kagablog

The Music in Exile conference produced several reactions in people. These can be sampled in the sequel discussions on Kagablog which served as a post facto clarification of what the conference was about.

My first impression of the conference brief was that it overstretched exile the way academic conferences of yesteryear once stretched already tenuous things like Freud into complete vacuity by applying them.

I wondered if Edward Said’s recent discussion of exile- a revaluation of the concept beyond its customary biblical and literary focus – had been deliberately ignored, making its omission a polemic or if it had simply been unnoticed.

I decided that either way Said on exile was the appropriate starting point for a contemporary discussion of music and exile for much the same reasons I believe a discussion of music and religion should take Messiaen or music and philosophy take Adorno or at very least Kivy or Scruton as their starting points.

This was a mistake. Only Christine Lucia and I mentioned Said as I recall and if not for Aryan Kaganof reproducing Howard Yoder’s excellent discussion of Said on exile we would have continued to have got puzzled stares for our trouble. Discussion was in fact dominated by two versions of South Africa in the twentieth century and played itself out in their incompatibilities: the conference turned on the rival potentials of Stalin and Hitler as ways of articulating South Africa’s musical past.

The parallax view of South Africa formed between the two great masters of undemocratic power was fascinating -with Tim Jackson’s untroubled reminders of the systematic Nazi strand in apartheid South Africa and several former exiles telling of how they sidestepped or danced with the ogre of Soviet communism during the ANC’s most vulnerable moments.

Powerfully reminded that South Africa scraped past alternate tyrannies by the skin of its teeth it seems better to forget about setting up exile for discussion in its contemporary sense defined by Said and his critics and focus on the more fascinating and anyway far more urgent thought that exile in its South African context played out an immense battle for integrity between neo-nazi white utopian harassment and neo-stalinist courtship.

It may well be South Africa’s most cosmopolitan moment- not because exiles were so widely scattered but because they formed the stratum between the twentieth centuries two defining pathologies of power; fascism and soviet communism.

The situation of non exiles was equally cramped by ideologically powerful and homogenous complexes; between a fake ethnicity and a fake republic veneered onto the old colonial framework. These vast configurations certainly set the programme for more than musicological research. The haze in which the presentations and discussions at the conference seemed to evolve was actually caused by the underlying problematics of Nazism and Stalinism, fake ethnicity and fake republicanism surfacing faster than they could be recognized and thought about around the theme of exile.

Obviously much needs to be done to understand the ways South African music resisted or capitulated to the force field of the Soviet vision of anti-imperialist struggle . Just as much needs to be done to understand the extent and inherence of Nazi conceptions of society, of race-unique modernization, of aryan manifest destiny, of cultural and educative frameworks and of mono-racial civil society in apartheid South Africa. A third research programme in musicology would be needed to understand the role of scholars like anthropologists or art and music historians and philosophers, jurists, economists and the media in bringing about the fake ethnicity and invented traditions of the ‘Bantustans’. Finally the way the white republic constructed itself out of the elements and styles of colonial administration while appearing to combat these is scarcely understood.

Despite the exile conference producing acuter awareness of these framing issues,exile as a theme may not be the most effective way to explore all of them . My own interest in the conference was as an occasion to discuss Mosoeu Moerane . I owe much of my growing understanding of this composer to the generosity of my friend and colleague composer Mokale Koapeng and also to the insights of Christine Lucia and the late Mary Rorich. In my initial discussion I compared Moerane to the great and equally easily misconstrued painter George Pemba. Both seem to take their bearings in an inherited and conservative-seeming western style but both stand out by making this pre-given language resonate with South African reality in an almost inexplicably powerful way- a power denied their contemporaries whose imaginations often seem simply westernized and colonized by comparison.

The ideas of Deleuze and Guattari about Kafka- ideas that circulate under the rubric of minor literature -seemed a useful way to understand how situating yourself in the language of the oppressor can give access to a new and subversive way of feeling, thinking and formulating rather than the expected mannerism, co-optation, stifling and sterility.

