Wow! eBook
Music, Metamorphosis and Capitalism: Self, Poetics and Politics
Author(s): John Wall (Author, Editor)
- Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
- Publication Date: 9 Feb. 2007
- Edition: 1st
- Language: English
- Print length: 123 pages
- ISBN-10: 1847181333
- ISBN-13: 9781847181336
Book Description
The essays in this volume look at various kinds of music from a number of perspectives, including the socio-political, the aesthetic and the psychological. The music under discussion here is diverse but fits loosely into the categories rock-pop, new music, rap, metal and music video, with the caveat that much of the music discussed here is historically layered and engages self-consciously in the deconstruction of music genres. If there is an interpretative theme that links these essays, it is that of the cultural embeddedness of music. At the same time, and this is perhaps the single most important challenge taken up in these essays, this variable cultural studies approach embraces fully the aesthetic dimension of music, construing it as that which resists and articulates the signifying function of symbolic systems of meaning. Music is seen here as the kind of social critique that traces out its own phenomenological and structural pathways in such a way that, in the end, it is critical hermeneutic theory itself that comes under scrutiny. By way of reference (and perhaps indebtedness), the non-signifying property of music discussed variably in this volume is the same as that which was brought into relief in the terminologically contradictory title of Theodor Adorno’s masterwork, Aesthetic Theory.
Editorial Reviews
From the Author
At the philosophical level, these essays test and make the
assumption that music is less a representational than an existential and
highly particular perspective on the social-symbolic system. Thus music is
said to make a significant contribution to the way in which things come to
acquire meaning–aesthetic, personal, political, ideological, economic and
scientific. The essays cross a range of musical genres, including Rock,
Jazz, Metal, Classical, New Music, Rap and music video. Their orientation
is towards an analysis of music within its cultural environment.
In the first essay, Dafydd Jones asks how minority linguistic, ethnic and
social groups opposed to the standardization of experience may
simultaneously invigorate a dominant culture in a dominant language without
at the same time diminishing the invigorating voice of minority voice.
Minority music, therefore, in this case Welsh, is not simply the voice of
an ethnic identity threatened with debilitating change; minorities change
too, not necessarily according to the dictates of enormous concentrations
of power, but according to their own sense of who they are and will be. In
an essay on David Bowie, Rodney Sharkey counters the “sell-out” argument,
and reflexively, submits his own counter argument to criticism; David Bowie
is no innocent actor plying his critical trade only to be absorbed by the
system in his later years. Bowie reflects it from within, draws on its
resources, transforms and exploits it. He is at once a social agent and a
theatrical figure responding to being subject to social and, significantly,
theoretical change. Moreover, the precariousness of the study of popular
music forces the critic to acknowledge the social, intellectual and
symbolic conditions under which theory is developed for the interpretation
of culture. Thus popular music criticism is a testing ground not only for
the music in question, but for theory itself, as Adorno insisted must be
the case in all music criticism, despite his own blind spots. On the
subject of heavy Metal, Ýbrahim Beyazoðlu offers an indepth analysis of the
cycle of Norwegian Metal from its novel radicalism in the early 1980s, the
church-burning, “other-hating” middle period to the quiet of what turned
out to be prison for some, wealth for others. Beyazoðlu examines both the
self-mythologization of the Metal movement in Norway and its complicity in
the system it purported to loath.
Focusing on New Music of the 1960s ad 1970s, John MacKay traces the
institutional pressures on composers to form themselves into ever
increasing blocs of influence and style. In order to avoid this
predicament, Californian composer Robert Erickson stayed aloof from
“schools” of music, favouring the smaller and more spontaneous “scene”,
despite its often fleeting nature and institutional insecurity. MacKay
tells the story of Erickson in a biographical mode, the beauty being that
it becomes possible to note and plot the myriad of influences that
perpetually transformed the life of a single individual. In an essay that
links cultural studies with music theory, Vincent Meelberg explores
accounts of the psychology of trauma, not so much in order to advance
therapeutic practice, but to interrogate the representational structure of
music, asking what would be required for music itself to internalise
characteristics of trauma. Meelberg devises a “grammar” of traumatic
musical content and concludes that trauma may be expressed or embodied in
music through musical anomaly–stray sounds, gaps and interruption to the
general structure of the musical phrase. On the subject of musical silence,
if not also anomaly, David Hanner and John Wall engage with American
composer, Morton Feldman’s claims to return music its sonic roots, as he
sees it, by reorganizing its form, its duration, its production in space
and as a thing, its silence. David Hanner and John Wall argue that silence
is a kind of dehiscence, an opening of meaning onto the material, in this
case the body. Thus the politics of music, contrary to what Feldman would
insist, is bound up not only through social class, taste and obvious forms
of power, but also through the constitution of the intimacy of the body in
the public sphere.
In an insightful essay on `noise’ Paal Fagerhiem argues that Rap music
exists in a mimetic relationship of discordance and volume with the hostile
world of American social politics. Fagerheim devises a method that brings
to bear formal musical analysis onto the noise producing frictions of
society, and thus is produced, at a theoretical level a musical analysis of
society, as if it itself were music. Thus Public Enemy produces
simultaneously the most radical and the most traditional of music, a music
whose a priori of enunciation inheres in society, its clamour and its
silence.
