Eastern Affect
Noise and Silence
Before embarking on an analysis of the music I have chosen to discuss I would like to set the scene, as it were, by relating some of the concepts that are vital to an understanding of it.
The history of western thought is characterised by a preoccupation with the static, visual object, with linear history, geometry and the logos. Eastern thought is, on the contrary, concerned with the dynamic of flows, the sonic environment and resonance, with cyclical history or rythym, arithmetics and the nomos. (1) This is not to say that the state and stratisfication are a western invention, nor that nomadic turbulence does not exist in Europe, since both are forms of organisation immanent to all societies. Rather it is to focus on the differences in the collective forms of enunciation, or regimes of signs that are to be found in each locale. The Western, ‘civilised’ world is often seen as originating in Greece with the supposed emergence of democracy, and with the rational discourse that centered round such figures as Plato and Aristotle.
‘Aristotle assured his readers that the sense of sight was “above all others”, the one to be trusted’(2)
In one of Plato’s most famous episodes he describes a dream which functions as an allegory that sums up his view of human/mortal perception. In it the chained inhabitants of a cave watch the play of shadows cast by a fire on the wall, convinced that this is life (perhaps in his prescience he saw the modern tyranny of the TV). This is a striking image, and one which demonstrates the dominance of the visual in Platonic thought, since a natural awareness of acoustics would enable any of the incarcerated to clearly perceive the spatial dimensions of the cave and its entrance, or rather exit. Of course this is only an allegory and is not designed to withstand a material analysis, however it is intended to relate the idea that reality as we perceive it is only a dim reflection of the absolute forms (i.e. justice, truth etc.) which are supposedly eternal and unchanging, and therefor immobile and silent.
‘It is almost as if the great acheivements of Western philosophy and science were produced in a huge anechoic chamber. Myriads of books were written in silent rooms and silent libraries.’(3)
The Socratic ideal is pure contemplation, uninhibited by the weakness of the body and the untrustworthiness of sensory perception, we ‘see through the eyes, [Plato] insisted, not with them’(4). This is the beginning of a current of anticorporeality which runs through all western philosophy, which is continually grappling with the problem of the relation between subject and object. A relation which is exemplified by the visual sense, ‘the eyes are the organic prototype of philosophy. Their enigma is that they not only can see but are also able to see themselves seeing’(5). In visual space there is always distance between the subject and object, the subject is detatched and uninvolved in the perception of discrete, often static objects. Acoustic space, on the other hand, is fluid, mutable, curved or spherical, and entails non-linear relations of superimposition and resonance. This critique of western thought is called anti-occularcentrism. One of the strongest advocates of which is Marshall McLuhan.
McLuhan shows that primitive, tribal societies prioritise the oral, with stoytelling and singing at the heart of their culture, they live in an acoustic space and are ahistoric and intensive rather than linear and extensive. This can be seen in the Innuit conception of transubstantiation where ancestors are materially coexsistent with their living relations, and speak to them through what we would call auditory hallucinations (see the film Atanarjuat).’. The invention of the phonetic alphabet in Graeco-Roman times ushered in a new age where the visual claimed dominance. The introduction of the alphabet superceded the tribal mode of inscription which was ‘magically discontinuous’ (6) and ideogrammic. A form of writnig which still exists in the orient. In fact even western religious, pre-literate lore priveleges the aural, where we ‘hear the word of God’, these expressions are vestiges of a time of sonic dominance. The alphabet facilitated mass literacy, complex social bureaucratic organisation, militarisation, the expansion of the Roman empire and the translation of information from other cultures.
The technology of alphabetic writing is thus central (and centralising) to Greek philosophy and by extension western thought and music. In Derrida’s deconstructive analysis of Plato he discovers a logocentrism and principle of exclusion or repression at the heart of the Socratic dialogue. This is exemplified by the duality of meaning in the word pharmakos which means both poison/cure and pharmakon which relates to the structure of society and to the elements of it which are formally outside it (i.e. slaves, beggars, the disabled or deformed, women and children). In his vision of a philosophical utopia Plato spends some time delineating the kind of music which should exist in such a perfect world. He is resolutely anti-instrumental (since this relates to the body and dancing) and accepts only music which accompanies words(logos), and then only those which praise military heroism (certainly not the kind of emotive ballads he sees as feminine and hysterical).