To explore this theme for music it is necessary to understand what cramped and exceptional circumstances force people into imposed languages – languages which are part of the greater systems by which colonies supplant existing experience with norms and co ordinates of their own. It is also necessary to show that the stance of Moerane – the creation of a voice through deliberate restriction – is an inherent and available potential of music and has been used to great effect as a strategy despite being mis-recognized as extraterritorial or naive art or as aesthetic conservatism.

What follows is merely a sketch of how such an argument may be developed around Moerane and how its assumptions fare when applied to other better known composers who I also regard as minor in the Deleuzian sense while being absolutely major in the way the still dominate musical discussion:

Gustav Mahler, Charles Ives and Conlon Nancarrow

cramped creation

Juan de Pareja was Diego Velasquez’ black slave and colour mixer. He was not allowed to handle a brush. In some versions of the story he practiced drawing in secret and emulated Velasquez from a distance. One day , expecting the kings studio visit, he placed one of his paintings on display. When the king reached it Juan de Pareja dropped to his knees an begged that he be allowed to paint. The king responded that nobody of such talent could possibly be a slave and Velasquez was obliged to grant his ‘indentured servant’ freedom.

Mosoeu Moerane was not that fortunate. There was no king in South Africa, only bureaucrats who were so witless about their job that they had to import hundreds of ex Nazis to talk them through the running of their rebaptised colony (now a whites-only utopia) and help staff universities. Moerane – heir of one of the worlds longest unbroken music traditions – had to seek assistance from one such redeployed fascist, Friedrich Hartmann, in order to receive the white mans music degree; the apartheid states way of granting black teachers a kind of license to speak in its territories.. Velazquez and the king had an easier time than Hartmann and his watchdog university because Juan de Pareja, as far as we know, did not carry the legacy of one of the great African traditions of design into his captivity with Velasquez. Possibly generations of slavery had obliterated any way of transmitting such traditions. It’s tempting to imagine de Pareja, who has already been the subject of a novel, sitting in his tiny room, the great autodidact exhausted by a day of pigment grinding and colour blending, bent over a copy of Vasari’s The Lives of the Artists -absorbing that saga of individual discovery as a single line from Giotto to Michelangelo.

Perhaps de Pareja reflected on this adventure of appearances captured like himself and thanked what slight luck he had that instead of being the property of a blacksmith or pig farmer, he was the chattel of a man he could secretly observe extending this great Vasarian ambition of conquering the way the world looks.

De Pareja was fortunate too that the king didn’t believe as the architects of separate development did, that only a certain kind of art and culture was appropriate to him by virtue of the accident of his colour and insisted that he weave baskets or string beads or run a cultural centre in his new found autonomy. As a result of his more enlightened era, Juan de Pareja was eventually allowed to speak in the language of his captors, to paint their world in his own name, out of hiding and more than in the incidentals to Velasquez own canvases. Some smirking western commentators still remark that de Pareja did not learn much from his master Velasquez. His The Calling of Saint Matthew shows something far more interesting than a secondary Velasquian though.

It openly shows Velasquez world at its most conventional and bizarre . Its is baroque painting become unconcernedly artificial and indiscreet ; Figures from Raphael’s The School of Athens stand around philosophizing behind Christ who himself seems to have walked straight off the set of a Bellini painting. Holbein’s ambassadors rug supports a meeting of fences or pawn shop operators , three of whom are dressed as bourgeois dandys. Manet would be admired and chided centuries later for showing Spanish realist painting in all its latent artifice and disarray- his only precursor is de Pareja.

