Everyday actions become existential events

Of the many interesting things in Kurtag’s fragment cycles, perhaps the most signal is the removal of certain types of contrast. In an opera aria (a comparable genre) the material induces the audience to perceive and mimetically participate in some sort of dialectical and cumulative structure. Seven minutes of push and pull and repetition and development ensures this. In Kurtag, in, say, the Kafka Fragments, we have, instead, moments. Even the longer pieces of the cycle, those at three minutes, shatter into a disunity, or strain during a unity. Yet that momentary dynamic opens up a space of stark clarity. The moment is a cleansing one in these works.

In Peter Sellars’ staging of the work the aesthetic of the mundane, appositely for Kafka, is made the scene of revelatory shock. As it was put in a New York Times review of an earlier performance of this production at the Lincoln Centre, ‘everyday actions become existential events’ in this cycle. As such Sellars’ staging is all the more penetrating for so sensitively designing a context sympathetic to the minutiae of the work. It presents a site of the everyday where Upshaw’s existentially troubled housewife can, with the benefit of photographic and projected textual enrichments, think out her situation in a heightened setting congenial to the mundane vividity of Kafka’s texts, and Kurtag’s contexts. Drabness and acid sit alongside each other in this staging, making a peculiar coincidence for the similar admixture shared between text and music.

Each song fragment, some seconds long, some a few minutes, distinct from each other musically and emotionally yet conjoined by an infinite and piercing light, coheres around, in the director’s words, ‘a crystalline and blazing moment’. The moment is dense and condensed, sharply-hewed and gypsy-intense – the gypsy aspect shorn up by the stark instrumentation of violin and voice, and by the musical enhancements taken from its idiom. Yet we never gain purchase on these motifs as pastiche or homage. This music does not permit much purchase on anything at all, at least in the expected way, and that is its point.

The fragments are excised of growth, contrast, crescendo, and decay. Everything colludes to the sharpened flash of recognition, to the flicker of life.

Can Hauntology operate in the comedic register?*

*Probably not.

La Valse and Old Hauntology

If the hauntological mode denaturalises the postmodern memory disorder of revivalist, facile nostalgia—seeking instead a critical relationship with temporality and with history—then surely Ravel, with La Valse, can be seen as a proponent of early adopting hauntology.

La Valse is a twelve-minute tour of destruction of the Austro-Hungarian Empire as told through one of its foremost cultural forms, the waltz. Originally conceived in 1906 as something like a celebration of the form, a ‘grand homage’ to be entitled ‘Wien’ (in the composer’s words), La Valse was finally completed and premiered in 1920, now sounding something like a macculate reliquary for a disappearing Europe. In its dark trance the piece captures well the dream melancholy of Sokurov’s transhistorical text Russian Ark, which film consists of a 90 minute unbroken shot of The Hermitage museum in St. Petersburg, with stagings of various significant events from Russian history taking place in dizzying succession. Only in the Ravel the melancholy has become dysphoric, and the dream a nightmare.

La Valse is built out of an arc of molten dance fragments in curious misalignment (impressionism and expressionism in a curious, sidereal juxtapose) that moves toward tutti waltzes too charged to maintain equilibrium, twice. Following this double pincer movement, devastating percussion blows finally destroy the desperate volumetric rendering that characterises La Valse‘s creative attempts to reconcile polite waltz conventions with the innovations of musical modernism (and, perhaps, with the horrors of the Great War). Looking at the score we see these tensions everywhere. Distinctive waltz periodicity crumbles into accented offbeats, broken triplets, and harmonic rhythms articulated across bar lines as the fragmented beginnings coalesce into the climax at the centre, where statements of the triple accent pattern thrust forward only to snap under the weight of the pressure from above. The final page, given below, reveals the endgame of these carefully managed stratagems. Strings, tambourine, brass and winds finally blow the waltz apart after overburdened hemiola across the texture in the preceding pages works to alienate the already fragile hierarchy of the 3, these instruments playing 4s, fortissimo, and sounding (symbolically) as revelatory and terrible as a machine gun on a quiet city evening.

The waltz appears decayed and distended in La Valse, often in the same frame; its overdetermined metric accents struggle for assertion, whilst at the same time and elsewhere grotesque waltz bombasts swell to bursting point, spattering the musical texture with all-thrusted out brass tattoos and consonant leaps rendered as escaping flies from an ointment of jaunt. Ravel presents in La Valse a constantly irrupting grid of tonal and rhythmic material across all orchestral planes; ballroom covens flirt into view, genuine in themselves, but these are ruthlessly suppressed by the dialectical flow between vision and memory at the music’s edge.

La Valse, in the end, can be construed as hauntological because it thematises a tragedy of time, giving the waltz a spectral presence as a discursive figure in order to convey the breakdown, perhaps, of historical progress that came with the cataclysms of the First World War, but also so as to be able to express the crumbling, rupturing state of Western musical history itself, recently torn asunder as it had been by the famous emancipation of the dissonance that took place in the music of Mahler, Schoenberg, Wagner, Strauss, Scriabin and others. La Valse has a problem with time, and it thinks this problem through at the level of syntax. By contrast, an exemplary postmodern work such as Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction utilises multiple genre tropes, shuffling these in the surface play that so masks the postmodern as the new

The use of a popular dance form as the entity of reference in La Valse also echoes, in inverted form, what Mark Fisher recently described as ‘popular modernism’;

‘I’d argue that high modernism was retrospectively
justified by its filtering through into popular
culture via paperbacks, pop and television. This
kind of filtering didn’t have to involve any kind of
dilution; there was often a condensation which
intensified things’.

