The Musical as Drama

So I just finished Scott McMillin's very amazing book, The Musical as Drama, on what was my first venture into a critical analysis of musical theater. One of McMillin's main points is that musicals have a subversive multiplicity to them because they operate on two orders of time: number time and book time. Which is to say that the time that passes during song is almost like a parallel dimension to the narrative action of the book. He emphasizes that, because of these two orders of time, the characters in musicals necessarily "double" themselves, and become two separate versions. This doubling uniquely enables a multiplicity and a sort of Brechtian alienation from a singular dramatic momentum.

"There is always a bit of cheek in the musical's revision of its sources." p. 52

"The heart of the musical is the projection of musical ability, which takes the performers into the second order of time, lyric time, and lets them extend their characters musically....The larger characters are capable of living in two worlds as though they were real and normal...They aren't, but we are glad to think they are" p.67

He says that the old imperative for an "integration" of the book and music is really a red herring, and that "coherence" is a better suited term for the form.

"Integration means the blending of difference into similarity...Coherence means things stick together, different things, without losing their difference. Most musicals are not political, but all musicals depend on conventions that translate into political terms. The political implication comes from the conventions of the musical itself, which establish a groundwork of doubled time and character, source stories reformulated into the routines of the show business, raids on private motives, most of us keep to ourselves in normal life, a delight in throwing authority off balance, and a desire to maintain song-and-dance formats that go back to Harlem and the Lower East Side. It is an illegitimate drama that disturbs the managers of our affairs the more it remains true to its roots in popular entertainment. Its aesthetic is radical, and that means its political potential is always there, as a matter of form. " p. 209

"I think the new shows will have what we have been talking about: a power of reflection running between the different modes of book and number, a sense of the irreverence of the genre, and a feeling for the anger and beauty of radical multiplicity." p. 211

I hope so!


"The Musical as Drama"
by Scott McMillin
2006 Princeton University Press

44 Considerations for Young Composers

1. Stop listening to what everything/everyone seems to be saying.

2. Then start listening again whenever.

3. Spend lots of time doing whatever you like doing.

4. Forget about everything you learned sometimes.

5. Make music that only your cat likes.

6. Music can be the wrong place to look sometimes.

7. You are very powerful.

8. You are very tiny.

9. You are perfect.

10. You are making a difference.

11. As an experiment stop trying to do the thing that you've been expecting yourself to do.

12. If you aren't doing anything you are still a composer.

13. Don't write a score for a piece that doesn't have a score just because the grant application says you have to have a score. (You might suggest that they read Varese's "The Liberation of Sound" 1936)

14. Don't take the rhythm out of your piece because "contemporary music isn't supposed to have rhythm."

15. Don't put a pulse in your piece because you think no one will listen to it otherwise.

16. Whatever your parents think about your music is fine.

17. If your significant other won't listen to your piece all the way through it doesn't mean that he/she is not right for you.

18. Read "Noise" by Jaques Attali

19. Read "The Rest is Noise" by Alex Ross

20. Music bloggers have a disturbing appetite for live and recorded music, and you shouldn't feel like you have to keep up. In fact, just don't read them unless you really like the feeling it gives you.

21. Go to the library sometimes.

22. Listen to the city.

23. Take a walk.

24. Eat local vegetables.

25. Consider the semiotics/social impact/evolution/formal structures/psychological effects of recording technology.

26.Try to imagine that sonic art (music) is the non-linguistic expression (explanation) of an infinitude of things that happened, are happening, and that will happen.

27. Grant yourself permission to write the future of humanity's organizational efforts in all areas.

28. Work with the assumption that your music has a massive capacity to achieve transformative results.

29. Consider quantity over quality.

30. Allow yourself to keep everything and forget everything.

31. If you want to say "I hate music and I'm going to do something else" just say it.

32. If you went to a conservatory it doesn't mean that you are letting someone down if you:
a. Don't notate your music.
b. Do something different entirely
c. Put down the instrument you practiced for your entire life and only play an instrument you barely know how to play.
d. Never practice.
e. Have a healthy skepticism (disrespect) for all the crap you learned in conservatory.

