Arts

Musicocide across our culture

Hans Keller

Of course, the killer, like Oedipus, may not know whom or what he is killing — but in his case, as distinct from Oedipus's, that only Means that he, or somebody else, has done it before: for him, by the time he kills it, music has ceased to be music.

Let us start with the original threat to the Musical world, however little recognised — gramophone record and tape. Unrecognised threats invariably contain promises — and they need not be empty promises: the good that recorded music has done to music is there for all to hear, whereas the evil it is doing remains hidden. Yet, for a natural Musical mind (no matter whether musician or music lover), it is easily definable — or rather, they are: repeatability and exeerptibility are the twin evils. Good electronic music and bad live music apart, sounding Music is not meaningfully repeatable. Artistic meaning is unique, and since not only music itself, but also its performance is (or should be) art, performance cannot, pace Toscanini, be repeated: this, in fact, was Portwangler's basic objection to Toscanini. th proportion as a gramophone record is te:heard, its artistic communication is diminished, assuming that the performance Wasn't phoney in the first place, as it is in the case of most modern gramophone records, Which consist of an infinite number of excerpts craftily stuck together. Don't tell Ille this isn't true: I was there when it happened — and when, as an oddgram-producer-out, I stopped it happening. Which brings us to excerptibility, except that there are layers of it. For it isn't only What's inside a record that extracts, but also What's outside it — what you do with it: you are able, not only to repeat, but also to take things out. For one thing, then, there's no heed for you to concentrate: any bit you miss You can play again. For another, there's no need for you to have it all: any bit you want to hear you can select. I know downright gr.amophone virtuosos who will, without a hitch, present you with a string of chosen excerpts, and any moment now they will call what they are doing 'art'. In fact, for all I know, Glenn Gould already does.

Demonstrably, there are two dimensions ro musical meaning: there is local meaning, and there is total meaning. Local meaning resides in the defined entity of what you hear at any given moment; total meaning emerges 'mom its context within the entire structure of the work. There is no total meaning without local meaning — even though nowadays, there are quite a few composers around who,

w„..heo you ask, 'What does this mean?', reply, Wait until you see p.93 of the score'. On the Other hand, there is local meaning without thtel meaning: a so-called symphony may, in

reality, consist of bits and pieces, but some, or even all of these bits and pieces may, in themselves, be meaningful — a creative situation which, again, one frequently encounters these days.

If this is the situation, so be it: the composer has robbed us of one dimension of musical meaning. But with the help of gramophone record and tape, we can rob ourselves, and produce bits and pieces where there were none, until we are no longer capable of taking in the whole. This is what we do when we use signature tunes, theme musics and title musics taken from largescale works, or musical identification signals, again excerpted, for radio or television channels, news services and the like — and by `us' I don't merely mean us in this country, but virtually the entire civilised world.

Whenever we use such excerpts .repeatedly or indefinitely, as we usually do, we are guilty of this double assault on musical significance — the extinction of total meaning, and of the meaning of performances ad nauseam usque, through repetition. What we are debasing, therefore, is both the music and our own musicality, if any — and if there isn't any (as there often isn't), we are debasing other people's musicality.

If you want to stick to the use of music for wholly extra-musical purposes, and don't want to commission a considerable composer to attempt the daunting task of creating a microcosmic, infinitely repeatable 'work', there is no alternative which preserves a minimum of musical dignity, for the simple reason that the only alternative, and a well-tried one at that, is the use of music which is meaningless in the first place, so that you can't rob it of either intrinsic meaning or interpretative meaning. I am, of course, referring to what are commonly known as jingles — meaningless sound patterns whose effectiveness increases with repetition. What, then, does this effectiveness consist in, if it is achieved through the very absence of meaning? The answer is simple, its truth observable: hypnosis. It will be recalled that when rhythm is employed towards achieving a hypnotic state, it isn't really rhythm at all: it

is metre, which we might describe as music without musical meaning. Rhythm — the meaningful contradiction of metre — is the very basis of musical significance: there is music without melody, there is music

without harmony, but (pace sundry con

temporary efforts) there is no music without rhythm. The prototypical jingle thus emer ges as a decorative glorification of metre — towards which aim melodic, harmonic and, of course, colorific means will readily be employed, carefully avoiding the slightest implication of musical thought. Each time such a jingle is heard, therefore, a suspension of mental life takes place: the hypnotic effect of thoughtless music ensures the absence of thought altogether. In short, whether we like it or not, our civilisation robs us, day in, day out, of civilised mental behaviour. In trendy parlance, the endless repetition of a meaningful musical excerpt ensures an hypnotic feed-back: the experience of such music is gradually reduced to the psychological status of the experience of a jingle, a bit of hypnosis. The upshot of it all is the musical murder of music: throughout his history, man has learnt that to fight something with its own weapons is the most realistic way of fighting it— that if you want to destroy, you ought, ideally, to aim at selfdestruction.

No, I am not prepared to accept the counter-blow that here am I, a musician with his head in the clouds,,who fantasises about the abuse of his beloved art, without concern for real people to whom music does not mean what it means to him. It isn't even a blow below the belt, for there is no belt: the body of my submission does not show any vulnerable spot. For one thing, that is to say, these real people, inasmuch as they are musical at all, are already caught in the vicious circle of the stupefaction of both music and themselves: they have lost their ability to perceive music my way, or have had it paralysed for them, with-the result that they don't mind if music itself becomes ever more meaningless. But for another thing, their stupefaction has not resulted in a positive demand for stupidity: stupefaction produces, not requirements, but indifference. There is not a shred of evidence to support the assumption, implied by sundry mass media, that music designed to identify and/or advertise somthing (if only broadcasting itself) meets a need on the part of the public.

I have been around and, what's more, I have never stopped asking questions. I have not yet encountered a single individual who has confessed to any such need. My statistical sample, which is lavish, neatly falls into two categories — those people, admittedly the vast majority, who don't care, and those who do. The logic of my urgent, rhetorical question, therefore, is inescapable: why should 'you and I be victimised, why should our perceptivity, our alertness be sacrificed to those who don't care, anyway? If anything comparable hap

pened in the world of verbal thought and verbal thoughtlessness, if verbal incantations were reduced, by repetitions to

senselessness, we should soon have to face a barrage of protests: our verbal education makes verbal stupidity less easily sufferable than musical stupidity. But for this very reason, musical intelligence is in need of greater protection. If there are those whom I haven't met, who want hypnosis, let them produce it for themselves: the gramophone records are there. And they can even tape themselves what will, ultimately, bedome a jingle. But leave me in peace, in order for my mind to remain joyfully peaceless.