Notes on sociology of musical form and rhythm

from Bill Martin Avant rock: experimental music from the Beatles to Bjork, Open Court: Chicago. 2002

In the first half of the twentieth century, a good deal of ink was spilled in comparisons of Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky. Indeed, there is a dynamic to this comparison that describes well what happens when traditions seem on the verge of exhaustion. Schoenberg was extolled by Theodore Ardono for his systematic deconstruction of tonality, while Stravinsky was sometimes denigrated for his expressivism and exoticism. . . Schoenberg's move to the dodecaphonic (twelve-note) system can be seen as the next step in the progression from the extreme chromaticism of Mahler. . . In some sense Stravinsky, who comes after Mahler . . . instead of asking what the next step was for "the scale" and for harmony, asked what this "scale" was all about, anyway [:] a desire to be liberated from Western tonality altogether. [9-10]

[P]art of what came out of the attack on "the scale," and the concomitant turn to other scales and sounds, was an elevation of percussion. . . .In some sense, even in "classical music" . . . the "rhythm section" steps forward [11]

Robert Fink Repeating Ourselves: American minimal music as cultural practice, U California P, 2005

repetitive music implicates creators, performers, and auditors in repetitive commercial culture like advertising and television [xi]

[We] trace the presence in minimalist music of both Eros and Thanatos, of dialectical entrainment to desire as well as libidinal liberation from it, never forgetting that these lofty psychoanalytic terms are just metaphors for the bodily effects of material social constructions. [7]

[T]he repetition-structures of American minimal music broke into the Western cultural mainstream around 1965, the precise moment that the complete transformation of American network television by commercial advertising established the medium's distinctively atomized, repetitive programming sequence. Minimalism, whatever judgement of taste one might pronounce upon . . .takes on a unique cultural significance: it is the single instance within contemporary art music of what Raymond Williams called "flow," the most relentless, all-pervasive structural trope of twentieth-century global media. The sheer scope and intensity of this media torrent index an aesthetic effect that we might call the media sublime. Minimal music turns out to structure its repetitious desiring-production in much the same polyphonic way as a spot advertising campaign spreads out across diversified media vehicles . . .; its effect on the listener is the sublime perception of all those campaigns and all that desire creation perpetually coruscating across the huge expanse of mass-media flow . . .[I]n an aesthetic effect absolutely characteristic of consumer society, the sheer excess of processed desire turns out to be the biggest thrill of all. [10-11]

Justin Winkler, Space, Sound and Time: A choice of articles in Soundscape Studies and Aesthetics of Environment 1990 - 2003, 'Rhythmicity (2002)'

Rhythm is defined by the approximate repetition of a cycle – thus standing out from measure, the precise, identical repetition of a cycle. I would like to make the point thatalthough rhythm thus implies many kinds of elasticity and resilience it is actually a structure of extreme robustness. We can, together with Lefebvre, imagine that rhythmic systems develop a strength similar to those well entwined paper fibres which serve as a bridge capable to support heavy weights. Rhythm is concrete, worldly time, rhythmicity its systematic aspect. [2]

Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth Sequel to History: Postmodernism and the Crisis of representational time Princeton UP, 1992.

In this conjugating rhythm, each move forward is also digressive, also a sideways move. A postmodern narrative submits to the sequential nature of language grudgingly and at every juncture keeps alive for readers an awareness of multiple pathways and constantly crossing themes. Rhythm is parataxis on the horizontal and in motion: a repetitive element that doesn’t “forward” anything, one that is always exact but never “identical.” Narratives where time is rhythm give readers an opportunity to take up a new kind of residence in time, a way of staying in the narrative present – often literally or effectively in the present tense – that requires new acts of attention.
Rhythmic time – the time of experiment, improvisation, adventure – destroys the historicist unity of the world by destroying its temporal common denominator. In rhythmic time mutual reference back and forth from one temporal moment to another becomes impossible because no neutrality exists between temporal moments; on the contrary, each moment contains its specific and unique definition. Each “time” is utterly finite. [53-4]

[P]ostmodern narrative forces readers into a new kind of present: not the dematerialized present of historical time but what Nabokov calls the “Deliberate Present” of rhythmic time. [54]

Jacques Attali, Noise: the political economy of music, U Minnesota P, 1985.

Composition thus leads to a staggering conception of history, a history that is open, unstable, in which labor no longer advances accumulation, in which the object is no longer a stockpiling of lack, in which music effects a reappropriation of time and space. Time no longer flows in a linear fashion; sometimes it crystallizes in stable codes in which everyone’s composition is compatible, sometimes in a multifaceted time in which rhythms, styles and codes diverge, independencies become more burdensome, and rules dissolve. In composition, stability, in other words, differences, are perpetually called into question. Composition is inscribed not in a repetitive world, but in the permanent fragility of meaning after the disappearance of usage and exchange . . . It is also the only utopia that is not a mask for pessimism, the only Carnival that is not a Lenten ruse. [147]

un-hooked on classics: Beethoven after tonality and recording

Professor Robert Walker from School of English, Media and Performing arts University of NSW, Sydney responds to Mark Bahnisch's opinion piece in The Australian 'Fable of the Cultural Elite'.

