Thursday, September 26, 2019

yes, but it gives me a headache: a rambling anectdotal, i.e. conversational-styled commentary on minimalism, julius eastman, class, activism and luigi nono


Luigi Nono, the painter. 1850 - 1918

      Minimalist music at first blush seems quite controversial and then over the years increasingly appears pleasing to the mainstream popular palate. Some will never like it for their individual, peculiar reasons but it no longer appears in any way threatening to the status quo. Liking it at first and then growing a bit tired of it, on the whole, seems to have been my own trajectory. Those first moments of luminous experience with Wim Mertens and Meredith Monk (records or cassettes) in my first real (lonely) apartment in San Francisco left me with the feeling of having gained access to a special world few understood and I rested for a while inside the belief that I had transcended, flown all previous social barriers, entered the classless haven of pure music. My little utopian apartment, three rooms on 14th street, between Guerrero and Valencia, going for 235 bucks a month, cold, in 1986, in an ex-hotel once owned by John Hammond: that would be where I discovered the avocado tree that would nourish me during hardest times and I'd listen to the cassette deck plugged into my guitar amplifier. The same apartment, exactly the same, where I will find myself in 2003, the place I would go to visit a friend recently re-located from Denver, a software designer named Biaggio Azzarelli, who made a killing by doing a Eno-esque start up sound for a program (now we call them apps) for one of the big companies. Biaggio was paying 1,600 for the same three rooms. I looked and saw the stump of the avocado tree three floors down through the grill of the fire escape. It was wonderful to encounter the new friend in my old place of residence and he was doing well indeed, his three rooms minimally adorned and clean as a whistle.  

     Most people know how quickly San Francisco changed after the dot com boom but my memory also stretches back to sitting at Cafe Trieste with the poets, the two Jacks not Keruoac, Jacks Hirschman and Micheline, probably in 1989, when I worked in North Beach, listening to them muse into grumbling how the town had gotten white-washed. What did I know? I walked around the corner stumbled into Bob Kaufman, eighty-sixed from every bar in the hood, shook hands, nodded, since he didn't speak much in those days. And Ferlinghetti was at the desk upstairs, just over there. It seemed like the greatest place on earth. Sun Ra at Mabuhay Gardens, saw him buying cookies for the Arkestra, greeted and spoke to him too. Little did any of us know what was to arrive with the bridge and tunnel crowds and the displacement of people from the old housing projects, some winding up rough out on the streets quite often. Minimalism has many faces and one of those faces belonged to the homeless Julius Eastman, although on the other side of the country -- but his minimalism left a very troubled stain on the white and white-washed world which surfaced many years after his demise in a recent scandal about the titles of his pieces, the ones which left the history of his people dangling uncomfortably by the roots. for example:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_QGQcKq1ik

     Memories of Julius Eastman at the moment linger in my mind(s) along with the fading strains of "nothing compares 2u" -- the restaurant line (in the song) especially stands out sorely. I don't like restaurants as a rule. Diners, delis and cafes, taquerias all more my speed. Asian food is different. I can suffer a bit the wait and the strange guilt I feel of being "served".  This is class-derived guilt, I suppose and I should be busing here for a few extra bucks myself. Learning to cook was a princely revolution, although it takes time from the working person's life to rustle up some vittles. But the days of uber eats will even likely surpass me in the bikes lanes of consumerism. 

     I started out with mentioning minimalist music for a reason. And that is because eventually, while listening to Julius Eastman's music last year it struck me that he alone perhaps among composers who might get installed into this genre retains within his music the tension of the class struggle and that the easy commercialization and growing popularity of all the others was precisely because this music in other hands could jettison association with social issues or address them with a smile somehow, since in the trance of repetition, bliss removes the suffering of hunger and social inequality. It is the fact that people can find the music pleasing, diverting that allows it to become popular, I guess. 

a short video about luigi nono

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkqxGEDqaRk

   the thought-long wound, the open wound 

       When listening to the music of Luigi Nono again a few days ago I realized that what was essential in his art is the tension created by the rending open of space, these abyssal spaces between us, between people of different classes, ethnicities, between art and life, between the human and the other creatures, between the human and the storm of the raw elements. One can actually hear in the orchestrations the voices of people straining to work together, divided, united by their common despair, their common hope, anger, frustration and longing for change. The music of Luigi Nono stands at that crossroads when composers and artists felt the need to bear witness (or withness)  to the people's struggles and made works that were classically speaking difficult. Not difficult for the sake of being difficult but in order function as an index of sorts, as a flashing sign of danger, a flare sent up in an emergency. Much of this sense of music as having social message nowadays is bound up with the testimonials of rap music, some new punk (about which I know zilch), and relies mainly on a clever use of words to create the tension of the message which is of course easy to digest with the funky beat going on and very little of this social advocacy depends of tension created in the instrumental aspect of the songs (Death Grips perhaps the exception). Music like Nono's still disturbs many, many people. The tension is related to the coming of storms and the fact of losing personal control, deprived of liberty and choice. It remains haunting and ominous. I am no longer certain when it occurred to me that most avant-garde music, even the most quiet, reductionist or the most jarringly microtonal had lost the need to relate it's tension to some sense of social advocacy but it did in fact happen somewhere along the line. Now all the music we hear is largely within the realm of entertainment and the sense of social advocacy has taken up residency by and large in the logos again and wanders in the forests of story-telling. Even if it's like me, talking to myself.      

  short film about composer Luigi Nono







 article in ARTnews about Julius Eastman's incendiary titles by composer Mary Jane Leach

http://www.artnews.com/2019/09/13/julius-eastman-incendiary-titles/?fbclid=IwAR2WnQU4puizH8BGN0iNrk9jBarqsESITlAbZbRyGKDmJ5K8qBW9UNI5CWk



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