in the hall of mirrors

Wandering the stacks

So: I am finally going through all the books, and then the papers, in my office.

My office is being moved soon – rather sooner than I'd expected: repeated insistence on a clear date on my part gave rise to a flurry of emails assuring me that it wouldn't happen until mid-September; but now of course some administrator somewhere has changed his mind.

Or perhaps not: another administrator, always obliquely unsympathetic to our department, may simply be rushing me. (She retires next year... as she, for some reason, pointed out to me in our discussion. We may be feeling similarly about this.)

But, given that I have a huge mess of books and papers – approximately 9 of those tall Billy bookcases? –

and, even more importantly, given that my professional tastes and goals have changed in the past fifteen years...

it is a good idea to cut back (not as much as the administrator hopes – perhaps 10-15% will go) and look through things.

***

This is, however, not merely a practical experience, but an existentially complex one.

In the 80s and early 90s, I was fascinated with many aspects of music and musicology, gender and theory and modernism, history and ideas and people and... oh, tons and tons of things.

This all solidified a bit across the upheavals of the 90s: it became a bit clearer what I was good at, what I'd never be good at, and most of all what I cared about. The general move from a fascination with complex systems to more existential concerns, partly as a result of AIDS, emotion, bodily experience, and an anxious realization that many complex systems have little to offer beyond their own complexity, made me feel as though I was leaving Castalia... and that I was right to do so.

Then the crash landing in Newcastle, after expulsion from Australia, left me with chaotic feelings of retreat and anomie – nothing that I had formerly found interesting seemed alive any more. Yes, of course, I should have been grateful for this job, but it was hard to experience that... and so many projects dissipated into thin air.

But lately even the Stäbler book has been finished!...

***

So, as I go through these books, many of them recall people, conferences, conversations, events... concerts, ideals, hopes...

I'm thankful for the shifts of the past two years: this would have been emotionally painful before those transformations.

Still, books raise many flashes of wistfulness, disappointment – gladness; missing certain people, recalling them happily or with annoyance. There are people who have simply vanished from the face of the planet, as far as I can tell – a difficult thing in an internet world, that makes one wonder.

And, strangely enough, some old ideas and projects are starting to seem interesting again... 

***

So, exactly which books shall I get rid of?

Many, many books on modernism. Some repeat what others say, but more cheesily, with terrible illustrations. Some are by composers – if I don't care much about the composer any more, and it's an incoherent personal tour of various thoughts, it's out. Many overviews of modernism, avant-garde, technique: some are better than others – the wonky ones are jettisoned.

Loony, wide-ranging babbling by composers, even good ones, is of limited appeal. Only the ones who can actually make a point and stay focused are worth keeping.

Look at all those Stravinsky books! Are they all really useful?... but ultimately I only got rid of one of them.

Darmstadt: a wide range of composers and ideas interest me. But hey, not all of them – this collection on Goeyvaerts will never be opened again. Slush pile for library.

***

I've always been impressed – probably too impressed – by General Theories of Everything. Antiquated ones can go (Toch, Zuckerkandl, etc.); ethnomusicological tours of all time periods and places, which are inevitably vague and cloudy; and a range of I-Know-A-Lot-About-Music-And-I Know-What-I-Like overviews of why the great is so great. Or why the great is good, in any case, or other nonsense like that. Too many silly people who were too impressed by bad translations of Hanslick.

It's slightly strange how many works on feminism and gender studies are on the shelves: did I really buy everything that was for sale at all those conferences in the 90s? Yes, of course, I'm known as part of the generation that championed gender studies, but... so many of them say exactly the same things. There are merely better and worse writers...

Anything on gay composers stays, but a lot of the purely feminist can go the library, especially if I don't care about any of the musicians being written about. That's easy.

***

How about really, really complicated theory, that I honestly don't understand any more?

The answer is obvious – anything that works on Kh sets can go; Perle's first book makes sense to me, his second might as well be in Early Assyrian. Too much trouble for one lifetime, it goes to the library.

And what about weird theory – such as the peculiar photocopied pages on Schat's tone clock that were sent out by a New Zealand composer, bound in with an impassioned, handwritten letter pleading that all musicians must take this theory seriously, or otherwise we would drift down the sinful paths of atonality?... (I see from her Wikipedia entry that she resigned from university teaching to join the Divine Light Mission. Well, modernism is next to craziness, we all know that.)

Am I keeping Wuorinen's Simple Composition just so that I can make fun of the title?... He is always rather cranky, as it happens. (Sure he's gay but who cares – and he was crazily abusive of Monk, whom I like.) Dump it (him).

And how about books by other individuals I have come to thoroughly dislike over the decades?... unless they're absolutely necessary, dump 'em. (And no I'm not naming names here. Besides, you almost certainly can imagine the top five, or bottom five perhaps, of the nastiest musicologists in the Anglophone world... since the 90s there has been a great resurgence of unpleasantness in our profession. Some people think that is because these people are more right than others... they will have a bad time in a Buddhist hell, I think.)

***

Who ever thought Penetrating Wagner's Ring was a good title for a collection of articles?... I've got keep that one I guess. If only because no one will otherwise believe that the book exists.

