The Year Of Difficult Listening

I will scorn Masterchef until a contestant serves a dish involving the raspberry bootlace.

My sense — I guess it’s one of the things that got me interested in the first place — is that something “like”
punk has been repeatedly recurring in music, since at least the mid-19th century: a new group of music-makers (and listeners) reacting against the what seems to be the closed-world impenetrablity of their predecessors, and precipitately dispensing with some element of technique or attitude which the predecessor world considered indispensible. Debussy’s or Satie’s scorn for Wagner and the germanic trend to overthinking structure; jazz, obviously; John Cage versus everyone; rock’n’roll versus jazz; rap versus 80s pop-soul. And so on…

Some of it is “ourselves at 40 versus ourselves at 25 versus ourselves at 15 versus ourselves at 13 versus ourselves at 8”: and food fits in there.

(haha tho some of that piece i now find THOROUGHLY ANNOYING)

In book and music some kinds of difficulty directly relate to not knowing, at point, WHICH bits you’re meant to be storing as potential “past knowledge” when you get to the point in the future where you could use it. There’s always an overload of information — even music or literature that makes a point of cutting away irrelevant information (for example sources of narrative or quasi-narrative pleasure that are distractions in the intended context), as some strands of modernism do, can’t possibly cut away everything that might be distracting or irrelevant, in the composer’s or writer’s mind’s ear or eye. The flaw in Babbitt’s “Who cares about the listener” argument — even accepting that this wasn’t his intended title — is that the composer CAN’T tamp down all possible, well, punctum: the listeners ALWAYS bring some of their own sandwiches to the picnic, in the form of information they consider relevant garnered before the performance began. The point I was making in my Xenakis piece was basically that a sub-generation of post-war modernist composers really did behave as if music-making could sustainably be based on the establishment of little gaming clubs where the listeners all arrived with the appropriate rulebooks having signed agreeements that their responses would all fall within the correct set of rules. But all the little clubs were in effect competing with each other; diminishingone another’s listener-set rather than enhancing one another’s meaning-making.

One of the differences between lit and music is polyphony — different things happening at once. Or perhaps say “at once” operates differently in writing. Hmmm.

Actually a way to approach this project would be to list and isolate different modes of potential difficulty: so that length and density and intensity of polyphonic interweave — and interweave not just of melody — and etc.

Factions are one thing, and yes, you find them everywhere. What I’m getting at are compositions which demand that the listener internalise a highly specific set of axioms of organisational choice — possibly relevant only to a single work — in order to be allowed to claim you “understand” that one work. The axiom-set isn’t transferable, sometimes even to the next composition by the same composer
(at difft tmes this is true of Boulez, Cage, Stockhausen and Xenakis). And the effect was that you couldn’t develop a cultural sense of value — all these pieces had do be considered exactly as successful (which is to say, as unsuccessful) because they were all one of a kind. And what you also got was fan-clubs of hard music who — far from being better listeners or critics — seem to be more passive: that is, they’re aggressive across faction boundaries (same old same old) but allowng themselves to be shut out even of the discussion of the music they claim to favour. (Because they’ve accepted rulebooks and axioms which shut down the discussion; as a consequence putting huge constraints on the capacity of the music to come into its possible meanings.)*

Babbitt’s piece could also have been called “Who cares about the perfomer?” — or “Who cares about the social?” It’s about lab testing new sounds and sound-clusters, new types of sound-motion — but shutting out any way these can get wound into the wider world, as they’re learned. So they’ve ended up as little more than the objective correlative of a narrow element of the dynamics of their own era — which is not an awful fate, but surely a far tinier role than all the life and time and passion invested by their makers deserves?

*I guess the literary equivalent is Oulipo: axiomatic games of arbitrary rule and constraint designed to produce and foster the writer’s imagination. But Oulipo’s embrace of rules doesn’t shut out the reader: it has a playful openness and sense of shared enquiry, perhaps because it doesn’t so furuously set itself up as the one true pinnacle of Right Making.

Yes, well spotted on “passivity” — not a very clear way of saying what I meant; and I’m not at all as sure that this quality persists in the same way today, among similar groups. Basically after the 60s, audiences of every type got somewhat more sassy towards their own gurus. I guess I meant that people were — in the service of what they deemed an exciting vanguardy idea — more willing to present themselves as followers. So they’d happily fight designated foes, but would be quite meek when they felt it was once more time to shut up sit down and listen.

Partly this is a technological thing: a lot of this music didn’t get accessibly onto disc till a lot later, and I think the world of the sassy audience is deeply related to the world of listening via record and arguing laterally — in other words, the composer is not in the room, or anywhere near, and not in any sense responsible for the context, where all discussion is more likely to be on his/her terms.

One of the things that’s often bugged me about much post-68 avant gardism is a sense that its fans feel “Don’t give it too rough a time or it will break and fail.” It has to be kept away from the world it’s commenting on. Though again I feel this observation — about a more recent tendency — is now somewhat dated.