Despite my absence from the poster, I’m going to be speaking at CONCEPT‘s one-day conference on politics and art next Thursday (this absence is not CONCEPT’s fault, I should add). I’ll be talking about Joseph Beuys, Johannes Stüttgen and Karl Fastabend’s Organization for direct democracy through plebiscite, social sculpture and Benjamin Buchloch’s criticism of Beuys’ ‘simple-minded utopian drivel’. I’ve not read – but have heard good things about – Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things; Lyman Tower Sargent has forgotten more about utopia than I’ll ever know; and Chris’ does some great stuff on political posters, so it should be good…
And I’m not speaking at, but will be attending this, the following day…
A couple of months back I produced a pamphlet (and gave a talk) for the Psykick Dancehall and Jon Marshall curated exhibition Thinking Ourselves into Existence at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow (full text below). The exhibition explored the social and political relevance of improvised and experimental music and featured works by Psykick Dancehall; curated readings and listenings; and pamphlets by Psykick Dancehall and Jon Marshall, Adam Harper, Ben Watson, Marie Thompson and Paul Hegarty. My pamphlet was entitled Playing the Future: Improvisation and Nomadic Utopia, and can be downloaded here, read below, or bought here. One can only speculate what Watson would make of its use of Deleuzean nomadic thought to read improvisation (and perhaps of improvisation to read Deleuzean nomadic thought)…
My thoughts have developed a little since I wrote this – I think I’d be even more cautious about improvisation’s utopianism now (I like Foucault’s idea of ‘hyper-pessimistic activism’), though I still think the key arguments are relevant. Paul Hegarty’s pamphlet (which you can buy here) perhaps offers a slightly more cautious counterpoint to my own piece. Anyway, you can read the piece below the picture…
“When I close my eyes and I am just playing with other people in a free situation, where we can all do what we want, I am in a utopian space. And I have been very lucky to spend a huge amount of my life in that utopian space.” Evan Parker, in an interview given to Stewart Lee, 2010
The fundamental argument of this essay is that the practice of collectively improvising music creates utopian space. But this is by no means a self-evident truth: it cannot simply be said that the space of improvising music is a utopia which solves problems of social and political organisation once and for all, for improvisation is an inherently muddy phenomena, frequently constituted by frustrations and failure. Though the adjective ‘utopian’ has been used to describe the practice of collectively improvising music, (1) an investigation into exactly how its utopianism operates and what its utopia might look like is necessary before the claim can be taken seriously; and even then there are limits to improvisation’s utopianism. Nonetheless, I believe that the claim can be taken seriously and that these limits need not prove fatal. There is a utopianism inherent to improvisation.
Before this argument can be developed further, it needs to be established precisely what is meant by the term ‘collectively improvising music’. I use the phrase to refer to the activity of creating music in a group of people without reference to any ideal/limitation determining how the music created can, or should, sound; or which determines the relation- ships between musicians. (2) An infinite number of possibilities should be open to each musician at all times during the creation of music. (3) Ideals/limitations and hierarchies may be formally predetermined before the music is created or they may emerge during the performance itself, and they may be recognised or unrecognised by the performers. Fol- lowing a score or agreeing before the performance to play in 7/8 time would be recognised factors, whilst the impact of music the performers
had listened to at any time in their lives prior to improvising might be recognised (“let’s do something that sounds like Can”) but would, without a doubt, place parameters on the performance that went unrecognised – as would the emotional state of the musicians, the temperature in the room, the musician’s life histories and innumerable other affective inputs. Playing in a certain time signature, scale or key may also emerge during the performance and may not be consciously recognised by the musicians if this is the case. In terms of relationships, meanwhile, improvisation is built on non-hierarchical relationships between musicians – there are no leaders in an improvising collective.
Making music free of these ideals/limitations is, of course, impossible in its pure state (just as it would be impossible to create ‘fully composed’ music that gave performers absolutely no freedom of choice regarding how to play, at least so long as the performers were human). This means that improvised music should not, therefore, be seen as exist- ing in a binary opposition with ‘composed’ music. (4) Rather, all human musical performance operates on a spectrum running from these two inaccessible poles: music is improvised to the extent that performers are free to explore the infinite for its entire duration and it is composed to the extent that they run up against ideals/limitations which prevent that exploration.
