of his previous work sees the erotic as the primary valence through which such concerns are figured, from the radically compromised devotional erotics of Music for Porn and Common Place and their Genet-ian love poems to the dead, the beautifully bungled, self-sabotaging love poems in the chapbook Fertility. That’s perhaps less the case in these Hieroglpyhs, where the erotic occurs alongside a broader range of dedications—to Halpern’s daughter, Laia-Rose, to his late father, to Sean Bonney and to Andrea Brady—and on less programmatic lines. Yet Halpern nonetheless continues to borrow from the erotic and more-than-erotic methodologies of the Romantics and the Metaphysical poets in particular. As he suggests in the afterword, via Anahid Nersessian’s recent The Calamity Form, these are poets whose approach to the collapsed distances of simile, metaphor, rhyme, and other forms of metonymy reproduce the changing scalar dimensions of the growth of racial capitalism, from the initial colonial moments of the Early Modern era and its extensions into the Americas, to the growth of the Industrial Revolution and the Atlantic expansion of the triangular trade. Like these emergent and expanding forms of capital, the conceit, wordplay and wit, maintain multiple dimensions at once, at once an expansion and a compression, or what Halpern might, in today’s terms, name “a ‘kill box’ collapsing space [...] the interior of a prison cell like another hoary figure for the soul” (38). 

This receives perhaps its clearest expression in one of the longer poems in the book, Halpern’s elegy-cum-verse essay, “for & after” Sean Bonney: 

 Counterfeiting stones to rhyme with what I can’t even hear 

 Inaudible substance of catastrophe a heavy-handed conceit [...] 

                                                                           like the soul 

 In Donne’s Funerall where the poet compares his to a wreathe 

 Of braided hair laced round his lover’s shrouded writs 

 Confusing the spirit that inspires his verse with a cuff 

 Or cop-lock affirming the vehicle’s power to collapse mystery. (36) 

For Halpern, as in Donne, this metaphysical collapse maps the image of the beloved, of fulfilled or frustrated desire, onto the cartographic extensions and concealments of imperialism and its mirrors in a language which enables and justifies—or at least normalises, renders into common sense—this movement. (Again, that naming and renaming of conquered territory, “the names of occupied places & lands / And how each enlarges a colony”.)  Here are some of those cartographies: constantly recurring images of body parts and the desires they arise juxtaposed with the tortured bodies and corpses of the War on Terror and the occupation of Palestinian lands: the erasure from maps and physical locations of dwellings, which, raised according to Zionist tenets, Halpern “was told as a kid / never existed as places” (26); the bones of buried Palestinians ground up to simulate the sands of a beach in Ramallah (27); the victims of drone strikes or the wounded soldiers of occupying armies juxtaposed with Halpern’s interactions with his one-year old daughter; the poet writing the poem alongside the workers in Shenzen or Ghuangzho (20) who produce the earpieces and computer devices he uses to communicate internationally or the clothes he wears, in a parody of globalisation’s distances, at once collapsed through technologically-advanced commodities and radically extended through the gap between Global North and Global South. 

For Halpern: “What appears to be the most obvious of things—be it the self-evidence of everyday life, or the social violence erased in that self-evidences—arrives dispossessed of a language not already structured by the violence it might wish to oppose or decry” (49). The aim, then, is not a revelation of a tenderness that might outstrip such conditions—a tenderness that reaches its parodic peak in Halpern’s images of erotic fantasy and commune with the corpses of US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan and of Guantanamo Bay detainees in Music for Porn and Common Place—but of the inextricability of a language of love, desire, tenderness and care from the structural conditions in which these affects are produced. For Halpern, the poem thus evinces a kind of Marxist version of “negative capability” challenging the irritable facts and reasons of what passes for common sense in the “inverted world” where unequal social relations are reified as normality, where abstraction of value and the commodity form is the ground on which relations from the most minute to the largest are conducted; “whose unspeakable aim might be to abolish its own conditions, something the poem is only ever too frail to do” (57). Poetry is at once both the ideal site for such analysis and something which, precisely because it moves beyond the analysis of diagnostic, prosaic language, gestures beyond itself and beyond the social conditions which produce it and in which it is produced: “In other words, diagnosis of our conditions always lies elsewhere [...] the poem’s competence is [...] as a point of departure [...] a move beyond the poem, out of poetry, headlong & recklessly into the world” (57). 

