Relying on the belief in the existence of a voice that has never spoken, thinking the sound and it’s timbre has just been lost — this is virtuoso cloaking behavior — virtuosic silencing. And in this kind of woven silence, the many layers of shuttling silence, of cloaks, a voice nearly impossible to find. Both inner voice and outer voice in the same. Has, for example, democracy always been a cloak? Perhaps the current global political situation is not the silence that cloaks democracy, but the perfectly soundless voice of liberal democracy in it’s purest, most silky and invisible format.
Another cloak: our obsession with extreme catastrophic events and publicly acceptable conspiracy theories, fueled by unfortunately legitimate questions as to the transparency of democratic institutions and the earnestness of the American popular media:
[Occult Secrets of Jay Z, Kanye, & Nas]
[Great Japanese animation on what happens when an asteriod hits the earth]
[Barry Soetoro / President Obama is a Muslim]
[Google Maps Reveals All]
ed
[armageddon trailer]
[Michael Hard on the possibility of revolution, from the film Examined Life]
[Charlie Sheen’s message to Obama on 9/11/2009]
*
another way: silence is inside a room with a many-sided scrim. a projection can be made from all directions from a rotating truss. we must find a way to view the screen as a lucid mirror in order to leave. we must ignore the projectionist who draws focus as the screen moves, projecting back a simulacra of our collective imagination. can you distinguish our own idea of a mirror image from the endlessly scrolling simulation? is silence not a silhouette, but an eclipse? are we capable of listening straight at it? silence on the periphery.
[eclipse grid]
[dan graham’s “performer / audience / mirror”]
http://www.ubu.com/sound/graham.html
*
(A. Cagean Silence) (B. =) (A. Permissibility Incarnate) (Grand Pause) (Hard Stop)
*
As a cultural producer of any kind, one can easily silence the observer. In music, as in advertising, audienceship is often request for ecumenical-style rituals of devotion and an alignment of value systems — one type of entrainment and entrancement.
These experiences can seem like a type of consumer-identity pageantry where youth are initiated into one of a handful of value systems. These choices are limited further by cultural groupings, geography, race, etc. ultimately created through the distribution channels existing in the region.
Cultural, intellectual, and financial class are all implicated, common ritualizations of melodramatic emotional values, often on topics ritualized through media before personal experience, modifying the timbre of the gaze on objects it has yet to view.
These rituals simulate the perception of free will and authenticity yet function more as activating sparks on behalf of powerful actors driving popular culture and drive choice amongst consumer-identity. These actors can be an individual given voice by the media, a large corporation, a “viral” bit of information online. These function to ritualize certain feelings, senses of time, ways of being with relative consistency. An incredible silence: unspeakable conformity cloaked as choice.
[Ozzfest promotional video: shared disposition toward the camera]
[Chicago Opera Theater: amongst diversity in social categories a shared affect toward the camera]
[Adorno on Popular Music and War Protest]
ed
********
Is trance music kosher?
An abstract, Cagean view of whether music is or isn’t Halal
One heart can not love music and quran at the same time?
Composers today are silenced by previously used and disposed of historical checkmates. It is as if there a sense of kosher, halal — a kind of moral position in relationship to certain aesthetics, artists, timbres, etc. This seems to be true across all genres, even what’s often called “experimental” music.
John Cage’s legacy, not his music, but the manner in which he has been historicized, his notion of silence, was the checkmate or coup d’éta SIXTY YEARS AGO for experimental music’s validity. What do us composers know about the world in the early 1950s besides music and perhaps some painting? Sixty years ago Cage gave permission — it was his coup — he died for our close-mindedly classicist sins. What happened? Has the hall pass has simply expired? Silence is a cloak of disappearance, but the mists of history can reveal it’s shape, and once reveled, it can be pulled back at which point it collapses.
Moving backwards, Webern had his own coup — a student of Schoënberg but with a unique sense for silences that would reveal timbre. Sounds on their own, as they mean, alone. Shot dead after the war. It was his work that brought Earle Brown and Cage together, cutting tape in 1952 on the Music for Magnetic Tape project only a few months after meeting. Earle told Cage his music had something to do with Webern (this was in Colorado) and Cage, so shocked that someone in Colorado even knew about Webern, invited Earle and his wife (Carolyn Brown, the principle of the Cunningham Company to-be) to New York. This is such wonderful, warm, openended history. What happened? Webern’s coup was a century ago.
[webern: opus 14]
[webern: opus 22]
[webern: string quartet opus 9 (1911-13)]
Music on the continuum of European classical music still as no comprehensive theorization of rhythm in composition. There are traditional forms, notation provided as a guide to how to group and subdivide, etc. but as for the functionality of rhythmic structure, there’s little. Steve Reich’s music could be considered about as close as it gets for contemporary composers. Minimalism in music, not to be confused philosophically with other uses of the word in the arts, has offered a way for a few generations of composers to structure their music: through a consistent pulse track, permuted and made florid through techniques such as phasing and nuanced use of arpeggiation. Ochestrate with ingenuity and blamo! you got a piece. This was Reich’s coup (in simplification) and it’s been an endgame for nearly forty years. Lachenmann’s approach to timbre a more recent endgame, Amacher’s approach to sound in space, Lucier as sound as sound, Rzewski as the futility of explicitly political experimentalism, etc. It’s an era of many endgames, strands loosened in the fifties and slowly tied over the next decades. From the fracture came many strands, now tied. Is there a “whole” left?
[With the exception of Joseph Schillinger, a long-forgotten theorist and founder of what is now called Berklee School of Music in Boston, who had a complete theory of composition that avoided the subjugation of time to frequency (harmony)]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schillinger_System
********
[Yet Cage’s piece still, often in school, grant temporary permission for musical / performance art curious experimentation. Though it seems, like many composers of his era — the idea of freedom was intended to be within the jagged pitch and temporal aesthetic of the time]
********
When I’ve imagined being shot, I always imagined a very loud sound — that I’d die in an appropriately magnificent blast. It turns out this is quite unlikely as many firearms sound more like a mechanical click than an enthusiastic explosion.
