Below is a prompt from a course I took with Dr. Joanna Demers on ecology and music. For me, it brought forth some ideas worth sharing. Prompt: In his article on the music of John Luther Adams and strong environmentalism, Mitchell Morris contrasts Adams’ compositional style (which he regards as sympathetic with ecological concerns such as Deep Ecology) with qualities often found in Modernist composition. Drawing on either of the JL Adams’ pieces that Morris discusses, please first summarize what (according to Morris) distinguishes Adams’ approach as ecological, as opposed to subjective. Then, assess the validity of Morris’ methodology: is there merit to Morris’ valorization of JL Adams’ music (as opposed to twentieth-century modernist composition)? Or, should he and we focus our attention not on European and North American art music, but rather on the music of peoples whose history and culture are actually rooted in the Arctic (or wherever a case study is situated)?
Mitchell Morris’s article “Ecotopian Sounds; or the Music of John Luther Adams and Strong Environmentalism” offers a definition of ecological music practice through an analysis of the so-called “Green” composer John Luther Adams. Morris asks “what would it mean to be a Green composer?” (131), which serves as the article’s axis of inquiry. The logical assumptions within this one phrase are intriguing (some of which Morris seems aware of), and this paper traces some of Morris’s universalizing claims that foreclose the possibility of transforming the ecological paradigm. As the prompt for this occasion suggests, Morris attaches Adams to a conception of ecology in terms of “objective” versus “subjective” musical materials. This theoretical argument occurs most explicitly on pages 134-137 (a case study of Adams’s Dream In White on White), where Morris suggests that the musically “subjective” emerges from/as traditional classical music behaviors (“melody”, “harmonic progression”, “arpeggiation”; “icti”, to borrow from Morris). A reason isn’t precisely given for why these musical behaviors are conceptually subjective, but his discussion of timbre suggests the latent histories embedded in sound are the cause: according to Morris, certain timbres (in the case of classical harp but – incongruously – not in the case of violins or cellos) contain a historical connotation which evokes the concept of human subjectivity. Conversely (and perhaps too simplistically), Morris argues that what can be read as the musically “objective” thwarts these aforementioned behavioral expectations; eluding an empathetic, subjective response, and suggesting, through its negation, non-human entities or non-living objects (i.e. landscapes, inanimate “natural” object). Although he spends time discussing the historical precedent for the “ecotopian” and Deep Ecology (132-134) and a brief moment detailing the historical threads embedded in harp timbre (135), Morris does not diachronically argue how subjectivity has been mapped to the musical behaviors considered, perhaps because this might require an expansive, interdisciplinary abstraction (involving Enlightenment germinations of subjectivity and their blossoming in the Romantic and Modernist periods of classical music) that would – in a clarifying way – highlight the contingency of his argument. In this sense, Morris remains uncritical of the initial apparatus that directs his analysis: classical music epistemology itself. A meta-critical analysis like this would benefit the argument, as the “objective/subjective” formation essentially arises from two culturally Western claims: that ecology can be collapsed to the historical dualism of “human/nature”, and that musical behaviors are to be read in (or in contrast to) the terms “melodies”, “progressions”, etc. As such, Morris’s definition of the “Green” composer does not analytically problematize normative awareness of human’s ecological standing (an important aim in Deep Ecology), and can only be recognized within and through classical composition’s particular musical discursiveness. These contingencies are suggested at the end of the article on page 140 (“To be sure, this definition is dependent on the peculiar characteristics of North American culture. No doubt a Green composer in Europe, Asia, or Latin America would require a different profile”), but Morris does not seem to read this as an indictment. This quote suggests that Morris has not truly completed the task of defining a “Green” composer in the abstract. Instead, he has described, through case study, an analysis of John Luther Adams’s musical themes as they could be understood by a traditional awareness of “ecology”. In some sense, the axial question’s conceptual task is confused, because it requires: a) defining what is meant by “Green”, a concept that arises from a global, political (in)attention to ecology; and b) defining what is meant by “composer”, a term that categorically delimits the