Music, Politics and Agency seminar: Sonic Radicalism

Centre for Cultural Studies Research
School of Arts and Digital Industries
University of East London 

Presents

Music, Politics and Agency Seminar 3: Sonic Radicalism

May 23rd 2012

13:00-17:00
University of East London, Docklands Campus
Room EB.1.03 (directions below)

Can sound subvert? Thinkers since Plato have assumed that it can, that social form and musical form are intrinsically linked, resonant, or pre-figurative of each other. In this seminar, lead
ing and innovative thinkers will interrogate and explore these claims and their implications.

Speakers and Papers:

Adam Harper
Musical Radicalism Beyond the Sonic

Adam Harper is a music critic, music theorist and author of Infinite Music: Imagining the Next Millennium of Human Music-Making (Zero Books), which argues for a contemporary reappraisal of modernist aesthetics and offers a system for understanding musical creativity, as well as pamphlets on the future of music and underground pop music for the Glasgow Centre for Contemporary Arts and Precinct respectively. He is a PhD candidate, tutor and teacher at the University of Oxford, writes regularly for Wire and Dummy magazines and blogs at Rouge’s Foam.

Matthew Pritchard
‘Cornelius Castoriadis: Music and the Radical Imagination’

Matthew Pritchard is British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Music Faculty, University of Cambridge. His work centres on the history of music theory and aesthetics in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, addressing such topics as the role of the musical motive as vehicle for metaphorical imagination and negotiation, the political origins of modern music analysis, and the social organization of music-aesthetic discourse. “Who killed the concert? Heinrich Besseler and the inter-war politics of Gebrauchsmusik” recently appeared, with an accompanying translation of Besseler’s 1925 essay “Fundamentals of Musical Listening”, in the journal /twentieth-century music/.

Dhanveer Singh Brar
“The whites have become black” – grime, blackness and pathology

Dhanveer is a PhD candidate in Media and Communications at Goldsmiths College. His research focuses on black radicalism and its obscured manifestation through phonic substance. He has taught at Goldsmiths College, University of East London and Central St Martins College of Art. Dhanveer is also a member of the University for Strategic Optimism.

Respondent – Jason Toynbee

Jason Toynbee teaches in the Sociology Department at The Open University. At the moment he’s researching and writing about music and cosmopolitanism, and also trying to work out how far music has taken on an ideological role under neo-liberalism. HIs books include Making Popular Music: Musicians, Aesthetics and the Manufacture of Popular Music (Bloomsbury Academic, 2000) and Bob Marley: Herald of  a Postcolonial World? (Polity 2007)

Chair – Jeremy Gilbert, UEL

All Welcome – No need to register

Room EB.1.03 is on the first floor, main building: turn left from main square when entering the square from Cyprus station.

Cyprus DLR (Docklands Light Railway) station is literally situated at the campus.

“What about Black Radicalism?” A film screening and discussion

Tomorrow (29th March), Dream of Safety (http://dreamofsafety.blogspot.com/) and I will be holding a film screening and discussion at The Really Free School (http://reallyfreeschool.org/). The event is called “What about Black Radicalism?” and starts at 4pm. For details see the outline below. All welcome:

“Within the current moment of heightened activism, the question of Blackness is one that, too often, seems forgotten or relegated to a footnote. The possibility of Black militancy, articulated with a reading of racial oppression in general, appears absent from the questions being raised right now in London about protest and building new forms of social life. This is despite the fact that, like feminism and Marxism, Black radicalism, as a set of practices and viewpoints, has constantly both addressed these issues and influenced, profoundly, student protests in the past, especially in the 1960’s. We would like to raise, once more, the question of Blackmilitancy by diverting our attention, temporarily, from the UK in order to see how Blackmilitancy formed and mattered in the context of the United States. This ‘diversion’ would ultimately allow us to return to our own situation, transnational and national, and will be informed by two documentary films: “Take This Hammer” (1963, featuring James Baldwin) and “Black Panthers – Huey!” (1968).”