Walker isn't interested in the political and social context into which Bahnisch's essay is situated: the current round of culture wars that are in play, albeit with less vigour than before the ALP victory last November, and how battles in these wars turn around issues of public funding, the politics of recognition and redistribution, and History and English curricula. Walker's riposte instead contents itself by rehearsing the Kantian discourse of judgement of the sublime: the discourse which Pierre Bourdieu has done so much to historicise and to analyse for its use in the reproduction of stratified social classes. Walker will have none of this sociological infection invading the religious experience of sophisticated art: the sort of art that only an emotionally, intellectually, musically and aesthetically educated, and thereby sophisticated, person is capable of understanding and appreciating. Not the three-minute pop song (philistine, rubbish, appealing to the base emotions), but rather a Beethoven symphony.

I have some sympathy for Walker's view. I'm interested in literary and musical form, too. But Walker's Adorno-esque disdain for 'uneducated-art' stops short in a number of ways. Walker's elitism is ignorant of the sociology of form.

An example. Adorno's sociology of musical form saw him support Schoenberg's modernist innovations in advancing musical form into a break with harmony and tonality: twelve tone music. How an audience heard this music would, of course depend on how they heard the tonal music of Beethoven. That said, Adorno wasn't content to talk of the sophistication and education of the experience of Schoenberg's performances (where Walker ends his formal-cultural lessons). For Adorno the break with tonality marks a break with the logics of commodity exchange and reificiation.

Now the point here is that there is a homology established between musical and social forms, and that the dominant nexus (harmony and commodity exchange) is broken by a new organising logic: twelve-tone music. But while Adorno's sociology of musical form is exemplary it is only one version of how the logic and order of harmony and tonality in musical form is broken with.

Robert Fink has written, in the shadow of Adorno (the new musicology), about the emergence of pulse-pattern-minimalism music: Steve Reich's compositions, for example. Fink's argument, which sits alongside that of Jacques Attali's in Noise: the political economy of music, is that Reich's music is a form in which we can think the media sublime. The way Fink puts this is to argue that Reich's Music for Eighteen Musicians, like Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder's "Love to love you baby", are both musical performances of a refiguring of the desires that advertising's repetitions play through us.

Anyone that has heard that extra-diegetic musical section (music that is incidental to the action) in an American sit-com, or movie, even in Australian movies and dramas, where mallett instruments (vibraphones, xylophones etc) play a motiff that is counterpointed and repeated (often signifying the repetition of everyday cyclic time, and often what is experienced in a city-office job) will have heard the after-echoes of Reich's piece. This form has entered popular culture and it's condescending for Walker to invoke the elitism of his Kantian judgement while not recognising that we use the forms of Reich's, and let's admit it, disco's, music to make sense of a world in which media repetition is constantly shaping our desires.

Another break with tonality is that which arises out of the drone-noise movement, of which John Cale's mentor, Lamonte Young, was a practitioner. Cale, trained as a classical viola player, moved into the Andy Warhol Factory orbit in the mid 1960s, joining up with Lou Reed and formed the popart band the Velvet Underground. While the VU did employ pulse pattern music ("Waiting for my Man") it was Cale's electrified viola drones, overdriven valve amplifier noise, that has had such a lasting influence on popular music. The drone and noise, also break with the tonality which Walker's examplar - Beethoven - would, on this (the post-Adorno sociology of musical form) account, be locked into. And the drone, the electrified noise, are now commonplaces of popular music.

That we make sense of the contemporary world through the forms of popular music that we experience through TV shows, as disco and its afterwards, as the electrified noises and drones of a million pop songs, doesn't mean that we cannot experience the sublime. It's just that unlike Walker, we learnt how to live with, sometimes resist, sometimes negate and get around the media and commmodity sublimes of the contemporary world by taking these forms and putting them to work in our everyday lives. To call us lovers of the pop sublime uneducated, philistine, capable of only appreciating the *spits* music of base instincts is precisely the performance of distinction that Bourdieu exposed as deelpy imbricated in class stratification.

Loosen up Professor: there's not much you can do for the barbarians have long ago moved into the house of fine music and locking the gate won't stop us from getting out.

