FINAL BLOG: Ólafur Arnalds - Ljósið (Official Music Video)

Final:



Firstly, I appreciate this song further after finishing the class because of its lack of words. Because there are no lyrics to dictate what I am supposed to feel, I am free to completely interpret the song as I encounter the reactive emotion. I am not busy applying personal meaning to words I did not write or feel on my own. I am not forced to find meaning in someone else’s experience or interpretation. I feel more deeply and clearly what the song is supposed to mean. My study of Schopenhauer’s musical theory has prompted me to think in this direction with his appreciation for the most direct form of the Will. 



Secondly, I appreciate the Dionysian qualities I feel when I listen to it. It is passionate, emotional, and divine. When I hear it, I can easily get lost in another world made possible by experiencing this song. However, it also has a slow, measured, calculated repetition that I enjoy when I listen to it, which keeps my mind from getting carried away by the ecstasy of the song and never leaving the house! This side of my mental dialogue was clearly inspired by Nietzsche. Although I doubt either philosopher would agree with my taste or interpretation, they do nonetheless inspire me to use their challenging theories to dive deeper into reflecting on the way I experience music.



Original:



This song reminds me that "the best art simply answers the question, 'What is life?'" (Lecture, 26/January) There is a sweet melancholy to it, a combination that always reminds me of the beautiful irony of life. There is sorrow and hope, light and darkness that complement each other and express what words cannot.

Final Blog Post: For Nietzsche and Radetsky March

Original post:

I selected this piece because I feel it demonstrates the qualities that Nietzsche saw in Bizet. Radetsky March's liveliness coupled with toe-tapping melody is similar to the Bizet's Carmen, particularly in its overture. Radetsky March is not decadent, as Wagner's Tristan and Ilsode tends to be.  There is nothing morbid in the tune of Radetsky March- all tunes are light-hearted. The sense of doom and sorrow is no where present, unlike the heavy melody of Tristan and Ilsode.

Extended post:

Although my purpose originally when selecting Radetzsky March was to provide a parallel piece of music to compare to Bizet’s Carmen, the two works are quite different in theme. Carmen is a tragedy, whereas Radetsky March is not.  Both pieces are lively indeed, but Radetsky March skill cannot be appropriately compared to Carmen.  Nietzsche praised Bizet due to the opera being light and lively despite the death of the main character Carmen and the ruin of her lover.  Such music requires burying ones ears into it to see its depth; it is not apparent to the casual observer that Carmen is a tragedy if he or she only listened on the surface.  On the contrary, Wagner’s Tristan and Ilsode is very clearly a tragedy and Wagner conveys the heaviness of the opera with rehashed, sorrowful melodies.  Thus, Nietzsche described Wagner as “decadent” due to this and the fact that Wagner takes his audience as fools instead of intelligent listeners. Music for fools only allows for surface listening:  it is very clear at first glance how the opera will proceed in terms of theme and atmosphere. Music for intelligent listeners allows for deeper listening: not all about the piece is apparent at once and one must listen carefully and be enraptured in order to understand its full significance. 

Although the feeling of Radetsky March is certainly as upbeat and lively as Carmen, it is slightly out of context to compare the two together as the atmospheres of both are not the same.  A better option I should have picked for comparison to Carmen would be Yoshiwara Lament, a more contemporary Japanese song performed by Waggaki Band.  Although this song is from a completely different culture and was created quite recently, the underlying theme is similar to Carmen as the song’s lyrics come from the perspective of a girl who wishes to be freed from her life as a courtesan and laments her fate. The characters in both Carmen and Yoshiwara Lament barely dwell upon their misfortune. Both Carmen and Yoshiwara Lament are upbeat and if one does not listen carefully, it is easy to miss the significance which lies beneath their melodies.  

Posting for Heidi Zambetti Rh 109/Naddaff 9 May 2016 Original Post: Papa Roach -

Last Resort lyrics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhJ6bE4z5vsvideo on www.youtube.com, or 

My original intent was to write about my most recent post on A Perfect Circle song titled, "Judith." However, after a personal experience this week, I decided to post this song as an alternative. "Last Resort" by Papa Roach came on Pandora Radio and I found myself to be incredibly influenced subconsciously by the lyrics and heavy metal—it even altered my thinking momentarily. This being a unique experience I felt inclined to write about it. In my essay, I speak about music's ability to become a power dynamic that shows its force in the historical (through soldiers in Plato's era) and modern era (U.S. Military today). This being most eminent in recent no-touch or music torture cases in the present era. I made comparisons to historical and present day militia in music's ability to imitate and express behavior as well as emotions.

