New Music, New Age
warning: overly stuffy and didactic post follows. end warning.
Not sure if I agree with a long-gone post of Luke's where he's talking about how we attempt to relearn the rules of engagement when we come across new music. My experience has always been that initial encounters are a sort of twisted battle between my old rules and the music's stern and staunch seeming disavowal of those. So you try and contort your interpretation of the music to fit your natural schema: the homogenizing logic ultimately does violence to the other, then, to hop into bed with Adorno for a moment. So when I heard Derek Bailey's "Ballads" my initial reactions are to the melodic flutters which occasionally surface from the tangle of notes Derek wrenches from his guitar: I don't accept that this music, the lulls and noises, the cacophony sits in tow with the euphony, that this music has it's own logic. Now I'm hopping back out of bed because Theodore's ashtray heart has put me off him: I'm not meant to talk about the metaphysical politics of difference here: that is, I didn't turn off Unknown Pleasures (pulled from its sleeve in angry haste, earlier) to come in here and speak about (urgh) Adorno. Luke's right in that we have to learn how to read other musics but I don't think it's our initial response to bend: its not mine.
All politics is about change. All music is about change. The geneaology of a sociological criticism is trying to uncover a music's particularity through charting the differences in the sweep of the narrative. How then are we to characterise the politics of transition, then? The politics of switching to reading a different music: what is up for grabs? That is the precise question: intra-genre reading of music is about change and so is inter-genre reading but what is charted between the two are the 'rules of the game': what is at stake is the very fabric of interpretation. Not the inaugaration of the Human Rights Act or the Welsh, Scottish, Irish Assemblies but the 'thrill of the real' politics of velvet revolutions, denazification of West Germany, de-Apartheid-isation of South Africa. And we're not to speak of 'difference' when we're learning how to switch between modes of reading music because that would mean what are being contested then are means not ends: this is wrong: there may be no difference: the problem of teleology is one to avoid.
A thin community is one in which there are minimal shared values, thick community where there are a great deal of shared values. Music, loosely banded, is a thin community. Whereas specific genres, to some extent, are thick communities. Learning how to read other music requires just a thin community, in fact requires the non-existence of an all-encompassing thick community so as not to stop all argument whatsoever. The journey discerning thin from thick: of learning the other: the purpose of me listening to your tape of surly improv. Thank you. *close 'boring nonsense' tag here*
