Music and Subversion

This day-long symposium draws musicological, philosophical and psychoanalytical perspectives together with practice-led research to determine how music is subversive and the structural aspects of subversion. In drawing out intersections between these different disciplines, the symposium clarifies music’s role in contemporary society, how it can inspire collective action, and it’s the impacts on existing institutions and education.   

What is subversive is contingent on listening attitudes and contexts, which themselves have ramifications for how we explain musical actions and ontology. This symposium asks how musical material is transformed and what informs the future production of music. Possible questions to be asked include: what aesthetic content do modern audiences appreciate as subversive? In what sense is a contemporary performance of a piece like Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, 110 years on, still subversive? Does it still carry the same subversive character that saw it cause a riot at its premiere?  Can a musical work itself be subverted (through performance, for instance)? Does subversive music lie squarely with the music itself? Many of these questions illuminate a tension between notions of the musical work as a neo-platonic Form, and the social conditions that may inform its reception as subversive or revolutionary.   

This event is generously supported by the Musicological Society of Australia's Special Funding Scheme and the Philosophy of Sound and Music Study Group.  The symposium is on the 22 November 2023, at University House at the University of Melbourne.  

Schedule

10.00 – 10.15 Introductions and Welcome

10.15 – 11.00 Dr. Helen Mitchell

Can you trust your lyin' ears? Exposing the myths of music performance

11.00 – 11.30 Dr. Cindy Zeiher

What makes music, music?

11.30 – 12.00 Tea/Coffee

12.00 – 12.30 Kaitlin Smalley

Jamming, a subversive act

12.30 – 13.00 Dr. Paul Atkinson

Aesthetic pace in music and the subversion of anticipation

13.00 – 14.00 Lunch

14.00 – 14.45 Dr. Chris Stover

Minor Music, Subversive Theory

14.45 – 15.15 Vibhuti Sharma

The Dangerous Excess: Towards a new critique of music and violence

15.15 – 15.45 Afternoon tea

15.45 – 16.15 Alistair Macaulay

16.15 – 16.45 Dr. Tom Grimwood

When Rage Against the Machine won Christmas: Subversive Nostalgia and the Rhythms of Kynikism

Abstracts:

Helen Mitchell: Can you trust your lyin’ ears? Exposing the myths of music performance

Expert listening is prized in music performance evaluation, but recent research has explored listeners’ susceptibility to additional information in the performance which impacts their appraisals. Music performance is now widely recognised as a multisensory experience where sight trumps sound, and audiences are vulnerable to extramusical effects present in the performance. This talk will explore novel ways to engage music performance students with these recent findings to develop their own robust listening and enhance their future music performance endeavours.

In a series of studies, music students evaluated music performances which aimed to focus their attention to specific aspects of expert listening. They deciphered the complex perceptual skills required for evaluating music performance and harnessed new strategies to enhance their future listening. This experiential learning had a profound impact on music students and enabled them to absorb indescribable performance knowledge into their own music practice to enhance future audience experience. These performance evaluations will be discussed with reference to recent literature on multisensory music and experiential learning in music performance. The challenge for musicians and music educators is consider how experiential learning strategies in music education can prepare future music professionals as critical thinkers about music performance.

Kaitlin Smalley: Jamming a Subversive Act

I propose that the practice of jamming represents a subversive act in the context of contemporary society, and actually reflects the subversive possibilities of contemporary classrooms in institutionalised educational environments. As the modern-colonial matrix continues to inform educational policy, as this policy continues to inform teaching and learning standards, and as these standards continue to inform what is taken to be necessary and sufficient in the classroom, I argue that the logic underpinning the Australian education system, taken to its extreme, represents a desire to do away with teachers and the physical classroom altogether. Similarly, under capitalism, the concept of playing just to play (rather than playing while recording, or with the intent to create something that can potentially be recorded and commodified) seems at best pointless, at worst a waste of resources. In this way, the practice of gathering and jamming just for the sake of playing together and sharing that experience represents, I propose, an act of revolt (and one that is currently quite easily accessible – to both participate in, and to bear witness to) – not just against the system(s) which superimpose values and standards on our lives and modes of engagement, but potentially in the Camusian sense, as well (I will discuss). I conclude that musicians should allow themselves to enjoy the practice of jamming, knowing that sharing these experiences with others can also be educational, in quite a revolutionary sense; they are modelling and making possible the concept of subversion and revolt for others – including, significantly, educators.