 New post: How does the listener refrain from consuming music? How does the listener refrain from becoming influenced? The personal experience (referenced above) was an instance I wrote about in the first writing assignment. Making quite a significant impact on me, the song, in that moment, took over my body and mind—resulting in the swaying of my subconscious. A similar situation occurred recently. I was driving home from school and Pandora Radio was playing in the “background” of my thinking. I looked down at my speedometer and noticed I had started to accelerate and my speed increased significantly. This change in behavior seemed to correlate to the change in song. The unique component is the song I was listening to was also a faster beat. While speeding on the freeway, my behavior imitated the words and music—matching the beat of the song succinctly. In this instance, I believe this is a perfect example of what both Plato and Adorno speak of. It seemed as if I became the music—mirroring an automaton becoming one with it. The fast beat and repetition of the song put me in this same upbeat mode, making my body an automatic consumer of the song. Looking back on this moment, it wasn’t until after this behavior change that I even noticed the influence. How did I automatically succumb to this influence—did I become the machine? In that moment with that song, I was consuming the music allowing it to flow through my mind and body. It took its toll on me and I became a vessel through which it flowed. Plato would state this to be a modern instantiation of the imitative power music encapsulates. In Adorno’s case, he would agree that I was consuming it—even further, emulating the song like a machine.

Final Blog Post: What Music Adorno Would Like

NEW POST:

Nature considered as music would manage to avoid the temporal problem that avant-garde has with satisfying Adorno; that avant-garde is only fresh and exciting for the instant it is released and a short while afterwards. Moreover, nature considered as music could potentially battle against reinforcing comfort. Because Adorno despises music that places humanity in a state of regressive listening, I argue that he would enjoy simply listening to the sounds of nature in sequences, which are dependent on a myriad of unpredictable factors like weather and positioning, cannot ever be repeated. It would be as if nature is playing a new song to Adorno every time he tuned into listen.

While I still agree that Adorno would enjoy the sounds of nature as music, I also have to question whether or not Adorno would consider nature as music. Nature does not contain distinct patterned structures and bridges like most popular songs, and it does not understand which certain melodies, chords or sequences of notes generally appease popular crowds.

Regardless, I still believe that Adorno would love to listen to the sounds of nature because of the fact that there is absolutely no willed intention behind the sounds that nature “plays”. Adorno despises jazz in particular because of the fact that jazz is deceptive, or at least it attempts to be. His critique of jazz stems from the fact that jazz depicts itself as supposedly improvised, although he believes that any type of performance can be purely improvised. With nature, there is no pre-determined artistic approach that allows for deception. Nature is nature so nature’s sounds are nothing more than nature’s sounds.

OLD POST:

One of the reasons that Adorno dislikes jazz music is because jazz music, regardless of its improvisation, is always formulaic. If we consider the the ordinary sounds happening around us as music, then perhaps music of daily life, as a process, could be considered music that remains outside Adorno's critique. The class silence that makes Professor Naddaff feel uncomfortable and the sounds of papers being passed around in class are not subject to a formulated pattern that appeals to emotion. We do not ask or desire for the natural sounds/music that occurs around us. These sounds/music come in different patterns that make us feel uncomfortable because no pattern is ever predictable and act as a force that helps us realize how to be. Moreover, music as a natural process is similar to air. Both are distributed freely and are not able to be packaged, sold and perpetuated onto others--they are nature itself.

Final Post: Our Word Is Our Bond

Original Post:

In the popular Broadway jukebox musical "Jersey Boys," the story of Frankie Castelluccio, later Frankie "Valli," unfolds, depicting a lead character with friends caught in a few bad deals with the mob that cause him to go solo despite his success with The Four Seasons. As the musical retells, Valli released band mate Bob Gaudio's risky song "Can't Take My Eyes Off of You" as a solo artist after leaving The Four Seasons, which sparked criticism and discussion before taking off as a hit and reaching number 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart for a week. Extremely successful as a quartet, 29 Top Hits with The Four Seasons mark a comparable record with bands like The Beatles (so argues the musical). The musical narrates that the band had struggled with finding a particular sound that worked for them and that listeners would love, despite their harmonies and Valli's powerful falsetto.