After Fordism: Australian textual and American musical cultures

This is a riff on a quote from former editor of the Melbourne Left literary journal Overland, Ian Syson. Syson both articulates a sociological explanation for these dirty realist novels of inner-urban angst, and also takes a swipe at the name 'grunge' which he dismisses as marketing hype. While I agree that the labelling was indeed 'marketing spirit' I also think that as the label still adheres to some of these novels, it might be worthwhile to refigure the meaning of grunge itself away from the fairly obvious and, let's face it, fairly shallow critical formula: pop/rock music = expression of authentic teenage emotion. Syson forecloses on any homology of cultural form, and thereby sociology of cultural form, shared by grunge music and grunge literature, when he poses what his argument takes to be the absurd attempt to equate rock with fiction: a modernist or realist guitar solo doesn't make any sense!

Underscoring the fragmentary points made below is the notion that fordism in the USA is sensually experienced due to the sheer weight and size of industrialization in the American North. Conversely, in Australia Fordism is less urbanly concentrated and it is industrial citizenship as a form of script-text culture which dominates: hence the importance of The Bulletin in forming keystones in Australian Labourism and the radical nationalist movement in the post-war period. By thinking grunge music as Fordist, Grunge lit becomes more comprehensible as a response to the decline of industrial citizenship in Australia.
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What our band did was basically make a big noise and create some movement with that noise. Slowly I came up with a kind of concept. A lot of it was based on the attitude of juvenile delinquency and general mental grievance that I'd gotten from these dropouts I was hanging out with, mixed in with the sorts of music I like: hard r&b, hard rock and roll, and the exciting elements of jazz, 'cause I was starting to listen to John Coltrane, and the unpredictability of that. And then an added element was to find something simple, monolithic, metallic, like a big machine - like the drill presses at the Ford plant, stamping out fenders. I'd listen to that and think. 'God those are impressive sounds, big sounds.' And they're so regular and simple, I thought, 'Those are sounds that even we could master.’ Iggy Pop

The early electric guitar emerged out of the role the acoustic guitar played in Hawaiin music forged from the desire for volume in the swing and big bands of the 1930s and 40s. The innovators of the electric guitar solo, at this early stage, were Charlie Christian and T-Bone Walker. Can these early solos be interpreted as realist or modernist? To take the simplist understanding of the musical context here, the answer would have to be modernist, due to the jazz and blues context in which Christian played. While the electric guitar is and has played a role in jazz, it is the blues line in which its power and dominance over much post-war music has occurred. And in travelling up this line, effectively up the Mississipi to the heavy industry manufacturing towns of the American North, we can perhaps begin to hear that the electric guitar, even rock’n’roll, is fundamentally best understood as Fordist – a intimate part of a whole way of life, that sexualises, twists and rolls the rhythms and timbres of what Zygmunt Bauman calls heavy modernity with a loud, distorting electricity – the Chicago Blues.

~

A modernist guitar solo can be theorised – it is the guitar solo as most western ears know it: Charlie Christian, Chuck Berry, Robert Fripp. But this is the wrong question [Ian Syson’s question about modernist and realist electric guitar solos], put in the wrong terms, and it's here that the sense of incommensurable paradigms lead less to a knowing mocking, and more to a different way to conceptualise that might permit a smoother jump between what I’d like to argue are the shared structural tropes of Praise and Nirvana’s Lithium. For rather than attempting to set up a realism to modernism shift, it makes sense to begin with the notion that the electric guitar, and its solos, are only understandable within modernism. Indeed, what I want to suggest is that the forms and sonics of the electric guitar solo are intimately wound into that aspect of modernism, and modernity, Gramsci named Fordism.

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Rock’n’roll takes the repetition of the train, the cars on the motorway whizzing past, the monolithic machinery thumping out car fenders in time, in tempo, and re-stages these textures, rhythms and timbres in a Chicago or Detroit bar. Rock says –‘yes, this is the rhythm and timbre of our modernity, but we can still be free, we can still feel the blues, take this car, this train, and fly – we can make love like a fleshy-machine.’ The guitar solo is the romanticism that gets released by the rhythms of the factory – we can live with and subvert the rhythms of the factory – this machinic repetition: we can keep our human feeling, move faster and with more freedom than the factory. Modelled on the Fordist factory, Berry Gordy’s Motown, marks the Fordist dream as a black dream of creative capitalism: a production line of stars and hits. The avant-garde, the inversion and ‘reframing’ of Fordism in culture, enters popular music slowly, but its hard to shy away from the profound influence that Andy Warhol’s factory plays in this stream of post-Fordism.