Like improvisation, utopia is a muddy concept: it too is littered with frustration and failure. I argue that there are two poles of utopia: the ‘nomadic utopia’ and the ‘State Utopia’. Like improvisation and com- position, they form the opposite ends of a spectrum rather than existing in binary opposition, and cannot be realised in their pure states. A good starting point for exploring these poles is the etymological double entendre of Thomas More’s term: utopia is caught between ‘euto- pia’ (good place) and ‘outopia’ (no place): ‘the good place that is no place’.
The only thing clear here is that utopia is a place. In arguing that the practice of improvising music creates a utopia (more accurately, it creates a nomadic utopia) it is necessary, therefore, to consider how it is possible to speak of musical production as a place. Here, I draw on the definition offered by the geographer Doreen Massey, who argues that ‘place’ is “constructed out of a particular constellation of social relations, meeting and weaving together at a particular lo- cus” (2004: 69). There is a danger of circularity in this definition as ‘locus’ is Latin for place, and to avoid this, I understand the term in the mathematical sense, where it refers to a collection of points which share a property. The ‘points’ here would be the musicians; the shared property their desire to create music together – either in a particular style or through a particular process. In this sense, then, it is possible to think about a group of musicians working together as constituting a ‘place’, with the ‘locus’ being the music they create.
In order to understand this place of musical production as a utopia it is necessary to consider it as a ‘good place’ and a ‘no place’. Here, two rival definitions of the ‘good’ come into play. The State Utopia (which conforms to colloquial understandings of the term as a per- fect place separated from the present by time or space) is constituted by the ‘moral good’, in which that which is good conforms to univer- sal laws and speaks to a vision of perfection. It sees itself as “divine, transcendent, superior to life” (Delueze, 1986: 122), judging and orienting action from a location beyond the material present. This location is the State Utopia, a place in which all actions conform to this particular moral vision. Hierarchy is necessary to enforce this conformity and deny difference, meaning that the only form of free- dom is a negative freedom; in the words of the utopian scholar J.C. Davis, Utopia provides “freedom from disorder and moral chaos, freedom from moral choice altogether” (1981: 384).
This, clearly, is antithetical to the social organisation of improvising collectives. Indeed, it seems to offer a description of the orchestra, in which individual players are generally given no freedom to explore or pursue their own interests, and in which a strict hierarchy – flowing from conductor down through soloists, the first violinist, section leaders, and so on – enforces the strict moral ordering of the composer, whose score functions as an object of ‘perfection’. Like those living in a State Utopia, the orchestral musician has “accepted a discipline which is totalitarian in its scope and denial of human individuality” (Davis, 1981: 54). (5)
Whilst Davis is an advocate of (State) Utopia, he shares with its detractors a belief that it is ‘totalitarian’ in scope, denying the in- dividual the capacity to act on their own desires, or create their own conditions for life. For many (myself included), this would be a fundamentally dystopian state of affairs where the totality utterly dominates the individual. Marylou Speaker – a violinist in the Boston Symphony Orchestra – notes that “the more successful we are as instrumentalists, the more we have to sublimate our individuality…. to the tyranny of the conductor… players in an orchestra have to submit, instant by instant, to the dictates of a single individual… every movement you make, in the music that is the substance of your being, is dictated to you by others” (quoted in Fischer, 1994: 28).
This is clearly a long way from the experience of improvising musicians, so how might it be possible to use the term ‘utopia’ to describe the spaces they create? To do so requires a different understanding of the concept of ‘the good’. Unlike State Utopianism’s moral good, the nomadic utopia orients itself around an ‘ethical good’. Drawing on the work of Spinoza, Nietzsche and Deleuze, this can be under- stood as that which unfolds immanently and increases the capacity of those present in a space to act. This should not be understood simply as a reversal of the domination of the collective over the individual found in State Utopianism, however. Rather, it collapses the binary opposition between the individual and the collective: the ability of one to act from their position of difference increases the ability of the collective to act: an increase in the power of one increases the power of all, meaning power is distributed and produced non-hierarchically (and indeed, the imposition or emergence of hierarchy is damaging to such power). (6) As such, the concept of the ‘individual’ is replaced by the ‘dividual’, someone who – in the words of Lewis Hyde – is “con- stituted by the complexity of the world around him [sic]”. To be a dividual is to know that “we are always simultaneously individuals and sunk in our communities” (Hyde and Wallace, 2010: online at http:// bombsite.powweb.com). An increase in the power of the individual results in an increase in the power of the collective, and vice versa.
