The crucible of black power – ‘create, destroy, create’

Critics never really know what to do with Anthony Braxton.[1] Simultaneously the progeny of a false homology of primitive blackness and a strict intellectual, Tarzan and Einstein, more and less Other than one ever could be.[2] ‘Academic … intellectualised’, but ‘readily accessible’; ‘unpretentious’, yet ‘unearthly intimidating’; ‘iconoclastic [while] essentially a traditionalist’; ‘high on gimmickry, low on talent’, and a ‘virtuouso’, ‘original, thoughtful, brilliantly executed’; an egotistical ‘musical masturbation’, yet a prophetic and inspiring ‘new messiah’.[3] A primitive, drug-fuelled, bored chess player and a singular Romantic genius, all in one.[4] From these few excerpts alone, one could readily speculate that Braxton’s ‘controversial’ image (which consistently required a convincing of his critics) was the result of a journalistic spectacle.[5] Overwhelming praise sat hand in hand with damning reproach – occasionally in the same article.[6]

Braxton clearly incites strong feelings among his listeners and often stayed remarkably aloof from the debate, or encouraged it. ‘He opted to play the fool, often in a canny way’, and became to the critics as the Fool to Lear – supporting, undermining, conspiring with and against, all at once.[7] Mercurially slipping between the particularities of his image, Braxton happily filled contradictory roles. As revolutionary directly descended from the greats, he seemingly mocked the supposedly fixed ‘integrity’ of jazz music as a historical genre in the eyes of critics.[8] Radano puts it succinctly: ‘what really seemed to set him apart from the others was an ability to reflect creatively the uncertainties that typified the postmodern moment’.[9] Foster’s understanding of Braxton’s relationship with critics misses one crucial point, however: the ten years Braxton spent in writing his ‘theoretical and aesthetic foundations’.[10]

It was only after reading 500,000 dumb reviews that I found myself thinking, hmmm… I disagree with the critics who even like my music! So it was like – I don’t have any choice, I don’t see any viewpoint out there, so here I come! I had to write a book that established my right to have an opinion, and to do that I had to design a philosophical system that would allow me to … postulate what I wanted to do. But I would have preferred to … work on my model railroad trains[11]

So what can Braxton himself tell us about his regular metamorphoses, his public personae? There is an extent to which he is just like any other musician, having ‘to deal with the problem of no coins … I mean, who is Anthony Braxton? He’s just a guy who could use some coins’.[12] On some level, then, he is clearly aware that his identity operates on several planes: the Real and the Symbolic, at least. But any comprehensive reading of his prolific textual and compositional output would take many monographs, so we’ll attempt to read Braxton’s work inter-epistemically through Self and Community, as ectopically as Braxton formulated his own methods.

B: … It will all make sense, hopefully, in the next twenty to thirty years.

L: Oh – I was hoping it would make sense by the end of the tour (laughs)

B: (laughs) Well…I wish you luck, sir! But I think it’s going to take me longer.[13]

Braxton advocates emancipatory delinking, examining the ‘formation of classical music [as…] people are given one criterion of information that addresses itself to one spectrum of value systems which is conducive to one set of political dynamics’.[14] Consequences of these reductive cultural and cosmic epistemologies and ontologies are epistemic and oppressive.[15] ‘No performances of notated music for you, nigger!’[16] Not because Hobbes was right about the brutish nature of humanity, but because ‘people are not given [all] information’.[17] Repressions of informations and people is institutional and ideological to its very core – the ideology of neo-liberal capitalism. ‘Music is simply not encouraged … it is, if anything, more difficult to find one’s centre [because of] the refusal of these men to recognise anything beyond economic reasoning’.[18] Recall Wadada Leo Smith’s diatribe against the ‘commercial business-production-journalism factory of death’.[19] ‘The Reagan/Thatcher mind-set’.[20]

Braxton’s music is therefore a railing against the increasing empiricism and mechanisation of ‘modernity’, a ‘despiritualisation’ at the expense of personal expression. By appealing to a new universal mythology, or pluri-versal epistemology and ontology, Braxton hopes to ‘to reverse these trends, or rather to balance them, not least because he sees the reunification of the arts as a requisite to the advent of a new spiritual awareness that will, he hopes, lead to global co-operation and peace’.[21]