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If the new pop of the 1980s (ABC, Scritti Politti, Human League, Frankie Goes to Hollywood even Prince and Madonna) celebrated, if not attempted to subvert, commodity culture, then the return to authenticity (over this ‘artifice’) is most measured in Grunge – real, true, authentic. Ironically, Grunge draws genealogical lines into post-punk, punk itself and the rock and pop bohemians – Iggy Pop/ Stooges and the Velvet Underground: artifice pop art, art rock. Cobain’s aspiration to meld aspects of the Beatles with Black Sabbath, heavy metal with modernist rock/pop, confirms that his musical head was in sync with that of the US’s (and by extension UK, Australia’s) white, male, suburban teenage heartlands. But what Nirvana also brought into the mix was this post-punk legacy – the pop art subversion and artifice that had been enacted as an accumulating endless loop through bands like the Pixies; the stockpiling of records and CDs; and MTV. What Grunge promised to deliver was the underbelly, the dirt and heaviness of authenticity – the antithesis to the gloss and surface sheen of pop.

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Was America, then, like Australia, working with a sense of industrial citizenship as its basic subjectivity? Clearly not in the same way. The historic compromises in Australia, its lack of overt civil war and sense of manifest destiny, its lack of clearly sanctioned citizenship (compared with the U.S. Bill of Rights and constitution) produce a much thinner version of liberalism in Australia than in the U.S, and yet a version of liberalism that is more textual, more read than the American version which is more felt.

JF Archibald founder of the now defunct Bulletin & Henry Lawson.

Rufus Wainwright's Ineffable oscillating chamber music

We went to see Rufus Wainwright last night at the Wrest Point Casino. I'm a big fan and so is SO. Report following . . .

We got there in time to catch the beginning of support act Leena (Thavisin). With a strapless black evening dress, glittering, chandelier-length ear rings, and mostly capo-ed steel-string acoustic guitar, Leena is, as they say, a package. Well-tanned, elegantly svelte and with model looks, the girl can sing and write a song.
I gave her three songs to see if she could change gears from the mixture of wistful, wistfully defiant, and defiantly wistful songs she began with. No.

But that's the postpunk in me.Having supped at the alt.folk and alt.country altars of Gram Parsons, and Gillian Welch, and the junkyard cocktail-jazz-blues of Tom Waits, no Jewel-esque, post-Waifs ingenue will resonate much beyond platitudes like - 'She'd win Australian Idol, on looks alone.' Is she one to watch? Well, if you like Missy Higgins, or Jewel, then worth a look and listen, but I found her sophisticated folk-pop twee. She might end up on screen though.


And so, we left the flat-carpeted Tasman Hall, headed out to the foyer for a couple of overpriced 15oz Cascade Draughts and looked out onto Sandy Bay toward Hobart, some Pacific Gulls perched high on the roof behind us, squawking, and waited for Rufus.


When he did appear on stage, a simple grand piano in the front-centre and microphones over both the piano and closer to the foldback speakers near the edge, his boyish flop of hair and long sideburns sat neatly on a Peter Allen-style outfit: milkybar white jeans and a multi-colour short-sleeved body shirt, tucked in. 'I'm trying to get in the summer-feel' Rufus told us, comparing Hobart to the similarly changeable (cold) summers of his former hometown of Montreal. A touch of the warmth of Rio - especially with his first shirt-button ajar.


This was to be a solo performance, played mostly from the piano, although there were about seven or so songs perfomed on a variety of steel-string acoustic guitars - the crowd-favourite 'California' being one.

Rufus, rufus, rufus! The man can sing, write a song - lyrics and melody, and he can accompany himself on piano, exquisitely. There were moments here: the French-lyric tune with a waltz-time piano underneath that was performed with such a singular feel for tempo that I couldn't believe that the flowing vocal-melody was in the same time; and yet it synchronized, perfectly. Another highlight was a song from Release the stars sung in a falsetto, giving us the chance to hear his higher register, which was beautiful - not so much wistful, as transcendent.

But what struck me most was that his baritone vibrato, his perfect pitching melded with either guitar or piano mostly sounded orchestral. What I mean to say is that the harmonic overtones that are produced by and in his voice, I think, set in play oscillations and rhythms that counterpoint those emanating from the other instrument. Descriptions like, full, rich, orchestral, resonating, don't do justice to this sound. This is not to say that his baritone vibrato, especially at the volume we heard it, didn't at times become repetitive. It did, and when the third beer had me up and out the Hall doors, upon attempting to re-enter mid-song I was stopped by an usher who was then told by another patron that 'He's too nasal, for me', it hit me later that Rufus' nose is a key resonating chamber that can grate, sometimes, but mostly promotes this ineffable oscillating chamber-music. Another cliche that comes to mind is that the song begins to sing itself, and there is a choir of voices audible, and a chamber of instruments supporting.

And what songs - melodies that move with such certain grace, and lyrics that are by turns wry, ironic and vulnerable. I would liked to have heard 'Poses' or 'Tower of learning' from the Poses LP, but we left Wrest Point, satisfied. The sound of his voice, still resonating in my ears and, a little, in my blood.

[Image of Rufus from Sydney Morning Herald 31.01.2008 Photo: Domino Postiglione]