XX. JOUR MAL: Series II
For your curiosity, quote-fetish, and general interest, here is the transcript for JOUR MAL Season II, Episode I
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
In Association with PHASMID PRESS
THE EMPTY SET PRESENTS:
JOUR MAL: SERIES II
Written, Produced, and Narrated: D.K. V-B
Additional vocals: Clementine Robertson
Graphic design: Scott McCLure
Special thanks to Rob Scher
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EPISODE I: THE POSSIBILITY OF A HOMELESS MUSIC
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In the many videos I've seen featuring the young, affable, well-spoken, more energy than cracked atoms, multi-instrumentalist savant and Carl Sagan-of-music Jacob Collier, the concept of 'home' in music, both its manufacture and experience, is central – the chord, the note, the phrase to which you return after freewheeling adventures up and down and in-between scales, moods, tempos, and pitches. The journey and the return, the Unanswered Question, Bernstein, all of it damn near monomythic. Ultimately, however, it seems to me that this type of home is predicated specifically and, despite the seemingly infinite variety of musical creativity generated, recognized, and enjoyed by millions for hundreds of thousands of years, on repeated experience. So. Whether he’s in dialogue with Eric Whitacre, Herbie Hancock, Vogue, Teen Magazine, The Hollywood Reporter, himself or an audience culled from the digital social commons on YouTube, IG, Twitter, or Facebook, Collier’s explications of everything ranging from tonal harmonics, scales, musical, shapes, colors, and their emotional affects, deeper stuff too like cents, intermodulation, micropolyphonics, or contrapuntal speciation, seem to always-already orbit this notion of 'home', in the last instance.
Now, before we get into what I will call 'musical home' is and how I relate to it or don’t, I should be clear that this episode – which is really improvisational and written in one sitting – is not supposed to read as some sort of music master-class. I'd embarrass myself if I even tried. I make things out of music, sure, but I have absolutely no theory, something of an instinctual eat-on-the-wing intuitive understanding of some, and I'd like to stress basic, musical theoretical concepts. There are terrible master-classes delivered by instructors as dull as ash out there that are technically light-years beyond my understanding. No, what interests me about this topic is the concept of home in music. It got me thinking about the fact that as a TCK, that is a Third Culture Kid, I've always had a tense and recessed relationship with the concept of home in any and all permutations thereof I can surmise or conjure.
Home as person, place or thing has, especially in my youth, not even as problematic as I've seen it be for others, TCKs and not alike, been strange. For me, it's been about as alien as Kryptonese. A word with all sorts of 'proper' associations, cachet, value, commerce, and psycho-emotional purchase that was always affectively little more than a slight toothache to me. But then I wondered if there was some latent, but somehow also very obvious, relationship between my subject position as a TCK and my very deep and whole-feeling love for music. Is the experientially ever-present latter acting, in some capacity or other, as a surrogate for the experientially vacuous former? Is this true of other TCKs? Then I thought about Chomsky, specifically his discussions about creativity in relation to language, of course, but how, say, in his dialogue with Brian Magee, or his debate with Michel Foucault, how he discusses innate faculties, biological endowments, and what he calls organs of the brain or mental organs – the speech organ being obviously chief target of his investigative efforts – in relation to creativity, understanding, expression, and experience. Now, when he uses music as an example, and more so its experience and comprehension, in his discussion with Magee, acknowledging the ethical prohibitions against it, he nevertheless proposes an experiment in which two groups of children are separated from one another. One group, group A, let's call them, would be exposed solely to the likes of Brahms, Mozart, Hyden, Bach, Beethoven, Paganini, or even later figures like Liszt, Debussey, Ravel, Faure, Satie, Boulanger and so on. The other group, group B, would be exposed solely to post Shoenbergian music. Bartok, Stravinsky, the Totalists, the Serialists, the Minimalists, Holy and not alike, Reich, Glass, Eno, Adams, Sakamoto, Noto, Paart, Vasks, Kancheli, Goreki and so on.
Chomsky hypothesizes that one possible result of such an experiment would be that the children of each group, if allowed to interact, make, exchange, and discuss music would, in certain respects, be completely alien to one another. This is a West-centric experiment sure, but what it redounds to, ultimately, is the notion of musical universality, specifically as rooted or circumscribed firmly within the notion of the tonality of music. Violate this, says Chomsky and others, and one disrupts the biological faculty, both the apperceptive and appreciative acumen of the music organ or rather the tonal mental organ lets say, in human beings. To me, well, that’s quite a statement.
I remember watching a video of Bobby McFerrin's so-called demonstration of the power of the pentatonic scale at the World Science Festival, a presentation called “Notes & Neurons: In Search of a Common Chorus'' on June 12th, 2009 in which he randomly jumps around on stage albeit in specific intervals, humming a note for each interval he lands on. The audience mimics him, responding with the same note he sings as he leaps up and down on its 'key'. After several McFerrin-Audience interactions of this kind, he ceases singing out the corresponding note relative to his position. The audience takes over, unprompted, in completing the correct sound relative to McFerrin’s position. In essence he plays the audience in order to illustrate the idea that knowledge of the structure and sequence of the pentatonic scale is innate to human beings. It reads like a novel, simple, and yet extremely effective demonstration of what the neuroscientific underpinnings or constituents of what we could call the biological ‘home’ of the pentatonic scale are, a way of vibrating air molecules that is recognizably and inately available to the species seemingly in toto. The cliche of sad minoring and happy majoring, the discomfort of irresolution, the satisfaction of the plagal cadence. All of these things that seem experientially and theoretically true to the point of self-evidence.