On the subject of music video, video auteur Chris Cunningham is said to
generate a hermetic spatial world in which his subjects inhere as if purely
through the forces of the created environment, devoid of active, projective
subjectivity. Tristan Fidler argues that as the characters move through
this dream world, which, temporally speaking, is like a stream that flows
within a confined space and therefore flows nowhere, the body of the
non-subject takes on the elemental characteristics of the surrounding
world: fluid qualities and extreme brittleness. The argument here is that
Cunningham, by infusing the digital body with the varied rhythms of music,
conjures a drama of the imaginary body, which is a permanent feature of
social construction of the body and identity. Thus the music video here
constitutes a musical form that articulates the embrace of the virtual and
the actual, dissolving for the duration of the video the binary oppositions
that structure the practices of signification.
assumption that music is less a representational than an existential and
highly particular perspective on the social-symbolic system. Thus music is
said to make a significant contribution to the way in which things come to
acquire meaning–aesthetic, personal, political, ideological, economic and
scientific. The essays cross a range of musical genres, including Rock,
Jazz, Metal, Classical, New Music, Rap and music video. Their orientation
is towards an analysis of music within its cultural environment.
In the first essay, Dafydd Jones asks how minority linguistic, ethnic and
social groups opposed to the standardization of experience may
simultaneously invigorate a dominant culture in a dominant language without
at the same time diminishing the invigorating voice of minority voice.
Minority music, therefore, in this case Welsh, is not simply the voice of
an ethnic identity threatened with debilitating change; minorities change
too, not necessarily according to the dictates of enormous concentrations
of power, but according to their own sense of who they are and will be. In
an essay on David Bowie, Rodney Sharkey counters the “sell-out” argument,
and reflexively, submits his own counter argument to criticism; David Bowie
is no innocent actor plying his critical trade only to be absorbed by the
system in his later years. Bowie reflects it from within, draws on its
resources, transforms and exploits it. He is at once a social agent and a
theatrical figure responding to being subject to social and, significantly,
theoretical change. Moreover, the precariousness of the study of popular
music forces the critic to acknowledge the social, intellectual and
symbolic conditions under which theory is developed for the interpretation
of culture. Thus popular music criticism is a testing ground not only for
the music in question, but for theory itself, as Adorno insisted must be
the case in all music criticism, despite his own blind spots. On the
subject of heavy Metal, Ýbrahim Beyazoðlu offers an indepth analysis of the
cycle of Norwegian Metal from its novel radicalism in the early 1980s, the
church-burning, “other-hating” middle period to the quiet of what turned
out to be prison for some, wealth for others. Beyazoðlu examines both the
self-mythologization of the Metal movement in Norway and its complicity in
the system it purported to loath.
Focusing on New Music of the 1960s ad 1970s, John MacKay traces the
institutional pressures on composers to form themselves into ever
increasing blocs of influence and style. In order to avoid this
predicament, Californian composer Robert Erickson stayed aloof from
“schools” of music, favouring the smaller and more spontaneous “scene”,
despite its often fleeting nature and institutional insecurity. MacKay
tells the story of Erickson in a biographical mode, the beauty being that
it becomes possible to note and plot the myriad of influences that
perpetually transformed the life of a single individual. In an essay that
links cultural studies with music theory, Vincent Meelberg explores
accounts of the psychology of trauma, not so much in order to advance
therapeutic practice, but to interrogate the representational structure of
music, asking what would be required for music itself to internalise
characteristics of trauma. Meelberg devises a “grammar” of traumatic
musical content and concludes that trauma may be expressed or embodied in
music through musical anomaly–stray sounds, gaps and interruption to the
general structure of the musical phrase. On the subject of musical silence,
if not also anomaly, David Hanner and John Wall engage with American
composer, Morton Feldman’s claims to return music its sonic roots, as he
sees it, by reorganizing its form, its duration, its production in space
and as a thing, its silence. David Hanner and John Wall argue that silence
is a kind of dehiscence, an opening of meaning onto the material, in this
case the body. Thus the politics of music, contrary to what Feldman would
insist, is bound up not only through social class, taste and obvious forms
of power, but also through the constitution of the intimacy of the body in
the public sphere.
In an insightful essay on `noise’ Paal Fagerhiem argues that Rap music
exists in a mimetic relationship of discordance and volume with the hostile
world of American social politics. Fagerheim devises a method that brings
to bear formal musical analysis onto the noise producing frictions of
society, and thus is produced, at a theoretical level a musical analysis of
society, as if it itself were music. Thus Public Enemy produces
simultaneously the most radical and the most traditional of music, a music
whose a priori of enunciation inheres in society, its clamour and its
silence.
On the subject of music video, video auteur Chris Cunningham is said to
generate a hermetic spatial world in which his subjects inhere as if purely
through the forces of the created environment, devoid of active, projective
subjectivity. Tristan Fidler argues that as the characters move through
this dream world, which, temporally speaking, is like a stream that flows
within a confined space and therefore flows nowhere, the body of the
non-subject takes on the elemental characteristics of the surrounding
world: fluid qualities and extreme brittleness. The argument here is that
Cunningham, by infusing the digital body with the varied rhythms of music,
conjures a drama of the imaginary body, which is a permanent feature of
social construction of the body and identity. Thus the music video here
constitutes a musical form that articulates the embrace of the virtual and
the actual, dissolving for the duration of the video the binary oppositions
that structure the practices of signification.
These essays will be of interest to academics, students and cultural
workers who have an interest in cultural studies, sociology of music,
musical aesthetics, philosophy and literature. On the other hand, these
essays are accessible and would be of immense interest to the
non-specialised reader, in so far as the questions addressed derive from
everyday discourses on music.
About the Author
John Wall teaches literature and cultural studies at Eastern Mediterranean University, Cyprus. He has published articles on Samuel Beckett’s novels and Dada.