Departing from the style that made The Four Seasons famous, as in "Big Girls Don't Cry," "Sherry" and "Walk Like A Man," "Can't Take My Eyes Off of You" signifies, in a sense, the dying of a version of the English language, in a parallel fashion to Panzera capturing to Barthes the dying of a particular form of the French language in his singing. As a song that had to be fought for just to get any airtime, luckily for us, this song somehow slipped through the cracks and caught on in popularity once people got used to its meter and dramatic expressivity. Valli's voice, his grain, embodies love and longing that he had for his divorced wife who left him due to his constant touring/traveling with the band and his subsequent girlfriend whom he left because she was getting in the way of his relationship with his daughter. The narrative structure of the play highlights the four distinct voices, and attached stories, of the four band members of The Four Seasons, linking their voices with their experiences and interpretations of how the band formed and broke up. When listening for the grain of the voice and attempting to think of examples, Frankie Valli and this theatrical version of his story came to mind. This musical shows how the grain of the voice can be associated with narrative, with tellings and retellings of stories from different perspectives and with different emphases, with different intonations and inflections, with different voices.

Revision:

We can use the popular Broadway jukebox musical “Jersey Boys,” which features the story of Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons, as a lens through which we may better understand Barthes’s music philosophy, specifically regarding voice, language and culture. As “Jersey Boys” retells, Valli released band mate Bob Gaudio's risky song "Can't Take My Eyes Off You" as a solo artist after leaving The Four Seasons. The musical narrates the band’s struggle finding a particular sound that worked for them and that listeners loved, despite their harmonies and Valli's powerful falsetto. Departing from the style that made The Four Seasons famous, as in "Big Girls Don't Cry," "Sherry" and "Walk Like A Man," "Can't Take My Eyes Off You" signifies, in a sense, the dying of a version of the English language, in a parallel fashion to Panzera’s voice capturing the death of contemporary French language.

The narrative structure of the play highlights four distinct voices of the four band members from The Four Seasons, attaching their voices to their experiences, songs and interpretations of how the band formed and broke up. This musical shows how grain of the voice can be associated with narrative, with tellings and retellings of stories from different perspectives and with different emphases, with different intonations and inflections, with different voices. Valli's voice, his grain, embodies love and longing. This unique voice contributed to Valli’s hit success, as not only did it resonate with the audience but also embodied the cultural longing at the time. Along with the words, language, music and culture were bound; after all, JL Austin informs us that "our word is our bond."

Final Post: Music a Torture?

Final Post:

The pleasure taken in repetition, in abrasive textures, in the ungodly volume of rock music suggests two things: we are all masochists and we are all eternally unsatisfied.

Schopenhauer was correct when he characterized our individual will as perpetually striving. We are never satisfied—and never will be. A musical melody could continue at infinitude and we will always want more. The pleasure we find in a melody is never a complete satisfaction. Just like hunger, it will resurface again in greater pains than before.

This is also twofold evidence of our masochism. When we listen to a repeating melody, there will inevitably be a deliberate refusal of our pleasure, a limiting of our intake. Essentially the song will end, and leave us as empty as we began. Yet, a more powerful illustration of our masochism would be the pleasure we take in abrasive and ostensibly harmful sounds. 

For this reason, the exact interpretation of torture will always be hazy. 

I originally included a song by the band Swans as evidence of the grey area between a tortuous repetition and a pleasurable one. As would be fitting to the song title, a comparison with sex could be beneficial. The incessant rhythm continues without break, in a near salacious masochism. The downbeats on the 1 and the 1 &  seem to hint at the act of intercourse. The song fades out almost the exact way in which it comes in, as if climax was never reached and we deliberately refuse our own pleasurable end. 

Original Post:

One defining aspect of music torture is repetition: the idea that if something is played repeatedly then it becomes obnoxious or even psychologically harmful. The detainees at Guantanamo were subjected to the same music for hours, sometimes days at a time. This extreme level of repetition caused a paralysis of will and cognition. 

But repetition itself is not harmful. If anything, small amounts of repetition can be beneficial to psychological awareness and stress purging. The issue lies within the degree of repetition, from healthy to lethal. As Paracelsus said of substances, “everything is a poison. The difference between a poison and a remedy depends on the dose.”

A band that I believe straddles the fence between healthful and harmful repetition is the noise-rock outfit Swans. 

Below I included a link to one of their songs.