The nomadic utopia is made (and remade) by these productive operations of power, meaning it exists in a state of becoming. It is like Heraclitus’ river “which is not the same and is” (2003: 51), or Deleuze and Guattari’s “schizophrenic object” which can- not be understood without reference to the forces that produce it (2004: 6). It is a residue of materialist utopianism and not the telos of idealist Utopianism; a prefigurative space in the im- manent here-and-now that is open to becoming; not a perfect- ed space in a transcendent future which is closed to becoming.
I believe that the place of musical improvisation is a nomadic utopia. In it, dividual musicians assert their difference through their playing, yet this asserted difference does not deny the dif- ference of fellow improvisers. Rather, each player responds to the difference of the other players and adapts their own out- put accordingly. This is often described as ‘nobody solos, ev- erybody solos’, although I prefer George Lewis’ term ‘multi-dominance’ (2000): a nonhierarchical arrangement in which the ex- pression of power is not dependent on others occupying a position of powerlessness. (7)
This nonhierarchical multidominance unfolds immanently, mean- ing that the music created cannot be known in advance – nor can the specific form the social relations between the players will take. This is the essence of the nomadic utopia which, as noted above, results from – rather than creates – utopianism. In the liner notes to Change of the Century, Ornette Coleman notes that “[w]hen our group plays, before we start out to play, we do not have any idea what the end result will be. Each player is free to contribute what he feels in the music at any given moment. We do not begin with a precon- ceived notion as to what kind of effect we will achieve” (2006: 253).
It is important, however, not to forget the ‘no’ in utopia’s ety- mology. As I noted above, it is impossible to create music that is purely improvised, and the nomadic utopia cannot be actualised in its pure state. Even if no hierarchy or ideal/limitation is placed upon musicians before they begin to play, they will emerge as a performance progresses. A key or rhythm may be settled upon, or multidominance may give way to dominance by a single play- er or a section of the collective. These moments may be among the most powerful in improvisation – the feeling that a band has really hit its ‘groove’ and synced around a spontaneously created order – and they may well be necessary, moments of recupera- tion, of taking stock of gains achieved. (8) Heraclitus’ river is not a site of pure becoming, remember – it is “not the same and is” – and such synchronisations are perhaps necessary to give a sense of cohesion, identity and continuity to the nomadic utopia; they enable it to have a name, to be more than undifferentiated chaos.
Yet they are also moments which lessen the extent to which the music is improvised, and as the mode of musical creation moves along the spectrum away from the pole of improvisation and to- wards the pole of composition, the musical place moves along the utopian spectrum away from the pole of nomadic utopia towards the pole of State Utopia. Tyrannies of habit may emerge – informal hierarchies which show that it is not enough to simply overthrow formal hierarchies and declare the end of history . In Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel The Dispossessed an anarchist (nomadic) utopia, in which there are no formal hierarchies, slides towards State Utopia/ dystopia as habit becomes ossified into moral order, with those who question this order alienated from the society. Change becomes something to be resisted; the society begins to close itself off to the future. Tom Moylan cautions against such an occurrence, and his words could equally apply to improvising musicians ‘in sync’:
Remember to be historically vigilant, do not lock in the utopi- an achievement, do not remove the social utopia from the pro- cesses of time. Don’t cut a deal with the false utopian devil of your own collective imagination as it dreams of the end of his- tory; and don’t cover up the deal by changing the [utopia] from that of a place-in-process to one of eternal delight…[do] not let the processes of learning and change end (2000: 15).
The ‘no’ in utopia’s etymology, therefore, should serve to remind the improvising collective that they must not settle permanently on any given order; that they must always look to keep the musical space open to the unknowable future. Improvisation creates utopia, and it must do so continuously.
What, then, can improvisation do on a larger scale? What sort of role might it play in a more ‘macro level’ nomadic utopianism? A small one, of course: improvisation is not going to save the world, and it would be a mistake to simply extrapolate from the specific micropolitics of improvisation to tackle the messy dystopia of neoliberal capital. Yet I do believe that improvisation can play a role, no matter how small. It can teach people the joys of nonhierarchy, and help us understand that there is not a necessary war between the interests of the collective and the interests of the individual. Similarly, the techniques used by improvisers to overcome problems of hierarchy and lack of ideas may suggest techniques applicable to those involved in nonhierarchical forms of social organisation and political action (and vice versa).
