New Music and the Crises of Materiality

Sounding Bodies and Objects in Late Modernity

Samuel Wilson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000405989
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

This book explores the transformation of ideas of the material in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century musical composition. New music of this era is argued to reflect a historical moment when the idea of materiality itself is in flux. Engaging with thinkers such as Theodor Adorno, Sara Ahmed, Zygmunt Bauman, Rosi Braidotti, and Timothy Morton, the author considers music's relationship with changing material conditions, from the rise of neo-liberalisms and information technologies to new concepts of the natural world.

Drawing on musicology, cultural theory, and philosophy, the author develops a critical understanding of musical bodies, objects, and the environments of their interaction. Music is grasped as something that both registers material changes in society whilst also enabling us to practice materiality differently.

Part I

Musical bodies

1 The (dis)possession of the musical body

The performer – particularly the virtuoso performer – seems possessed: a kind of medium through which gestures flow. Lawrence Kramer emphasises an important implication of this when he suggests that ‘the performer takes possession of the music by becoming possessed by it; no one can say which is in control’.¹ The performer’s body belongs – if only for the time that the music lasts – to the work, just as the performer works to make the work their own. They play the music; the music also ‘plays’ them – instructing bodily actions and (at least in its romantic incarnation) spirited expression so as to direct particular modalities of being. A dialectic unfolds, one whose terms are those of ownership and control. Importantly, it should be remembered that ownership and control are by no means categories removed from politics and history. This is foregrounded in ongoing political discourses that encompass terms such as the private, the public, and the commons. But this also applies at the level of individuals: a normative politics of personal autonomy implies control over one’s own being. As N. Katherine Hayles summarises, a liberal humanist attitude is premised on the ownership of oneself: ‘visions of self-regulating economic and political systems produced a complementary notion of the liberal self as an autonomous, self-regulating subject’.²

Yet, as Hayles and many others have argued, our bodies are no longer straightforwardly our own – and one suspects that they in fact never fully were. The humanist envisaging of bodily autonomy (self-sufficient control, ownership) is challenged by a contemporary technological imagination that intimately intertwines bodies and technologies. That our bodies are not totally our own is an argument long made by Marxist materialist thinkers who have considered the historical and material conditions through which bodies are shaped and in which they are situated. The body’s normative ‘possession’ is challenged directly in Henri Lefebvre’s passing reference to the ‘dispossession of the body’.³ This he identified as part of the experience of everyday modern life – that our bodies are not fully our own when they are caught in a web of antagonistic rhythms that arrange them socially in time and motion (one could argue that this is only intensified in bodies now criss-crossed by technological networks).

One can trace seeds of this thought in the nineteenth century, in Marx’s critique of the deskilling of workers by machines under capitalism. Here the machine is no longer a tool used by the worker; the worker instead organises their actions around that of the machine. As Marx famously puts it, the human becomes ‘an appendage of flesh on a machine of iron’.⁴ This is in keeping with an even more fundamental dispossession, notes Timothy Morton: in Marx’s view, the worker is alienated from their own body in that the ‘worker’s body is imagined a system of movements without a subject’.⁵ The body is abstracted as economic resource, as potential to create value through labour. In capitalism inheres specific divisions of labour, and thus particular arrangements of bodies; I mean this not only insofar as some bodies appear somewhere and others elsewhere (Michel Foucault famously referred to the former as the ‘art of distributions’); bodies themselves are internally arranged through specific kinds of training and action appropriate to different fields of production and consumption (Foucault: ‘the composition of forces’).⁶ And as capitalism adapts and transforms, so do the terms of the (self) ownership and (self) control of bodies. The body of the worker in the factory of Marx’s time differs from that of the Fordist production line (as one sees darkly yet comedically reproduced in Chaplin’s Modern Times); the machinic actions of the worker here differ from the embodiment and affective labour the worker undertakes in a service-based post-Fordist economy.⁷ And, looking from production to consumption, one observes recent capitalism’s historic ‘shift of emphasis from ownership to access’⁸ – most recently instantiated in a renter’s market, streaming, and cloud computing.

This chapter considers the body’s possession and dispossession in recent music, with particular emphasis on what this means for (virtuoso) performers and listeners. Nonetheless, this follows from a longer history of imagined possession in artistry (not just in music but across the arts). For Plato, the artist’s possession by the ‘divine power of the Muse’, as Richard Shusterman helpfully summarises, problematically brought with it an ‘irrational frenzy’, the ‘loss of a strong, autonomous, rationally moderate, temperate, self-controlled, and knowing self who exemplifies the ideals of excellent character and sound mind that are combined in the ancient Greek virtue of sophrosyne’. Aristotle by contrast saw less of a chain of influence of possession (the Muse of the artist, the artist’s affecting the audience), and emphasised instead the rational artist’s influence on ‘manipulated perceivers’.⁹ Different again, Nietzsche celebrated the frenzy of the artist: ‘If there is to be art, if there is to be any aesthetic doing and seeing, one physiological condition is indispensable: frenzy.’¹⁰ But as I have begun to allude to already, what becomes acute in recent contexts and discourses of possession are issues around ownership of one’s body and actions by oneself, as mediated by economic and technological forces that refigure the terms of assumed bodily autonomy. ‘Possession’, read most literally in terms of ownership, might mean something different too, beyond our own bodies, for denizens of an age characterised by renting not owning, access to services rather than the accumulation of concrete goods, and conditions of precarity and mobility.

My aim is to establish how some questions around possession and dispossession relate to the ‘problem’ of contemporary materiality, with an ear to the discussions of specifically musical material, which come later. Furthermore, it should be noted that, if this dispossession seems overtly pessimistic, some see utopian possibilities in the movement beyond self-identities based in humanist bodily autonomy. Rosi Braidotti suggests that to become posthuman is to transform ‘one’s sensorial and perceptual co-ordinates, in order to acknowledge the collective nature and outward-bound direction of what we still call the self’. It is to emphasise an ‘assemblage within a common life-space that the subject never masters nor possesses but merely inhabits, crosses, always in a community, a pack, a group or a cluster’.¹¹ Braidotti here suggests through potentially new and generative forms of commonality one might – we might – move beyond the terms of the dialectic of possession outlined above, those of ownership and control. This is a suggestion also picked up in the next chapter.

Modernist musical bodies: medium and resistance

I argue that one must situate bodies historically and discursively. I have begun to do this above, if only briefly. I will now continue to press this line of argument through suggesting that in bodily practices in modernist music and after there inhere practices derived from a broader set of material conditions; furthermore, I suggest that music contributes to – and potentially enables critical reflection on – bodies unfolding under these same conditions.

The contemporary, posthuman body that I explore below, and in more detail in Chapter 2, contrasts starkly with earlier modernist practices of bodies in music. Igor Stravinsky’s infamous view of the performer provides a ready example of the ideological content of bodies’ musical ‘doing’ under another regime of musical modernism; this might be taken also as a lesson more broadly that bodies come to act as extensions that constitute apparently abstract aesthetic goals as concrete acts. Stravinsky made the demand that the performer undertake an ‘execution’ of the text – as opposed to an ‘interpretation’: a ‘strict putting into effect of an explicit will that contains n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Previously published material
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: New musical materialisms
• Part I: Musical bodies
• Part II: Musical objects
• Part III: Musical materials
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index