In metaphor, simile, and other forms of conceit, one thing stands for another thing, but they don’t line up as do the balanced parts of an equation or a fraction, the components of a sum. Relatedly, in its play with various forms of rhythmic counting, parallelism, the numbered parcelling out of syllables and other particles of sound, poetry may gesture at mathematics, but it lacks the forms of closure, or even the paradoxical logics of set and chaos theory. Likewise, it may gesture at music, but a music that’s lost the flow of sound, one which is blocked and dammed by the stumbling block of word on page (or perhaps vice versa). These paradoxes and double-binds—which are not, perhaps, fully-formed dialectics—once more for Halpern find their expression in the titular figure of the hieroglyph, taken both, as we’ve seen, from Marx, and from Johann Wilhem Ritter via Walter Benjamin (with Etel Adnan’s Arab Apocalypse ever in view). For Ritter, Halpern suggests, the hieroglyph is a sign that stands in for sound, a fixed mark that stands in for movement, a compressed point that contains a kind of transparent secret, were we to know how to read it, and the book’s cover design incorporates fragments Ritter’s sound diagrams, cut in half by the spine. The hieroglyph is thus a useful jumping-off point for the way these poems work with sound. “Purposeless rhymes mute forgotten / Crimes” (38), Halpern writes in the poem dedicated to Sean Bonney; or again, in the following poem, for Andrea Brady: “I think of the names of occupied places & lands / And how each enlarges a colony as if the word / Itself were a spit of sand in my mouth” (39). At times, sound forms an alternative way of knowing. In the same poem, Halpern notes his daughter Laia-Rose’s imitation of a seagull on the beach, “soaring in some divine imitation she soars the air / Parts as it would for a word like ‘bird’ it brings / Her closer to the world its creatures & mysteries” (39)—for the moment, a counter-possibility to the colonial mimesis, its naming and renaming of erased place names, redrawn borders on the map, from Afghanistan to Palestine, which occupies the rest of the poem. Likewise, in the concluding poem, ‘Hieroglyph No.11520’, dedicated to Laia-Rose, Halpern recalls the recitation of Delmore Schwartz’s ‘I Am Cherry Alive, The Little Girl Sang’ to his daughter during the first year of her life as a daily ritual. Here, poetry—particularly the jingling sonic pleasure of rhyme—is lullaby, balm and joyous invention, with “not one rhyme excluded” (45), “as if truth / Were hiding in some alphabetic trance where it reaches us / Thru a veil this screen of rhymes” (46). But a poem cannot include every rhyme, and rhyme’s infinity forms a clanging bad metaphor for the impossibility of imagining elsewhere, a perpetual echo to narcissus’ ever-same, the poem a mirror to nature only in that nature’s ‘self-evidence’ is that of the totalising sphere of global racial capitalism, with all its extractivist terror. 

Ultimately, then, the rhyme, the conceit, the metaphor, the simile, and all those forms of heightened language contained with the serial cell of the poem recur as a repeated, and traumatic re-staging of the poem’s own failure to grasp and encompass the common sense and common place it seeks: 

This model falls flat the conceit’s useless 

To do anything more than what poetry has always done 

To arouse the ache for communion or the rage that joins

Its loss [.] (37)

To many readers, this aroused ache will hardly seem “useless”: “To arouse the ache for communion or the rage that joins / Its loss” is surely as good a slogan or a programme for poetry as any, even as it within its very form is staged that collapse, that breaking apart so central to the book, easing as it does into iambics before the polysyllables of “communion” break it apart, extending into the line break between ‘joining’ and ‘loss’ that contradictions its very urge for communion or joining with their opposites. This double movement—that of utopian assertion and formal negation—doesn’t so much cancel out as further the project of deciphering the hieroglyphs that surround us, reading the unreadable, in aching rage against the losses the daily we hide from and are hidden from us. In doing so, the ache and the rage of Halpern’s verse trace a music intensely moving in its repeated commitment: “To exceed its limit in a movement beyond the shattered sight of glass: to conceive what’s inconceivable as part of a larger effort to abolish the conditions of that impossibility” (59).

December

I talked to Diedre Murray earlier in the year, and that interview is now out in Point of Departure, thanks, as ever, to Bill Shoemaker. We touch on her career as a cellist in improvised music, including her work with Larry Young (Khalid Yasin) in the 'Lawrence of Newark' band, with Henry Threadgill and Marvin Hannibal Peterson, with Fred Hopkins, with The Roots, and as a composer for the stage. A respected figure in the world of musical theatre for her arrangements of Gershwin, her collaboration with the likes of Chesney Snow, and as a composer of operas and musicals, Murray's prior career as an improviser has been sorely neglected in the often male-centric world of jazz criticism, but it's a crucial part of the legacy of American (and global) improvised  music. Hopefully this interview brings it some of the attention it deserves.

Also in the new Point of Departure, reviews of a Sam Rivers session, Undulation, and of the newly-rediscovered recording of John Coltrane performing the 'A Love Supreme' suite with an expanded group live in Seattle.  Another talk on that album, focusing more on its social and historical context, appears at Artforum, here.

And my essay on Gabrielle Daniels, writer-choreographer Ishmael Houston-Jones, and New Narrative appears in Journal of Narrative Theory.

Other things in the pipeline meanwhile, on the 'Occult School of Boston', musical responses to the Attica uprising, etc...