The first peice of music I would like to discuss is an example of the court music of Japan called gaguku which ‘fused influences from Korea, India and China during the seventh and eighth centuries’(7). The first thing one notices when listening to this is the time structure or abscence of one. Fundamental to an appreciation of gagaku is an understanding of the Japanese word ‘“ma” which signifies “interval” in time and space’ (8). This is not to be confused with the western concept of a counted ‘rest’ (whose oppsing term is work; ‘”free action” in a smooth space and “work” in striated space(9)) between one note and another, as Ooka Makoto writes:
“If you think of “ma”
as something between one thing and another,
you’re wrong.”(10)
Pierre Boulez distinguishes between two types of ‘space-time’ in musicology, the smooth and the striated. Counter-intuitively, it is the striated which is homogenous and the smooth space is composed of heterogenous elements. Classical music is almost always striated, whereas nomadic folk music usually exists in a smooth space.
‘In the simplest terms Boulez says that in a smooth space-time one occupies without counting, whereas in a striated space-time one counts in order to occupy. . .The smooth is a nomos, whereas the striated always has a logos, the octave, for example.’(11)
This becomes a fundamental opposition in D+G’s array of terminological devices, and relates to all fields in a transdisciplinary manner. Logos and striation pertains to the state or city (polis), jurisdiction, coding, (also decoding, and overcoding) and homogeneity, whereas nomos refers to the smooth space of the desert or steppe, territorialisation and deterritorialisation, and heterogeneity. This difference is exemplified by the relation of the Western game of chess, as opposed to the Eastern (japanese) game of Go.
‘The nomos of Go against the State of chess, nomos against polis. The difference is that chess codes and decodes space, whereas Go proceeds altogether differently, territorializing and deterritorializing it’ (12)
The social form of the desert is of course nomadic, which we might readily associate with constant movement from place to place, however, again contrary to popular conception, movement is not an attribute of the nomad. It is in striated space that one moves from point to point, and it is an essential function of the state to organise points, to halt the flow of goods or people, levying taxes, selecting and excluding. Nomads on the other hand create lines of flight between points(13), by speeds and slownesses - they are characterised by rhythm rather than meter. This is not the rhythm we find in classical music, or striated pop, which is measured; it relates instead to the heterogeneous space-time of music like gagaku and the work of John Cage.
‘rhythm is never the same as measure. . .[it] relates to the upswell of flow, in other words, to the manner in which a fluid occupies a smooth space.’(14)
‘Percussion music is revolution’(15)
Movement relates to the visual, to extensive Euclidean space; geometry, boundaries and the noumenological object; as speed relates to intensities, rhythm, tactile, sonorous space, arithmetic and a coexistence becomings.(16) Another way in which we can understand the concept of ma, and of smooth space-time is D+G’s concept of the rhizome, which is ‘an acentred nonhierarchal, nonsignifying system’(17), like a map rather than a tracing. Theirs is an anti-representational philosophy of affect. In the Western classical tradition musicians trace the score (acoustically represent the striated visual code), directed by the ascendent conductor who reads the text, builds tension, and releases it climactically. As in a narrative the music generally begins harmoniously, moves into dischord, and then resolves itself in harmony.
A movement analogous with the Hegelian dialectic, and the progressive historicity at the core of Western culture. Eastern music like gagaku is on the contrary played by a small group who are trained vigorously in the art of determining the singularity of that sound in the moment. Traditionally the blind have often played gagaku. Ma is not a written measurement but functions like a plateau. This is a term D+G took from Gregory Bateson who describes Balinese culture as a constant pasing of thresholds, of heterogeneous fields of intensity, or plateaus, a social system much more akin to feminine desire than the phallocentric, Freudian western model of homeostasis, where the accumulation of tension results in discharge and a return to equilibrium(18).
We can hear this in track 2, called Ketjak Dance, which is a Balinese adaptation of a hindu myth about Hanuman, the monkey God, who represents the strength and agility of the body. The corporeal and affective world of acoustic space is celebrated in this visceral, polyvocal chant, their voices phasing in and out with each other reminds one of the frog chorus and the patterns of turbulence that emerge from them. The other famous music of Bali is the gamelan, which when payed, usually in a gamelan orchestra, produces an audible tone as well as an ultrasonic high frequency sound. Though the high sounds are barely audible the frequency travels through us, and resonates our body, in the same way a low bass does in dub music for example, Other asian instruments, like the Indian sitar, also produce overtones, and it is the skill of the musician to control both tone and overtone. This is acheived through affective response, or being aware of the body with the body.
Where classical music uses harmony and discord to represent order and entropy Gagaku produces haeccicities as lines of flight which escape measurement and flee between points, which transcend the triangulation imposed by the despotic coding of the logos by producing antiproduction.
