Back in the groove…
I have not so much as looked at this blog for the past four months. In that time I put my MA thesis to bed, had performances in Berlin, Dresden, and New York, created music and video for a dance company in Johannesburg and survived my first round of PhD class work in Saas Fee. Now I want to get back in the groove and try to write more regularly.
Future posts will likely become oddly more personal and yet more academic. Also I plan to broaden my topics. The focus will still be thinking about sound and music, but expect to find some more abstractly philosophical musings and the occasional despondent political rant.
So…
The Philadelphia Live Arts festival begins next weekend, and for the first time in 8 years or so I have absolutely no involvement with it. Because of my lack of funds coming off of four months of travel and replacing my laptop (stolen in Johannesburg) I will not be seeing many shows either. But whatever shows I do see I will try to write about here.
As if to make my point about the loss of status of music within the “art world,” the Live Arts Festival has only two curated music events this year. How the festival constructs its discourse around these shows is instructive of something I think. In the festival guide, each artistic discipline has its own section with some introductory commentary. For instance the dance section begins…
“Contemporary dance has seen an infusion of multimedia, text, abstraction and minimalism, inclusion of cultural dances, dramaturgy, innovative set design and technologies of all sorts. In this collection of work we present a remarkable range of performance. There is a fusion of tradition and innovation.”
And so forth. This is the start of the 14 pages of the guide outlining the dance programming. The “music” section of only 2 pages begins…
“Music based artists continue to defy boundaries. Rock/hip hop, ska/punk, the list of fusions go on. Though the music industry struggles to limit artists to single categories, artists and audiences want more.”
I would like to try and unpack these few sentences a bit before quoting more. The idea that “artists” “defy boundaries” through the “fusions” of “Rock/hip hop” and “ska/punk” does not seem very meaningful to me. Or rather it is only meaningful in a context in which the musical universe defined by the commodities of the music industry is the only musical universe that exists. Even accepting this context, these examples historically leave a lot to be desired as examples of “fusions.” Genres within popular music (and it should be clear that that is what we are talking about here) develop through selective appropriation and elaboration. “Hip hop” is such an elaboration within “rock.” “Ska” was clearly part of the cultural nexus out of which “punk” developed in England in the ‘70s.
But this hair splitting is to miss the point. The real issue here is that a festival that presents itself as a premiere venue for the cutting edge, the experimental in the performing arts in Philadelphia, when it comes to music, seems to only understand “music” as the realm of experience bounded by the commodity form of the popular song. That the “music industry” is commented on at all by an arts festival in this context demonstrates what a different set of problems in faced by music than by dance for instance. The “music industry” is a subset of the whole realm of pop-cultural media that Adorno wrote about as “The Culture Industry.” For the culture industry “dance” is what Gwen Stephani’s backup dancers do in music videos. But Dance for the Live Arts Festival exists in an autonomous realm determined by art history not by the culture industry. Why is this not the case for music?
One reason of course is that music has lost its status as an autonomous art separate from entertainment. In this sense the Festival can not really be faulted, it is merely going along with much larger cultural forces. But if for no other reason than that it is conceivable that this subsumption of autonomous art by corporate capitalism could happen to dance or theater some day as well, the Festival should give a little more thought to what dynamics are being played out in its music programming.
To continue with the next sentence from the festival guide…
“They escape boundaries and respond to a variety of influences, from European Classical music, American Jazz, Blues and Hip Hop and African and Caribbean rhythms, and everything in between.”
The first thing that strikes me here is the use of the word “European” in front of “Classical music.” I looked through the dance section of the guide to find a similar usage in front of “ballet.” There is mention of ballet and “classical ballet” but no mention of “European.”
The phrase “everything in between” suggests to me a kind of polar space. Is it “European Classical music” on one side and “American Jazz, Blues and Hip Hop and African and Caribbean rhythms” on the other, or “European Classical music, American Jazz, Blues and Hip Hop” on one side and “African and Caribbean rhythms” on the other. The first division one of presumed ethnicity, and the second division one of first and third world? Either way I have to wonder, what lies in this “in between?” Psychedelic jam bands? Canadian Gamelan Orchestras? What about the whole 100 year American experimental classical tradition from Ives through Cage to Reich to…?
The polar division I see as active here is an all too common one in postmodern musical discourse…that between “dead white European males” and the music of the African Diaspora. While one may wish that this discourse would have imploded after the culture wars of the 80’s, opening up a space for a thinking that was less simplistic and more productive, this does not seem to be the case.
