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Aug 16View SourceRe-mind-ing us of Hitler's (dramatic) in-spir-ation.
"Why is the spirituality of the musician in "High" cultures so often a low-down spirituality?
In India, for example, the musician belongs to a caste so low it hovers on the verge of untouchability. This lowness relates, in popular attitudes, to the musician's invariable use of forbidden intoxicants.
In Ireland the musician shared the same Indo-European reputation for lowness. The bards or poets ranked with aristocrats and even royalty, but musicians were merely the servants of the bards. In Dumezil's tripartite structure of Indo-European society, as reflected in Ireland, music seems to occupy an ambiguous fourth zone, symbolized by the fourth province of Munster, the "south". Music is thus associated with "dark" druidism, sexual license, gluttony, nomadry and other outsider phenomena.
In all these cases the music itself represents the highest spirituality of the culture. Music itself being "bodiless" and metalinguistic (or metasemantic) is always (metaphorically or actually) the supreme expression of pure imagination as vehicle for the spirit. The lowness of the musician is connected to the perceived danger of music, its ambiguity, its elusive quality, its manifestation as lowness as well as highness -- as pleasure.
Music as pleasure is not connected to the mind (or purified elements of spirit) but to the body. Music rises from the (inarticulate) body and is received by the body (as vibration, as sexuality). Chant is music which sublimates the body.
Paradox: -- that which is "holy" is "forbidden" As Bataille points out, sanctity and transgression both arise from the fracturing of the "order of intimacy", the separation of the "human" from "nature". The "original" expression of this violent break is undoubtedly musical. Subsequent to this "first" expression, a further separation begins to appear: -- the musician remains involved in the "violence" of the break with the intimate order in a special way, and so is seen as an uncanny person (like the witch, or the metallurgist).
The musician emerges as a specialist within a still non-hierarchic society of hunter/gatherers, and the musician begins to take on the sign of the taboo to the extent that the tribe's undivided culture or "collective self" is affronted by this separation or transformation. The undivided culture (like the Mbutu) knows no "musician" in this sense, but only music. As division, and then hierarchy, begin to appear in society, the position of the musician becomes problematic. Like "primitive" society, these hierarchic "traditional" societies also wish to preserve something unbroken at the heart of their culture. If society is "many", culture will preserve a counter-balancing cohesiveness which is the sign of the original sacred order of intimacy, prolonged into the deepest spiritual meanings of the society, and thus preserved. So much for music -- but what about the musician?
Hierarchic society permits itself to remain relatively undivided by sacralizing the specializations. Music, inasmuch as it is bodiless, can be the sign of the upper caste (its "spirituality") -- but inasmuch as music arises from the body (it is sublimed -- it "rises"), the musician (originator/origin of the music) must be symbolized by the body and hence must be "low". Music is spiritual -- the musician is corporeal. The spirituality of the musician is low but also ambiguous in its production of highness. (Drugs substitute for the priest's ritual highness to make the musician high enough to produce aesthetic highness.)
The musician is not just low but uncanny -- not just low but "outside". The power of the musician in society is like the power of the magician -- the excluded shaman -- in its relation to wildness. And yet it is precisely these hierarchic societies which create "seamless" cultures -- including music. This is true even after the break -- in the western tradition -- between the "oneness" of melody and the "doubleness" of harmony.
The ambiguity of music allows it to drift between high and low and yet remain undivided. This is "tradition". It includes the subversive by excluding the musician (and the artist generally) and yet granting them power.
Thus for example the lowly musician Tansen attained the equivalent of aristocratic status in the art-intoxicated Mughal court; and Zeami (the great dramatist of the Noh theater of Japan, a form of opera), although he belonged to the untouchable caste of actors and musicians, rose to great heights of refinement because the Shogun fell in love with him when he was 13; to the Court's horror, the Shogun shared food with Zeami and granted courtly status to the Noh.