And of course there are problems relating to exclusivity which must be addressed before improvisation can truly be hailed as even the smallest part of political movement. Whilst my focus in this essay has been on improvisation as a practice rather than a genre (or an umbrella term encompassing a number of sub-genres in the jazz and improv traditions), serious questions need to be asked about why improvisation is so dominated by men; why there are still racial divides; and why queer and many other minority issues are so absent from the discourses and practises of improvisation (including this discourse, I should add). A nomadic utopia needs difference; it thrives on difference: it cannot be an exclusive, privileged sphere. Discussions must therefore take place around the practice of col- lective improvisation to ensure that it becomes a space in which all those who want to take part can do so (not everyone, of course, wants to make music – and some may simply prefer to play com- posed pieces: that is fine, and I would not suggest this means they are likely to have ‘bad’ politics). (10)
Improvisation is indeed a muddy, contested practice. But so is utopia - and by getting our hands dirty and engaging, we might just be able to move towards a freer, fairer, more exciting world for all. In the utopian community he founded at New Lanark (just thirty miles south-east from this gallery) in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Robert Owen established a number of musical groups – choirs, orchestras and brass bands – believing they ‘had the capacity to break down barriers and offer the opportunities for collective activities that would foster friendship and cooperation’ (Davison, 2010: 234). Whilst there were disconcertingly hierarchical aspects to Owen’s use of music (it could, he asserted, create “obedience and order in the most imperceptible and pleasant manner” [quoted in Davison, 2010: 238]), the use of music to help create community is inspiring. We can only imagine the joys that a nomadic utopia which replaced the brass bands with free improvisation collectives might obtain as they played the future into existence.
Notes
1 See, for example, Cox and Warner (2002: 251-252), Fred Van Hove (online at http://enotes.com) and Evan Parker (2010: online at http://guardian.co.uk).
2 I write this term as such because an ideal necessarily imposes a limitation on possi- bility – if you are a cellist performing Elgar’s Cello Concerto it is not possible (or at least not permitted) to start using the body of the cello as a percussive body, for example. It should also be noted that improvising collectives might involve non-human actors: computers, animals, cyborgs, the acoustics of the room – although I do not consider these in this essay.
3 Initially, it may seem that this commitment to infinity would require each impro- viser to have infinite musical talent and a continuously tuned and instantly responsive instrument capable of synthesising all possible sounds. This fails to understand that there are near infinite potentials within discrete parameters, however, not least when notions of playing an instrument ‘properly’ are abandoned, and when there is more than one person involved in the production of music.
4 Indeed, I have been tempted to reject the term ‘improvisation’ in favour of ‘in- stant composition’. This would draw on Adam Harper’s insight that “technically, the word ‘composer’ suggests anyone at all who might create music. In this sense, the term overlaps with the word ‘performer’. Composers may also come in groups that collaborate on the creation of music” (2010: 7). As the term improvisation is more clearly recognised, however, I am inclined to stick with it.
5 In line with my earlier comment that it is impossible to have music in which per- formers always have an infinite number of options open to them, it is impossible to perform music which leaves no space for individuality on behalf of the perform- ers. However, the degree of freedom an orchestral musician is given is likely to be miniscule, with soloists, or those at the very top of the orchestral hierarchy the only musicians truly permitted to stamp their individuality on a piece (the conductor, of course, has relative autonomy in deciding how a composer’s instructions are to be interpreted). It should be noted that this has not always been the case, however, and many baroque compositions left significant space for musicians to improvise within a given set of parameters.
6 In his Ethics, Spinoza calls this understanding of power potentia, and distinguishes it from postesas, which is power as domination (2000).
7 For Lewis, the concept of multidominance is Afrological, and is central to a great deal of art (both visual and sonic) from the African diaspora. Though he notes this is “historically emergent rather than ethnically essential” (2002: 217), for a fuller ac- count of improvisation’s utopianism the way in which social histories have informed its development would need to be taken into account.
8 A process of pure flux would be overwhelming; chaos without the potential for self-ordering. Angela Carter’s novel The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman is set in a society in total flux, and its narrator – Desidero – is so overwhelmed by the constant play of difference that he “only has one desire: that everything stop” (2011: 2), an experience that many who have played (or listened to) improvised music may well be able to relate to.
