The Agony of Modern Music (1955)

I recently happened upon a book in a music store called The Agony of Modern Music. It seems to have caused quite a stir upon its publication in 1955. The author was an American music critic and CIA agent (…!!!) Henry Pleasants. Here are some key arguments from this rather amusing little book: 

“Modern music is not modern and is rarely music.” (The first line of the blurb).

“There is more real creative musical talent in the music of Armstrong and Ellington, in the songs of Gershwin, Rodgers, Kern and Berlin, than in all the serious music composed since 1920.” (Ok then, if you say so).

“Serious music is a dead art. The vein which for three hundred years offered a seemingly inexhaustible yield of beautiful music has run out. What we know as modern music is the noise made by deluded speculators picking through the slagpile.”

When googling the above book I also came across the following, also rather hilarious, anecdote. The little novelty comes from a blog style article on Pleasant’s polemical title. Enjoy!

“I once played second trombone in a performance of an orchestral piece by Morton Feldman, in which no actual notes were written in the score. Instead, there were rectangular boxes of various lengths positioned in “high,” “medium,” and “low” portions of the staff. These boxes represented high, middle, and low notes, which were to be held for lengths of time represented by the length of the boxes (at least the time signature was 4/4). The actual pitches were left up to the discretion of the players — i.e., you could play anything you wanted.

As it happened, Feldman had ended the piece with a couple of bars of brass alone. This presented an opportunity to make a musical statement — or so the trombone section decided. “Why not end the piece on a nice C-major chord,” was the thought that occurred to us. After all, the composer allowed us complete freedom to choose the pitches we wanted to play. So, in a spirit of rebellious conspiracy, we decided on our notes, then easily persuaded the trumpets to go along with us and play their own C-major triad.

Unfortunately, the horn section refused to go along with our little scheme — they played random notes of their own choosing, so the piece ended on a C-major chord with a few “blue notes” thrown in. It was close enough to the composer’s intent that I don’t think anyone noticed anything funny — the conductor appeared not to, in any case. But our idea was to say, “Hey, if the composer is going to give up any attempt to write music, he’s got no beef if we decide to play some on our own!”

A performance at the Obama inauguration with music by John Williams was pre-recorded. Here is a brilliant alternative to how the whole thing could have sounded!

Founder of UbuWeb, that megalithic internet portal into (unfortunately - yet understandably - often usually, poor quality) digital archives of the avant-garde, Kenneth Goldsmith, makes some interesting comments on the state of digital culture today.

At the beginning of the year I linked to a short video extract of Christian Carrière’s very striking interpretation of Fratres, by Arvo Pärt. Here it is in full! Thanks to Christian for getting in contact.

Interesting comment in a Guardian article from John Perry Barlow, lyricist for the Grateful Dead: ”What unites these groups [Anonymous/Wikileaks/Lulzac/Occupy movement/the Pirate Party] is the belief that the future is not about vertical, hierarchical government, but horizontal [peer-to-peer] government. This pits the forces of the information age against those of the industrial age, as we move from scarcity of information to abundance. The last year has established our ability to have revolutions, but not to govern in their wake – but that’s coming.”

God bless America, land of the free. A family checks out a pistol at a National Rifle Association convention. Read about why “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” here.

“The art I prefer. The one I think we’ll need tomorrow, [is] a clear precise art, without rhetoric, that doesn’t lie, that isn’t flattering”: Marcello, in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960)  

Are You Excited?

weekly radio show produced by Simon Roy Christensen (in Tokyo) and myself (in Vancouver); broadcast on aarhusstudenterradio.dk at 9pm (GMT+1)

A still from the real-time generative graphic video score, which I’m currently working on. 