[Final] Revised: Chance the Signifyin'

Barthes speaks of the signifying and signified in relation to Musorgsky's Death of Boris versus the Death of Melisande. He claims Boris represents "the triumph of the pheno-text, the smothering of signifying under the signified; soul." (275) In the pheno-song we understand the singer from the totality of the piece: rhythm, tone, melody, voice, silence. In this case the grain of the voice is overpowered by the drama of the other elements. Barthes notes the "perfect intelligibility of the denotation." Every word sung holds literal meaning, and the way the grain acts upon the voice does not confuse the meaning. On the other hand, Barthes describes the "prosidic contour of the enunciation" for Melisande; representing signifying and the geno-text. Here, the precise way a single word might sound or the way it is pronounced interacts with the (rather than embodying) denotation to form a more original meaning. Signifying's part of speech implies its nature: signifying acts on language while signified has been planted by language.

My song is "22 Offs" by Chance the Rapper. I think Chance is signifying in the way he repeats "Off" 22 times (in homage of Jay-Z's 22 Twos). As a pheno-text, Chance raps about being in high school and getting caught and arrested by the school’s police officer for smoking pot off campus. But the story is hidden behind so much slang and wordplay, and extra information (“Buying hella bugspray/making sure I get off” hahaha) that you need to listen multiple times and maybe even know about Chance to understand.

What we do understand on the first listen is how Chance signifies with his attitude. The repetition of “off” and the fact that the “off” sound sneaks up in other words, signifies how Chance thinks the criminal justice system and life on the south side of Chicago is off from the ideal of justice and the American life he would like to envision for himself. As a result he feels “off” and resorts to drinking and smoking to feel good, but this gets him in trouble with the cops. As a result is tone is both giddy and angry. The rap is delivered from some place where chance is off his nog, recalling the events. 

[FINAL] Barthes: Crystallize Lindsey Sterling

"it is a muscular music; in it the auditive sense has only a degree of sanction: as if the body was listening, not the "soul"; this music is not played "by heart"; confronting the key board or the music stand, the body proposes, leads, coordinates - the body itself must transcribe what it reads: it fabricates sound and sense: it is the scriptor, not the receiver; the decoder"

Original:

In this quotation on "music you play", Barthes labels the body, not the voice, as the 'decoder' of the music that is being performed. In this regard, the body is acting as the translator between that which signifies the music and the music itself. Barthes uses the example of the key board and the music stand to exemplifies this. The key board and the music stand is the medium in which the body is able to translate the codes that it deciphers. The codes can be the received thoughts, signs, and musical notes that guides the performer to produce the melodic sound that is music. It is a type of music that can only be done through physical means, hence Barthes's use of the term 'muscular'. In my example with Lindsey Sterling's  'Crystallize', the musician utilizes an external instrument, the violin, to script the signals received by her senses into a 'muscular music' that progresses throughout the duration of the song.

Question: Would Barthes consider dancing as an act that can 'play' music?

Updated:

In this quotation on the playable type of music, Barthes labels the body, not the voice or the 'soul', as the 'decoder' of the music. This means that music is no longer being created through the expression of the voice but from the proposition, lead, and coordination of the movement of the body as it confronts a piece of implementation that can perform that task in the place of a voice. In this regard, the body is acting as the translator between the instruments that signifies music and the form of the music. Barthes uses the example of the key board and the music stand to exemplifies this. The key board and the stand is the medium in which the body expresses the musical codes that it perceives and deciphers. These codes can be received in the form of thoughts, visual cues, and sound just to name a few, that guides the performer's fabrication of 'sound and sense' into music. It is a type of music that can only be done through physical means, hence Barthes's uses the term 'muscular' to signify the movement of the body. In this example of Lindsey Sterling's 'Crystallize', Sterling confronts the violin as Barthes would say to script the codes of sound that she receives through her senses into a 'muscular' type of music that can only be performed through the expression of the body. This expression comes from the movement of the muscles strumming the instrument with the bow. Sterling utilizes large combinations of rapid, slow, big, and small movements to create different changes in pitch and tone. She then scripts those patterns to create a combination that is manifested as the beautiful harmony, 'Crystallize'.

Barthes | The Grain of Hozier & Dylan: Blog Post Expansion

"To Be Alone" - Hozier

And since the proper Dylan video won't attach due to copyright issues, here's a link:

"In My Time of Dyin'" - Bob Dylan

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x155k7t_bob-dylan-in-my-time-of-dyin-1962-digitally-remastered_music

“‘Grain’ - the singing voice is not the breath but indeed that materiality of the body emerging from the throat, a site where the phonic material hardens and takes shape.”