discussion to the realm of classical music (the musical genre that conceptualized the term), which is a global music genre but cannot account for the musical behaviors of the globe. By only defining Adams’s particular case within classical music (as opposed to defining a framework to observe ecological thought as it appears in global music-making), Morris forecloses any possibility of radical transformation to the “human/nature” opposition. Perhaps a more developed inquiry into the history of Adams’s sonic palette would lead to questioning the epistemological limits imposed by Western culture, namely “subject/object” dualism, and to analysis that could offer an abstraction of “Green” music that is more globally applicable and transformative. This historical aversion continues with Morris’s account of Earth and the Great Weather (a piece for voices and instruments), where he makes a more linguistic argument. Adams’s libretto employs multiple languages: Inupiaq, Gwich’in (two Indigenous languages), English, and Latin; juxtaposing different (mis)translations of words traditionally tied the Western concept of “nature”. In Morris’s commentary, he argues that “[t]hey are juxtaposed in such a way, however, that they do not seem to enter into any kind of conflict, but reflect across each other while remaining separate” (Morris 138) and that “[e]ach language can be understood first of all to make a kind of clearing within which the world manifests itself. In its creation of clearings, each language performs in a strongly “musical” way, for such sonic domains as timbre, attack, and quantity are more important to the creation of conceptual space than are grammatical relations” (140). Although this offers a convenient framework for Morris’s argument about Indigenous people and ecology, this analysis relies upon an autonomous art fantasy that is native to Western aesthetics, which frequently and insidiously overdetermines the readings of classical music pieces as constructing utopic realms that transcend (by erasing) history. What needs to be proven for Morris’s argument is the following: how is it that these languages have shed their histories and now become purely “sonic domains”, when previously the timbre of the harp recalls “a long tradition of heavily coloristic , even onomatopoeic effects in program music, opera, and ballet” (Morris 135)? On a structural level, these four languages stand in for axiological processes of violence (a simplistic summary of colonialism), whether their speakers were almost eradicated (in the case of the Inupiat and Na Dene people) or whether the languages are used to collapse cultural difference (Latin in a historical and biological sense, and English as the newer, global “language of business”). Adams’s piece, then, demands a more radical analysis of our current globalized ecology, an ecology that decimates Indigenous people (the communities Morris suggests we look to for ecological answers) and any community that has not (or does not) adhere to the “master code” of the West. In the vein of conceptualizing Indigenous people as “ecological saviors”, Morris slips an aside within the piece that warrants further thought: “Many activists continue to see such “pre-modern” indigenous peoples as possessing the ecological or spiritual stances most appropriate for their particular geography; that is, each indigenous people possessed a vision of their place in the world that was appropriate to their location, and this correctly understood their position in the local order (That this is a rearticulation of the ideal of a cosmic order should be obvious)” (133). It is worth noting that Morris brings up this concept of a cosmic order a few times, referencing “Great Chains of Being” towards the beginning of the article (129). Perhaps it is the insistence upon there being a “cosmic order” – a theodicean “master code” evading rigorous interrogation – that produces the frustrating logical assumptions that occur in the writing. Put simply: it is not that Indigenous people knew/know best. It is that they never claimed to know best through the process of decimating, colonizing, and accumulating everyone and everything on the planet. In contradistinction to venerating a group of people whose culture offers a convenient replacement to the West’s “cosmic order”, we might develop an abandonment of universal codes as defined by one monolithic culture, and turn towards globally applicable abstractions (with respect to ecology, culture, ethics, and society) formed through rhizomatic and contingent arguments, dissolving the logics of our destructive present. Work Cited: Morris, Mitchell. “Ecotopian Sounds; or the Music of John Luther Adams and Strong Environmentalism”. Crosscurrents and counterpoints: Offerings in Honor of Begnt Hambræus at 70, 1998, Göteborg, Sweden.
0 Comments
Tamzin Elliott and I are starting a talk show (read "hot boys" talk show). Watch us at twitch.tv/hautboistalkshow.