I take this popular modernism to be akin to the conception I myself employ as regards the broader underground scene that much hauntological music moves in, that of the ‘popular avant-garde’. Such an avant-garde, making the same formal breaks with preceding artistic schemata found in earlier avant-garde movements, makes an enigmatic wedge in our own popular culture through detournement and ‘serious’ (Agamben) parody. But the cultural moment of the avant-garde is surely gone. The Restoration is all around. These facts make the modernistic culture under discussion a form of haunted avant-gardism, where the very notion of political polemic achieved through a romantic conception of art is being replaced by an uncanny version of the same where political ideas and potentialities are submerged in an enigma and mystery directly related to the hypertrophies of the contemporary cultural moment.

In answer to a culture in stasis, hauntology performs the operation of ‘profanation’ discussed by Giorgio Agamben in his 2007 collection Profanations, where, in answer to the impossibility of use in today’s multivalent economies, Agamben puts forward a strategy of bringing into view, making intelligible, what was thought lost, apostrophising the forgotten that lies behind the mysteries of our culture. By questioning so explicitly the relationships between time, history, and musical material, La Valse transcends the common modernist technique of ironical or ambiguous ‘low’ quotation, and casts forward instead to the dyschronic contemporary moment.

The Recognition Epiphany

Why has more not been written on the sublime jouissance of unforeseen recognition in music? When we undexpectedly hear a melody, a certain arrangement of timbres, a harmonic twist from some buried past, we disintegrate in the most thrilling of ways. The world is affirmed, time stops. The music steals in before the void, separating me from myself, insisting on a visceral impingement of past and present critical awarenesses. Recognition is ‘a time of fascination’ (Blanchot), a kairos time, the ‘time in which nothing begins, where before affirmation there is already the return of affirmation’. The recognition epiphany, though implicated in circular logics of canonicity, provides music with a bright and surging moment of speedy, ecstatic imagination. It’s the masking of re-presentation as presentation, of semblance as the real.

Uncanny recognition eroticises the possibilities of listening, replacing the everyday with a momentary eternal.

Twin Peaks and the Returnal Noise of Memory

Hypnagogic Pop, Hauntology, and Chillwave all repurpose found mainstream material — 80’s VCR footage and pop songs — for new, sonically and emotionally maculate ends. Detritus of spectral reminiscences become looped, subjected to noise and FX, dubbed into some sort of real virtuality. Sometimes the result is fragmented, expansive – see James Ferraro’s KFC record for such. Sometimes it is focused, yet endless – cf. Oneohtrix Point Never’s ‘Nobody Here’, where a four bar loop from ‘Lady In Red’ overwhelms in repetition, attaining a sort of cosmic pentecostalism (the glo-fi video mirrors the processes and affect of the music). The resources, the bombast, of eighties production techniques and blustery sensibilities are redreamed for a new, shimmering fragility, a curious joy. Our world becomes estranged in the textural flicker of the music, yet it does not turn to the grotesque, rather to a sort of pathetic bliss, a melancholy utopia (though ‘utopia’ glosses over the unexpected political charge many of the tracks glimpse). As history crashes into the wall of time, musicians all over the world (though concentrated in these respects for now in the UK and the USA) are turning the objects of memory into readymades for detourning. As with Man Ray’s objects of affection and Duchamp’s readymades, the new music uses modernist collage and quotation, but woozily here, at an adjunct to a way of being that is unsure of itself, that is sceptical of time.

It is as if these musicians, many of them in their twenties, are the first generation to realise the digital, historiographical charge of the phantasmagoria of their minds. All of our dreams becoming memories, and vice-versa, given the means through the thickening technology museum, given the desire by the secular rapture which our curious age describes to us. The desired delirium of harsh noise music turns anew here, renewed, to a specific abyssal postness (in IDM, Avant-Rock, Hip-Hop, or other forms), a sharpened yet nebulous nostalgic haze for things that never happened, but may yet.

An even stranger memoradelia occurs when, with such thoughts in mind, you go back and consider again some of those readymades (or possible readymades) in their original context. The title sequence of Twin Peaks, for instance, sings of the tragedy of memory, casting forward to Laura Palmer’s talismanic death. This event presages the collapse of a certain parochial way of being for the residents of the town (and for everyone else), whilst at the same time sensually depicting 1990-as-sonic-funeral to us listening now, two decades later. Badalamenti’s famous (and famously haunting) 11-note tremolo guitar tattoo shimmers with the anticipated spectre of memory-collapse, whilst the string synth chords (and the reverbed production) place you squarely in a secure past made all the more poignant by its specificity. The music and the just-distant visual graphics do the job of hypnagogia and chillwave, placing the bank of time and memory in front of your experience, whilst at the same time piercing that bank with the force of an immanence that the new music shades in FX.

The Twin Peaks theme music is like My Bloody Valentine and the Cocteau Twins as imagined by Rothko. You’re put in mind, in fact, of a fiction music. When later in the first episode we see some of the cast in the blue collar Roadhouse bar, the whole bluesy context implodes in the dream textures of the theme music, which returns after much intermittence from Badalamenti’s (equally effective) secondary thematic material, but now diagetic. The band on stage are performing it. The many strands of the programme collapse in on themselves at this point – memory; small town Americana; the grotesque, Weird insistence of the other. It is as if Pynchon’s vision in The Crying of Lot 49 of bars with jukeboxes full of a mysterious electronic music is here made real, only aimed at the electric melancholy of tragedy, not the bite of future-satire.

Hypnagogic pop deals in memory and the fault lines of time. The curvature of cultural space, seen here through the music of Twin Peaks, shows us that it had already been doing this long before its musicians, Sun Araw, Toro Y Moi, Daniel Lopatin, James Ferraro and the rest, began in earnest to work and dream in time.