Dream Sequence soundtracked by Cooly G

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Listen:

http://www.uk-funky.com/ukfunky_previews_167.htm

Read:

Last night my dreams were made of broken kinship. I was a man who had passed on but was yet to catch up with the news. I lingered around those for whom my passing was old news, yesterday’s headlines, tomorrow’s chip paper. Between their acceptance that I was gone and my stubborn refusal to realise this was so, we stumbled along in some kind of unanimity. Yet it wasn’t quite like that. I knew there was something horribly wrong, some unbridgeable divide between us. It was as if loss was what was keeping us together, but none of us were able to accept it. To try to end this thing I would finally have to get the news. For them that meant re-living news that was old. When that time came, the combination of my delayed arrival at and their reencounter with the news of my passing would be acted out as some kind of degraded reunion. We would know we had all been there before. Tears enough to drown in. Stomach empty. Choked moan. But we hadn’t shaken it all off the last time. Hadn’t let it all out. And we knew it might not even be enough this time around. We would have to do it all over again. In the mean time we could go on as we were, beating loss at its own game.

Miles Smiles before he kisses (with tongues and shit)

Acidic juice of a just picked / orange. Acidic sweetness of a / trumpeter’s kiss

The line above is taken from Nathaniel Mackey’s poetry collection “School of Udhra”. “Udhra” forms one part of an ongoing episodic project operating under the title of the “Song of the Andoumboulou” which deals in the aftermath of broken kinship as a textual and sonic category. Although Mackey does not openly name it as such, he locates this process within the drift of what we might call the Black Atlantic. I have been particularly drawn to this line from “Udhra” since I first began reading Mackey’s work, because whenever I read it I am reminded of Miles Davis. It reads to me like an attempt to transcribe the experience of listening to a Davis recording. It is not simply that Mackey is making an oblique reference to him in the midst of the poem, but rather that these lines lead into the mechanics of Davis’ aesthetic sensibilities. Mackey sets this in motion with his use of the kiss. The kiss, I want to argue, is a potent way of tuning into Miles Davis.

How is this possible? Firstly there is the way in which the kiss leads into romance as a dominant theme during certain moments in Davis’ career. He appeared to have an attachment to the romantic ballad as a means of locating his aesthetic sensibility. In particular there was a regularity of unrequited love, of mournful love, especially early on and during the creative peak of his first major ensemble. I think Davis’ choice of these song forms may have had more at stake than his possible melancholic romantic leanings. The tempo of the love ballad provided him with the necessary space to locate the “cool” tone which allowed him to move away from the intense modernist experiments of his heroes Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie.

But Mackey’s kiss is also about much more than romance as Davis’ prevalent theme. The trumpeter’s kiss also transcribes the extension of his musical romanticism. His (literal) kissing of the trumpet became an amplification of the mournful love which shaped some of his strongest records. Davis’ instrumental kiss nearly always seemed to be drawn out. It lingered too long, so that affection sounded like it had become gnarled. Something sugary in Davis’ playing was often pushed to the tipping point where it was tinged with bitterness. Trumpeter’s kiss was acidically sweet.

Finally there are also the cross-sensory allusions of Mackey’s line. It hints at a synaesthetic bent to Davis’ artistry. The instrumental kiss is possessive of sound as much as it is of taste. There is also a lingering suggestion from Mackey of a synaesthetic slide into colour. Metallic bitter kiss becomes sound becomes lurid citrus glow.

But what is the relevance of all this? What kind of value do Mackey’s poetics have when imagined as a way of listening to Miles Davis?   I want to argue that his translation of Davis’ playing into the gesture of a kiss comes into contact with a sensibility which has built up around him.
As I have already touched upon, the kiss as a sonic-romantic act was one which Davis was adept at limning. The tenderness and sensitivity of his tone became embittered, sour. As if a soft spot had become sore.

In opposition to the kiss as a vehicle for a romanticism that tended towards the tender, there was Davis’ public persona. He regularly sought out two roles which were in many ways related. There was the demanding, short tempered musical disciplinary, and as an extension of that Davis also developed a version of Black masculine badness. This prototype tied Davis to a mode of Black urban authenticity, which borrowed heavily from a gangster lean and appears throughout his autobiography (his tales of nightly prostitute and cocaine binges during his temporary retirement being one of the highpoints of this self narrativisation).

But having been so markedly undercut by Davis’ intimidating mack stance, the kiss returns with a vengeance during Richard Pryor’s autobiography “Pryor Convictions”:

After the show Miles invited me to his dressing room. When I entered he was kissing Dizzy Gillespie, with tongue and shit, which made me wonder what kind of shit he had planned for me.