9 The writings of the ‘postanarchist’ Saul Newman are of relevance here. See, in particular, p.47-51 of From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-Authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power.
10 I would suggest that these discussions take the form of popular education work- shops. Popular education – a form of radically inclusive learning largely developed in Latin America – is, I argue, another nomadic practice which has a number of striking similarities with the practice of free improvisation (see Bell, 2010: online at http:// ceasefiremagazine.co.uk)
Works Cited
Bell, David (2010) ‘The Shape of Education to Come’, online at http://cease- firemagazine.co.uk/deserters-songs-5/ (accessed 31/1/12)
Carter, Angela (2011) The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, London: Penguin Coleman, Ornette (2006) ‘Change of the Century’ in Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner (eds.), Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, London: Continuum, pp. 253-254
Cox, Christoph and Warner, Daniel (2006) ‘Improvised Musics: Introduction’ in Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner (eds.), Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, London: Continuum, pp. 251-252
Davis, J.C. (1981) Utopia and the Ideal Society: A Study of English Utopian Writing 1516- 1700, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Davison, Lorna (2010) ‘A Quest for Harmony: The Role of Music in Robert Owen’s New Lanark Community’, Utopian Studies, 21(2), pp. 232-251
Deleuze, Gilles (1986) Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. H. Tomlinson, London: Continuum
Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Felix (2004) Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, Helen R. Lane, London: Continuum
Fischer, Marilyn (1994) ‘The Orchestral Workplace’ in Journal of Social Philosophy, 25 (3), pp. 26-39
Harper, Adam (2010) Infinite Music, Winchester: Zero Books
Heraclitus (2003) Fragments, trans. Brooks Haxton, New York: Penguin
Le Guin, Ursula K. (2006) The Dispossesed: An Ambiguous Utopia, London: Gollancz
Lewis, George (2002) ‘Improvised Music After 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives’ in Black Music Research Journal, volume 22, supplement, pp. 215-246
Lewis, George (2000) ‘Too many notes: computers, complexity and culture in voy-ager’, in Leonardo Music Journal 10, pp.33-39
Massey, Doreen (2004) ‘A Global Sense of Place’ in Tim Creswell, eds. Place: A Short Introduction, Malden: Blackwell, pp.63-74
Moylan, Tom (2000) Scraps of the Untainted Sky: science fiction, utopia, dystopia, Boulder: Westview Press
Newman, Saul (2007) From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-Authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power, Lanham: Lexington Books
Spinoza, Baruch (2000) Ethics, trans. George Parkinson, Oxford: Oxford University Press
Below is an edited version of the talk I gave at Nottingham Contemporary on the 8th December last year as part of their Klaus Weber exhibition public programme. I also produced a commissioned piece of music – based around the tritone – with Surfacing, which we played in the gallery itself. We are currently working on a recorded version. Watch this space…
Nottingham: 2011
Hanging from the ceiling of Nottingham Contemporary art gallery is a giant windchime. With two fans angled towards it, it is tuned to emit only dissonant intervals and spreads a palpable unease throughout the gallery.
‘Long Dark Windchime (Arab Tritone)’ is a work by the German artist Klaus Weber, and forms part of his solo exhibition ‘If you leave me I’m not coming’. It’s a powerful piece: the carefully tuned steel tubes producing a rich sound which oscillates gently as it spreads throughout the gallery. Among the dissonant intervals it emits is the tritone. An interval spanning six semitones, it is also known as the ‘diabolus in musica’ and has long been associated with Satan: rumours persist that it was banned by the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages.
Weber, though, is keen to dispel a straightforward reading of his work as being about evil: speaking at the launch of the exhibition, he stated that he saw the windchime as a hopeful work; a piece that might disrupt the usual operation of our society.
But how is it that something so ominous can be seen as hopeful? Can we really hear dissonance as something related to positive social change? I want to suggest that we can, but doing so will involve a journey through time, space, and some excellent music…
Birmingham: Friday 13th January, 1970
Four young men from Aston release their debut album. There’s pouring rain, thunder, and an ominously tolling bell. Then – from nowhere – an enormous, crushing riff. “What is this that stands before me?”, howls Ozzy Osbourne. Rock music has discovered the devil.
Appropriately enough (though unbeknown to guitarist Tony Iommi), the first two notes of the riff (G and C#) form a tritone, an interval that will go on to become a well-worn trope in heavy metal. (Slayer will even go so far as to name their seventh album Diabolus in Musica.) It’s loved by metallers because it sounds dark and because of the pantomime-ish shock value its Satanic connotations bring to a record. But they aren’t the first to associate it with evil.