“This voice is not personal: it expresses nothing about the singer, about his soul; it is not original and at the same time it is individual: it enables us to hear a body which of course, has no public identity, no ‘personality’.”

“I will not judge a performance according to the rules of interpretation, the constraints of style...I shall not go into ecstasy over the ‘rigor,’ the ‘brilliance,’ the ‘warmth,’ the ‘respect for the score,’ etc., but according to the image of the body (the figure) which is given me...I know immediately which part of the body it is that plays...If on the contrary it is the only erotic part of a pianist’s body: the pads of the fingers, whose “grain” I hear so rarely....If we were to succeed in refining a certain ‘aesthetic’ of musical enjoyment, we should doubtless attach less importance to the tremendous break in tonality which modernity has produced.”

Upon listening to the first song, “To Be Alone”, the corporeality of the singer’s voice begins to emerges alongside the genotextuality of the song within the listener’s mind as we recognize the communicative effort of the artist isn’t found in voice but rather in the grain.  A sort of kinesthetic hearing must be learned by the listener in order for the grain to be perceived and understood.  This voice requires a lack of issuance of “personality” as it would so be perceived by the listener, and rather demands the receding of any initial impression of the artist as a body to be understood - by which one might wrongly attempt to be evaluate their artist’s music against.  This wouldn’t be an accurate portrayal of the artist, but rather a construction of prior acumen of artists the voice might contain a resemblance of based on it’s depth, warmth, and lullabied quality.  This personality of the voice, however, contains no identity or parallel to that of the artist no matter the soulfulness or authenticity felt.  Is this soulfulness just a perceived depth of emotion that can somehow be seen or heard within the voice?  Can it be fabricated through acting like within the emotions of an actor, and if so, does this diminish the music’s quality of soul?  When describing something that has soul, are we describing it as something that is felt within our soul, something that is an experience of the listener’s whole body, or a perceived conveyance of the artist’s soul?  An assemblage of adjectives is conjured as the voice empties itself of pain, craving, and acerbity while alleviation and quasi-atonement is found by the artist as his consummation with her becomes his form of worship - like that of a user to his drug.  This attempt within the listener’s mind to define the voice’s tone, timbre, and individuality is vain in that the construction of Hozier’s voice resembles nothing of who he is.  Rather, this voice develops its own identity and personage that gives way to the development of a being that simultaneously contains an anonymity (if the artist were not pictured) and a familiarity.  The familiarity felt might be through its kinship with another artist’s style or intonation, but the familiarity is ultimately a falsehood that can only be rid by the listener’s choice to become accompanied with this voice.  The familiarity is mere distortion until the voice and grain have been spent time with by the listening ear.  This voice too, can’t be deemed original or individual despite a seemingly unprocessed authenticity.  Influence on the artist comes from somewhere outside the artist himself, and the construction of his voice is not a construct of himself, but rather that by which he himself has been constructed.  While listening to the second song, “In My Time of Dyin’”, we hear a likeness in the voice of Dylan and his song.  Similar descriptives might be used to assimilate it to the listening experience to that of Hozier, yet the soul of his voice seems to be provided by a less perfectly atuned structure.  The grain of his voice is harsher than that of Hozier’s, yet the grain of his guitar finds itself paralleled with the materiality of the voice through it’s more strident twang.  While the voice and guitar cannot be said to carry the same qualities, they might be said to carry quite similar feelings which can be accounted for the sense of familiarity when listening to the second song after having played the first.  In both, we find the eroticism Barthes speaks of coming through the fingertips of each artist, and the grain is seen to have a feeling of spontaneity and imperfection - leaving us to wonder if each song is replicated perfectly each time they’re played.  The second song (which was released in 1962 as opposed to the 2014 release of the first) although comparable to “To Be Alone”, has much less of the perfect tonality that Barthes refers to within modern music and the grain depicts a more beaten and broken body, whether it be of the singer or of the personhood of his voice.  The breaking and strain of the second voice gives grain to the voice that requires an aesthetic appreciation much more in alignment with Barthes’ view of musical enjoyment than that of the first.  Dylan’s voice, containing a rough grain, causes a body to be formed within our mind that is of a bruised and beaten being.  Hozier grain is found lacking of this thwarting and vanquishment due to its refinement and purity which stands in stark opposition to the lyricism of the song.  The grain of Hozier’s voice is one that is more aligned with the message of Dylan’s song, while the grain of Dylan’s voice matches the mastered and controlled nature (by the subject of Hozier’s longing), in that of Hozier’s song.