For the musician the power of inspiration can be transmuted into the power of power. Consider for example the Turkish Janisseries, the Ottoman Imperial Guard, who all belonged to the heterodox (wine-drinking) Bektashi Sufi Order, and who invented military marching bands. Judging by European accounts of Janissery bands, which always speak of the sheer terror they induced, these musicians discovered a kind of psychological warfare which certainly bestowed prestige on this very ambiguous group, made up of slaves of the Sultan.
Traditional music always remains satisfactory (even when not "inspired") because it remains unbroken -- both the high tradition and the low are the same "thing". Indian brass bands -- Mozart -- the same universe. In Mozart's own character (reflected in his "servant" characters like Leparello) we again discern the figure of the outsider, the gypsy-wunderkind, the toy of aristocrats, with a strong link to the low culture of beer-gardens and peasant clog-dances, and a fondness for bohemian excess.
The musician is a kind of "grotesque" -- disobedient servant, drunk, nomadic, brilliant. For the musician the perfect moment is that of the festival, the world turned upside down, the saturnalia, when servants and masters change places for a day. The festival is nothing without the musician, who presides over the momentary reversal -- and thus the reconciliation -- of all separated functions and forces in traditional society. Music is the perfect sign of the festal, and thereby of the "material bodily principle" celebrated by Bakhtin. In the intoxication of conviviality in the carneval, music emerges as a kind of utopian structure or shaping force -- music becomes the very "order of intimacy".
Next morning, however, the broken order resumes its sway. Dialectics alone (if not "History") demonstrate that undivided culture is not an unmixed "good", in that it rests on a divided society. Where hierarchy has not appeared there is no music separate from the rest of experience. Once music becomes a category (along with the categorization of society), it has already begun to be alienated -- hence the appearance of the specialist, the musician, and the taboo on the musician.
Since it is impossible to tell whether the musician is sacred or profane (this being the perceived nature of the social split) this taboo serves to fill up the crack (and preserve the "unbrokenness" of tradition) by considering the musician as both sacred and profane. In effect the hierarchical society metes out punishments to all castes/classes for their shared guilt in the violation of the order of intimacy. Priests and kings are surrounded by taboos -- chastity, or the sacrifice of the (vegetal) king, etc. The artist's punishment is to be a kind of outcaste paradoxically attached to the highest functions in society. [Note that the poet is not an "artist" in this sense and can retain caste because poetry is logos, akin to revelation. Poetry pertains to the "aristocratic" in traditional societies (e.g. Ireland). Interestingly the modern world has reversed this polarity in terms of money, so that the "low-caste" painter and musician are now wealthy and thus "higher" than the unrewarded poet.]
The "injustice" of the categorization of music is its separation from "the tribe", the whole people, including each and every individual. For inasmuch as the musician is excluded, music is excluded, inaccessible. But this injustice does not become apparent until the separations and alienations within society itself become so exacerbated and exaggerated that a split is perceived in culture. High and low are now out of touch -- no reciprocity. The aristos never hear the music of the folk, and vice versa. Reciprocity of high and low traditions ceases -- and thus cross-fertilization and cultural renewal within the "unbroken" tradition.
In the western world this exacerbation of separation occurs roughly with industrialization and commodity capitalism -- but it has "pre-echoes" in the cultural sphere. Bach adapted a "rational" mathematical form of well-temperedness over the older more "organic" systems of tuning. In a subtle sense a break has occurred within the unbroken tradition -- others will follow. Powerful "inspiration" is released by this "break with tradition", titanic genius, touched to some extent with morbidity.
For the "first time" so to speak the question arises: -- whether one says yes or no to life itself. Bach's anguished spirituality (the "paranoia" of the Pietist gambling on Faith alone) was sometimes resolved with a "romantic" effusion of darkness. These impulses are "revolutionary" in respect to a tradition which suffers almost-unbearable contradictions. Their very nay-saying opens up the possibility of a whole new "yes". Despite its tremendous inner tension, Bach's music is "healing" because he had to heal himself in order to create it in the first place. Healing -- but not un-wounded. Bach as wounded healer.