Rome: 1322
A papal decree is issued expressing outrage at the increasing prevalence of polyphony in sacred choral music. Of particular concern is the tendency for singers to ‘deprave’ melodies by injecting ‘dissonant’, rather than ‘consonant’ polyphonies. The purpose of the decree is to ‘banish those methods, nay rather to cast them entirely away, and to put them to flight…far from the house of God’. Only on feast days or in the ‘solemn celebrations of the Mass’ will the use of ‘some consonances’ be permitted. It is polyphonic dissonance that is banned, then, and not the tritone per se.
This decree reflects a long running suspicion of dissonance in Catholic thought. As far back as the second century the Roman philosopher Gaudentius warned against dissonant intervals because ‘when they are produced simultaneously…[they] never seem to be the same in any part of the musical sound [and] do not show any evidence of blending with each other’. Dissonant intervals not sounded simultaneously (including the tritone) were also frowned upon by the church, though I can find no evidence to support the oft-repeated claim that they were ever subject to an outright ban: indeed they featured in choral and instrumental sacred music throughout the Middle Ages, with the tritone often used to signify Satan or the crucifixion of Christ. They remain subject to strict rules, however – typified by Prosdocimus de Beldemandis’ Tractatus de Contrapuncto of 1412 – which orders that ‘if the listener has been disturbed by the harmonies in the course of the counterpoint, at the end he must be inspired with harmonies more dulcet and amicable by nature’.
This distrust of dissonance was not exclusive to the Catholic Church, though. In Ancient Greece it was seen as a threat to ‘harmony’ – which was understood not as the pleasant organisation of musical sounds but as a principle of cosmological and social order – a view also evidenced in the writings of the Chinese historian Sima Qian who – around the 2nd Century BC – claimed that ‘music honours harmony; it spreads spiritual influence and is in conformity with heaven: when the rites and music are clear and complete, heaven and earth fulfil their normal functions’.
This ‘pleasant organisation’ has traditionally been understood as ‘consonance’ and has close ties with the concept of ‘unity’: in the 13th Century John of Garland argued that polyphonic consonance referred to a group of notes heard as a single sound, whilst in dissonant combinations the tones could not be aggregated into a coherent whole.
* * * *
The fear of dissonance, then, stems not so much from the fact that it sounds in some sense evil or ugly, but from the fact that when sounded consecutively, dissonant tones appear unresolved; and when sounded consecutively they appear riddled by disunity. In the words of the musicologist Dane Rudhyar, ‘consonances are static, dissonances dynamic…as long as a dissonance is not resolved into a consonance suspense reigns. Fulfilment [and] satisfaction come as the consonance is sounded’. Consonance, then, is settled and content; and whether peaceful or triumphant it upholds the status quo. Dissonance is emphatically not; it sticks out, refuses to ‘blend in’. It unsettles the status quo.
Music, then, takes on a moral dimension: it is Good when it conforms to the natural laws of harmony and Evil when it does not. But there is nothing ‘natural’ about this moral order: it is promoted by those with an interest in preserving the status quo. Dissonance in music is feared because it might foster social dissonance, and so it needs to regulated by ‘morality’.
New Lanark: 1790-1800
In the late eighteenth century, Robert Owen founds a utopian community in the Scottish mill town of New Lanark. Keen for it develop a sense of unity, he promotes a programme of music and dancing for residents, believing this will provide ‘health, unaffected grace to the body, teach obedience and order in the most imperceptible and pleasant manner and create peace and happiness in the mind’.
In an article on the political and social function of music in New Lanark, Lorna Davison noted that it ‘was almost universally perceived’ by visitors to the community to ‘transform the members of this otherwise very ordinary Scottish factory community in a way so unexepected, remarkable, and noteworthy, into graceful, elegant, happy, and healthy citizens, living together in harmony’ (interestingly, Owen would go on to attempt a similar experiment in Indiana. Its name? – New Harmony).
With consonant music playing an important tole, Owen’s utopia can be seen as one of consonance. His is a dream of finality, of resolution, of the end of struggle: the tierce da Picardie as the End of History.