‘In the West chords tend to colour a melody and drive it on by setting it in situations of tension which require release, in music terms, by setting up chord progressions. . .The chords of the sho, however, do not serve this function. Rather they “freeze” the melody.’(19)
In the first track, John Zorn plays with Satoh Michihiro, on an album entitled Ganryu Island. This is the site of a famous, quasi-mythical duel between the legendary samurai Miyamoto Musashi and Kojiri Sasaki. Here Zorn plays the kind of reeds traditionally used in gagaku and other japanese music, while Michihiro battles with tsuguru shamisen. Shamisen is a kind of guitar-like instrument with a long, thin, fretless neck and four loose strings, played with a large, stiff, triangular plectrum, resembling a car window scraper. The materiality of the instrument is deliberately exaggerated. Similar to the biwa (an oriental lute) its construction is based on the ‘active inclusion of noise in its sound’(20), an aesthetic diametrically opposed in the design of western instruments, which ‘in the process of development, sought to eliminate noise’(21)Toru Takemitsu explains this purposeful awkwardness by the concept of sawari, which refers to ‘a part of the neck of the biwa, then extends its multiple meanings into aesthetics by denoting touch, obstacle, even menstruation. . .Inconvenience is potentially creative’(22).
In his radical cultural history on the political economy of noise, Attali proposes that noise is the always excluded element of music. This is an idea that comes from information theory, where noise is that which disrupts the transmission of the message (23), this is called entropy and is analogous to death in the Freudian appropriation of homeostasis conceptualised as the pleasure principle. Attali goes further, however, proclaiming that noise is a simulacrum of murder and ritual sacrifice, and that music is the organisation of noise. A fundamental function of the socius is then to ward off essential violence (entropy) through the organised reenactment of death that is music (discharge).
‘Noise is a weapon and music, primordially, is the formation, domestication, and ritualization of that weapon as a simulacrum of murder.’ (24)
Attali’s theory of music as a channeler of violence is compelling, and his association of musical harmony with social order, and the confluence of nature is substantiated both in the West (Plato’s Republic), and the East. As Ssu-ma Ch’ien says ‘Music honours harmony. . .and is in conformity with heaven’(25). Attali divides the history of music into four phases, which he calls sacrifice, representation, repetition, and composition. Though he understands these as being in a relation of virtual coexistence, he still falls into the western preoccupation with categorisation and progessive historicity that he is ostensibly critisizing. He claims to present an antioccularcentric view of history yet his citations are predominantly eurocentric, and he remains entangled by the eye, and the situationist critique which partakes of the structures it attempts to resist.
‘First music - a channelizer of violence, a creator of differences, a sublimation of noise, an attribute of power - creates in festival and ritual an ordering of the noises of the world. Then - heard, repeated, regimented, framed, and sold - it announces the installation of a new totalizing social order based on spectacularity and exteriority.’(26)
Furthermore, his knowledge of contemporary popular music is, like D+G, scant; he follows Adorno in the pompous rejection of pop as mass-produced low-brow commodity; his understanding of the impact of electricity on music is naive; he conceives of it as a historical climax using the homeostatic model when he should notice that it has multiple layers and is rhizomatic and vortically autopoietic (self-assembling).
‘The modern musician says nothing, signifies nothing, if not the insignificance of his age, the impossibility of communicating in repetition’ (27)
Before the rise of fascist military despotism Japan was a largely agrarian society. Cut off from the rest of the world for hundreds of years it had kept many of its traditional ways (and still does) but the electrification of the world was nowhere more rapid and total than here. Many, like novelist Jun’ichiro Tanizaki, ‘deplored the progressive forces that were flooding electricity into Japan’s old world of muted tones, of materials that blotted up sound and light.’(28) Many others wholeheartedly embraced the new technology. Takemitsu was one such. In 1948 he had a revelation concerning the musical potency of everyday sound, and began making music concrete, innocent of the activities of Pierre Schaeffer et al. Anticipating the theories of Michel Chion he worked with many of the great Japanese directors of the time, including Kurosawa (who says ‘Real sound does not add to the image, it multiplies it’(29)) and Teshigahara, obsessively poring over the sound recordings and splicing them with fragments of found sound, such as Presley, setting the precedent for modern sampledelia. One of their greatest collaborations is ‘Woman of the Dunes’, a film which explores the conflict between the Western scientific beleif in control and structure, and the older Oriental acceptance of nature as flow.
