A Study by James Wood

* This is a product of a series of performances, educational projects and ruminations in 2015-6. It was improvised and is ever incomplete. To begin with a general overview, refer to the "Parallels" page. Otherwise, happy travels. It is a ludic and ergodic text and is not to be considered definitive. Each reading should deepen each previous, and be reliant upon postexpectant and preexisting readings. Consequently, in a formal sense, it owes much to Nietzsche's Zarathustra and Braxton's Tri-Axium Writings. Sections over- and under-lap, alluding freely within and without themselves. There is no correct method of engaging with it, nor a linear approach. "As we will have seen", many sections explain themselves only through others. It is a philosophical matrix, a web contingent upon all strands and - most crucially of all - an investment of the Reader's sense of Self into the work. Like a metaphor, the Reader must place themselves within the work as the absent tenor or vehicle relevant to each piece (leaning on Graham Harman and Jose Ortega y Gasset). In other words, it is an attempt - a nobly failing attempt - to ensure the Reader - the audience - is as much a creator as the writer. * Not so very long ago a community of people came together and, after a lengthy and luxurious dinner, after which the group found their prepared topics of conversation too incendiary, fetid or dull to suit the evening, decided to invent Art. During the protracted debates that followed, according to the comprehensive minutes of the gathering, Art’s proportions and dispensations were agreed upon: Art was to have no place within quotidian daily life or public policy; it was to be devoid of both educational merit or impetus; it was to arouse emotion but never too strikingly; and was to be deemed the final topic of conversation at dinner, after its natural locutory progenitors science and politics. Feeling pleased, the group dispersed. (It is worth perhaps parenthetically noting that the following morning the host of the party – nursing a fiercely raging headache – found and read over the proposal prior to its distribution. After a while he discovered he disagreed with the entire document and, throwing into the fire, rewrote it entirely. Since this was all done in secret and because his friends are that particular type of people, he stills receives no credit whatsoever in the publication of the document.)

Hui Shi’s Thesis #4: The Sun at noon is the Sun declining; the creature born is the creature dying.

Music has been at the centre of philosophical debates of subjectivity and its expression for centuries.[1] Philosopher and jazz saxophonist Andrew Bowie notes – in the introduction to the usefully self-descriptive Aesthetics and Subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche - that the end of the eighteenth century saw the notion of philosophical ‘aesthetics’ develop in Europe, in a transformative shift that pertained to ‘vital changes in both the production and reception of music.’[2] From this point, Bowie proceeds to explore this transformation through the lens of German Idealism and Romanticism. While Bowie’s tome is incredibly informative and explores a huge array of ideas, within it ‘music’ still concerns and enforces the primacy of the Western Classical tradition and analytical epistemologies that have time and again been shown to fall short of comprehending anything other than its own articulated forms. When Bowie mentions ‘specifically modern experience’, he means modern to Wagner.[3] Nonetheless, Bowie’s aim is to prove a certain timeless application of the ideas he elucidates. Of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde he observes that

dimensions of the work have to do with the modern awareness of the subject’s failure to grasp its ultimate nature, not with some kind of ultimate insight into the ground of being. Otherwise the continuing power of such works for very different audiences becomes incomprehensible[4]

The limits of this position are inherent in their assumptions. Following the Nietzsche he critiques, Bowie is keen to avoid a ‘nihilism’ that suggests a failure in any teleological meaning of existence, that makes any act of ‘becoming’ solely arbitrary change. Thus, to the pair it must stand that there exists an ‘ultimate nature’ of the Subject that is yet to be uncovered.[5] Furthermore, this reading of aesthetic value in Wagner’s music and mythology, regardless of its reception, remains not only solely limited to Wagner and not ‘music’ generally but also ignores the cultural and historical contingencies of the concepts themselves.[6] One either falls to subjectifying aesthetics, and thus cements each reading of music as singular, or succumbs to descriptive speculation. The former fails to account how art can hold great significance in the most varied social and historical contexts, the latter, in falling into fixed semantic accounts for the meaning in the work, remains biographical or superficial.[7]

This is a digression, but I feel one worth making, helping as it does to shape my argument as well as illustrating potential pitfalls of the topic. My discussion concerns subjectivity in improvisation, not Wagnerian opera, so why address the latter? Simply put: all forms of musical performance enact undulating subjectivity of listener and performer of work-event. In improvised musics, however, the authorial voice is the subjectivity – the expression of Self inherent in performance is not mediated through a potentially long-dead composer, or even the erratic dancing of a conductor. We return to the notion of agency in performance.