It's not surprising that people preferred Telemann. Telemann was also a genius -- as in his "Water Music" -- but his genius remained at home within the unbroken tradition. If Bach is the first modern, he is the last ancient. If Bach is healing, Telemann is healed, already whole. His yes is the unspoken yes of sacred custom -- naturally, of course, one has never thought otherwise. Telemann is still -- supremely -- our servant. This kind of "health" is exemplified in only a few composers after Telemann -- Mendelsohn, for instance. One might call it "Pindaric", and one might defend it even against "intelligence".
The bohemian life of the modern artist, so "alienated from society", is nothing but the old low-down spirituality of the musician and artisan castes, recontextualized in an economy of commodities. Baudelaire (as Benjamin argued) had no economic function in the 19th century society -- his low-down spirituality turned inward and became self-destructive, because it had lost its functionality in the social. Villon was just as much a bohemian, but at least he still had a role in the economy -- as a thief! The artist's privilege -- to be drunk, to be insouciant -- has now become the artist's curse. The artist is no longer a servant -- refuses to serve -- except as unacknowledged legislator. As revolutionary. The artist now claims, like Beethoven, either a vanguard position, or -- like Baudelaire -- complete exile. The musician no longer accepts low caste, but must be either Brahmin or untouchable.
Wagner -- and Nietzsche, when he was propagandizing for Wagner -- conceived of a musical revolution against the broken order in the cause of a new and higher (conscious) form of the order of intimacy: -- integral Dionysian culture viewed as the revolutionary goal of romanticism. The outsider as king. Opera is the utopia of music (as Charles Fourier also realized). In opera music appropriates the logos and thus challenges revelation's monopoly on meaning.
If opera failed as revolution -- as Nietzsche came to realize -- it was because the audience had refused to go away. The opera of Wagner or Fourier can only succeed as the social if it becomes the social -- by eliminating the category of art, of music, as anything separate from life. The audience must become the opera. Instead -- the opera became . . . just another commodity. A public ritual celebrating post-sacred social values of consumption and sentiment -- the sacralization of the secular. A step along the road to the spectacle.
The commodification of music measures precisely the failure of the romantic revolution of music -- its mummification in the repertoire, the Canon -- the recuperation of its dissidence as the rhetoric of liberalism, "culture and taste". Wave after wave of the "avant-garde" attempted to transcend civilization -- a process which is only now coming to an end in the apotheosis of commodification, its "final ecstasy."
To argue that music itself, like language, is a form of alienation, however, would seem to demand an "impossible" return to a Paleolithic that is nearly pre-"human". But perhaps the stone Age is not somewhere else, distant and nearly inaccessible, but rather (in some sense) present. Perhaps we shall experience not a return to the Stone Age, but a return of the Stone Age (symbolized, in fact, by the very discovery of the Paleolithic, which occurred only recently). A few decades ago civilized ears literally could not hear "primitive" music except as noise; Europeans could not even hear the non-harmonic traditional classical music of India or China except as meaningless rubbish. The same held true for Paleolithic art, for instance -- no one noticed the cave paintings till the late 19th century, even though they'd been "discovered" many times already.
Civilization was defined by rational consciousness, rationality was defined as civilized consciousness -- outside this totality only chaos and sheer unintelligibility could exist. But now things have changed -- suddenly, just as the "primitive" and the "traditional" seem on the verge of disappearance, we can hear them. How? Why?
Is there actually a problem with the commodification of music? Why should we assume an "elitist" position now, even as new technology makes possible a "mass" participation in music through the virtual infinity of choice, and the "electric democracy" of musical synthesis? Why complain about the degradation of the aura of the "work of art" in the age of mechanical reproduction, as if art could or should still be defended as a category of high value?