Cindy Zeiher: What makes music, music?

The truth lies within the music, not in anything outside it.

Stephen Isserlis (2021, Bach’s Cello Suites, p. 240).

If we listen to Beethoven and do not hear anything of the revolutionary bourgeoisie—

not the echo of its slogans, the need to realize them, the cry for that totality in which reason and freedom are to have their warrant—we understand Beethoven no better than does one who cannot follow the purely musical content of his pieces.

Theodor Adorno (1962, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, p. 62).

Might music start where thinking namely philosophy, ends? What kind of relation, if any, do music and philosophy share? Can we name this relation subversive? Certainly, philosophy can make propositions about musical sensibilities and tastes, or whether music needs to possess meaning beyond itself. A few philosophers with formal musical sensitivities such as Vladimir Jankélévitch, even employ musicality as an orientation to their curiosities, thinking and writing. Conversely, music sometimes philosophises. For example, Bach’s baroque masterpiece, his cello suites pose six questions about the nature of love. Starting with a beautiful prelude which marks the musical intention of the first suite, Bach then sets the cellist to work with his philosophical question: how can love be expressed in all its totality, purity, vulnerability and truth? With only four strings, a bow and hopefully some experience of love, how it is that the cellist might transcend technique to express, note by note, something about the subversive nature of love? Bach gives the cellist freedom within limits with some improvisatory moments in which to solve musical problems in order to traverse a wider, more subversive horizon. Here are the rules, now break them, he dares the cellist. Bach, like the philosopher is here interested in human nature, in what can be ‘said’/expressed, even subverted as distinct from what is observed and talked about. Bach chooses the cello much like the philosopher chooses words because although difficult to master, both are lucid and versatile instruments which enable human curiosity to range far and wide.

It is the strange mixture of music’s often perceived casual status and the supposed elevated thinking of philosophy which makes their (non)relation so curious. It seems that music and philosophy are locked into the ambivalence of the speech-act in so far as the philosopher’s will to transcend the word and the musician’s/composer’s will to express that which cannot be spoken both attest to the encounter of listening with curiosity. Both, it seems, are devoted to setting up rules only to subvert them. With this in mind the relationship between music and philosophy can be framed as an ineffable one in which the function of music is to intentionally restrict certain properties and subvert itself. It is via music situating itself as ‘self excluding’ that can it be a curious (un/conscious) ‘speech-act’.

Paul Atkinson: Aesthetic Pace in Music and the Subversion of Anticipation

Why has contemporary classical music found it much more challenging to find new audiences than contemporary painting when both have significantly challenged the norms of tonality or representation? The answer may lie in the tension between immanence and foreseeability. Painting’s immanence can be readily truncated to suit the demands of cognition. Spectators can take in the whole of the work in a glance and can determine a sufficient time for comprehension. When encountering a new musical work, the time remains beyond the direct control on the listener and comprehension is constantly modified by the work’s becoming. The sensual continuously surpasses cognitive appraisal. The more subversive the tonal and rhythmic structure, the more difficult it is to imagine the work as a whole. Consequently, there is a tendency to refer outside of the work to the telos of its conclusion or the quantitative expression of its duration.

Following this line of inquiry, the paper revisits the philosophy of Vladimir Jankélévitch and his claims that music should be primarily addressed through Bergsonian durée, as well as Susanne Langer’s argument that we always submit to music’s aesthetic pace. Do such arguments depend on a concept of familiarity, where an immanent future draws seamlessly on a sensual present, and can one inhabit an aesthetic notion of becoming with the constant subversion of anticipation?

Chris Stover: Minor Music, subversive theory

Martinican philosopher Édouard Glissant describes the origin of Creole languages in Caribbean slave colonies as forms of subversive and emancipatory poetics, taking ‘the linguistic limitations’ imposed on a slave community and choosing ‘to limit it further, to warp it, to untune it, in order to make it an idiom of [their] own’. French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari similarly describe the movement of what they call ‘minor language’, ‘what a minority constructs within a major language’, which for them includes ‘a high coefficiency of deterritorialization’ grounded on three incommensurable impossibilities through which a major language becomes ‘appropriate for strange and minor uses’. Glissant puts these notions to potent use, writing of daring experiments, radical questions, and even violent contestations made possible by reforming or violating major poetics, while also, importantly, insisting that ‘there is no break in continuity from the contested order to the contesting disorder’.

