Ben Watson: Music, Violence, Truth

8/7/2019 Ben Watson: Music, Violence, Truth

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Music, Violence, Truth

Ben Watson


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After the devastation in Manhattan on 11September 2001, what can radical musicmean? Einstrzende Neubauten - whosename translates, prophetically, Collapsing

New Buildings - earned their avantgardestripes in Britain by applying pneumaticdrills to a stress-bearing beam at theInstitute of Contemporary Arts.

After 11 September, such transgressionssurely pale into insignificance. Indeed,any comparison might seem offensive. AtNo Future, an academic conference onPunk held in Wolverhampton in lateSeptember 2001, an American delegate

announced that after 9-11 the relationshipof music to violence and shock neededto be rethought. The whole Punk and

Noise transgressive aesthetic, one he'dsubscribed to throughout his youth,

needed revision. Like watching the lateLinda Lovelace, born-again and demure,denouncing porn and sex-before-marriageon a TV chat show, such reversals in ideologycannot be taken at face value. T h e s e

rifts and contradictions indicate a clash oftectonic plates at a more fundamentallevel, something violently mismatched inthe relationship of music to truth andconscience.

Musically, America responded to the painand loss of 9-11 with a fund-raising telethonwhich drew on the sombre substratum ofhymn-singing which underlies corporatepop, and which unites country, soul and

reggae. Music written for church performance- unmediated, involving, communal andlocal - inevitably became kitsch and falsewhen delivered by top-selling super-starsfor international broadcast. These songs

are made for internal reflection, not personaladulation. The economics were hypocritical

too: the artists may have waived their fees,but as with Live Aid, it's obvious that theglobal exposure they're achieving is worthmore than any fee. However, in such a

context of harmonic maturity and low-keysentiment, the concept of audio terrorismdoes appear silly and adolescent. Shouldthe noisy end of the avantgarde shut up,

and confess its misdemeanours were alla ruse?

The avantgarde registered its ownpeculiar response to the disaster. Rushingin where angels fear to tread, KarlheinzStockhausen voiced what some mayhave felt in the instant, but none dared

say. For him, the crashing planes andcollapsing towers felt like art: "Whathappened there is - now you must re-adjustyour brain - the greatest work of artimaginable for the whole cosmos. Minds

achieving in a single act what we in musiccan only dream of, people rehearsing likemad for ten years, preparing fanaticallyfor a concert, and then dying. You havepeople who are that focused on a performance

and then 5,000 people who are dispatchedto the afterlife, in a single moment. Icouldn't match it. Against that, we - ascomposers - are nothing."Surely the guyis crazy? In Stockhausen's defence, he did

go on to admit the attack was a crime,because part of the audiencewere not

Music, Violence, Truth

Ben Watson

You didnt need torepeat the images in

your head, TV did nothing

else for days


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consenting. This demur didn't softenGyorgy Ligeti's retort: "Stockhausen

should be locked up in a psychiatric

h o s p i t a l ".A comment by one TV reporter - that

the image of the planes crashing into thetowers "repeated in the memory like a

nightmare loop"- was distinctly strange.

You didn't need to repeat the images inyour head, TV did nothing else for dayson end. As usual, the mass media materiallycreate the psychic conditions which they

then proceed to moralise. But what shouldartists do when reality outdoes them?Stay quiet? Admit anti-art destructivismwas just a tease? Confess that thesetumultous, apocalyptical events we call

radical were really just conjury with lutesand viols, a luxury product ornamentedwith frissons of phony danger?

Such evasions smack of the brittlerepression of married couples who banishtheir teenage metal and pop albums tothe attic and call their yen for music a

passing phase. For us, giving up onextreme music can't be the answer.

Quite the opposite: it's by paying closerattention to the internal structure of radicalmusic - violenceand all - that its historical

and social meaning might be decoded.Stockhausen's equation of art and terror- "this leap from security, from what'sordinary, from life"- may be poor consolationfor inhabitants of Manhattan who have

lost loved ones, or now feel desperatelyinsecure. However, his weird outburst didtouch on something deep. Why is it that,since the modernist revolts of the earlytwentieth century, composers and improvisors

have continually shouted noise, crisis

and violence?The crucial point is that art is an attempt

to tell the truth about the world, the wholeworld, not simply to provide baubles forthose in the comfort-zone of privilege.The economic pressures and nationalconflicts that create world wars and mass

starvation and genocide are still in operation.