But it's not "Western Civilization" we're defending here, and it's not the sanctity of aesthetic production either. We maintain that participation in the commodity can only amount to a commodification of participation, a simulation of aesthetic democracy. A higher synthesis of the Old Con, promising "The Real Thing now" but delivering only another betrayal of hope. The problem of music remains the same problem -- that of alienation, of the separation of consumers from producers. Despite positive possibilities brought into being by the sheer multiplication of resources made accessible through reproduction technology, the overwhelming complex of alienation outweighs all subversive counterforces working for utopian ends.
As we reach out to touch music it recedes from our grasp like a mirage. Everywhere, in every restaurant, shop, public space, we undergo the "noise pollution" of music -- its very ubiquity measures our impotence, our lack of participation, of "choice". And what music! A venal and venial counterfeit of all the "revolutionary" music of the past, the throbbing sexualized music that once sounded like the death knell of Western Civilization, now becomes the sonic wallpaper hiding a facade of cracks, rifts, absences, fears, the anodyne for despair and anomie -- elevator music, waiting room music, pulsing to the 4/4 beat, the old "square" rhythm of European rationalism, flavored with a homeopathic tinge of African heat or Asian spirituality -- the utopian trace -- memories of youth betrayed and transformed into the aural equivalent of Prozac and Colt 45.
And still each new generation of youth claims this "revolution" as its own, adding or subtracting a note or beat here or there, pushing the "transgressive" envelope a bit further, and calling it "new music" -- and each generation in turn becomes simply a statistical mass of consumersbusily creating the airport music of its own future, mourning the "sell-outs", wondering what went wrong.
Western classical music has become the sign of bourgeois power -- but it is an empty sign inasmuch as its period of primary production is over. There are no more symphonies to be written in C major.
Music reminds us of one of those cinematic-vampire-victims, already so drained of life as to be almost one of the Undead -- shall we abandon her?
Music is the most border-permeating of all arts -- perhaps not the "universal
language", but only because it is in fact not a language at all, unless perhaps
a "language of the birds". The "universal" appeal of music lies in its direct
link to utopian emotion, or desire, and beyond that to the utopian imagination.
By its interpenetration of time and pleasure, music expresses and evokes a
"perfect" time (purged of boredom and fear) and "perfect" pleasure (purged of
all regret). Music is bodiless, yet it is from the body and it is for the body
-- and this too makes it utopian in nature. For utopia is "no place", and yet
utopia concerns the body above all.
As a "complete art-work" the opera will involve music and words, dance, painting, poetry -- in a system based on "analogies" or occult correspondences between the senses and their objects. For instance, the 12 tones in music correspond to the 12 Passions (desires or emotions), the 12 colors, and the 12 basic Series of the Phalanx or utopian community, etc.
By orchestrating these correspondences, Harmonian operas will far exceed the paltry music-dramas of Civilization in beauty, luxury, inspiration, not to mention sheer scope. They will utilize the hieroglyphic science of Harmonian art to provide education, propaganda, entertainment, artistic transcendence, and erotic fulfillment -- all at once. Sound, sight, intellect, all the senses will respond to the complex multi-dimensional emblems of the opera, made up of words and music, reason and emotion, and perhaps even touch and smell.
From our point of view we can now say that the music is ours -- not someone else's -- not the musician's, not the record company's, not the radio station's, not the shopkeeper's, not the MUZAK company's not the devil's -- but ours.
Music will never lose its holy unholiness; it will always contain the trace of the violence of sacrifice. How then could the "blues" ever come to an end -- that orgone indigo utopian melancholy caress of sound, that little-bit-too-much, that difference? The low caste of the musician will of course be dissolved in utopia -- but somehow a certain untouchability will linger, a certain dandyism, a pride. The one tragedy that this Harmonian Blues will never lament is the loss of the blues of itself, its appropriation, its alienation, its betrayal, its demonic possession. This is the "utopian minimum", the money-back guarantee, the sine qua non -- the music is ours."
[Hakim Bey, The Utopian Blues] http://www.gyw.com/hakimbey/utoBlues.html
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