beau's blog

Okkyung Lee and John Butcher played together at Issue Project Room back in 2009. To celebrate Lee’s upcoming residency, Issue has posted one of that evening’s sets along with my commentary to the Free Music Archive. That show was a bit of a touchstone for me; it woke me up to a tension between the frenetic physicality of a lot of improvisation and the need to engage that physicality with musical structures that are internally differentiated and act on our memory. This issue had been lurking in the background of my own work for some time, but seeing Lee and Butcher play together really solidified it as a matter of great importance.

“Progress” always implies a historical past relative to which it is possible to evaluate the future. That is, everything which is historically “progressive” is necessarily antecedent. (I’ve been thinking recently about Ligeti—who, it seems to me, went to great pains to position his music as “after” the music of his forebears and peers.) The strategy of positioning a work as historically progressive manifests not just in supporting documents such as interviews, liner notes, and other publications, but is telegraphed by the form of the work itself.

The clearest way to signal a relationship to historical precedent is the appropriation of materials and techniques. Simple appropriation, though, opens one to accusations of unoriginality or vulgar nostalgia. It is not enough to simply be aligned with the past; the past must also be distanced.

There are at least two common tactics for achieving this distance. The first is to break the appropriated element, rendering it non-functional. That is, recognizability is retained, but perceptual and cognitive effects are interfered with. The second is to dislocate the element, removing it from its cultural context and placing it within a network of symbols foreign to its originary time and place.

Rhetorically, these tactics often effect foreclosure on the historical trajectory of the appropriated element. The obverse of the progressiveness of the new is the naivete of the old.

Dislocation is on evidence in Ligeti’s appropriation of African rhythmic devices in his piano concerto, and both dislocation and breakage are key to the “blurring” of romantic flourishes into indistinct gestural clouds in his second string quartet. Outside of music, Hal Foster’s The Return of the Real describes a paradigmatic case of strategic and tactical distancing in his account of “simulationist” appropriation of abstract impressionist techniques. This particular game of historical oneupmanship continues to this day, as discussed in Tom Moody’s critique of digital abstract painting.

Just got home from an interesting concert by the SEM Ensemble and Ostravská Banda at Zankel Hall. Several of the pieces tonight (and numerous others I’ve heard in New York in the past couple of years) evoke some notion of process or mechanism without actually being algorithmic. Mechanism or “process” (in very deliberate scare quotes) is signified by devices like inexact repetition (thematic echoing) and hocketing. “Process” is recognizable in these techniques because they force performers to embody mechanistic qualities—interchangeability, synchronization, total absorption into the ensemble machine.

The audience is led to regard mechanical movement (or a facsimile thereof) as an aesthetic object. In so doing we become observers, affirming our separateness from the movement itself and confirming our essential humanity. This works whether or not one deems the movement “beautiful”—everybody gets to feel good, so long as there is a judgement.