There is no way to vouch for the accuracy of Pryor’s account. It may be a typical case of his absurdly unnerving humour, but the question of veracity does not interest me. I think it is beside the point. Rather I want to focus on this (admittedly shaky revelation) as a way of thinking about the sonic kissing Nathaniel Mackey hears at work in Davis. Was the synaesthetic kissing Mackey located in any way illicitly queer? Is that elongated romantic solo a hidden queering of musical tone-colour? If we take the acidic sweetness of a trumpeter’s kiss as a process that is slightly askew, odd, unorthodox because of it’s slide across sensory boundaries, then yes maybe Davis was playing a kind of queerness. But what is queerness when practiced by Davis? If we go looking for a queer kiss across Davis’ body of work it tends to appear in certain critical places.

Take for example his movement outside jazz and towards a hybridisation with funk and rock. The Amazonian-machine squawks of “On the Corner” could, in certain respects, be described as queer sounds. Davis’ attempt to enfold the skin of the tabla into the olafactory domain of Blackness produces something akin to a tactile queerness.

Accompanying this sound there was the synaesthetic queerness of his album covers. With “Bitches Brew” and “Live-Evil” you have the appearance of the kiss and embrace animating a deep palette of colour as (sonic) drift.

I am not really sure what this necessarily means or where all this is could lead, but its something that goes to work in the recesses of my mind each time I go about listening to Davis. Queerness, in both the broadest and most precise sense, seems a way of linking the multiple ways in which Davis operated as an artist. It suggests a way of bridging the sonic with the necessarily visual, sartorial, romantic and the hyper-masculine as they shadow each other across Miles Davis

I believe I’m gonna drown (reprise)

I have always wanted to develop a way of writing that was irrevocably black. I don’t have the resources of a musician but I thought that if it was truly black literature it would not be black because I was, it would not even be black because of its subject matter. It would be something intrinsic, indigenous, something in the way it was put together – the sentences, the structure, texture and tone – so that anyone who read it would realise. I use the analogy of music because you can range all over the world and it’s still black……I don’t imitate it, but I am informed by it. Sometimes I hear blues, spirituals or jazz and I’ve appropriated it. I’ve tried to reconstruct the texture of it in my writing – certain kinds of repetition – its profound simplicity…..What has already happened with music in the States, the literature will do one day and the when that happens it’s all over.

The passage above is an excerpt from an interview Toni Morrison gave to Paul Gilroy in the mid 1990s. (The full text can be found in Gilroy’s “Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures”) Her comments could be considered a template or even a sounding board of sorts for something I was attempting to get across with my first post on the American novelist. I’m fascinated by the variety of positions Morrison is able to stake out for her writing in such a short space of time. In particular she reflects on of the status of her work’s Blackness, and through that consideration of its Blackness, a musing on its musicality.

Morrison makes a series of advances and withdrawals in this exchange with Gilroy. She appears to be intricately mapping out the aesthetic ground from which to encounter her work. Firstly she expresses a desire for her writing to be “irrevocably black”. This is an ontological wish. Her writing needs to exist as a way of being, as a way of being Black that cannot be refuted. But she puts a tactical rejoinder on this claim, perhaps as a way of undercutting its apparent reductiveness. The desired blackness of her art has little or no relationship to her own status as a Black American. The irrevocable Blackness (a Blackness that can’t be anything but Black) she strains for has nothing to do with subject matter either. The writing does not have to be about Black people, the community, the nation. The irrevocable Blackness Morrison speaks of here then is apparent in the assembly of the writing itself. There is something deep in its structures, in its tactility (“texture and tone”) which means that its Blackness would become self evident to those who encountered it (“so that anyone who reads it would realise”).

In effect Morrison produces an anti-architectural schema. She wants her writing to be Black in a way that can not be refuted (and that can even be felt). But this desired Blackness has nothing to do with her own, nor does the writing have to be about Blackness. A soundscape arrives to fill the space Morrison opens up and quickly withdraws from without ever quite leaving. There is another kind of thinking of identity and essence at work in this passage. One which breaks down those forumulations only to try to build them in another way, a way that sounds like Black music. She is not putting forward a case for repetition but a much deeper form of critical mimesis for her writing. An irrevocable Blackness which is not Black because of her but because of its music. The ability of words to attain the tactility, the straight up feel of sonic experience. I guess this in some sense was what I was trying to set off between Morrison and Aretha Franklin in the last post. An exchange that is seemingly obvious but all too evasive at the same time.