A Third Space for the Soul: 'The Cut' Between Humanity and Slavery in Gaye's 'Since I Had You'

“The image of the technical world possesses an ahistorical aspect that enables it to sere as a mythical mirage of eternity. Planned production seems to purge the life-process of all that is uncontrollable, unpredictable, incalculable in advance and thus to deprive it of what is genuinely new, without which history is hardly conceivable…” (Adorno, Perennial, 125)

"And this, in turn, leads to the question of the relation between castration and alienation, between castration, on the one hand, and disavowal and fetishization, on the other hand, in the Freudian and Marxian registers. Here we can begin to examine how a particular line of psychoanalytically influenced inquiry—say, from Adorno to Silverman— operates against the backdrop of these racial-historical determinations of language and the background of a reduction of the phonic substance of language that bends their analytics of aurality in the direction of an overwhelming ocularcentrism. For Adorno, black aural culture is defined by its fetish character in a way similar to the definition of female body/voice that Silverman sees in classic cinema. After all, according to Adorno, “[p]sychologically, the primal structure of jazz may most closely suggest the spontaneous singing of servant girls . . . [,] the domesticated body in bondage.”16 But I’m interested, here, in the insight Adorno’s deafness carries: for what is borne in work of the black radical aesthetic tradition—and not only at the site of its recitations of terror and violation but also in the critical and metacritical discourse it produces on its own productions—is nothing other than the cries of a servant girl, the material-phonic substance that is transferable but not interpretable from either inside or outside the circle, the aural content that infuses and transforms (our dominant understandings of ) primality, extremity, or extension out from inside or outside. Here I want to establish black aurality as the site of an improvisation through the structures both Silverman and Adorno talk about. Ultimately, I want to show how Baldwin’s baraka, his blessing, moves in the tradition of the servant girl and in the encounter with psychoanalysis and in light not just of castration but of augmentation, of a beneficent and song-producing prosthesis—the augmentation of vision with the sound that it has excluded, the augmentation of reason with the ecstasy it has dismissed—that improvises through the determinations of lack and alienation, not via some direct adequation between word and object, but through the object’s transferential reproduction in and as the (re)production of sound and of an ensemblic, dynamic totality. What I’m trying to talk about is another address of Lacan’s “question of a horn,” about which more in a minute. That address takes into account those transferences of the servant girl’s scream in the black musical and literary traditions, the “afro-horn[s],” say, of Henry Dumas or of Albert Ayler, phallic instruments infused and reconfigured by the materiality (content-substance-objectivity) of the maternal and by the knowledge of freedom the experience of bondage affords...
In Gaye’s work after What’s Going On, the contrapuntal is constructed not only by way of such polyrhythmic and extraharmonic intervention (a kind of irregularity or nonstandardization of pulse-to-hummm-or-buzzzzzz to whose differentiating force Adorno was unattuned), but as the disruption of the disciplinary hegemony of another powerful technic, namely, the rhetoric of the love song, a generic technicality that produces its own large set of problems. Here subordination to the technical apparatus of the love song is again cut by manipulation of, by technical in/subordination to, the recording apparatus. The lyric subject of the love song is disrupted by Gaye’s own other voices. The rhetoric of a most instrumental rationality is cut by the rhetorician’s own rapture. Listen to the song and think about how the theoretical image of the city might be held in and might emerge from the interconnection of the knowledge/discipline of labor and sexuality that this particular aesthetic space-time contains." - Fred Moten, "Visible Music," In The Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, pp. 179-180, 228

Adorno believes that the reproduction of certain sensations that are common between pop and jazz have produced a lack and a need for reproduced, external stimulus. This deprivation, as he calls it, is the castration at the heart of Fred Moten's deconstruction of the psychoanalytic foundations of Adorno's theory. Moten characterizes the production of Marvin Gaye's "Since I Had You" as transcending this by producing a prosthetic for the cries of slavery inherent to the black "aural" (cultural?) tradition. The music goes beyond castration and produces a sense of social life typically denied to the slave girl. This seductive capacity inherent to black music like Gaye's is the reflection of these cries, which Adorno arrogantly writes off as "feminine" and "female" at various points. Adorno misunderstands black music as a reflection of the paradigm of slavery their history has produced. He has excluded that as the essential history that determines the political ontology of social life within social death, where the music finds itself. It should also be of note that Adorno begins his discussion of the history of jazz with minstrel folk songs, which were also a part of this political ontology of antiblackness that jazz finds itself. He ignores the true impact on the political economy of American culture by ignoring the way minstrel music sustained slavery, and thus ignores a fundamental limit that is required in order to properly trace the psychoanalytic structure of music as a fetish, because these minstrel songs supported blackness as the fetish object.

