Re: [microsound] food for thought

[Ed Hall <edhall@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Nature and ourselves are not two, and it is one source of our troubles
that we often do not see this.  Territoriality, tribalism, and hubris
are all part of the human animal, as are self-centeredness, the drive
for survival, and the need for control.  Violence is but one of the
inevitable results of these impulses, greed another.  This is all a
part of who and what we are, as humans.  But it is only a part.

I have a nine-month-old son whom I love as much as life itself.  Yet it
is patently clear just how all of the "base" elements I mentioned are
the core of his being.  His need for territory and tribe, and his hubris,
are all plain to see, as is his self-centeredness, his drive to have his
needs met (without concern for his mother's or mine), and his need to
control as much as he can.  I don't believe he'll eliminate these things
any more than I have -- rather, he'll become aware of other beings, and
aware of their identity with his own, of his place in the cosmos and in
the society of his fellow humans.  This self- and other-awareness is what
counterbalances those other components.  I like to call this counter-
balancing awareness the "spiritual."

Whether you consider "mind" to exist outside of the physical sphere or
to be solely a manifestation of particular complex systems of matter,
we all have a sense of "that which perceives" within ourselves.  This
is the domain of the spiritual.

We Americans like to thinks of ourselves as a spiritual people.  We're
not.  We're a religious people.  And religion is basically the attempt
to subvert the spiritual to selfish ends.  Our primary religion has
traditionally been a distorted version of Christianity (where the
teachings of the founder have been largely ignored in favor of a
selfish obsession with simplistic moral formulae and the afterlife).
Otside of this, our religion increasingly has become a form of
mercantilism, where the so-called "free market" has become the base
of discourse and values, such that a new feudalism of consumer serfs
and producer lords has taken hold.  This religion has roots in the
Puritanism that (along with the so-called Enlightenment, heavily
polluted with ideas of "Manifest Destiny") is an antecedent of American
culture.  Among other things, Puritanism maintained the belief that
prosperity was a sign that one was among God's elect.  (Think about
this next time you sit down to Thanksgiving dinner.)


To me, art can be the "communication" of ones self- and other-awareness
to others, and thus can be a basis of the antidote to our cultural ills.
(I put "communication" in quotes because so many people assume that
communication must involve a language and not just a mutual sharing of
conciousness.)  Unfortunately, so much of what passes for "art" is mere
entertainment, at best a distraction from our malaise, and a lot of the
rest is rhetoric, an attempt to coerce and not to enlighten.  (The latter
is one reason why politics and art often don't mix very well.)

My viewpoint is very Cageian: the idea that the purpose of art is to
expand conciousness is at the center of many of Cage's works.  (I
also feel that many -- though not all -- of Cage's works are more
interesting for how he explained and executed them than they are in
themselves.)  And here is where I pull things toward microsound: to
me, Cage is the father of the microsound asthetic.  He loved to use
technology (often in unintended ways) and to create processes and
systems.  There are elements of both playfulness and subversion in
his works (as there is in some of the best microsound).  I'll not
try to draw the parallels too far -- I'm only trying to use him as
an example of one way of creating art that enhances the spiritual.

As another example, Kim Cascone once wrote here that one of his
objectives was to write emotionless music (some folks called it
"inhuman," but that's just silly).  He wrote: "my goal is to focus
on ideas (thereby stripping away emotion) until my work has as much
emotion as a calculus textbook..."  The curious thing is that I often
associate many emotions with his music (in particular his "Blue Cube"
album).  That's because, rather than lead me down some path of pre-
conceived emotional allusions, his music holds up a mirror to my own
mental state.  The result in part is a small measure of self-
enlightenment, something that the melodramatic emotionalism of
most pop music can never achieve -- forming another example of what
I call the "spiritual" in art.  (His is hardly the only example of
such music, but on this list he's a better example than, say, Elliott
Carter.)

I'm too tired to tie this all back to the role of technology (any
further than my passing comments about Cage's use of it); feel
free to have a go at it.  Needless to say, I don't see any iron-
clad coupling between high technology and our social maladies;
the latter has more to do with our impoverished sense of purpose
than any of our tools.

		-Ed