The operations of global capitalism, andits political face-savers, those blue-suitedbastards Bush and Blair and Berlusconi,mean that the inhabitants of Burundi,

Beirut, Belfast and Baghdad (I use alliter-ation to limit the list) have long sufferedthe terror and chaos which the suicidehijackers brought to Manhattan. EdgardVarse brought the noise of sirens and

bombs into music in the 1920s, aresponse to the terrors of World War I.His Hyperprismpredicted the Nazi strategy ofthe Blitz, when civilian populations firstbecame long-distant targets of military

hardware. Unlike his objectivist followerIannis Xenakis, Varse bent the shapeshe heard into organic ovaloids which

speak for the suffering ear. This is why,of all the pre-war orchestral composers,

only Varse has a non-salon, yet humanistruggedness: a realism that moves theblood and shakes the entrails. Sonically,Varse can stand comparison to Coltraneand Hendrix, who provided lasting testi-

monials to a different noise: a struggleagainst racial oppression in America and

genocidal war in Vietnam.These moments of musical truth weren't

easy to achieve, nor were they facile,

attention-seeking stabs at ugliness orexcess. They were not the sound of GeorgeAntheil seeking to be a bad boy of theavantgarde by slamming his fists on thepianoforte keyboard, or of the japanese

Noise artist Merzbow producing fashionablycatatonia-inducing, all-enveloping drones(to steal a name from Kurt SchwittersMerzbauand then recycle the shocks ofa degraded surrealism deserves some

kind of critique). According to his wife

Heavenly universalitysounds like hell to

closed-in ears


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Naima (talking to C.O. Simpkins, his bestbiographer), John Coltrane systematicallystudied scales from all over the world,and tried to pack every musical systeminto his music. If the results sound ugly,

that is because you are too wedded toyour partial musical identity, to your comfort-blanket of familiar harmony: heavenly

universality sounds like hell to closed-inears. For his part, Hendrix was intensely

loyal to classmates who had been drafted

and to 101st Airborne, the regiment he'dserved in. Eric Burdon was amazed athis rightwing stance on the Vietnamesewar when he reached England in 1967.

Music journalist Karl Dallas challengedhim in print. Reaching an anti-US position

was painful and slow, yet by MachineGun, it happened. Hendrix's rainbows ofaudio-feedback revelled in spaces which

brought pain to the repressed and rigid:in the ears of GIs, they were incitementsto immediate pleasure, to disrespect forauthority, and to outright mutiny (fragging).

Coltrane and Hendrix did not invent this

dialectic between musical shock andpolitical liberation. It had been the majortheme for Beethoven and his followers.Romantic music was a call to revolutionthat now languishes under the idiot term

classical. The exhilarating allegri of thesymphony - the hoofbeats, the janglingbridles, the crack of loading muskets -are not about hunting, as Roger Scruton

fondly imagines. They are about bourgeoisrevolution - "to arms, citizens!"- discoveringcommon aims, seizing the castle keep,liberating the prisoners, letting in the lightof reason, sweeping away the cobwebsof feudal reaction. After 1848, when the

bourgeois class made its historic pactwith state power and landed interests, the

excitement turned sour. In March 1871,the French state slaughtered the Communardsin tens of thousands, and drove the voice

of universal truth and reason underground.In Wagner, massive chromatic transitionsinvoke myth and fate: surrender to the

madness of the stock market as to a naturalforce. By Mahler, the revolutionary allegri are

hollowed-out, febrile, a nostalgic memorythat relates to erotics rather than history.But this radical subjectivity had consequences.

By rationalising the brain-bendingc h r o m a t i c i s m of Wagner and Mahler,Schoenberg and Webern forged a music

whose freedom of note combinationrejected the respectable, bourgeois worldof repression and exchange. Their negationof tonality in Twelve Tone, born throughlogic, is painful; its parallel in the Blues,

itself born through pain, is alluring. Thesetwin attacks on the tempered key system

stalked each other through the twentieth-

century, fighting, aiding and abetting, fusingand swapping places (see Muhal Abrams,

Frank Zappa, James Blood Ulmer, DerekBailey). The struggle for authentic musicresembled political resistance to war and

inequality and mass starvation. Its historyis likewise fugitive and unofficial: stark

glimpses of a different order in a blacknight of violence and lies. When Mark

Sinker, writing in The Wire (no 211, September2001),worried that the offensive volume ofrock can be mobilised to confirm conservatism,

he needed to pay more attention to themusic's economic base. Noise organisedfor extraction of surplus value isn't noise,but silence at high volume: rock as spectacleblocks its liberating essence, its democratic

release and insurrectionary energy(hence the necessity of Punk etc.) Asusual in bourgeois thought, idealism linksto positivism: Sinker's decibel-countingcannothandle the fact that noise in music is an

aesthetic fact concerning collective human

Noise organised for

extraction of surplusvalue isn't noise, but

silence at high volume


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experience and individual response, nota quantitative measure.