We meet around St Matthew the stock characters of baroque painting: humans frozen as types and versatile extras stretching back to the renaissance in an unbroken string of conventional roles. They return without the disguise of individual portraits in de Pareja hands. All around these usually hidden human props of the painter , the Vasarian myth of mastered appearances is evident in literal property which overshadows the generic people ; velvet on a drape coming to show itself out of nowhere marble, leather, gold light and shade, smoky figures in a mirror. These are the surfaces of goods and possessions seen by a painter who had recently been just such a subtle piece of property himself – one which could add value by opulently painting opulence and who now presents it in scarcely hidden tatters and seams.

Mosoeu Moerane’s problem was not simple capture in an identity as property along with cattle, goods or other slaves In his time colonialism was revised into an A stream and a B stream both consisting of humans. Both streams were realized as ‘nations’ rather than as owners and slaves although in fact they were nothing more than two classes; white supremacists emulating Nazis and a working class administered into ethnicities as spurious as Verwoerd’s own.

Moerane was unlucky to be part of a creative State- something far worse than a merely repressive one. He found himself reflected in the overnight State creation of white civil society with its orchestras, virtuosos, prizes and pretensions to white style, opinion, taste ,culture urbanity and civility – another polishing Nazi touch. Against this , spurious ethnicities were created , vast administrative and tactical stereotypes within the existing colonial manifest destiny. Moerane could not default from the noveau-white glitz to his own tradition because that tradition was occupied and driven by racist social science and apartheid eugenics.

Velasquez court of Philip IV was brutal but at least genuine, not reinvented with every generation of brainstorming colonial bourgeois. When Juan de Pareja was part of it – either as chattel or as free agent – he was at least part of something actual. When a slave spoke to a king it was not also through two layers of Nazi and colonial ventriloquism hastily knocked together into a republic.

Towards a minor music

Moerane’s double state-administered identity, double style veneers and double layer colonial class war was the map of his unique migration -from the vernacular space of an unbroken oral tradition to the caricatural curriculum of the school, to the white culture-vault of the university, to the fascist meister, to the colonial missionary space of sacred music which may have seemed a liberated zone beside its claustrophobic neighbors.

When scholars get beyond the sheer paleography of Moerane’s Fatso la Heso (who wrote what, could Moerane have managed it all or was it Hartmann sketching in solutions to get rid of his untermensch pupil and have a laugh at examining academics etc ) they will hear in its hesitations as much as its glibnesses the same things they see but seem not to see in the great painting of Juan de Pareja the slave.

There is something specific – certainly a genre- in the work of women, homosexuals, colonized people, workers, slaves -of all who are forced in one way or another to speak in the language of their oppressor. That the vast literature of this condition has not been focused on Moerane is surprising Franz Kafka epitomized this condition by writing in the language of the occupier. This feature of his work was what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari believed they captured in the notion of a minor literature.

Kafka captures the dimensions of his own situation in his story A Report to an Academy. He tells of an ape captured and transported on board ship in a cramped cage . During this passage the ape is faced with fading away in despair or escaping to leap overboard in suicide . It uses its enforced waiting to observe the humans around it so closely that it is able to copy, comprehend and reproduce their behavior and thoughts; it even seems to capture part of the soul of the distracted sailor who comes to feed it. This vast learning is undertaken to assist it to escape from its cage. Instead, on reaching a destination the ape is confronted with life in a zoological garden or life in the music hall. Choosing the latter it uses a succession of teachers to reach so high a skill in imitation that it reports- now under the name of Red Peter- to a scientific academy on its metamorphosis- so complete that it can no longer describe its emotions and experiences as an ape.

Red Peters report is the model of the minor – understood as a relation to the majority which it embraces and dissents from in the same gesture.

Gustav Mahler suffered the earliest forms of the antisemitism that would eventually grow to sweep away his world. His conversion was his primary bid for a place within a majority, his music endlessly rescinded this conversion as much as Red Peter – another converts- wry report rescinds his. The fertile anomalies in Mahler still occupy us far more than whatever arguments still surround his place in the succession of western music.