Furthermore, as many scholars have noted, these accepted ‘academic’ modes of musicology – short of acknowledging any internal inconsistencies – fail to encapsulate their subject.[8] Without recourse to the semantic minefield of metaphor, one cannot replicate or even define the exact effects or nuances of one means of articulation synaesthetically through another.[9] These limits of written and verbal articulation pertain to written music; all these limits are amplified exponentially in regards to improvised music, wherein nothing is fixed and perhaps no rules followed. For improvisation is the condition of its own activity, an essential paradox of its own synchronic creation and destruction.[10] Amiri Baraka, discussing the broader mercurial notion of ‘jazz’, put it succinctly:

In jazz criticism, no reliance on European tradition of theory will help at all [the white critic…] was already trying to formalize and finally institutionalize [the music]. It is a hideous idea. The music was already in danger of being forced into that junk pile of admirable objects and data the West knows as culture.[11]

Jones was distrustful of the music being appropriated and undermined by the superficiality of what he understood as Western culture (‘admirable objects’). Critics had not yet begun to comprehend the ‘most singularly important aspect’ of the music, being that ‘the notes of a jazz solo, as they are coming into existence, exist as they do for reasons that are only concomitantly musical’.[12] As an example, Jones offers ‘Ornette Coleman’s screams and rants are only musical once one understands the music his emotional attitude seeks to create’.[13]

John A. Tynan, reviewing Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz in Down Beat in early 1962:

‘Rating: NO STARS …

It’s every man-jack for himself in an eight-man emotional regurgitation. Rules? Forget ‘em.

Where does the neurosis end and psychosis begin? The answer must lie somewhere within this maelstrom.

The only semblance of collectivity [sic] lies in the fact that these eight nihilists were collected together in the studio at one time and with one common cause: to destroy the music that gave birth to them.[14]

Tensions between the empirical, rational understanding of improvised music – which could easily be defined as a colonialism of thought – and its ‘soul’, ‘spirit’, ‘feel’ – a seemingly non-conceptual immediate intuition, a hermeneutic experience of meaning that ‘cannot be mechanised’ - are vast.[15] The antagonism within the discourse is a difference prior to what it attempts to differentiate. Hence this text’s tone, form, style… We wish not to be locked into institutions of restrictive epistemologies.

[1] Title quote: Quoted in Yiu-ming Fung, ‘The School of Names’, in History of Chinese Philosophy, vol.III, edited by Bo Mou (London: Routledge, 2009), 168-70.

[2] Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 1.

[3] Ibid., 286.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke, edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (New York: De Gruyter, 1980), 47-8; Bowie, 291.

[6] Hence a Foucauldian ‘endless need for discourse’ amid the ever-changing truth-value of ideas. Michael Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1972).

[7] Bowie, 163-4.

[8] For example, see Philip Tagg’s ongoing work, particularly ‘Troubles with Tonal Terminology’, 2013, accessed April 28, 2016, http://tagg.org/xpdfs/Aharonian2011.pdf.

[9] Paul Berliner, Thinking in Jazz (London: University of Chicago, 2009), 510.

[10] Unlike objects which are always conditioned by something else

[11] LeRoi Jones, Black People (New York: Quill, 1967), 11-20. Reprinted from Down Beat, August 15, 1963, 16-17.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

[14] John Tynan and Pete Welding, ‘Double View of a Double Quartet’, Down Beat, January 18, 1962, p.28.

[15] For example, see: Cornelius Cardew, ‘Towards an Ethic Improvisation’, Edition Handbook (London: Edition Peters, 1971); Eric Porter, What is this thing Called Jazz? (California: University of California Press, 2002), 240-286. Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics and Criticism, translated by Andrew Bowie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 11; Hans-Georg Gadamer, Gadamer in Conversation: Reflections and Commentary, translated by E. Palmer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 70. Also: Bowie, 189.

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