Some of you might be interested to know that a pretty intense debate on music/art and commodification has been debated in the pages of Weekly Worker recently - in a rather needlessly intemperate manner from various sides, but nonetheless intelligent. Anyhow, the latest issue of this official CPGB newspaper actually has excerpts from two Downie scores on the front cover! Never thought I'd see that - at the very least the issues at stake are being considered more widely than in the musical world. The whole issue can be downloaded at http://www.cpgb.org.uk/ - there's a particularly interesting response in the letters page.

Gordon Downie says:


I know I'm just a typically British anti-intellectual pragmatist, but this is so wrong on so many counts that one hardly knows where to start.

But why bother, actually.

Well, I feel that if it (and all the other articles that led up to it) is felt to be worth reading by those who buy Weekly Worker (one can't gauge what all readers think, but the fact that it's generated so much debate has made the editor want to stick with it - and incidentally he would probably be interested in printing any contributions that members here might send in), then it's worth discussing. I feel that claims for either free improvisation/composition's intrinsically more 'democratic' nature are both off the mark, both rely simply upon metaphorical interpretations of situations which are wholly of an artificial nature. Issues of democracy and music are about the latter's relationship to undemocratically accountable capital, or about whether the decisions of institutions to give certain individuals (composers, performers, improvisers, whoever) a platform for individual expression favour certain groups of people more than others, on account of class, gender, etc, or about whether the whole process of musical production reflects the democratically expressed wishes of the populace. The rest is a sideshow, what I'd call 'superstructural fetishism', making too much of culture divorced from its means of production.

Thank you for posting this. Interesting stuff, especially given the intended audience.

Bolus is a straw man, and the actual 'problem' of total serial organization as some guarantor of political opprobrium remains a legitimate concern. The discussion Downie brings up has also been addressed by Mathias Spahlinger in the German MusikTexte, under the title "politische aspekte der musik" (MusikTexte 39) -- a talk that is now almost 20 years old.

He outlines four political aspects of music, and argues that the four cannot all be satisfactorily addressed in a single work. Unfortunately, the journal is not online, so all I can do is summarize.

The upshot of Spahlinger's position relevant to the present context, as a constructed response to Downie, is that while music with a sophisticated content, such as the Boulez/Stockhausen examples cited, may be politically correct in the manner that it resists commodification, it raises other political issues by perpetuating the power structure which decides who is to be the creator, who the intermediary, and who the recipient, of a work of art. Improvisation has the potential to do break this down, perhaps; yet something about the nature of improvisation invites habitual and habituated musical responses, so that the content suffers.

On both accounts, there have been efforts to address the deficiencies. On the one hand, the newest notated music has gone a long way toward reflecting self-skepticism, hopefully encouraging a listening experience that invites the same; on the other hand, improvisation schemes can be and have been designed to circumvent habit, though there is still a huge amount of possibility here.

People ought to go on making whatever music they feel most strongly about, but the reconciliation of all political problems associated with making music in society cannot be achieved unless the society itself changes from the ground up. Musicians can see themselves as a catalyst and accept that the shortcomings are not of their own making.

Sorry to be so condensed about it, a lot has to be fleshed out here, but this is just to say that the conversation has been going on for decades now, and I think Downie is coming into it with a distinctly un-dialectical bent. In fairness to him, I haven't done the Google thingy that Ian just suggested, so perhaps there is more to be unearthed.

Of course, the music which resists commodification most strongly is improvised music, in so far as there isn't a score to fetishise in the way that Downie seems to do, or (theoretically) a social/economic hierarchy between the people responsible for its production, or, arguably, between performers and audience, so that it comes across strongly as a fundamentally, er, democratic kind of music, as has been pointed out many times.

Oops, I said I couldn't be bothered. My response was really occasioned by Spahlinger's claim that improvisation "invites habitual and habituated responses"... while notated composition doesn't? While I'm prepared to accept that Spahlinger is concerned with avoiding such responses, this is because of his political/artistic conscience and not because he writes notes on paper. Put say Derek Bailey's musical output next to Salvatore Sciarrino's and see which looks more habituated!