His finest biographer, Henry-Louis de La Grange, wrote that Mahler ‘cannot be classed in any definite category .Those who consider him a post romantic ,late offspring of the Wagnerian tradition are infallibly disappointed by the neoclassicism of the fourth symphony. Those who think of him as prolonging Bruckner’s monumental neoclassicism and who admire his prodigious craftsmanship and supreme mastery of form must concede that his art is more subjective than objective and that his aim like the romantics, is to convey a message by awakening the listeners emotions. And finally those who take him as a modern forerunner of the Viennese school and prophet of the future are disconcerted by the banality of his themes and by his fidelity to traditional form and diatonic harmony’ (H-L de La Grange Mahler -a Biography introduction xv Gollancz 1974).

In this a stasis is described in Mahler’s music and his reputation arising from existing between idioms . Twentieth century composing , performance and recording culture is filled with interpretations designed to push Mahler out of this stasis and towards an idiom. Bernstein construed Mahler between a Jewish past of popular music and a prophecy of twentieth century disasters. Bernstein’s Mahler becomes as sincere as himself, leaving no room for Mahler’s obvious irony. Abbado’s Mahler is filled with irony-but all suitably historicist as if coming directly from dialogues between the conductor and Luigi Nono. Levine arrives on cue with subjective irony which then all but disappears again into detailed musical tectonics with Gielen.

The inexhaustible demand for Mahler cycles is part of this ongoing hermeneutic obligation to strongly construe Mahler one way or another, as if he were troublesome evidence in a court case where sets of performances serve as closing arguments to the jury.

Mahler is also forced into blanket redefinition by composers: Boulez sees musical narrative in him and a new way of approaching Berg , Shostakovitch sees him as his particularly deep rooted contemporary , Stockhausen sees him encapsulating human experience in a way ready for visitors from another planet to comprehend.

Multiple Mahlers result from his inclusion in so many idioms while belonging to none. Thus spectralized Mahler becomes mythic -either as a monster made of different parts or a transcending spirit drawing then all together: at the same moment Ken Russell portrays the Mahler-monster, David Holbrook interprets him as the Kleinian quest for spiritual integration.

Mahler is modernity’s Zellig or Chancy Gardener, a cause of endless projections, famous because he is pervasive but pervasive because he is everywhere and nowhere -nameless- a perfectly modern vacant universal. de La Granges subtle antinomies turn into an epic biography which Stockhausen called a vast detective story in which anything might be a clue. In this sustained ambiguous perspective the only thing clear is that there is never going to be a definitive Mahler- neither in performance nor in some clarified canon. H e inhabits several incompatible idioms at once each one a lure to the hasty interpreter and he leaves these idioms untouched, unlike any modernist or postmodern successor. For Mahler the contemporary of Giovanni Morelli, Sherlock Holmes. Charles Peirce and Sigmund Freud reality consists entirely of details.

Through technical mastery Mahler possesses several languages- recrossing their terrain many times as a conductor, a reader and composer . He never takes the various escape routes he himself marks out in his music ; routes which Sibelius, Nielsen, Shostakovitch, Zemlinsky and Schoenberg each make their own. He begins in the same place over again bounded by the same triangle of romanticism classicism and modernism. This is what prompted Schoenberg to say that Mahler wrote the same symphony nine times.

But Mahler the great objective reader, particularly of himself, finds elbow room in incongruities between different languages. Incongruities that would disappear if he imagined a more coherent and consistent language at their point of convergence and moved towards this by elimination as Sibelius and Webern did.

Ives is as determined as Mahler to exist between host languages while letting them be themselves. An exasperated Boulez is referring to this when he calls Ives an amateur unable to impose a single body of technique on his material. Taking advantage of an American performance tradition not yet ossified or commercialized Ives easily situates himself across the entire spectrum occupied by music of his time : a vernacular, a commercial, a learned and a sacred language exist as unconnected layers in him and each language migrates freely between these conditions.

