Out of Egypt:

response to Sarah's thesis (a tentative attempt to situate music theory within the broader context of media theory)

Interested in how the categories of "high" and "low" art interact in contemporary critical discourse? Check out Sarah's thesis on the concept of "avant rock" as exemplified in the music of the Velvet Underground, Sonic Youth, and three contemporary bands: Animal Collective, the Fiery Furnaces, and the Strokes.

Though I haven't read the whole paper yet, it seems quite possible that cross-overs and mergings of genre will become increasingly prominent parts of the musical landscape, as part of the transition from modernism to postmodernism. Following McLuhan, I would want to connect this shift in dominant artistic style not simply to a shift in the philosophical framework through which people view the world, but, more fundamentally, to a shift in the "master media" of our culture.

(I follow McLuhan in believing that "media work us over completely" (Medium 26) and so, therefore, shifts in media - defined broadly as the "extensions of [humanity]" - are the driving force behind shifts in worldview. Possibly, however, it might be more accurate to say that shifts in worldview and shifts in media/technology mutually influence each other, since humans, as incarnate beings, are externally situated like animals but are also internally oriented, possessing self-consciousness. We make the world over in our image, even as our image become defined through interaction with the world. I am indebted to both Christian theology and Lakoff's thought for this account of human existence.)

As I argued in my undergrad thesis, the "master media" of our time is hypertext, which contrasts in its collage-style rhetoric (a rhetoric of expanding spaces and tentative relationships) to the linear-argument rhetoric of print media. McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy, though it predates the advent of hypertext, exemplifies this collage style, as it attempts to present an argument through juxtaposition of key texts, historical figures, and incidents, rather than through strict deductive logic. McLuhan's text is more allusive than the conventional monograph - cool communication vs. hot communication. The work of making meaning is shifted over, in greater measure, to the reader.

A parallel could be made to the alternative reading of music history which John Cage offers (cf. pp. 25-28 of Sarah's thesis). In The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan sets himself a paradoxical task: to present the development of media as a dialectical progression by juxtaposing key moments in media history rather than by giving a chronological account. In this way, he hopes to reveal similarities between oral and electronic culture - the two media cultures which bookend his account - that might otherwise go unnoticed. Similarly, John Cage's reading of music history relies upon simultaneity and contrast of seemingly antithetical elements/styles in order to escape the Enlightenment narrative of progress, in which each composer built upon the work of predecessors.

Atonality, as practiced by Schoenberg and Webern, represented the end of that road. The Modernist composers created serialism as a means to overcome the hegemony of common practice Western harmony, which had already been pushed to the breaking point by composers such as Wagner. Following that, there was nothing new than could be done short of overcoming the opposition between the sound of "art music" and sound in general. Thus, Cage and his avant-garde contemporaries engaged in a process of breaking down boundaries, variously making use of chance elements and borrowings from popular or jazz music in their compositions.

In McLuhan's terms, this artistic approach is characteristic of oral culture, or, at the least, manuscript culture, rather than the typographic culture in which common-practice Western music flourished. Aleatoric music could be compared to the process of textual transmission in manuscript culture, insofar as "the reader [(performer)] [is] literally involved as producer" (McLuhan Galaxy 120). Genre hybridization, on the other hand, is more characteristic of oral culture, "a small world of...total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence" (44) in which artists are involved in a perpetual process of re-visioning, simultaneously interacting with the totality of the tradition in which they were enculturated as well as with the community of their peers.

The constantly hybridizing space of electronic culture is different from oral culture in two key respects, however. First, artists in electronic culture, as they draw their influences, are not limited by place or traditional cultural loyalties. If there is a village, it is a global village. Tradition is ecumenical, rather than narrowly familial or tribal.

Second, the new orality is an orality informed by and mediated through writing. Hypertext and other forms of electronic communication are not text in the same way that printed texts are. They occupy a kind of "middle space" between pure speech and conventional writing, since they are occasional and transitory - more conversational in tone, more easily revised, more easily placed in relation to other texts. As has often been said, hypertext is postmodern theory (a la Saussure and the semiotic web, Derrida and "free play") made visible. Sarah's thesis leads me to believe contemporary music shows much of the same dynamic.

Now I believe it would be fascinating to extend Sarah's thesis into the realm of popular music's borrowings from non-Western music, making the argument that much of contemporary music strives not only to transcend the high art/low art opposition but the native/foreign opposition. Both dynamics can be seen in the work of Animal Collective, for example. In fact, the latter dynamic comes across to me even more strikingly, as I am more familiar with "world music" than I am with the "avant garde."

All that to say - an excellent paper. I have learned a lot from it, and I want to learn more.

"art music"? Hey, my excessive use of quotations is rubbing off on you! :)

Thanks very much for the feedback. If you want some fascinating information on Orientalism, or the foreign/native dichotomy, you need to get your hands on Edward Said's book with that title. I think I quoted him once in the fourth chapter, but I was merely referring briefly to an issue that is actually quite a hot button topic in academia.

Posted by: funke at September 16, 2007 3:14 PM

I'm always the servant of my influences :) Thank you so much.

Posted by: Evan Donovan at September 16, 2007 11:40 PM