Indeed. But Downie and Spahlinger in their various ways seem to be; all I wanted to say was that the old chestnut about improvisation being more prone to habituation than notated composition doesn't really stand up against the evidence.

For myself, though, I don't think that improvisation needs to become a fetish if viewed as a method of composition alongside others (more than one of which might be appropriate to a given musical situation). While "pure" improvisation is certainly something I'm interested in and committed to, as well as a fully-notated approach, these are so to speak points within a larger space.

Try and stay away from suicide, it's very unhealthy.

Er, is there?

No, but there are CDs (or vinyls in earlier times) which are an extremely important part of the whole field of improvised music (and jazz and other popular genres as well). Some woudl argue that the recording comes to fulfil a role akin to the score in terms of commodification. Certainly recordings are much bigger business than contemporary scores.

That argument only works in theory if such a category is limited to the actual musicians. But the organisers, sponsors, funders, record companies, are also intrinsic to the production, in the sense of making it possible in a public arena.

Well, that dictum has been asserted often by many in the improvising world, but I find it as unconvincing as Gordon's a priori valorisation of the notated against the improvised. Where Spahlinger's comments seem particularly interesting is through his willingness to look at both positive and negative elements that are particular to either approach. So that improvisation maybe has some advantages over notated music, but also some disadvantages, with respect to commodification. When the latter part of such a dialectic is extracted out of context, then we return to a 'notation better/improvisation worse'/vice-versa type of argument. Also, theoretical arguments concerning commodification need to be considered in the light of which genres (or particular manifestations therein) can be found to attract greater degrees of private capital.

He may not be claiming the latter, necessarily. But it could be argued that a notated score specifically serves the function of steering the performer away from such responses - certainly Ferneyhough's conception of notation seems of this type.

I believe that is a false dichotomy - neither of those things would per se guarantee such an avoidance; a composer can have a political/artistic conscience, but how that is made manifest in their work is what really counts in such a sense, whereas precisely how a composer approaches notation can have an effect on the extent to which habitual/habituated responses are likely.

Two particular examples can't on their own be used to extrapolate a generalised conclusion about genres. One could equally compare Evan Parker with Spahlinger, or with Downie for that matter, and the relative degrees of habitutation might be seen differently.

That statement requires a definition of Spahlinger's conception of what is 'political'. If with a capital 'P' (in the sense that 'Political Music' is often talked about), then I'm with him, but artistic autonomy, to do with immanent properties of the medium, in the late Frankfurt School sense of the term (and which accord with other ideas of 'relative autonomy', including those in the late letters of Engels I posted links to in another thread recently), as I imagine Spahlinger to be referring to, might be considered equally 'political' (as Eagleton puts it 'Aesthetic autonomy becomes a type of negative politics'). Could you clarify where Spahlinger draws the line between a 'political' and a 'non-political' understanding of music?

(I would also add that the constructions of the 'political' that are common in that sort of late Adornoesque tradition (I'm not equating Spahlinger, or Huber or others, with Adorno, but certainly what I know of his ideas resonate with that tradition) do tend to evade political questions of gender, ethnicity, etc., in terms of the very identity of the artistic protagonists who are purporting to produce work of more universal significance)

I've seen a similar thing argued (in an article by Philip Clark) concerning points of similarity in the approach to instruments in Charlie Mingus and Lachenmann; Bailey would seem to go further than Mingus. However, as we have seen in the classical world (where scores of young composers churn out works using all of the stock extended instrumental techniques developed by Lachenmann and others), can't/couldn't Bailey's innovations equally be commodified? That's not a merely rhetorical question - that which has some wider meaning or structural function than mere novelty is perhaps less easily commodified (and that's why the superficial cod-Lachenmann work of young composers is utterly different to that of Lachenmann himself - for him the contextualisation is every bit as important as the sounds themselves); if this is the case in Derek Bailey (whose work I know to an extent but have never really analysed for myself), then mightn't the improvisational grammar be more important than the vocabulary?