Mountains of Creation: How many am I?

Why do we privilege humans over conventions?

We talk of particular movements, of works, of songs, of albums, and, above all else, of the people that make them. We promote a lie of creation in doing so. We think of the song as articulating a set of conventions or a style for a certain moment, as instancing a moment of inscription whereby conventions (understood in the broadest historical, technological, and acoustical respects) are used and exceeded.

What is really happening is a sleight of hand that robs the world outside of the human of its strange primacy. The act of creation is an act of illusion. It is troubling, and entirely telling, that the closest we get to thinking this weird root of creation is in artists’ fuzzy feelings of conduity. But even this talk of ‘just being a conduit’ doesn’t quite get at the simple inversion of moment and (broadly conceived) convention that I want to promote. The object-orientated allegiance of drone music is an exhibition at the terminus of the phenomenon under discussion, where, put simply, music (or, better, vibrations of matter resonating in an audible spectrum) largely plays people, as opposed to the other way around.

Such a spectral view of creation puts us in troubled mind of Fernando Pessoa’s questions; ‘How many am I? Who is me? What is this interval between me and me?’ That interval, in respect of creation, is made of the gap between the ego and the superego, the now and the immanent.

We talk of people to the detriment of sonics, senses, and the abstract collusion of culture. In this talking about people and their works we construct a useful and alluring apparatus for enriched communication. But this is surely not the whole story. Is the work in fact an interval?

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.

What would a modern magick world view look like?

I’ve been in London this week, and as ever it has provided a wealth of variegated experience. The Knife’s opera Tomorrow, in a year, an ‘electronic opera’, to use the seemingly designated rubric, clamoured a lot, sometimes impressively, but it never really knew what it was trying to say, nor how it could possibly go about saying it. A New Music Prom provided the familiar sensation of musical dazzlement (mostly) met by (mostly) blank stares, and creaking of chairs.

Alan Moore, narrating his own telling of Steve Moore’s life with always restrained, always apposite soundscape and guitar/piano musical backing from Crook and Fail (the Fog), leaned a little too much on his familiar, routinised world-view, but at its best his oration had me not only believing in magick, but aching for its total enchantment of the everyday. He made a bold case for an institution of language that strives for the uncanny and the occult, and that is antipathetic to the ‘disinfectant’ rhetoric of Tolkien, Rowling, and other faux-Fantasticians. Nothing, Moore said, would be hypothetical anymore. Couldn’t this be the true extinction event, the way to swamp the capitalist horizon with an erotic, trans-spiritual real founded on the deferment of the reality principle?

Chris Watson’s Whispering in the Leaves slightly underwhelmed. Consisting (the Dusk section anyway; I can’t comment on the Dawn as it is only being played in the morning) of a roughly twenty-minute recreation of nightfall in a tropical rainforest channeled through 80 speakers in Kew Gardens’ famous Palm House, the piece is a testament to the sound recordist’s ample sensitivity and skill. Choruses of cicadas turned to hear the stentorian cries of exotic birds, before rumbling, gurgling storm clouds gave way to sheets of rain. An insistent woodpecker towards the close actually suggested the dawn of Mahler’s First Symphony, though the calming gesture of night eventually enveloped all.

The problems I had mainly concerned dissimulation. The things I enjoy most about Watson’s Sound Art is its insistence on the radical insincerity of the listening experience; his albums are filled with faithfully recorded and denoted sound environments, but the affective charge actually comes, for me at least, from tension between that reality, and the reality of the listening experience itself. Surrounded as we were in Palm House by a simulated environment of palm trees and bamboo shoots, the striving towards simulation felt a little hollow. I can’t say the chattering visitors (though, in fairness, it would be a little rich to expect them to be quiet; this was hardly a concert) helped (phonocentrism my bum); indeed, once I had ascended the staircase to the heights of the conservatory, I felt a strange vestigial quickening, and Watson’s immersive and shape-shifting arrangement began to impress all the more.

Bruckner and Romanticism as Weirdness and Horror

Listening to even a strong performance of Bruckner’s eighth symphony, you get an idea of why so many people find the composer impenetrable. Even, indeed, why they find him a bore.

Its great slabs of sound revolving in sequence, sometimes developing, often building in density and dynamism, often still simply repeating (though with each repeat of course comes a frisson of difference), present an obstinacy of argument that can be hard to reconcile with the expectations we have for nineteenth century symphonic works. Namely, that they finesse through refined proportion and clear dialectical positioning some sort of dramatically appreciable rise or fall. Bruckner is much more exorbitant than that. Excessive, even. (Or, as Eduard Hanslick said of this symphony after hearing its 1892 premiere, ‘repugnant’.) We are teased with the sound world of the high romantic age, yet at the same time we find the work agitating against its inheritance, promiscuously anticipating its musical residue in heavy metal, minimalism, and in the fragmenting symphonism of the twentieth century.

Yet in this lure to romanticism, this temptation in sound, Bruckner founds the heart of his practice. He nurtures a tension of aesthetics by pushing his material and his audiences to their limits, beyond the ken of romantic musical working, overblowing the effect with cleavages in the form and distension in the design. Like Mahler, Bruckner fragments poise and introduces a hypertrophy of thought, yet the overbearing feeling here is not fragmentation, but rather a hardening, a calcification of the material. Great thematic terraces, liquid metal edifices of smelted sound buttressed by headbanging timpani tattoos rotate, imbricating along the way, burnishing to a new intensity of dream by the end of the thirty-minute movements.

The Scherzo, as in so many of Bruckner’s other symphonies, is both the pulsing heart and the rotten core of this piece. Incessant return, revenance by way of parataxis, considers philosophical notions of eternal recurrence, yet couches these in the sensual, diverting attention by way of a shift into duple metre, or a caress in the phrasing as the material is leading inexorably back to the thematic heart, once again, as always.

The timpani player should anchor the whole show with a bravura display of percussive headbanging. The timpani writing in the Scherzo, where you build on one tonality eked out on one of the drums, before shifting stunningly into a more effusive, devastatingly certain bang-patter across the other three, centres the whole thematic argument in a discourse of stable uncertainty. The timpanist’s thumping climaxes at those junctures in the Finale where the isolation of the component thematic parts threaten to rupture into some sort of cataclysm add echo and depth to both the sonic and the dialectical flow of the whole burnished thing. What does it mean to locate the heart of a major, complex, 80-minute work, in the clatter of a timpani player? In this case, I think we can align the image of the sage timpanist deploying precise machination yet banging through the heart of darkness in a rite of frustrated nuance, with the image of Bruckner busy composing this work, too clever and yet too barbaric at the same time for his contemporaries. It all seems a little different now…