“Many people are aware that sound is always associated with colour—that when, for example, a musical note is sounded, a flash of colour corresponding to it may be seen by those whose finer senses are already to some extent developed. It seems not to be so generally known that sound produces form as well as colour, and that every piece of music leaves behind it an impression of this nature, which persists for some considerable time, and is clearly visible and intelligible to those who have eyes to see. Such a shape is perhaps not technically a thought-form—unless indeed we take it, as we well may, as the result of the thought of the composer expressed by means of the skill of the musician through his instrument.

Some such forms are very striking and impressive, and naturally their variety is infinite. Each class of music has its own type of form, and the style of the composer shows as clearly in the form which his music builds as a man’s character shows in his handwriting. Other possibilities of variation are introduced by the kind of instrument upon which the music is performed, and also by the merits of the player. The same piece of music if accurately played will always build the same form, but that form will be enormously larger when it is played upon a church organ or by a military band than when it is performed upon a piano, and not only the size but also the texture of the resultant form will be very different. There will also be a similar difference in texture between the result of a piece of music played upon a violin and the same piece executed upon the flute. Again, the excellence of the performance has its effect, and there is a wonderful difference between the radiant beauty of the form produced by the work of a true artist, perfect alike in expression and execution, and the comparatively dull and undistinguished-looking one which represents the effort of the wooden and mechanical player. Anything like inaccuracy in rendering naturally leaves a corresponding defect in the form, so that the exact character of the performance shows itself just as clearly to the clairvoyant spectator as it does to the auditor.”

A short excerpt from the last chapter of  Thought-forms, a book about the visual manifestations of the thought process, perceivable by certain clairvoyants and/or those ‘who have eyes to see’. The book was first published in 1901 in England, and was written by two famous English theosophists, Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater. The above image shows a representation of the form associated with an organ piece by Charles Gounod. 

Are You Excited?

weekly radio show produced by Simon Roy Christensen (in Tokyo) and myself (in Vancouver); broadcast on aarhusstudenterradio.dk at 9pm (GMT+1)

I just came across this on a Canadian blog, Zolius (which seems not to have seen much action since last summer). Here’s what the blogger had to say about the picture:

IRIS Distribution (whose clients have included Chemikal Underground, Electrolux, EMI, Mint Records and Ninja Tune) is putting the above design on t-shirts for kids and even onesies for babies (because of the growing problem of baby-to-baby file sharing, of course). They’re also bundling it with a kids’ album by Kimya Dawson on K Records, and I’m surprised and disappointed either of them went along with it. As you can see, here we have some complete jerk of a rabbit ignoring a raccoon who’s trying to offer it an orange because it’s selfishly wrapped up in the sound on its headphones, which of course is Dick Rabbit’s personally exclusive property and must not be allowed to leak into the raccoon’s perky little loser ears. Because that’s how culture flourishes, by making sure that its circulation in the world is as controlled and hidden as possible, right? It’s a beautifully concise picture of capitalism trying to undermine kids’ inherent sense of right and wrong, cuddily stamping out their instinct for sharing and fairness in favour of greed and selfishness. (Coming soon, the Tea Party sequel, “I Share Everything But My Taxes.”) Sure, teach kids that artists need to be compensated for their work and that not every good thing comes for free. I’d endorse that, but those ideas are nowhere here. (And I’m not even getting into the crypto-racist coding of the good pink rabbit versus the bad blue-and-brown raccoon, which was obviously not intended, but still…) Luckily the marriage of image and slogan here are so inept that it practically serves as an advertisement for the opposite attitude. It’s crying out - as loudly and whinily as a baby in an uncomfortably obnoxious onesie - for reappropriation and detournement. Have at it, ye olde kultura jammaz.

Spot on!