Dreams unify the visceral and the emotional. They are a visible representation of an invisible, internal world. A dream is a constant feedback loop: what I feel is what I see is what I feel is what I see…
In my dreams, I see my late grandmother — and in equal measure, I feel her. She embraces me, a familiar warmth, and welcomes me into her home. She guides me to a golden room, late afternoon seeping in through the windows. She feeds me five candies from a red glass jar, a jar that never seems to empty, perennially full. And when she turns her back, I snatch another handful. She would never deny a request for more, but by some odd fear I decide to hide the second helping. Of course, these dreams are about my grandmother, but in another way they are about grief. These dreams are grief. My work in music mirrors my understanding of dreams. I am searching for surreal sonic phenomena; for sounds I can trust to translate large amounts of visceral and emotional information, a sensation with enough depth to convey a whole world. My search is informed by academic musical training, but I am not interested in proving my musical pedigree through sound. And although dreams may suggest a story, I do not aim to relate a precise narrative per se. I want to create a dream, a music that fearfully borders lived experience, a music with mysterious skin so warm I am convinced it is alive, a music perennially full of something strange and vital. And when I wake up from it, I hope I can snatch another handful of the feeling before it fades. An hour-long mistake, Bryce Dessner’s Triptych (Eyes of One on Another) staged a confused audio-visual amalgam, a faux interrogation of infamous and controversial artist Robert Mapplethorpe.
Weakly criticizing the racist elements while still defending the work’s artistry, there was little evidence of Dessner’s critical engagement with the source material, and ultimately his music was eclipsed by the work of his own collaborators. The large production team consisted of Dessner as composer, librettist Korde Arrington Tuttle (who synthesized poetry from Patti Smith, Rhea F. Miller, and Essex Hemphill), vocal soloists Alicia Hall Moran and Isaiah Robinson (both black singers), Roomful of Teeth, ten LA Phil instrumentalists, and a young actor – a black male “voyeur” who sat on stage and watched the piece with mild interest; his presence posed the painfully obvious meta-question: who is watching whom? Borrowing from Mapplethorpe’s classical sensibilities, Dessner’s piece featured swarms of polyphonic vocal writing and a tendency towards constant motoric rhythms in the instrumentals (think post-minimal madrigals, or Reich meets Renaissance). The piece also employed Roomful of Teeth’s uncommon vocal techniques, namely throat singing, yodeling, belting, and vocal fry. These classically taboo vocalizations read as a nod to Mapplethorpe’s own taboo practices, but the comparison is cheap. The 8-part choir has committed these vocal sins since the beginning of their career, and the transgressive bite has weakened with time. Triptych’s memorable moments came from the craft of the other artists involved in the project. The still-shocking photographs uncomfortably electrified the performance, each projected image displaying Mapplethorpe’s racial blind spots in stark focus. Tuttle’s shrewd libretto balanced between skepticism and scorn, the best lines coming from excerpts of Hemphill poetry: “is the passion mutual or is one wary of the other…does fear haunt the edges of the photographs?”. And I will not soon forget the piercing solo vocals of tenor Isaiah Robinson, ending the piece with a belted vocal run that plunged down from the spine-tingling stratosphere of his range. When I first heard the LA Phil would be producing Dessner’s Mapplethorpe project, it seemed unclear why this classical music institution would champion a white composer’s response to a white visual artist’s fetishized depictions of gay black men. Could this composer contribute to the dialogue around Mapplethorpe in any meaningful way? It seemed that Dessner, in trying to reckon with these racial criticisms, assembled a team of black artists to affirm his final product. But this decision to recruit (even display) black talent in service of Dessner’s success was comparable to Mapplethorpe’s treatment of black people as props, as material. Of course, all the artists involved chose to lend their craft to the project, just like Mapplethorpe’s willing models; but in both cases, the art ultimately privileges the white artist’s desire above any of his collaborators. And at every turn – musically, visually, or dramatically – Dessner seemed to take pleasure in entertaining the ambiguous merits of Mapplethorpe’s work, regarding the beauty before mentioning the racism behind it. The cultural stakes of such an ambivalent position are low for high-art content creators like Dessner; but whether in new classical music or elsewhere, American culture would stand to benefit from privileged people taking clearer, more convincing political stances. Then, at least, we could judge their naked intentions. |
BLOGWhatever comes to mind. |