‘You are your music’: our reading of Self abounds in Braxton’s philosophies.[22] As does Community, since the implications of Braxton’s compositions are that they are enablers, ‘platforms’, ‘vehicles’ or ‘generators’ of improvisation.[23] Requests for openness. ‘People being independent but working together. I mean, it’s a wonderful formula, it has social ramifications that are very beautiful … that extra element, that thing that’s not written … there’s a heavy human thing happening’.[24]

But how does one be the music, perform Self, if ‘one of [Braxton’s] primary axioms [is] keep away from the musicians … and keep away from the political scenes that surround the music’?[25] It is easy to misread this statement as a rule to keep music free from any politics and external influence. As we will have seen, however, this is an utter impossibility – you cannot physically, emotionally or spiritually exist in a vacuum. What Braxton means here is an avoidance of cocksuring, of adopting not the role of musician, but the social implications of that role. Avoid the ‘spectacle diversion’ characteristic of hegemonic western functionalities.[26] 

Braxton’s philosophies are unapologetically utopian: ‘I can’t agree with any view of humanity that doesn’t give the same rights to every sector of humanity’.[27] Until humanity is equal in every respect, creativity will always be ‘less than what it should be’.[28] Every ephemeral, immanent improvisation – created through all iterations of the experiential past of performer and auditor – pertains to the future tense.

The real aim of this music is to coordinate the minds of the people into an intelligent reach for a better world, and an intelligent approach to the living future[29]

Improvisations thus reach for infinity. We can hear (intended) grasp Braxton’s interest in rhythmic manipulation and repetition in unique performance realities.[30] His Kelvin, Cobalt, Kaufman systems: all means of exploring repetition and implied infinity. Development in minute increments, akin to ‘watching fireflies’, it is an experience of natural non-anthropocentric time.[31] These are systems which the audience seem to only glimpse in performance; a glimpse of an always-already developing and growing music that highlights the arbitrary nature of both rhythm and musical time.[32] Not least because neither term holds a distinct signified beyond their own signifier, but that both – and all infinite variations of each – always-already abound extra-musically. Not only this, but also embedded in large discursive formations and historicities that encourage certain accepted interpretations when articulated.[33] For surely the manipulation of one will always be a – perhaps unanticipated – manipulation of the other?

We return to the infinite. The provisionality of the performed sound – and performative – however, is also the source of its strength; able to emote or allude to infinite and perhaps unknowable previous or current and future uses of that one sound, or similar sounds within the performer or listener’s emotional memory. In such a way, all music ever performed or heard is connected as one, musically and Self experientially.[34] Performers simply tap into it every now and then. Perhaps as a type of Excitable Speech; active yet simultaneously illocutionary and perlocutionary, the same deed that it effects, a self-hailing, an auto-interpellation.[35] The results are both collective and individual. ‘One’s most basic “reality alignment” is the direct result of what he or she has learned through their own individual vibrational tendencies as well as collective conditioning’.[36] And one’s music can only come from one’s ‘reality alignment’. Braxton’s compositions are ‘an anchor for multi-improvisational participation – affecting the reality of both individual and collective decisions … sometimes together and sometimes separately’.[37]

Then I reflect that all things happen, happen to one, precisely now. Century follows century, and things happen only in the present. There are countless men in the air, on land and at sea, and all that really happens happens to me[38]

While these ideas may appear too abstract or forced to be applied to Braxton’s work, are they not directly evinced in Braxton’s collage aesthetic of the synchronous coordinate music? November 13, 1985, London: ‘Braxton is exploring “collage form structures” in which two, three or four people play two, three or four compositions simultaneously. The set lists simply establish the “primary territories” through which the music will flow … the movement from territory to territory being negotiated … via open improvisation’.[39] ‘By this point, different members of the group could slip in and out of a tune in the coordinate sequence and start to play any other Braxton composition they wanted’.[40] All music is always developing beyond the performance, and the performance opens up a door to a sonic experience of the universe. How else to explain that ‘in my music system, every composition connects together’?[41] For Braxton’s music reaches beyond anthropocentric conceptions of time and space into a ‘unified state which demonstrates a vibrational synthesis of forces’.[42]

The music is a perceptual awakening towards an ‘inseparable network of energies’.[43] Is this not how the phraseological (in(ter)dependent) signatures of the collage pulse tracks are ‘environment structures … like a galaxy’ calibrated to actualise a glimpse at ‘cosmic matters about which we know nothing’.[44] Time is merely ‘existential dynamics’.[45] To utilise Braxton’s own terminology, the structural time/space influence – married to the time and depth space – lie on an event flow continuum which humanity can only access experientially through brief, coruscating musical moments.[46]