Are You Excited?

weekly radio show produced by Simon Roy Christensen (in Tokyo) and myself (in Vancouver); broadcast on aarhusstudenterradio.dk at 9pm (GMT+1)

A very interesting and relevant report titled The Sky is Rising, written by Techdirt.com’s Mike Masnick, has shed some long overdue crap-clearing light on the debate raging around so-called ‘illegal’ file-sharing, and the dubious reasons being put forward by various governments in order to restrict the ways in which normal people can use the internet. Recent big news has seen the US fail to force through the controversial SOPA and PIPA bills, designed to allow authorities to tighten their grip on the various freedoms afforded current internet users, in the ways in which we share information. Not long after these bills were scrapped due to enormous resistance from internet users the world over, the multi-national ACTA treaty was signed by many countries, also aimed at trying to prevent people from ‘stealing’ other peoples’ digital property. The main argument for the still contested and also highly controversial ACTA treaty, is that digital file-sharing be killing the Culture Industry, putting important institutions out of business and preventing artists from making a living. For years, ever since Napster, we’ve seen record industries and bands (Metallica) sue internet users for downloading music without paying for it. The old industry model - company provides money; band records album; album gets sold; band make a small fortune; company laughs all the way to the bank - has struggled after the switchover to digital media, and so in a desperate attempt to ignore the facts, EMI, Universal, Sony et al, have turned a whole generation of eager listeners and curious souls into criminals, blaming every small kid who downloads a few tunes every now and then, for the reason U2 no longer sell any CDs. This has been the standard line of attack we’ve been hearing for a long time, and has provided the ‘facts’ upon which governments have proposed such glorious initiatives as SOPA/PIPA/ACTA. The new report by Mike Masnick, however, doesn’t quite agree with some of the ideas being put forward by the Big Boys. First of all, according to the report - which incidently is based on publicly available statistics and research - the Culture Industry, or as Masnick calls it the ‘Entertainment Industry’, has in fact being growing steadily ever since file sharing became an issue, i.e. since the internet allowed ‘fans’ and those interested in culture, to spread said culture throughout the world. Between 1998 and 2010 the global Entertainment Industry grew in value from 449 to 745 billion dollars. Furthermore, despite the apparently ubiquitous practice of downloading all media illegally, each household in 2008 spent 15% more on entertainment than in 2000. So why is everyone complaining?

The numbers from this report hint at the fact that, while a small sector of the EI is experiencing problems, the industry as a whole has seen unprecedented growth. What’s more, again according to the report, the individual artist is today seeing a larger portion of the profits go directly into her pockets. By cutting out the middleman, artists are finding new ways to reach their audiences, and still making a living from their art, in ways other than just recording a record and then handing 85% of all the profits back to ‘the Industry’. Interestingly, the report states that the number of people employed within the EI rose by 20% between 2000-08, and what’s more, 43% more (compared with 2000) of those involved in and making their livings from the EI, are independent artists who have worked out ways, thanks to the internet, to support themselves without the help of huge multinational companies. Why that’s terrible, no?

In a world which is based on the idea that producing loads of crap and then selling it is ‘the only way’, it seems strange that big names in the EI should be annoyed at a 166% increase in the value of their business, and it would seem therefore that the major players in this ball-game have been spinning a few tall stories when it comes to their doom-and-gloom tales of demise. (Or at least selectively choosing which figures to present to the world in support of their case.) Yes, the big record companies may be losing out, but perhaps this isn’t such a bad thing. In fact, of course it’s not. The old music industry model was based on a whole heap of rather crazy ideas - the LP was fun for a while, but who says that this is the only format in which music can be recorded and sold/presented to the world? Today independent artists have endless possibilities for producing personal and lovingly made works, selling them (perhaps) directly to their fans. What’s more, people today, instead of paying for records, are paying to see the musicians themselves in concert. Artists no longer need the big records execs, since they can do everything themselves, low-key like. I personally don’t see how this is anything other than a good thing…

If one happens to speak Danish, there is more to be read on this story here: http://www.information.dk/294018

Are You Excited?

weekly radio show produced by Simon Roy Christensen (in Tokyo) and myself (in Vancouver); broadcast on aarhusstudenterradio.dk at 9pm (GMT+1)