In this talk I will examine three moments in radical Black music history in order to begin to construct a music-theoretical perspective that subverts music-analytic norms in dialogue with what I hear as subversive strategies within the music itself. First is Sheila Jordan’s performance of the early 20th-century American song ‘You Are My Sunshine’, where she transmutes that joyfully affirmative song into a haunting dirge. Second is Cecil Taylor’s rendition of Cole Porter’s ‘You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To’, which transforms the song’s harmonic and melodic material along a spectrum from pitch to noise. Third is Sun Ra’s recording of Harold Arlen’s ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’, which in the spirit of Sun Ra’s interstellar redeployment of promised-land narratives from the Black American church, seems to aspire to actually transplant us to the other side of the rainbow—to ‘teleport the whole planet here, through music’, as he put in his opening monologue in Space Is The Place. In each case, I’ll work from within the musical structures and processes to consider the subversive potential afforded by a poetics of minor musical expression, revealing how each contests affective boundaries of musical expression and syntax while also maintaining a continuous link with them.

Vibhuti Sharma: The Dangerous Excess: Towards a new critique of music and violence

This paper will look at the relationship between music and subversion by linking it to the other side of the problem which is that of desire and violence.  Historically there has always been suspicion about the sensual pleasure and enjoyment attributed to music. It is this inherent danger in music that led to its constant regulation and restriction. However today the question of pleasure attributed to music that made it dangerous is undergoing considerable transformation. Today it is normal to attribute pleasure and enjoyment as the function of music. But what is the status of subversive music today when subversion itself is becoming a consumable object under the current regime of capital?

Pascal Quignard, in his book The Hatred of Music, for example advocates a certain hatred of music as an act of resistance towards contemporary ubiquity of music. Such saturation, Quignard argues, gives music a commodity form removing its subversive potential. Clearly the disappearance of the subversive potential of music today is related to a particular economy of pleasure which proliferates within new circuits of desire in our contemporary consumer society. The question of desire and its relation to capital, therefore becomes a key point of entry to understand music and subversion. Is music losing its transgressive potential today where forms of artistic transgressions are more and more absorbed by a consumer-culture which fetishizes freedom? This is the introductory problematic which this paper would like to explore that would further take us into an examination of music-subversion and its relation to desire-violence.

The second part of the paper will try to critically develop upon Quignard’s thesis that music is inherently violent. Albeit there is considerable truth in Quignard’s thesis that historically there has been a subterranean force of violence inherent to music, can we not argue that such violence is only a restricted form of expression of the true creative force of musical excess which exceeds all representation? And might not that excess which is difficult to capture in language because in essence it belongs to music and music alone – can we not harness the power of such excess for a subversive function?

Tom Grimwood: When Rage Against the Machine won Christmas: Subversive Nostalgia and the Rhythms of Kynikism

In December 2009, the traditionally vaunted Christmas Number One spot in the UK music charts was won by Rage Against The Machine’s 1992 anthem, ‘Killing in the Name’. This resulted from a campaign organised by an English DJ, John Morter, to subvert the norm that the winners of TV talent show The X-Factor would be Number One for Christmas.

In this paper, I suggest that the event highlights distinctive aspects of the subversive potential of anger in music. To do this, I draw on two concepts from Peter Sloterdijk. First, his concept of kynikism – the playful counterpart to cynicism – provides a frame for the combination of nostalgia, irony and anger played out in the digital promotion of the song.

Second, I suggest that the event offers an alternative to Sloterdijk’s account of rage as a psychopolitical investment, or ‘rage bank’ – which, paradoxically, restrains the effectiveness of anger. While Sloterdijk’s notion of rage as an investment is useful, a more detailed analysis of the relationship between ‘Killing in the Name’s musical form, and the medial technologies which carried it – the digital platforms, archives and communication networks – will show that rage banks might be reconsidered as resonance banks: channelling audience investments in nostalgia to create kynikal subversion.