33. If you didn't go to a conservatory you don't need to "go back to school" and refer to 9.

34. If you are currently in a conservatory don't take yourself so seriously, remember that you are learning inside a specific institutional dynamic (point of view), and refer to 9.

35. Specify failure. Generalize success.

36. All rejected applications are valuable gifts, the summed value of which will purchase tremendous acceptance in the future.

37. When you don't get the grant you will doubt yourself. When you get the grant you will be proud of yourself and then doubt yourself. All of that is fine.

38. Be wary of out dated and newly minted sonic and musical moralities.

39. Be wary of composers and teachers trash talking "Pop Music" if they aren't referring to specific artists or musical currents. It's entirely possible that they don't know what they are talking about.

40. Be wary of the cult of the "new."

41. Be cautious fixating on new technologies just because they are new. Consider letting your musical imagination guide you to the technology that will aid in the realization of the imagined sounds.

42. Think about what caveman music might have sounded like, and what purpose it might have served.

43. Send your music to your middle school music teacher. I bet he/she will be really happy you did.

44. Make more music. We need it.


I wrote this piece in response to Annie Gosfield's Article for the New York Times website entitled "Advice for Young Composers."

Audio Surveillance
and the Phono-Centric Fabulousness of Tom Levin

photo cred

1. "Audio-Surveillance in Narrative Film manifests as a narrative excess"
Which as I understand it means that the depiction of surveillance in film, creates a network of possibilities for the viewer/characters. The collection, storing, manipulation, use, misuse, and erasure of the collected data becomes an undepicted but revlevant "excess."

2. Listening as Menace.

3. The sound of rewinding = "The materiality of the signifier"

4. Though the representation of digital is not phenomenally accessible (we can't perceive the media with our senses) , "I insist on the materiality of the digital" ( and it's nearly impossible to get rid of).

5. Error conditions specific to transcriptions are harnessed to signify specificity of new media. (We have such a bright future of errors and artifacts)

6. "A sign is any thing that can be used to lie." - Umberto Eco

7. Tom views himself a working for the "Production of surveillant literacy"

8. Shape Your Data Shadow

9. I'm watched therefore I am.

10. A short history of voicemail.

"Music is more than an object of study: It is a way of perceiving the world. A tool of understanding. Today, no theorizing accomplished through language or mathematics can suffice any longer; it is incapable of accounting for what is essential in time- the qualitative and the fluid, threats and violence. In the face of the growing ambiguity of the signs being used and exchanged, the most well-established concepts are crumbling and every theory is wavering. The available representations of the economy, trapped within frameworks erected in the seventeenth century or, at latest, toward 1850, can neither predict, describe, nor even express what awaits us. It is thus necessary to imagine radically new theoretical forms, in order to speak to new realities. Music, the organization of noise, is one such form. It reflects the manufacture of society; it constitutes the audible waveband of the vibrations and signs that make up society. An instrument of understanding, it prompts us to decipher a sound form of knowledge."

- Jacques Attali from Noise: The Political Economy of Music

SPECULATION

Rodney McMillian, Untitled, 2007.

When computers begin to feel it will be delusion alone that is uniquely human. There are so many layers to this. Here's a fake map for the development of intelligence from the beginning of life to the materialization of intelligence. We're at about 7.8:

0. Void
1. Animation of Life
2. Multiplication of Life
3. Complification
4. Relationship
5. Linguistic Stucture (meaning created)
6. Codification (referential)
7. Extension (externalized evolution eg: tools, technology)
8. Genesis of (man-made) self-replicating species
9. Explosion of Species
10. Materialization of Intelligence (permeability becomes a sensation)

It is so hard to imagine the materialization of intelligence without feeling like you are drowning.

