Re: [microsound] essay on TWiki site

["tobias c. van Veen" <tobias@xxxxxxxxx>]

ola,


> Where does John Cage say "Jazz is the future." I had thought that John
> Cage had a rather dim view of Jazz as well, but I think I must have
> been misinformed.

"Percussion music is a contemporary transition from keyboard-influenced
music to the all-sound music of the future. Any sound is acceptable to the
composer of percussion music; he explores the academically forbidden
³non-musical² field of sound insofar as is manually possible.
Methods of writing percussion music have as their goal the rhythmic
structure of a composition. As soon as these methods are crystallized into
one or several widely accepted methods, the means will exist for group
improvisations of unwritten but culturally important music. This has already
taken place in Oriental cultures and in hot jazz."

³The Future of Music: Credo.² Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage.
Hanover: Weslayan UP, 1973. p. 5.

I talk a little about this -- for reasons of dissecting aesthetic categories
tied to arts funding in canada -- in:

"FUCK ART LET¹S DANCE." Fuse 26.3 (2003). pp. 12-19.

Online in PDF at:

    http://www.quadrantcrossing.org/papers/FuckArtLet'sDance-FUSE[72].pdf

> On what are you basing the idea that Adorno "did not dig  musics and
> styles of performance originating from cultures of colour"


"The aim of jazz is the mechanical reproduction of a regressive moment, a
castration symbolism. 'Give up your masculinity, let yourself be castrated,'
the eunuchlike sound of the jazz band both mocks and proclaims, 'and you
will be rewarded, accepted into a fraternity which shares the mystery of
impotence with you, a mystery revealed at the moment of the initiation
rite."

Theodor Adorno (1981). "Perennial Fashion - Jazz", Prisms, p.129, Trans.
Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

also:

"Jazz is the false liquidation of art - instead of utopia becoming reality
it disappears from the picture."


"Jazz is music which fuses the most rudimentary melodic, harmonic, metric
and formal structure with the ostensibly disruptive principle of
syncopation, yet without ever really distrubing the crude unity of the basic
rhythm, the identically sustained metre, the quarter-note . . . The wild
antics of the first jazz bands from the South, New Orleans above all, and
those from Chicago, have been toned down with the growth of
commercialization and of the audience, and continued scholarly efforts to
recover some of this original animation, whether called 'swing' or 'bebop',
inexorably succumb to commercial requirements and quickly lose their sting.
The syncopation principle, which at first had to call attention to itself by
exaggeration, has in the meantime become so self-evident that it no longer
needs to accentuate the weak beats as was formally required. Anyone still
using such accents today is derided as 'corny', as out-of-date as 1927
evening dress . . .  there is the tendency, especially among those devotees
who have adopted it as a  Weltanschauung, to regard it falsely as a
break-through of original, untrammelled nature, as a triumph over the musty
museum-culture . . . However little doubt there can be regarding the African
elements in jazz, it is no less certain that everything unruly in it was
from the very beginning integrated into a strict scheme, that its rebellious
gestures are accompanied by the tendency to blind obeisance, much like the
sado-masochistic type described by analytic psychology, the person who
charges against the father-figure while secretly admiring him, who seeks to
emulate him and in turn derives enjoyment from the subordination he overtly
detests. This propensity accelerates the standardization, commercialization
and rigidification of the medium."

"the perennial fashion-jazz." trans. by samuel and shierry weber. in _the
adorno reader_. ed. by brian o'connor. oxford uk and malden ma: 2000. 268-9.


--> As you can see, Adorno does target the commercialization of jazz, but
even then, he berates the "African elements" for their stylisms (mainly
aspects of repetition / control).

My guess is that Adorno was too tight to dance. He probably wouldn't have
got along well with Nietzsche or Rosa Luxembourg.


> Do you think this paints him as a racist, and was that your intention?

No.

Is there, however, an insertion of race as a constituent element, a
condition of possibility for the assertion of an aesthetic criterion in
critical theory?

That's a good question.

Is there a continual erasure of race as determining the "critical reception"
of styles of music, art, conceptual rearrangement in the "artworld"?

This is a question a "critical theory" might ask, but it could only be asked
by asking itself in which ways its criticality is defined by its tenuous
relation to (the exclusion of) race.

For example, in the next email you ask: "What role does race legitimately
play in musical discourse."

Already we've presupposed a criterion of (aesthetic) legitimacy, of
legitimacy in general -- which presupposes a logical if not ethical
category, at the least a category of authenticity (truth).

Is there a persistence of dominant Eurocentric logic kicking around?

Perhaps..



> Also, could you lead me to some info about Nam June Paik's interest in
> DJ culture. This also slipped past my radar.

He (thanks Kim for picking up my gender slip -- or slip of sex) did a few
interesting collage and sculptural works with records and record players. I
discovered this in an intensive and wonderful presentation by curator Carrie
Gates at the _Phantom Power_ festival in North Bay, Ontario, last winter.

Carrie is part of Vinyl Interventions:

http://www.vinylinterventions.com/

I'd encourage her to put this together into a history of the use of vinyl!

She's got a crazy powerpoint presentation of almost everything I've ever
seen of vinyl use in creative ways.

best,

    tobias




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