‘was a stationary condition absolutely indispensable for existence? Didn’t unpleasant competition arise precisely because one tried to cling to a fixed position? If one were to give up a fixed position and abandon oneself to the movement of the sands, competition would soon stop.’(30)
R, Murray Schafer takes the western progressive homeostatic view that the world is becoming noisier, that the pastoral sonic environment was an idyll of nature, and that the post-industrial soundscape is an ugly confluence of banging machinery, amplified voices cut off from their sources (which he calls schizophonic) and, above all, flatline hums. Pierre Shcaeffer classes listening in three camps; semantic (listening for meaning); causal (listening for spatial origin); and reduced (listening to the sound as sound). Chion proclaims reduced ‘has the enormous advantage of opening up our ears and sharpening our powers of listening’ (31), a practice which artists like Fransisco Lopez (who makes his audience wear blindfolds), and Toshiya Tsunoda (who records the noise of airplanes) support. (32)
The fourth track is a collection of samples from japanese popular media, mostly TV advertisements, including some which function as jingles, or ear-worms. This is sonic branding, the corporate name is associated with a sound and then fired through a TV directly into your brain and body. Some of the most displeasing, ugly noise one could wish to hear. These sounds permeate our environment everywhere, especially in cities like Tokyo. As John Cage says we cannot escape this noise, however, ‘When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating.’(32a)
As I stressed at the beginning of the essay West and East are not mutually exclusive entities, there has always been a flow of goods, people, information and culture between them. They are self constructing biocultural assemblages. The advent of instant communication has amplified the flow, however, and the East has affected, and is affecting, the West and vice versa in the manner of a productive conversation. This widening of the sphere of music to incorporate all sounds and the soundscape is also at the heart of the work of Cage and others in the easternized western world.
‘Ives, Debussy, Russolo, Varese, Schaeffer and Cage all pioneered the use of ‘music’ to make us coscious of the life and sounds outside the accepted musical-social environment.’ (33)
Cages’ approach to music, and his use of silence stems from an interest in the East, after visiting a Zen garden in Japan he wrote a peice based on its structure of fifteen stones. Cage himself says that ‘without my engagement with Zen . . .I doubt whether I would have done what I have done.’(34). That there is no silence, of course, is a fact that Cage is well aware of, for even in an anechoic chamber you can hear your own blood and brain frequencies, and in a concert hall you can hear a lot more. The work of Cage and Feldman incorporated the sonic environment as part of the music, in the same way that the japanese word shakkei describes a garden which incrporates the landscape around it (such as a mountain).(34)
References
(1)Deleuze, G & Guattari, F.. ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ p.388.Athlone Press 2003.
(2)McLuhan, M. ‘Media Research. Technology, Art, Communication’ p.39. G+B Arts International 1980
(3)Shafer, R.M. in ‘The Auditory Culture Reader’ edited by Michael Bull and Les Black. p.35. Berg. 2003
(4)Jay, M. ‘Downcast Eyes’ p.27 University of California Press 1994
(5)Ibid, p.21
(6)McLuhan, M. ‘Understanding Media’ p.91Routledge and Kegan Paul. 1964.
(7)Toop, D. ‘Haunted Weather. Music, Silence and Memory’. p254. Serpent’s Tail. 2004
(8)Ibid, p41.
(9)Deleuze, G & Guattari, F.. ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ p.490.Athlone Press 2003.
(10)Toop, D. ‘Haunted Weather. Music, Silence and Memory’. p41. Serpent’s Tail. 2004
(11)Deleuze, G & Guattari, F.. ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ p.447.Athlone Press 2003.
(12)Ibid, p.353
(13)Ibid, p498
(14)Ibid, p364
(16)Ibid, p.381-2
(17)Ibid, p21
(18)Ibid, p22
(19)Toop, D. ‘Haunted Weather. Music, Silence and Memory’. p254-5. Serpent’s Tail. 2004
(20,21,23)Ibid, p.129
(23)Attali, J. ‘Noise’.p.26. University of Minnesota Press 2003.
(24)Ibid, p.24
(25)Ibid, p.60
(26)Ibid, p.23
(27)Ibid, p.114
(28)Toop, D. ‘Haunted Weather. Music, Silence and Memory’. p127. Serpent’s Tail. 2004
(29)Ibid, p.136
(30)Ibid, p.142
(31)Ibid, p.16
(32)Ibid, p.17
(32a)Cage, J. ‘Silence’ p.3. Marion Boyars Publishers. 2004.
(33)Nyman, M. ‘Experimental Music. Cage and Beyond.’ p.103. Cambridge University Press. 1999.
(34)Cage, J. ‘Silence’ xi. Marion Boyars Publishers. 2004.
Tracklisting
1)‘Natsu Matsuri’. Zorn, J.+Michihiro, Satoh. . ‘Ganryu Island’
2)Ketjak Dance. Music from the morning of the world. The Balinese Gamelan
3)+. Ryoji Ikeda.+-
4)’Nihon Victor’. Otomo Yoshihide. ‘The Night before the Death of the Sampling Virus’.
5)‘Tsuru no Sugumori’ Gagaku,koto,shakuhachi and shamisen.
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