Take the example of Cecil Taylor. Incarrying out zappologist Marco Maurizi'sdictum that the dialectic of Modern Art is"mediation criticised by immediacy", Taylorexplodes the meaning of the piano - that

prime embodiment of bourgeois tonality -

from within, seemingly bending noteswhich the machine was designed to deliverstraight and even, transforming pianisticmastery into a battlefield of physical tensions

and clashes. Taylor has reduced pianismto lightning rhythmic nuance and bounding

sonic volume. Encyclopedic harmonic

knowledge is balanced like an invertedpyramid on the nose-tip of the moment,

causing a frictive density and horridpower which make lovers of civilised tinklingflee the room.

Why this cataclysm at the heart ofmusical creativity? Because the reputationof the classical masterpiece, this civili-

sation, is the accumulation of the sweat-ed labour of legions of composers, musi-

cians, concert organisers and concert-hallbuilders, all those who have worked tomake these moments possible. Taylor's

intent is to inject the spontaneity of theinstant - his actual presence at thismoment in front of you now in this particularhall - into the frozen monolith, to explodethe tempered key system into a million

scintillating fragments, to make the

process of playing the point of us gathering,and not the congealed kudos of the past.Taylor is the most refined and gentlest ofpeople - to underline the point, he even

recites poetry and wears pink fluffy slippers

at recitals - yet ears trained by radio andfilm musics, used to music which fails to

address the listener directly, shout "Violence!Violence!! Violence!!!" every time theyhear it.A recent performance at the Barbican

(13 May 2002) is a case in point. Invited

to write a concert piece for performance

by Bang On A Can All-Stars ("a fiercelyaggressive group, combining the powerand punch of a rock band with the precisionand clarity of a chamber ensemble"

according to the New York Times, whoappear to have swapped genuine musiccriticism for promotional falafel), CecilTaylor questioned the fetish of the writtenmasterpiece by appearing in person with

the group. His scorewas an A4 photocopyof some derisory doodles containing randomlyscattered letters and musical signs. Hisrehearsal consisted of a thirty-minuteseance at which the musicians were

instructed to make no soundwhile Taylorexplored the limits of the auditorium byslowly moving up the aisle (the pianist

tinkles some notes and is admonished,leading to a backstage war in which she

is finally banished from the performance).Then the musicians were themselvessent into the auditorium to test the space,exhale air and pronounce a word. Whenthey turn this into a clever improvised

event, cooing and chirping at each other(as they do downtown), Taylor upbraids

them and tells them to slow the tempo tonear silence. Worse even than gaggingthe All-Stars, he imports drummer Tony

Oxley, insisting Oxley is "the best drummeron the planet"(thus bouleversing decadesof careful negotiation between BlackNationalism and American patriotic hardsell to make Jazza global cultural hegemon).

In their performance, Taylor and Oxley

upset any notion of received harmony orrhythm, forcing the three members ofBang On A Can who dared show up toimprovise what they are rather than what

they know. The improvisation tore spaces

Taylors intent is toinject the spontaneity of

the instant into the

frozen monolith


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in the fabric of community, and createda genuinely new and unheralded musicalconstruction with the materials to hand.Like a John Cage piece performed in themidst of a set of new minimalist hack-

works, Taylor and Oxley proved that allthe careful notations by Tan Dun, HermetoPascoal and Don Byron (pieces which

had occupied the first half) were so muchtepid filmscore twaddle, trivial evasions

of what playing music in front of peoplereally is.

The rhythmic relationship of Taylor andOxley brought in something vocal andauthentic that was completely lacking in

Bang On A Can's finicky reproduction of

strategies from Henry Cow, Curlew andthe Mike Post Coalition. The fusion ofrock powerandchamber clarity promisedby the New York Timesproved to be

ersatz class-reconciliation, a postmodernistsales pitch indicating a consummationdevoutly to be wished by harrassed artspromoters (ie bums-on-seats plus high-class tone), but nothing at all in terms of

musical micro-substance in the hearing.Bang On A Can's clumsy attempts atrock and samba were exceedingly ugly,notes as illustrations of the idea ratherthan the thing-for-itself, cluttered and

awkward. Their performance revealed theabsolutely empty character of academicmusical values: all the music said was"we can play these dots", there was no

motive force, no message to the bowels,no meaning.