Unlike a modernist, Ives does not see in these varied states of music different meanings -in the way Stravinsky finds in jazz , fairground music or village wedding chants a distinctness which can only be drawn together in a collage.

In Central Park in the Dark we do not hear a place filled with different types of music but a music made up of different types of places . The act of moving between these places is presented in Over the Pavements. Ives contains no collages and nor does Mahler : like a soul caught in the wrong body and signaling this dilemma with unexpected twitches and stumbles both inhabit existing languages and force them to blurt out what lies against their grain. These blurts are not the unexpected distortions, and exaggerations of expressionism- they are as carefully prepared and deliberated over as fireworks.

These blurts are also very specific Conlon Nancarrow devises a technique and an aesthetic to produce and study them. They appear in him as virtual harmonic motions without literal pitches below them and durations irresolvable into rhythm or metre.

Everybody notices these things in Nancarrow but mistakes them for contrasts to the frozen melodies and modular phrases of his music- as if he were a minimalist become ornate. The legible surfaces of Nancarrow are like the stuffed goat and tyre in Robert Rauschenberg’s combine- not the subject of his painting but a frame for the daubs dropping down from the goats face which continue punctuating the hidden words and images it stands on.

Nancarrow’s neatly stuffed melodies and phrases are also defaced by smears of diminutions, superpositions and motion blur accelerandi which scatter off them to make a different musical plane. Paul Griffiths remarked that Nancarrow works like an animator, carefully designing legible transitions between music frames which when played back fast are stretched on the rack of mathematically assured nonproportion. Melodies attached to these warping grids become unrecognizable at breaking point and snap back to dots ,layers of polyphony form out of a shower of notes and are shaken off like water. Nancarrow’s cartoon physics, which no doubt comes from the technical matrix shared by cellular animation and piano rolls , hides under its freedoms the strangulated position he occupies.

He writes a score, transcribes it into another code giving the same microscopic control over its performed surface as any electronic music – this code is read by one or two pianos which have been altered to render the density of the music . For all the freedom of design and specificity this promises it also binds Nancarrow tightly in a three step transcription between layers which do not resemble each other . These are the strata Nancarrow must cut into at different points, a kind viscous layer which Nancarrow ingeniously instructs or coaxes along its way; the inertial dead music moving in the ingenious automaton of virtually alive music which he is famous for.

Nancarrow in his basement – pinned between nineteenth century music , a pianola code that speaks to no human eye or ear and fading obsolete instruments – dramatizes the way the intact layers of language in Mahler and Ives also constantly and uncomfortably partition their composing. A musicologist from mars would have no difficulty seeing Mahler Ives and Nancarrow as working with profoundly conservative languages, much as they would see Thomas Mann or Pierre Bonnard working with genres and idioms of the past.

But of course none of these seeming conservatives have conservative consequences in their work or conservative followers- therefore what are they doing?
An indication comes from Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of Kafka where we learn that minor literature is one which does mostly three things:

It unpredictably alters a major languages relationship to context and reference (‘deterritorialises’ it) by being written in the major language but from a marginalized or minoritarian point of view.

It has an immediately political effect because in its cramped spaces what is individual and what is social are inextricable.

It has a collective value because what each author says individually also constitutes a common objective.

Compare any Mahler adagio to Strauss ‘Tod und Verklarung’ to see that that Mahler shifts the language he shares with Strauss far from its customary capacity for declaration and expression A Mahler adagio is Strauss off the Wagner-Strauss-Sibelius line on which he habitually travels . Not that Mahler’s adagios effect this by lying or being ironic , they are often intensely sincere and literal but are also quite simply elsewhere , unable to go on coding or conveying whatever they were designed for . They are not beside or beyond themselves at an extremity of the language in the expressionist manner, they are in a blurred or suspended relation to the entire history they gave rise to- hollowing from within its language and possibilities of use. In short Mahler deterritorialised the major language of his time by remaining within it.

