re-sound: Sublating the Symbol
re-sound recordings are marked by transgressions of musical style. This applies to the individual Australian works chosen for this album and also to the compilation as a whole. At its most basic level of signification, music is indexical of its style. Surfing swiftly across a number of radio stations gives an idea of how little time we need as listeners to identify Jazz, Classical, Metal, Klezmer and so on. So the first step in sublating the symbolic in music was to ask the musical authors to push beyond their own boundaries of style and genre.
‘Sublation’ is a translation of the German philosophical term ‘Aufhebung’, which is associated with dialectical thinking and, in its verb form, can mean anything from preserve, pick up, and keep, all the way to abolish, cancel, and repeal. These diverse and conflicting meanings make ‘sublation’ a fitting conceptual tool to explore the dialectic of music’s representational affordances and its non-signifying presence. Put differently, the musical works on this CD engage with the symbolic by emphasising it where it may otherwise be concealed, and by questioning it where it may otherwise be taken for granted.
Afglu was composed and improvised collaboratively, developing original materials, rather than being bound by traditional Jazz standards. Contrary to the sense of exclusivity associated with Neomodernism and New Complexity as clearly marked territories within the spectrum of contemporary Classical music, the music of many contemporary Jazz artists appears to move towards a broad inclusiveness with little reliance on any single subgenre.
The pregnant silences and expressively sustained sounds in Momentary Pleasures highlight duration as being musically meaningful. Here it is not a goal-directed sequence of sound objects or a regular pulse that provide continuity. Instead, the work emerges from the listener’s own mindfulness of how each sonic gesture occupies its own place. The momentary pleasures referred to in the title might thus paradoxically result from a sense of musical elongation.
Pillow Talk embodies the idea that there is something cosy and private about the combination of tenor recorder and accordion. The work’s musical materials unfold in free association but always with emotional intent, as one would expect in real pillow talk. Similar to the previous work, there is no preconceived form or thematic development that would guide the musical narrative. Every musical event, every expressive gesture, every embrace between the two instruments occurs in its own right and moves gently to the next.
Dali’s Double Toasted Sandwich makes reference to Salvador Dali’s melting clocks in The Persistence of Memory. The regular beat and steady tempo associated with electronic dance music melt away at times and create a stylistic void that vacillates between the promise of something more substantial than style and the threat of nothingness.
Unmasked Pantomime explores the image of the sad clown and its association with the complexities of human emotion. One wonders whether there was ever a time when the Clowns, Harlequins, or Pierrots simply stood for fun and humour, or whether their shenanigans always signalled a darker psychological and social reality. The music reflects this dialectic through an at times familiar-sounding subdued and melancholic playfulness.
Jonestown Threnody was inspired by Stanley Nelson’s 2006 documentary Jonestown: The Life and Death of the People’s Temple. The work marks the 30-year anniversary of the Jonestown Massacre, the largest mass suicide in modern history. More than 900 people died, including a US congressman, whose death triggered the charismatic yet unstable cult leader Jim Jones to direct his followers to commit ‘revolutionary suicide’. Jones’ idea of the people’s temple for a communal utopia touches on the essence of sanctuary and the sacred that modern religiosity esteems. It also opens up ancient ideas of sovereignties and the Homo Sacer (the hallowed and simultaneously cursed man set aside from society), but in a perverted, inverted manner, where eventually the entire body of state is sacrificed in a total erasure, rather than in a specific act of violence designed to bring order to general chaos.
The title is points to all sorts of philosophical concerns, especially the investigation into the nature of being. This work for amplified solo violin with its soundscape-like serenity might simply exist without having to represent anything other than itself. And yet even something as unassuming as serenity has more to do with a human state of mind than with the quality of sound itself. Maybe a work like this encourages us to conceive of the unfolding of its sounds and our awareness of these sounds as being the same thing.
Undeterred by the somewhat fashionable stance of not wanting one’s music to tell a story, The Fire Woman follows the narrative of a woman enraged by the injustice of inequality. Through her convincing logic and passionate rage, the woman lights a fire within her previously indifferent male counterpart, and together they burn down the structures that enable inequality to thrive, sublating them in a new landscape with the promise of equality. This sublation in the program’s socio-political domain is mirrored at the level of the musical material through merging the opposing approaches of Paul Hindemith’s tonal system with Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method, creating a non-tonal surface over a tonal background.
Forlorn Remix is normally performed with a video showing a young Aboriginal in a military uniform, which together with the word ‘forlorn’ in the title is enough to set the tone of the work. The music with its dark foreboding mood echoes the despairing reality of war, including that of Aboriginal service men, who in the First World War fought for a country that would not recognize them as citizens until 1967.
The Departing is the contribution of a Hong-Kong-based composer who studied in Australia and wrote this intensely engaging chamber work for soprano, double bass, and percussion as a reflection on the topic of asylum. The Cantonese lyrics are an excerpt from an ancient Chinese poem called Li Sao by Qu Yuan.
All the greedy people thirsty for power,
having their wallets filled, yet still asking for more.
They have low self-discipline and tolerate their own,
but are cruel to others.
They pretend to be friendly but are actually scheming,
battling for power and fame.
This form of living is not what I pursue in life.
And one day when I get old and die,
I will have to leave all my fame behind.
I leave all my things behind,
I drink dew from flowers in the morning,
I eat petals in the evening.
I give up all the luxury and fancy meals.
As with the previous re-sound release (The Flowers, Move Records, MCD 436), the final track of this recording, V, is made up entirely of samples from the other works on this album. And as with all sampling, sounds are re-contextualised both in terms of their placement within the new work but also in their potential to create new meanings. But rather than selecting recognisable sound objects, most of the sampling is done with Granular Synthesis, radically breaking down the source sound into tiny grains often less than 50ms in duration. The resulting soundscape is thus characterised by shimmering semblances of the other pieces as the ultimate gesture in our sublation of the musical symbol.
Thomas Reiner, based on comments of the authors
Brunswick, 2015
ArsPublica
Edizioni Musicali
Sede legale: piazza S. Valentino,12
33030 Camino al Tagliamento UD - Italia