Or, to elucidate by transcribing into the terminology of Western Enlightenment traditions: Perhaps, then, Music is extra-musical. Only when performance begins are considerations (of ‘time’, of ‘wrong’ notes etc.) and their implications manifest to the listener, and even then through the sphere of their own subjective imaginings. Through Schopenhauer:  Music is the Will, pervading everything we are and do and see – independent of all empiricism, dialectic and transcendentalism – and, through music – through access to aesthetic or artistic – and thus wholly subjective, empirical and dialectic – beauty – we are momentarily able to will-lessly contemplate the Will.[47] Performed or heard music allows us to momentarily music-lessly contemplate Music. This happens most often when musicians succumb to the most egregious of art’s temptations: that of being a genius. ‘Ends’ of improvisation become non-existent, as do ‘beginnings’.[48] The improvisation is no longer ‘finished’ when the last note is played; there is no longer an implied contentment or totality.[49]  The Event of improvisation embraces its own ephemerality.  Instead – to ape Paul Valéry as misquoted by Auden – improvisations are never finished, only abandoned.[50] To successfully ‘analyse’ an improvisation, one would need limitless access to the full social and historical context of the development of the player and conditions of the particular playing situation. Each new improvisation is a new experiment swirling toward infinity. Players can never stop shedding.[51]  

Braxton’s work and improvisations strive toward a pluri-versality of experiential empathy, an infinity of possible expression: a synaesthetic ideal of cultural synthesis.[52] An openness to all possible parallaxes. ‘Hear with your eyes, see with your ears’.[53] Self ‘is not limited to only the reality particulars of a given encounter … but is instead a subject connected to the composite spread of information dynamics’.[54] This brand of pluri-versality is not solely related to present vibrational realities, either. But it is intrinsically ‘related to that fact that many cultures, from ancient Egypt and China to European Renaissance Hermeticism, have seen music as part of a network of mystical correspondences that includes not only colours and shapes but also astrological signs, numbers, times of the day, parts of the body, the elements, the seasons and the planets’.[55] A ‘trans-idiomatic’ continuum of experiential empathy and unity.[56] The clearest example? Braxton’s visual titles and graphic scores. Or, if one wishes to delve deeper into Braxton’s personal language and mystery system, in his schemata.[57]

To translate:

World expansion principle as it relates to the concept of controlled information – in three different contexts: that being, in the context of: 1) transition (involving vibrational dynamics and to information integration as related to points of redefinition) or in the context of 2) transformation (involving cosmic particulars as related to composite continuance) or in the context of 3) projected continuance (involving linkage implications and social reality dynamics as related to redocumentation).[1]

As it is said in the Ghost Trance Music series: the ‘melody that doesn’t end’.[2] Melody is rhythm, rhythm is time, time is infinite.[3] Extra-musically, Braxton’s perspective ensures his confidence that ‘the human species is evolving … there’s the promise of dynamic vibrational and mystical breakthroughs’.[4]

I think that everything is connected and that the challenge of the next time period is not simply the advancement of a concept of entertainment or of music as separate from life, but rather the move towards three-dimensional, holistic experiences with music, image logics and dynamic spirituality all connected—including physicality, dance, movement. I’m looking for total integration[5]

Following such ideological perspectives, one cannot be anything but a revolutionary. ‘The planet is not healthy’, through sexism, racism, ecological trauma and other discriminatory and neglectful systems.[6] As a result, Braxton boldly declares that ‘we’re on the eve of the complete fall of Western ideas and life values. We’re in the process of developing more meaningful values’.[7]

That was written in 1968. There have been social and technological advances that could not have been predicted since then and, in case it is not yet clear, Western ideas and values – while eroding – still dominate most theoretical discourse.[8] As such, some of Braxton’s views have become less applicable or anachronistic. In the growing culture of gender awareness, for example, it is increasingly difficult to clarify Braxton’s binary understanding of feminine and masculine vibrational consciousness or aesthetics.[9] This is not to suggest that Braxton’s writings were in anyway supportive of repressive functions (Braxton commendably writes that ‘the realness of both sexism and racism stands as a major blockage to real transformation’) but that certain more contemporary concerns are understandably absent from his texts.[10] Yet in his opus the Tri-axium Writings, Braxton prefaces each text with a clarification that what sits before the reader is ‘a snapshot of what I have been thinking from a period of September 1970 to March 1980 … I offer nothing in this book as definitively true … none of the viewpoints written in this book are viewed as complete in any real sense’.[11] Furthermore, universal (ie. pertaining to the Universe) ‘change is inevitable’.[12]