Edit: After class, I find it necessary to clear up a couple things. Foremost, we cannot equate black people and blackness. Black people are black, but there is no "the black." Assuming an authentic "black person's experience" exists in black cultural forms like jazz would be susceptible to any basic critique of the Enlightenment's universal category of the subject. This is not what we are after. What we are after is blackness as a metaphysical category in the Western political ontology. Although there is no authentic category of "the black," there is the problematic of blackness that alters such phenomenal realities. (Moten has some great quotations on how the black aural tradition is fertile soil for discussing the history of philosophy (of music), and if anyone would like, I have a free electronic copy available.) Thus tracing jazz, soul, and other myriad black cultural forms as authentically black isn't the point. What we must do first is understand the political ontology in which these forms materially participate. Adorno has identified several problems with certain - I would argue  petit-bourgeois - audiences, but has overlooked the fetization of  blackness at root in early jazz (minstrel) performance. As such, his attention has been drawn away from the way jazz operates within the paradigm of social death necessitated by slavery. Instead, he argues is merely a palliative against universal social death under capitalism. Slavery breaks the usual subject/object divide which assumes itself in the ontological category of the human at work in this universal social death. Slaves were objects that spoke, commodities that spoke in breaking with Marx's critical analysis of the commodity. (Moten, In The Break, p. 6) As such, they attained social death beyond the industrial worker or the postmodern consumer. To that end, their material and cultural resistance in refining the cries of the slave girl "into music" is not a fetish project but a necessary instrumentation of the black aural tradition. This focus on instrumentation of such a tradition, which is the tradition of the object who speaks, means that sex and labor change into genuine and loving categories because they exist not as a palliative but as survival of social life in social death.

Final Project Addition
               When the “apparatus” of the song meets the process and manipulation of the recording apparatus, a cut occurs between the two, and as the cut grows a third space opens up. “The lyric subject of the love song is disrupted by the Gaye’s own other voices. The rhetoric of a most instrumental rationality is cut by the rhetorician’s own rapture.” This is the process by which a space beyond either expression of sentiment, which Moten recognizes in the love song, and the repression of that very sentiment by the presence of the master in the “planned production” of recording, forms. Adorno identifies jazz as slave’s music, but it is precisely because jazz and soul inherit slavery that they must produce a way of “rapture.” However, this “rapture” could easily fall prey to Adorno’s criticism of a false consciousness. In this case, the false consciousness would be false liberation of blackness from slavery. This "rapture" of slavery is only ideology that soul music sells. Moten’s analysis demonstrates that the cut is a musical move through and between the expression of humanity and the repression the slave faces.

While Gaye’s voice no doubt echoes the slave girl that Adorno finds in jazz, the production of “Since I Had You” finds life in the third space produced by the cut. The cuts congeal, so to speak, and do not negate the existence of the slave’s humanity nor her repression. Instead, this congealed space exceeds the first and second ways of liberation (expression of sentiment in love songs) and doom (repression in production) in favor of a third way: fugitivity. The fugitive slave is always, always in flight from the master and finds life in the flight. This movement requires neither freedom from slavery nor an acceptance of the repressive destiny. Specifically it is the production, the laborious aspect of music that Adorno criticizes as “purg[ing] the life process,” that enables such a movement. In the process of production, the slave girl’s voice finds flight away from her masters in the space produced by Gaye’s cuts.

Updated Blog: Adorno and Matana Roberts

Original Post:
I wanted to find an example of jazz that's so atypically experimental that it might counter Adorno's critique's of different forms of jazz as pseudo-individualization revolving around standardization. Besides dynamic development and some repetition of motifs, I'm not sure that there's much in this song that can be targeted by his critiques. Plus the song is incredibly expressive with its spoken word and distressing instrumentals, and focuses a good amount of energy towards making the listener feel uncomfortable, particularly towards the beginning.