Fascinating as that may be, however, a swerist like me is interested in the possibility of a homeless music. Sure, I guess looking to Chomsky's example of Shoenberg, later Shoenberg, the post Verklarte Nacht Shoenberg (crazy rich harmonic idiom and chromatic language which, though home'd/housed in D minor, wanders damn near into other dimensions of color. Talk about luft von anderem planeten!), or to other luminary figures comprising the vanguard of atonal music; Second Sonata Bartok, Lulu Berg, Cage, Clothed Woman Ellington, Emantionem Penderecki, Rite of Spring Stravinsky, Bagatelles Webern, Unanswered Question Ives, Lux Aeterna Ligeti, and the dissonant final chord of Bernstein's 3rd, his Kaddish, there is a tradition – and a rich one – in Western music of what I like to think of as homeless music. Over the years in my explorations of these sometimes brutal zones, it has been interesting to note how the stereotypical notions of homelessness as a condition of uncertainty, angoisse, ennui, angst, hunger, pain, distress of physical and psycho-emotional registers, types, and kinds seems to play out specularly in the majority of reactions I've witnessed to people's experience of atonal music. There is no sense of wonder, of exploration, and experimentation. No appreciation of the extreme complexity, theoretical and compositional alike, being expressed and realized in the music. Hell, most people don't even see, understand, or broadly experience it as music at all. They see it as a climacteric, fricative, disorienting, even nauseating in its nadirs and vertiginousness, chaos-assemblage of tones without theme, consistency, measure, or proportion of color, flow, or pattern. This doesn't satisfy me personally. It feels closed, limited, biologically, thematically, and culturally. It seems to me a willful ignorance of odd complexities and the possibility of gleaning strange moments, the emergence of strange and radically unexpected feelings, the expansion of the musical eye that suddenly, even if for the flash of half a bar, sees in a strange ultraviolet.
And I suppose this brings us back full circle of fifths to the idea of an improvised aesthetic, which I tried to intimate in SERIES I’s opener about sewerism as an ethic of a type of improvised aesthetic. ANd yet, here again, it seems to me that many improvisations are oriented around a musical conception of home anyway. That without this anchor, any leeway or drift, any dérive risks the total obliteration of sense and satisfaction. That improvisations, regardless of how chaotic, are inextricably dependent from the home from which they emerge, away from which they wander, and to which they ultimately return. The measure of the musician's skill is incomplete without an assaying of how well they return, rediscover, reintroduce, re-enter the home note, bar, or phrase. A four chord set-up and within the frame of that home, within those four walls, so to speak, the bassist, drummer, pianist, and horn player decorate that space as they see fit or are able. This is a jazz example, of course and a range of other examples surely exist of a specifically improvisational kind in various genres, epochs, cultures, and arrangements of sound-making implements and the players that cast with them.
I remember Wayne Shorter telling Jon Batiste that in such arrangements, there is no such thing as error, only opportunity. Which I quite like. Pushed all the way out, the leaving of home precipitates the opportunity to create another, then move on, create another, move on. As are the ephemeral structures the players inhabit and create within the period of improvisation. I like to think of them as a type of musical temporary autonomous zone, which must end or change, in essence be destroyed, in order to remain improvisational. And if this ethic of the unresolved, semi-resolved, intimated resolution indexes error, then the sewerist aesthetics of homeless music are also most certainly an ethics of error, a concept I’ll develop in my discussion of True Love, death, Hiedeggar, and hammers sometime later.
But now, let me say that this improvisational aesthetic emerges in a lot of music I like and emulate: sample scanning, crate digging, finding sounds, colors, textures, hues, and shades that can be dislodged from their homes in various recordings, deterritorialized and reteritorialized in improvised re-arrangements to make a new home which can be as warm as and small as a winter closet, as large and cold and echoing as a winter castle. This is what I think about when I open a new Ableton file. I feel like a Martian, scanning the radio-waves of Earth, looking for strange and surprising ways of creating home-facsimiles that they, the Terrans, might recognize but specifically, may recognize as fundamentally unheimlich. I feel homeless but I don't feel destitute or impoverished. I feel free and excited, daunted and frustrated, encouraged and dissuaded by the possibility of possibility. I feel most at home where homelessness is repeated, spliced, cut, sampled, or looped. I feel most at home within the pseudo-framework, the partial portability, the zig-zag agility, the playful reach of an improvised aesthetic, one though potently, joyously precarious in the context of some of Western music's most fundamental theoretical principles like tempo and key, is at its best when it leans into the creativity of surprise, and the surprise of creativity. I'll close this with a quote from Shoenberg I really like concerning the exclusion of his Verklarte Nacht by and from the Viennese Music Society after its scandalous premiere in 1902. Referring to the piece's use of a single 'nonexistent' inverted ninth chord, Shoenberg said “and thus [Verklarte Nacht] cannot be performed since one cannot perform that which does not exist” (Vignal, 1977).
References
Vignal, Mark (1977), Notes to Boulez/New York Philharmonic Recording