The way Ives dissolves existing codes by means of themselves is apparent in all his music but especially where it pretends to be compendious and encyclopedic -in his orchestral works. Here a simple question must be asked : where this music is taking place? in a form? in a style? in a narrative? in an allegory? in a confession or a memory? in a tectonic continuity of technique? The impossibility of answering any of these questions means Ives evasion of the language he is in by means of itself is so complete that he threat ens to silently eviscerate even subsequent languages and hence the anxious concern of the avant-garde and post minimalists with him.

Nancarrow is marginal , an exile from American anticommunism working in obscurity. His music, which starts in earnest around his thirty fifth year, is a map of his alienation existing like the kind of forceps used to handle nuclear waste , reassembling at a distance the shell of mainstream music already pulverized by jazz, eroding that shells own internal forces of cohesion and presenting it in an altered state inside his machine, in its own afterlife as Nancarrow’s zombie.

By the second criterion of minor music it is immediately political because in its cramped spaces the individual is inextricable from the socius: The thoroughly, immediately political Mahler is not something hidden behind the massive cult of subjectivity surrounding him. It is that subjectivity. The Mahler biography is a rich compound of institutional power, antisemitic forces, generational bids for autonomy beneath aesthetic guises, patronage and deep hypocrisy all spun into a narrative center of gravity which Stockhausen, accurately called a myth which was only transiently Mahler and which may quite appropriately live on without him.

Ives space is so cramped that he cannot fit an identity as a composer into it or any of the musical legitimations or aesthetics of his day – he has to make do with a matrix remembered from baseball. The forensic tone of Ives scholarship indicates that he is nowhere present on the surface of his music – not even as its proprietor. His own social and patriotic writings delve back to the Bloomsbury of America, to Thoreau, Emerson, Hawthorn and the Alcotts ,suggesting that he experiences himself as the locus of an audience that has yet to come into being: where the people are missing (Kafka) you must freely shape them from your own void.

on the third criterion minor music has a collective value because what each composer says individually already constitutes a common action:

This predicts that Mahler, Ives and Nancarrow’s music becomes a tool of collective identity- and this certainly happened many times over . Mahler was the collective noun for soviet symphonism as well as for the western avant-garde’s conquest of complexity . Ives constituted an instant Americana and then became the hub of the American experimental tradition , Nancarrow precipitated Cunningham in the sixties and Frank Zappa in the seventies then became an idol to Ligeti and a universal precedent to American post-minimalism.

In this construction it is possible to begin imagining Moerane not as the composer of a sparse thread in sacred and western orchestral music but as a maker of pieces so resoundingly odd, identical to their host languages but indiscernibly different as to cast the identity and direction of the host in doubt – the way Mahler denatures Wagner or Ives makes the synthetic symphonic genre appear like it was merely eavesdropping all along. In Moerane the identity of the composer fades as we approach it closely and where it stood we are sucked instead into the literal tempo of the moebius apartheid strip of pseudo western and pseudo ethnic events – and then we glimpse Moerane again- but as if an era had grown a personality and a face.

Moerane becomes the collective name for a project- of which Mokale Koapeng and a few others are co-heirs -pioneers of first hearing and then writing a South African minor music – ie. a properly revolutionary because properly unsettling music- beyond Stalin , beyond Hitler, beyond ethnicity and beyond the genteel colonial white music world- a world which today is merely the waxworks of apartheid culture.

This project- which is a reading of Moerane which some will see as his deliberate travesty, does not free itself of Stalins, Hitlers Mangopes and Verwoerds as much as invites them to saturate one another, to blend indiscernibly into a South African present no longer hidden by yuppie fog or deluded rainbows. It is a language caught only in the blur of their languages, another voice heard clearly in the fiery furnace of their old voices. Moseou Moerane, like all people too great not to be minor, is in the process of being born posthumously.