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Re: [microsound] being 'political' in non-verbal music




and think about this: the popular music on the radio is some of the most
apolitical, apathetic music in the entire universe. and it's chock-full of
'lyrics.'
Good point. The world is awash in political messages in and out of music... you can go to the library and find stacks of utopias, dig through music history and find tons of examples of beautiful amazing music chock full of political meaning and important messages. But I suppose the thing to consider is that the vast majority of these works are not particularly active in the world. It seems to be worth thinking very very carefully about a few things... What works are there that have actually held a significant amount of political power? What kinds of forces should we expect a politically powerful piece of music to exert, and on what things? (Is it enough to inspire a few people here and there to find out more about some subject? Can a piece of music, playing a piece of music, making a particular sound, have symbolic power that's worthwhile? Is a shitty band playing shitty music, but producing it in a politically meaningful and positive way worthwhile? What about an amazing musician producing amazing music in an utterly apolitical, neutral, powerless way?)

do you not think the structure of music itself is not a statement? that the choice of using one instrument over the other, or one chord, or one scale versus another, is not a message in of itself?
I would agree that all of us, as music listeners and makers, need to acknowledge that these kinds of things /all/ have political meaning. But, saying that they have political meaning is not saying much at all ('X is a political message in itself', where X is nearly anything). The tricky bit is knowing exactly where that meaning lies, exactly what the message is.


the human voice and the words that it sings are just a serious of sounds
linked together through syntax. how is this any different than any other
musical sound or language?


an intense political or philosophical statement in mandarin is not going
to resonate with a listener unless they speak mandarin.


music is no different. the listener requires the cypher to decode the
meaning in music, and this cypher is acquired the same way we learn any
new language, musical or otherwise.

in essence it gets down to 'getting it.' get it?

sound signifies. just like a stop sign that doesn't need the word 'stop'
written on it. just like a cross or a swastika. just like a middle finger.
the sound of sound signifies. you don't need words. sounds are words.
words are sounds.

I don't think this is quite right, though. Talking about music as if it were language, as if it encapsulated meaning in a language-like way is very tempting, but I think it can also cut music off at the legs. There are any number of things that are "listening to music", there are any number of ways we can hash out what goes on between me and a piece of music. One of them is with meaning-talk, signifier-talk, but this is certainly not the only one.
What other ways can we talk about music besides using terms like 'messages' and 'meaning'? In what ways can music be (can we /make music that is/) politically powerful without it's having a message, a meaning, a cypher of any kind. Can we imagine a piece of music that is incredibly powerful, politically or otherwise, but one that, when we run it through the meaning-talk-machine, when we try to figure out it's cypher, it only comes out the other side a grey pool of mush, nothing interesting at all?
We can talk about Penderecki's Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima as having meaning like this, we can discuss the cypher that was used, and point to this and that as if we were teaching the names of objects to a child. But it seems like even once we've talked it into the ground, we've only touched the tiniest bit of what is actually there, and what is actually valuable about it. If the discussion stopped there, wouldn't we be selling it short?


Sound /does/ signify, but I think it does other things too.

Also, with regard to meaning and music, the following is very worth reading:
I suppose, rather than parrot a bunch of ideas that were better stated elsewhere, the following is worth reading:
http://www.atypedigital.com/~fscthaw/texts/DifferencesRahn.pdf



- Scott Carver


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