For musicians to deliver "the word withits theme intact, the word permeated withconfident and categorical social valuejudgment,"they must also provide the

next term in V.N. Voloshinov's argument:"the word that really means and takes

responsibility for what it says"(these arethe closing words of Marxism and thePhilosophy of Language, 1929). This

means developing a personal voice onyour instrument which sheds the chameleon-like pseudo-universality of the competent

orchestral interpreter - the musical equivalentof the polite dinner-party chatter which

pretends to talk freely of anything, butremains scared witless by economic orsexual reality - and risks genuine expression:what Leroi Jones called the stance whichdefines the authentic jazz saxophonist.

Taylor and Oxley provided stancein such

abundance that their presence felt like avolcanic eruption of directness andimmediacy, sending the Bang On A Canmusicians into gibbering recall of adolescent

Halenesque electric-guitar (the artificialityand fragility of the sexual equality inducedby classical training was revealed when thetwo female members of Bang On A Canfailed to show up; this was a punch-up any

female free improvisor would have loved,and shone in... fans of trombonist GailBrand's amazing performance at the V&AMerz Niteriot were reduced to imaginingwhat she could have done in this context).

However, just because musical truth

sounds violent and unacceptable to the statusquo, it doesn't follow that literal devastation

and violence are art. Stockhausen'senthusiasm for the Trade Center attackcould just as well be the futurist Filippo-

Tommaso Marinetti praising war ("theworld's only hygiene"). Stockhausen com-bines Baader-Meinhof's elitist concept ofspectacular political action with neo-Wagnerian megalomania: he doesn't

realise that art and revolution are not aphysical force, a firestorm (despite theimages currently used by halfwits to promoteEcstatic Jazz), but powers mediated viahuman intellect and will. In other words,

the powerof great music is its truth content,

The fusion of rock

power and chamberclarity proved to be

ersatz class-reconciliation


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its proposed relation to the totality ofsociety and the cosmos, not brute force.

Music is not real violence, but a discourse ofaffective states, one that creates opportunitiesfor judgment about feelings. The splitbetween intellect and emotion is transcended.This can't be done with a bludgeon, any

more than revolutionary seizure of the

state by the proletarian class can beachieved by individual acts of anarchistviolence (Trotsky's critique of Narodnikterrorism still stands).

Varse and his handful of authenticorchestral inheritors - namely James

Dillon, Simon H. Fell, Iancu Dumitrescu andAna-Maria Avram - make music which

short-circuits merely intellectual appreciation(the tight clean shape of a Haydn Quartetor a pop song), and at moments speaksdirectly to the body. It maps out the flowof blood, the rustle of nervous synapses,

the creak of bone. Yet these musics don'tneglect the intellectual thrill of graphing

such biological realities, nor twinges ofanxiety and guilt. This emotional sciencesteels the brainpan, giving us the resolve

to regard the world in its true colours.The political corollary is not aestheticawe before the actions of suicidal hijackers,but comprehension of the motives thatdrive global conflict. Not Deleuze & Guttari's

facile and rhetorical "surrender to the primordialOther", but Enlightenment: Freud's"Where Id was, Ego shall be".

9-11 was not radical music, but an atrocityinflicted by conspirators trained by the

CIA for destabilisation projects in foreign

countries. They applied what the CIA hadtaught them in pursuit of their leader's

power struggle with the Bush dynastyconcerning the price of oil (Cecil Taylorcites the fact that San Franciso's mayorwas warned not to fly on 11 September,maintaining that Bush organised the attack

to consolidate a lost-in-fact election: you

can hear Taylor's tough, Burroughs-likedisassociation from liberal unctuousnessin every note he plays). Even if they inevitablygain the applause of arab populations

suffering under US-backed repression,Al-Qaeda have no plan beyond revenge,using the civil populations of the enemystate as targets (they're like the USSRbacked with a people's bomb that will

wipe out the workers of the world theyshould be uniting with). Al-Qaeda's actionsdo not help to create an independent working-class politics which could overthrow capitalism,but instead invoke the logic that led to

the bombing of retreating Iraqi troops onthe road to Basrah, and deaths in tens ofthousands. Al-Qaeda are no more to be

supported than Cecil Taylor's alternativeaxis of evil(George Bush, Wynton Marsalis

and Philip Glass, as if you couldn'tguess).