Having said all this, I am glad that there is music of any kind still being presented at the Live Arts Festival, and look forward to seeing both shows. I will report my impressions of these shows sometime in future posts.
Future posts will likely become oddly more personal and yet more academic. Also I plan to broaden my topics. The focus will still be thinking about sound and music, but expect to find some more abstractly philosophical musings and the occasional despondent political rant.
So…
The Philadelphia Live Arts festival begins next weekend, and for the first time in 8 years or so I have absolutely no involvement with it. Because of my lack of funds coming off of four months of travel and replacing my laptop (stolen in Johannesburg) I will not be seeing many shows either. But whatever shows I do see I will try to write about here.
As if to make my point about the loss of status of music within the “art world,” the Live Arts Festival has only two curated music events this year. How the festival constructs its discourse around these shows is instructive of something I think. In the festival guide, each artistic discipline has its own section with some introductory commentary. For instance the dance section begins…
“Contemporary dance has seen an infusion of multimedia, text, abstraction and minimalism, inclusion of cultural dances, dramaturgy, innovative set design and technologies of all sorts. In this collection of work we present a remarkable range of performance. There is a fusion of tradition and innovation.”
And so forth. This is the start of the 14 pages of the guide outlining the dance programming. The “music” section of only 2 pages begins…
“Music based artists continue to defy boundaries. Rock/hip hop, ska/punk, the list of fusions go on. Though the music industry struggles to limit artists to single categories, artists and audiences want more.”
I would like to try and unpack these few sentences a bit before quoting more. The idea that “artists” “defy boundaries” through the “fusions” of “Rock/hip hop” and “ska/punk” does not seem very meaningful to me. Or rather it is only meaningful in a context in which the musical universe defined by the commodities of the music industry is the only musical universe that exists. Even accepting this context, these examples historically leave a lot to be desired as examples of “fusions.” Genres within popular music (and it should be clear that that is what we are talking about here) develop through selective appropriation and elaboration. “Hip hop” is such an elaboration within “rock.” “Ska” was clearly part of the cultural nexus out of which “punk” developed in England in the ‘70s.
But this hair splitting is to miss the point. The real issue here is that a festival that presents itself as a premiere venue for the cutting edge, the experimental in the performing arts in Philadelphia, when it comes to music, seems to only understand “music” as the realm of experience bounded by the commodity form of the popular song. That the “music industry” is commented on at all by an arts festival in this context demonstrates what a different set of problems in faced by music than by dance for instance. The “music industry” is a subset of the whole realm of pop-cultural media that Adorno wrote about as “The Culture Industry.” For the culture industry “dance” is what Gwen Stephani’s backup dancers do in music videos. But Dance for the Live Arts Festival exists in an autonomous realm determined by art history not by the culture industry. Why is this not the case for music?
One reason of course is that music has lost its status as an autonomous art separate from entertainment. In this sense the Festival can not really be faulted, it is merely going along with much larger cultural forces. But if for no other reason than that it is conceivable that this subsumption of autonomous art by corporate capitalism could happen to dance or theater some day as well, the Festival should give a little more thought to what dynamics are being played out in its music programming.
To continue with the next sentence from the festival guide…
“They escape boundaries and respond to a variety of influences, from European Classical music, American Jazz, Blues and Hip Hop and African and Caribbean rhythms, and everything in between.”
The first thing that strikes me here is the use of the word “European” in front of “Classical music.” I looked through the dance section of the guide to find a similar usage in front of “ballet.” There is mention of ballet and “classical ballet” but no mention of “European.”
The phrase “everything in between” suggests to me a kind of polar space. Is it “European Classical music” on one side and “American Jazz, Blues and Hip Hop and African and Caribbean rhythms” on the other, or “European Classical music, American Jazz, Blues and Hip Hop” on one side and “African and Caribbean rhythms” on the other. The first division one of presumed ethnicity, and the second division one of first and third world? Either way I have to wonder, what lies in this “in between?” Psychedelic jam bands? Canadian Gamelan Orchestras? What about the whole 100 year American experimental classical tradition from Ives through Cage to Reich to…?
The polar division I see as active here is an all too common one in postmodern musical discourse…that between “dead white European males” and the music of the African Diaspora. While one may wish that this discourse would have imploded after the culture wars of the 80’s, opening up a space for a thinking that was less simplistic and more productive, this does not seem to be the case.
Having said all this, I am glad that there is music of any kind still being presented at the Live Arts Festival, and look forward to seeing both shows. I will report my impressions of these shows sometime in future posts.
posted by Peter at 2:04 PM
0 comments