This seems to forget a key aspect of utopia, however. The term – coined by Thomas More – comes from the Greek for good (eu), no (ou) and place (topos): the good place that is no place. But with Owen, the ‘ou’ is forgotten: utopia becomes the morally good place in which life conforms to universal principles and from which no further improvement can be imagined. Dissonance has been expunged.
Though I have a lot of time for Owen and his experiment at New Lanark, there is something incredibly troubling about his consonant utopianism. Problems of political organisation cannot be resolved once and for all, and attempts to do so require unacceptable levels of hierarchical control (why, we must ask, can the inhabitants of New Lanark not transform their own community?). The consonant utopia becomes a totalitarian dystopia; the happy harmonies of cherubic youths morph into muzak, a sound both mind-numbingly boring and disturbingly authoritarian (‘the security system of the 1970s’, as the Muzak Corporation claimed in their adverts). What place is there for dissonance in this harmonic order?
We need, then, to theorise a utopianism which does not seek an ultimate resolution in harmony; which utilises dissonance rather than consonance as an ordering principle. Perhaps this ‘dissonant utopianism’ might be the ‘peculiar’ kind of hope that Weber ascribed to his dissonant windchime. But where might we find it…?
Vienna, 1924
In an essay entitled ‘Opinion or Insight’, the Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg speaks of ‘emancipation of the dissonance’. Surveying the history of western music, he constructs a grand narrative in which musical intervals have gradually shifted in time from being perceived as dissonant to consonant. This, he argues, has reached its logical conclusion in the twelve-tone technique he is pioneering, in which the terms dissonance and consonance – dependent upon each other for their meaning – cease to have any relevance at all. He believes that this new form of music will come to dominate in the future.
Like consonant utopians, Schoenberg believes in an End of History (he is, a Derrida would say, an ‘endist’). But his utopia is not governed by moral principles of consonant harmony. Dissonance is not seen as threatening and is not banished. For him, the twelve-tone technique realises the ultimate triumph of progress over reaction: it is the logical conclusion of the Enlightenment dream. No tones need be excluded from his brave new harmonic order.
Dane Rudhyar – composer, musicologist, spiritualist and friend of Schoenberg’s – recognised the political implications of this, arguing that Schoenberg’s ‘vast and radical attempt at world-regeneration’ creates a ‘dissonant Harmony’ in which dissonance – that which is unstable, that which was previously thought not to belong – is now considered beautiful in its own right. From this he argued that ‘dissonant music is thus the music of true and spiritual Democracy; the music of universal brotherhoods…All democratic units are free and independent; self-sufficient; yet all recognize the Law of the Group, which is in a sense their collective Higher Self’.
There is much to admire in Rudhyar’s claim, but Schoenberg’s ‘emancipation of dissonance’ is problematic for a number of reasons. Firstly, his grand, emancipatory narrative ignores non-western musics, many of which are centred around what western ears would consider dissonant intervals (a charge which I readily acknowledge could also be levelled at this article). Secondly, the twelve-tone technique (and serialism, which was closely related) threatened to become a hardened law of its own, restricting the ability of composers to experiment with forms, and reducing dissenters to a new position of dissonance. Thirdly, the power to ‘emancipate dissonance’ lay in the hands of a single architect: the composer. Just as Robert Owen saw himself arranging the affairs of the inhabitants of New Lanark, Schoenberg envisaged the composer as a heroic figure creating spaces of freedom: the task of everyone else (the musicians, in this case) was merely to reproduce this order. Fourthly, applying Schoenberg’s musical vision to society would be utopian in the colloquial sense of the word: it would be astonishingly naïve. Socially, at least, dissonance was nowhere near being emancipated in the 1920s. People were – and still are – seen as ‘other’ to the social order, disrupting its harmony due to their skin colour, their religion, their gender, their sexual preferences or their political beliefs. And finally, why does dissonance need to be ‘emancipated’? Is it not an integral part of history and struggle? The task should surely be to emancipate it from its associations with Evil, not eradicate the concept altogether. My next historical jumping-off point illustrates this, and perhaps points towards a more satisfactory conception of dissonant utopianism…
Los Angeles: 1941
Duke Ellington is being interviewed about his music. A record of his is playing on a turntable, and suddenly he asks that the needle be reset so a dissonant chord can be heard again. “That’s the negro’s life”, he says. “Hear that chord. That’s us. Dissonance is our way of life in America. We are something apart, yet an integral part”.