Political violence conceived as conflictbetween national or religious blocks is aspecies of psychic repression, akin to

conceiving sex in terms of individualgratification, or music in terms of a quantitative

measure (genius, outreach, sales). Itfails to find any agency for saving thehuman race (isn't it funny how the well-

heeled are so prone to political despair?)It reduces history and culture to a spec-tacle that is no longer carried out by peo-ple capable of reason: for example, themyth that the Arab/Israeli conflict is the

fruit of thousands of years of difference(one peddled in a recent headline by thesupposedly progressive french newspaper,Libration), rather than a US strategy toput pressure on Arab states and keep

down the price of oil. Religious and national

Polit ical violence

conceived as conflict

between national orreligious blocks is a

species of psychicrepression


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pseudo-explanations obscure the rationaldynamic of capital and its reproduction

(mangetouts from Kenya, silicon chipsfrom South Korea and the multi-colouredmetropolis are all highly explicablep h e n o m e n a ) , naturalising anglo wealthand afghan poverty. Alice Coltrane's mil-

lionaire mysticism retains the worst partof John Coltrane's legacy: its living partis its global integration of musical codes,its refusal of religious and national divisions.Free music is the song of the New

International.

By facing the horrors of an unbalancedworld, by making us experience its terrorand violence and sorrow, radical music

offers the satisfaction of truth rather thanthe blandishments of comfort. It arms the

psyche for reality. This will becomeincreasingly necessary as the weaponryand trade-deals sold by the First and ex-

Communist Worlds to the Third send ustheir refugees, their anger and theirdespair. The grief-stricken of Manhattanshould be allowed to bury their dead inwhatever manner they wish, but sombre

hymns and TV-studio candles are not thefinal word: only a courageous assessmentof global realities - musical and political -will allow us to shape a future worthhearing.

May 2002

Free music is the song

of the New International


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This piece was originally commissioned by RobYoung at The Wire in the aftermath of the Twin

Towers suicide attack on 11 September 2001. It was

deemed "not to fit" with other contributions (TheWire, no 213, November 2001 ). After Young voiced

the opinion that US bombing had created "a happierAfghanistan ... music and song are returning to that

devastated land"(editorial, The Wire, no 214,

December 2001), it seemed unlikely that the anti-imperialist sentiments voiced above would find

favour, so it was placed on Esther Leslie's website(www.militantesthetix.co.uk). The current publishers

found it there and decided to issue it in pamphlet

form: it was expanded for that purpose in May 2002(hence the inclusion of a Taylor/Oxley/Bang-On-A-

Can concert review). Thanks to Harry Gilonis for thequotes from Julia Spinola's article Monstrous Art

from Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 18 September

2001.

This piece was proposed to Rob Young at The Wire

in the aftermath of the Twin Towers suicide attack on

11 September 2001. Unfortunately, it did not fit withother contributions to a special issue (no 213,

November 2001): it was too long, and all the restwere on-the-spot responses by local New Yorkers. In

the next issue, Young voiced the opinion that the top-

pling of the Taliban seemed to have created "a hap-pier Afghanistan ... music and song are returning to

that devastated land" (Editorial, The Wire, no 214). I

concluded that the anti-imperialist thrust of the essaywould never find favour, and so published it at

www.militantesthetix.com. In May 2002, Andy Wilsonand Ian Land found it there and offered to issue it in

pamphlet form. When the launch of Music, Violence,Truth(at the Dolphin pub in Mare Street, Hackney,

on Tuesday 25 June) was posted to The Wiredis-

cussion board on Yahoo, Young e-mailed me to pointout that, far from censoring left viewpoints, he'd

made his own anti-Bush remarks in his editorial forJanuary 2002 - an anti-imperialist stand for which he

took "a hell of a lot of personal abuse from Americanreaders". It was outrageous to portray Young ashawk and censor simply because he didn't care to

print my personal musings on 9/11. I apologise toRob for misrepresenting him, and hope this makes

everything clear.

ben Watson

June 2002


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Copyright: Ben Watson, 2002contact www.militantesthetix.co.uk

Published: Ian Land and Andy WilsonThe Dolphin Pub, Hackney, London, 2002contact [email protected]

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Ben Watson: Music, Violence, Truth