I believe I’m gonna drown this morning

Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” is nominally a ghost story. Perhaps her most celebrated novel, it tells the tale of Sethe, an escaped slave from the American south, who remains haunted by an act of infanticide she was compelled to commit whilst on the run. The pivotal moment in the early sections of the novel centres on the appearance of her daughter’s ghost almost twenty years after she was desperately killed by Sethe. Emerging from the river running alongside her mother’s home, the ghost (who comes to be known as Beloved) arrives to interrupt and stake a powerful claim over Sethe’s new life. I want to reprise this scene of Beloved’s arrival and return in order to listen to it, to listen closely to a music Morrison has at work deep within its structure:

By late afternoon when the carnival was over, and the negroes were hitching rides home if they were lucky – walking if they were not – the woman had fallen asleep again. The rays of the sun struck her full in the face, so that when Sethe, Denver and Paul D rounded the curve in the road all they saw was a black dress, two unlaced shoes below it, and Here Boy nowhere in sight.

“Look,” said Denver. “What is that?”

And, for some reason she could not immediately account for, the moment she got close enough to see the face, Sethe’s bladder filled to capacity. She said, “Oh, excuse me,” and ran around the back of 124. Not since she was a baby girl, being cared for by the eight-year-old girl who pointed out her mother to her, had she had an emergency that unmanageable. She never made the outhouse. Right in front of its door she had to lift her skirts, and the water she voided was endless. Like a horse, she thought, but as it went on and on she thought, No, more like flooding the boat when Denver was born. So much water Amy said, “Hold on, Lu. You going to sink us you keep that up.” But there was no stopping water breaking from a breaking womb and there was no stopping now. She hoped Paul D wouldn’t take it upon himself to come looking for her and be obliged to see her squatting in front of her own privy making a mudhole too deep to be witnessed without shame. Just about the time she started wondering if the carnival should accept another freak, it stopped. She tidied herself and ran around to the porch. No one was there. All three were inside – Paul D and Denver standing before the stranger, watching her drink cup after cup of water.

“She said she was thirsty,” said Paul D. He took off his cap. “Mighty thirst look like.”

The woman gulped water from a speckled tin cup and held it out for more. Four more times Denver filled it, and four more times the woman drank as though she had crossed the desert. When she finished there was a little water on her chin, but she did not wipe it away. Instead she gazed at Sethe with sleepy eyes. Poorly fed, thought Sethe, and younger than her clothes suggested – good lace at the throat, and a rich woman’s hat. Her skin was flawless except three vertical scratches on her forehead so fine and thin they seemed at first like hair, baby hair before it bloomed and roped into the masses of black yarn under her hat.

This is a passage soaked in the trails of amniotic fluid. Morrison has assembled a spectral reimagining of birth. Beloved, the ghost of a child killed too young, has risen from the water with an unquenchable thirst. Conversely her mother, Sethe, is saturated. She is overcome with a need to void, to flush out the water from inside her. Morrison structures this scene by way of implication. A residual connection, a previousness is being named between Beloved and Sethe, but only in the absence of its naming. And it is water – a thirst that needs to be quenched and liquid that needs to be flushed – which carries all this information.

I’m interested in Morrison’s structuring of this passage around the showing of something that is never adequately named, but instead carried by water. In fact, I’m fascinated by how, in the absence of something being said, something being named, a musicality emerges (like water) to fill its space. Morrison, in short, writes this passage in a way that sounds like Aretha Franklin’s “Drown In My Own Tears”. Listen:

“Drown In My Own Tears” is a tale of water substituting for a traumatic absence. A relationship ended, the ties that bind irrecoverably broken, her thirst for affection continually threatens to drench her. Franklin’s performance is defined by a precariousness. A deep breach has been opened and the thirst that follows can only be satisfied by water enough to drown. It is this precariousness which activates the sensory experience of hearing “Drown” rolling into action whilst reading Morrison shape the reencounter between Beloved and Sethe. There is never enough water to fill the void, yet it is also always overflowing. There is always desire for more, but sometimes more is just too much. This then is the monumental achievement of “Beloved”. Morrison is able to build her writing in a way that sounds like Franklin singing in all her profound simplicity.