***

I cannot believe how much I have spent on books I don't much like... oh well.

Did you ever fantasize about getting back all the money you've wasted in your life? Falling for embarrassing sales pitches: that car... yes I know, I've read my Adorno, we live in Late Capitalism.

***

Much is done. Much left to do.

Yet this doesn't create depression or anxiety: a surprising number of ideas actually look interesting – as though I could get back into them.

We'll see how the move itself goes – but the conceptual world of this move isn't such a bad one...

And it's nice to clear things out.

Finally.

Chaos, visions, flights: Adventures

[A program essay I wrote – on a typewriter, during lunch hours at Mariedi Anders Artists Management, or perhaps when I was supposed to be working for her – about György Ligeti's Aventures/Nouvelles aventures when they were performed by the Berkeley Stage in California sometime between 1980 and 1984. I wrote a lot of program notes in those years, but this was my favorite; and I tripped over this old, hard-copy document, and thought it would be nice to put it into the computer....]

“I was asked for a work that would use the resources of an opera house, and so began a kind of opera with the title ‘Kylwiria.’ ‘Kylwiria’ was an imaginary land of my childhood, a sort of daydream, my private mythology. The first ideas of ‘Kylwiria’ were like Aventures: no clear progression of action and a concept-less, purely emotional text. It became clear in studying the sketches for ‘Kylwiria’ that the world of Aventures was closed, and could not be re-entered; that for a full-length work, performance as a scaffolding for emotions, characters and situations was unpardonable.” – György Ligeti

Though Aventures seems analogous to much of the avant-garde music theater of its time, its source is closer to that ‘concept-less’ universe wherein we find our dreams and flights of imagination. Unlike Berio, Ligeti used new techniques without resorting to traditional structures; and unlike Cage or Bussotti, he exploded the dull event/pause/event pattern of guided improvisation. In a remarkable burst of imagination, Ligeti managed in his first dramatic venture to surpass determinism, structure and tedium in one bound.

Some productions have staged Aventures in ways contrary to the published ‘libretto’; the most famous created an excuse for focused action by trapping four people in a room that they apparently could not leave. Such concepts actually sanitize and misrepresent the work, reducing it to a ‘post-cultural’ tragic gesture in the style of Beckett. Aventures is instead situated in a new universe, where fragments of emotion, gesture and sound coalesce into a vivid experiment in chaos. The point is precisely that there is no point to be expressed in the work, but only the work itself. It is experiential, present, real; it drags us laughing and screaming into a place where joy, dread, ecstasy and hysteria are interchangeable playing pieces, rather than traps for dramatic ideas. A production of the work according to its ‘libretto’ (actually an extremely complex scenario) should be an Artaudian experience of dramatic passions, in theory if not in style.

Aventures should not be mistaken for a collage; the material has no intrinsic meaning, and is not juxtaposed for purposes of comparison. Instead, the purpose of rapid change here is the constant catapulting of the hearer into a series of moments so intense and differentiated that he has no time to recover and withdraw from them. The constant illusion of meaning has the effect of intensifying the frustration, and resultant humor, of non-comprehension; the result resembles an impassioned movie in an unknown language that has been cut and spliced indiscriminately until the story has vanished, and only its intensely colored moments remain.

The sound materials include a vast range of phonemes and unusual instrument usages, intersecting with free variations on chromatic and pseudo-serial pitch collections. Simultaneities are generally in the close clusters dear to Ligeti; melodic and contrapuntal sections focus on the ‘impure octaves’ (Pousseur’s phrase) that are used to create such tension in modern music from Webern to the present. Constant use of the largest possible intervals without harmonic stability keeps the splintered pitch sets in an intense sensual focus.

Ligeti’s 1960 article ‘Metamorphoses of Musical Form’ is a carefully considered study of avant-garde problems of the time; in attacking the ‘party line’ and severely criticizing serialism, he managed an intelligent defense of the composer’s freedom. One result of those ideas was this release of humorous imagination under pressure, from precise sound and predetermined structures into passionate gesture and chaotic form. The only works by the composer that are at all comparable to Aventures and its twin Nouvelles aventures – the Cello Concerto and the operatic Le grand macabre – are comparatively traditional in structure and subdued in expression. In fact, no other work by the composer gets near to the intense chaos of this work; Ligeti’s other achievements are chiefly related to the movement inward, with music as meditation and the filling of sound space. To many audience members, Ligeti may be known as the composer of music for much of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 and The Shining; but it should be noted that Aventures would be not only inappropriate as movie music, but would probably tear any given movie to shreds.

Critics are frequently baffled by the apparent contradiction of this humorous, chaotic work that is no mere joke, and is in fact highly regarded by contemporary musicians. Several analysts (notably Jürgen Beuerle) have created complex schematics of action for this work, apparently to discover either a subtle dramatic connection (as in Berio) or a substructure of mathematical planning (as in Stockhausen).

Actually, the only point made by such schematics is that there is no reason for such analysis; there is truly no subplot, no secret structure, at work here. There are no hidden meanings – only a wonderful fabric of visible gesture.