With this short statement Duke Ellington shatters any pretence that societal dissonance has been emancipated. Like the note that makes Gaudentius’ chord dissonant, Ellington – as a black man in a deeply racist society – does not fit.
Yet it’s in playing dissonantly that Ellington’s power really comes to express itself. In his music, dissonance is celebrated. It stands not as something to be resolved into harmony; nor as something to be thrown off in the course of a linear history. Rather, it is an expression of utopanism. This is who we are, it says, and we will create joyous sounds from our marginalisation. And through this celebration, the stigma of dissonance – its association with ‘Evil’ – is made ridiculous, preposterous.
Here, then, dissonance becomes overtly political. But how might we convert the utopianism of Ellington’s chord into a utopia? That is, how might the force Ellington creates into a space of social arrangements? What would a dissonant utopia look like?
Utopia: 2015
An occupied warehouse. One of many such occupied spaces that have sprung up across the globe. Hundreds of people live here, organising themselves through consensus decision making and holding property in common. They draw inspiration from utopian communities of the past, including Robert Owen’s New Lanark, but are determined to forge a new way of living without leadership. Cultural activities are important: there’s a gallery, where Weber’s Long Dark Windchime (Arab Tritone) hangs alongside works by community members. And like Owen, these utopians recognise that the performance of music is an important way of ordering their community. Walking round, the visitor is struck by the sheer number of groups making music together: not for an audience, but for themselves.
What kind of music might the visitor to this utopia hear? All sorts, of course – otherwise it would be a dystopia. But free improvisation might be among the sounds heard. When considered as a practice (rather than as a genre), it suggests an altogether more satisfactory liberation of dissonance: freeing it from moral laws and Eurocentrism, but doing so without the need for a composer to liberate from above. It allows musicians (regardless of ability, training or background) to come together to create music without moral orders determining what can or cannot be played. The music is made with an acknowledgement that no final resolution can – or should – be achieved. The joy is in the process, not the resolution; it exists in a permanent state of flux to which all can contribute.
In this the space of musical improvisation resembles the forms of political organisation which have driven so many global movements in the last fifty years. Without aiming for a predetermined goal, this is a form of organisation which retains a fidelity to the etymology of ‘utopia’, but it’s in a radically different way to consonant utopianism. Following Nietzsche, but this does not mean that it abandons the pursuit of ‘the good’. Rather, it seeks is what might be called an ethical good, which creates new spaces for life and exploration. Dissonance is to be encouraged, for it is from dissonance that we create the new.
Dissonant utopianism does not forget the ‘no’ in utopia’s etymology, however. It acknowledges that utopia cannot be a settled, harmonic state. Rather, it is always constituted by instability – caught like the space between two dissonant notes, it is unresolved, expectant, open to the future.
For Ernst Bloch, the utopian is that which knows the ‘melancholy of fulfillment’ and embodies an ‘ecstatic openness’ to the unknowable future. Such a claim bares truth to the music theorist Leo Kraft’s statement that ‘the most beautiful sounds…are usually the most dissonant ones’.
So what is this that stands before us? It’s the future, and we must embrace it in all its uncertainty.
I ordered my horse to be brought form the stables. The servant did not understand my orders. So I went to the stables myself, saddled my horse, and mounted. In the distance I heard the sound of a trumpet, and I asked the servant what it meant. He knew nothing and had heard nothing. At the gate he stopped and asked: “Where is the master going?”. “I don’t know,” I said, “just out of here, just out of here. Out of here, nothing else, it’s the only way I can reach my goal.” “So you know your goal?” he asked. “Yes,” I replied, “I’ve just told you. Out of here- that’s my goal.”
Ilya Kabakov- The Man Who Flew Into Space From His Apartment
For Boris Groys, Kabakov’s installation ‘frees the original utopian energy of the cosmic dream from imprisonment in a particular political and technological system. Leaving behind its empty, ideological and technological shell, the cosmic dream re-establishes its own essence and establishes, post factum, its authenticity, because the essence of a dream is the very fact that its essence is not fixed, it has no definite form and it is not institutionalised. For it is only longings, desires and indefinable wishes that can now be genuinely collective…Even the act of emigration, leaving Soviet society behind, is not presented as a betrayal of that society but as something nurtured by the same utopian energies that originally led to the birth of this society…Which is why the desire to cross borders, to overcome constraints, can still be regarded as an expression of that original utopia.’