Kodwo Eshun on Rhythm (in modern music)
from: Swarm 3 "Abducted by Audio (Live)"

Thank you Mr. Eshun. I've been grasping at the Rhythm question a lot in the last few years and I was so elated to have happened upon some real insight.

"Part of the assumption that still exists in music is that futuristic music will somehow be beatless, somehow there won't be many rhythms, somehow it'll be weightless. It has a long heritage, going back from Holst's Planet Suite through to Kraftwerk, this idea that music will be transcendental and weightless, that somehow the beats will just slough off and we'll just kind of float through space astrally. But we know better now. After drum 'n' bass has retroactively switched us back on to the presence of rhythm, we know that the future will not only be just rhythmic, it'll be hyper-rhythmic. So in this sense when cyber-people keep talking about, "What's the fate of the body?", when they keep on moaning, "the body's going to wither away, the mind-body problem, it's so depressing," as far as I'm concerned rhythmic psychedelia is the opposite. The body's being triggered, the body's being switched on. Sensory perception is being triggered at a furious rate and, as far as I'm concerned, it's much more interesting to look at the idea of rhythm. Look at any piece of music writing and you'll notice an incredible absence about rhythm. So many people are unable to talk about rhythm. Music writers will talk about anything except what the beats are doing. It's actually very difficult. Rhythm is this terra incognita, it's this continent we've yet to land on. So you've got this strange dichotomy, what we call a gulf crisis: on the one hand, music is getting hyper-rhythmic, more rhythmic and psychedelic; on the other hand, the writing and the way we discuss it is more impoverished than ever. It's the most incredible thing."

"That's where I see music going: it's getting much more rhythmic, much more rhythmically psychedelic. We really have to start thinking about what rhythm does, how do we explain it, what is it, how does it work? The first thing to do is to acknowledge that rhythm isn't really about notes or beats, it's about intensities, it's about crossing a series of thresholds across your body. Sound doesn't need any discourse of representation, it doesn't need the idea of discourse or the signifier: you can use sound as an immediate material intensity that grabs you. When you hear a beat, a beat lands on your joints, it docks on the junction between your joints and articulates itself onto your joints, it seizes a muscle, it gives you this tension, it seizes you up, and suddenly you find your leg lifting despite your head. Sound moves faster than your head, sound moves faster than your body. What sound is doing is triggering impulses across your muscles."

"That's why drum 'n' bass talks a lot about the stepper, because sound is literally articulating you as a kind of exo-skeleton It's almost like your feet are gaining an intelligence at the expense of your head, or your arse, or your back, or your shoulders are gaining intelligence at the expense of your head. Anywhere you have a sense of tension, that's the beginning, that's the signs of a bodily intelligence switching itself on. And that's what rhythm is doing. You can foresee a point where the body is mutated by rhythm to the point where the head becomes completely superfluous, becomes this flabby muscle bouncing around, aimlessly lolling around, while your muscles go twenty to the dozen. In fact, of course, this already exists; its jungle. That's the whole point of it."

Animal Feet, Infra-Sound, and The Destruction of Humanity?



I had a wonderful discussion w/ James Rouvelle about his ideas on human disconnection from the earth.

1. Animals communicate w/ infrasound using the bottom of their feet.
2. Amphibians and other low lying creatures use their jaws as we use the tympanum in our ear.
3. Humans (w/ shoes, buildings, pavement) systematically disconnect ourselves from the surface/vibrations of the earth.
4. We are inventing our demise all the while we have an uncanny capacity to contemplate it.
5. Humans work to make everything known, Artists can conserve the unknown.
6. Parable of the elephant and the blind men
7. A gesture of expression helps illuminate the whole elephant.
8. Cultivate Empathy?
9. The Architecture of Teranobu Fujimori
10. What's wrong with the bees? Not cell phones but possibly GMOs
11. What will cull the Human herd? Probably a lack of something very basic (food/water) rather than a catostrophic event.
12. Robot Animals.