New Post:
Adorno’s critique of popular music, especially of jazz, seems to me to be limited to the type of jazz that he was exposed to in the 1930s - a type of jazz that does reflect his accusations of standardization and pseudo-individualization, but one that is ultimately limited and frankly much less experimental that what the jazz would later develop. Matana Roberts’ song “i am” (2011) utilizes typical jazz instrumentation of drums, saxophone, standup bass etc., and general dynamic development, but that’s about as far as Adorno’s criticisms can apply. The dense and distressing “i am” starts similarly to Adorno’s own music: atonal and lacking in any distinct tempo or melody - and just when a groove starts to form and vocals tease an entrance, soft saxophone squeaks mimic ominous, ghostly noises and develop into atavistic, almost unbearable squealing/screaming from Matana. This incredibly uncomfortable intro was inspired by the horrors of intersectionality that she has felt as a black woman - something that becomes more apparent as a jazz cadence does develop (something to provide musical comfort), only to be overwhelmed by an agitated spoken word that focuses the listener’s discomfort into a tangible sentiment. This use of suspending typical musical catharsis is actually not far off from Adorno’s own music, which evokes distress to best cope with his assertion that "there can be no poetry after Auschwitz.” Even the structure of “i am,” lacking verses/choruses and a notable melody other than the cadence, escapes Adorno’s description of standardization.

The modern condition of music, with creative expression unlimited by easy access to instruments, recording equipment, online distribution etc., allows for the most basically-equipped musicians to go beyond standardization and pseudo-individualization - even if that is what makes up the primary sphere of popular music. To be fair, Matana’s music is avant-garde in some senses (notably in the comparisons to Adorno’s music above), but it is definitely also jazz (specifically free jazz, which has been popular with very notable jazz musicians such as John Coltrane). I think Adorno would have a lot of trouble trying to dismiss this piece.

Final Post

Original blog post:

This song reminded me of Schopenhauer’s idea of human will and reveals how dominating desire can be. It’s interesting because music to Schopenhauer is the only thing that can quiet our desires and insatiable need to feel satisfied while this song, thus music concerns itself so much with the feeling of yearning. So, I chose this song because I think it offers at least a superficial paradox following the perspective of Schopenhauer. However, I then come to realize that while the song concerns itself with expressing this desire for another particular being, that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t still create this transcendental moment where it is rather the idea of companionship created by the Will that the listener then experiences. If that makes sense. In writing this, I now also question whether or not Schopenhauer in his work referring to the effect of music is referring to the experience of listening to music, of creating music or most probably music in or in itself.

Expanded post:

In a way this song is ironic in that though it presents a very clear message of devoted yearning in its lyrics, it is rather the ineffable feeling the song creates separate from that explicit expression that gives it its value. The lyrics are minimal and poignant due to the fact that they aren’t overcomplicated or suffocated by unnecessary details. So, rather than anchoring the listener to the realm of the particular, the lyrics begin to express wanting in its essence. This music connects the listener to the pain of unrequited infatuation while at the same time making this pain remote by expressing it in itself instead of the phenomenon it produces and one which we feel as willing beings.

Schopenhauer says that through aesthetic contemplation, one may escape the unending cycle of satisfaction and dissatisfaction and grasp a glimpse of the supposedly unknowable noumenal world. It is then where life becomes livable by giving it significance. However music, according to Schopenhauer, is the only art form that is a direct copy of the Will without imitation or representation. In this way, it expresses the ineffable and its value comes from allowing us to connect to that which we know so inherently yet privately. Finally hearing it expressed yet still uncorrupted from the layers of senseless sensationalism brings us closer to our selves the phenomenal world as distracted us from. It is a kind of intimacy that music creates for its listener and even despite this particular song’s call to revert to the eternally willing individual, the power of music transcends this and touches an innate part of the listener.

There is a dearness to not having to say something but for everyone to know, a community is built between the spaces of the lyrics. Power broods in what can’t be said because this thing goes beyond the phenomenal reality in which world of words was created. All that evades representation is what creates and guides all representations and all that evades representation is called the Will. Music does not undermine the Will by attempting to represent it but rather briefly lifts the curtain up for the listener to recognize the world in itself.

This song though seemingly calling the listener to feel the distaste of wanting but not having, due to its minimalism in melody and voice instead offers the concentrated listener a glimpse of the feeling itself, in its purity and poignancy. Rather than diluting the melody and lyrics with ornamentation, the song does not hide from the experience of pain and in doing so, makes that pain almost pleasurable by connecting it to the Will.