Tri-axium Writings are mighty texts, and not much analysed. Radano’s New Musical Configurations dedicates some time to them, but hardly enough to give more than a cursory explanation of their aims – they require whole exegetical tomes of their own.[13] They are mysterious and cryptic texts, full of nebulous neologisms, repetitions, redundancies and occasionally circular logic. But their scope and ontic drive are vast. They encapsulate an entire world view, a phenomenological (a word he would most certainly not use) context of meta-reality and reality, law and meta-law.[14]

So why not take him on these terms? Owing to the temporal and vibrational distances between the contexts of the Tri-axium texts and now, there will exist tensions, gaps and lacks. We will endeavour to move towards beginning a process of reading through Braxton, in the sense that scholars read through Marx or Kropotkin: certainly, their ideals were never realised, but their schools of thought develop strongly in new directions to this day.[15] After all, the future tense lies heavily in Braxton’s work. ‘My hope is that some of this information will be put into books … this will help the culture, help young people … it’s important in the future to have this information documented so that people can enter into the system’.[16] ‘The difference between those who planted seeds and those who didn’t is that in this period there are trees’.[17]

But one cannot understand the Tri-axium Writings without having read it six times, six ways. ‘Only after all of the approaches have been tried can the reader have some idea as to what I am trying to communicate’.[18] What you are reading here is therefore a partial and selective reading of Braxton’s work. No claims are made for definitive comprehension or exegetical insight. The sixth and final means of reading the Tri-axium texts is to translate Braxton’s critique into ‘one’s own terms’.[19]

Braxton becomes Dionysus, gleefully creating through destruction of precedent and himself.

*

Words. Words are words are words. The fantasia of lexicons. ‘A mono-dimensional language’, a sophisticated weapon of oppression by the white male.[20] The prison that calls itself an open plane. ‘Its tongue trapped to the rock by a limpet, the water rat succumbed to the incoming tide’.[21] So-und? SO!.[22]

S p e k e . – s e e  s s k s e e k

i e i k s e s s e - .  – e s k k s e – s s k

p p p p p i -    …   i  -  - i i i ’ – s k

k s p s p e i …                                                 i i         i s s s k p

p s p p i s . . ’               . e s k s s i i  i s i s p

k  p p p i s s k i i s – k p s p i k e  s p s e

s  s s s p s p i k e i  - s s e i . .   – e i - . . .

s s k  k s p i i k s e s  .

k s e  s s s -     - k k k s e .i e e i                      e k e

k s e e  i i s s i p i s e e  - e s e i         k p k i

s s s k p – i k p s p i k e i i  i – p i  p k i p

k i i i k s e        k i p p i k e -  - e s i  i s k

k i . k s s s  i s s s i k i i e e s k e i  s s  k –

i s s s k  s s k p i i i k s p s p p p p p[23]

Words. Music. Image. Communication. Reaching for – as I think was Braxton’s ever-goal – a pluri-versal, equalitarian communication of Self. Of Empathy. Of freedom of expression. ‘The hope of dynamic positive celebration and trans-global “actuality”’.[24]

Braxton regrets never being able to see Joe Harriott play.

hardly a writer has come near me to try to find out exactly what we are trying to do. Instead, they have used conventional yardsticks to measure a commodity of which they know nothing … [The music] is best listened to as a series of different pictures – for it is after all by definition an attempt to paint, as it were, freely in sound[25]

Upon reading the notes, Braxton: ‘Plus ça change. Plus ça change’.[26] Coming from a man who sees music ‘as if it were a three-dimensional painting’.[27] Why only three-dimensions, I can’t say.

*

Mystery is a necessary part of process[28]

SEE ALSO:

That is: (the concept of) improvisation as it relates to the concept of affinity nature – in four contexts: that being, in the context of 1) affinity transfer (involving trans-information as related to social reality dynamics and individual dynamics (concept of reality of) as related to self-realisation and its position within composite humanity and in the context of 2) participation (involving meta-reality as related to methodology as related to underlying philosophical bases and the dynamics of agreement) and in the context of 3) thrust continuance dynamics (involving cultural transfer shifts) and in the context of 4) existential observation (involving the concept of the perceived vibrational universe fundamental as related to unification). using the methodology and terminology in Braxton, Tri-1,2,3 xiv-xx, ‘Glossary of terms’.