CUSTODIANS OF THE PRIVATE:
Thoughts on the Future of Music
Lisa Bielawa
The following TEXT was commissioned by the Composition Area, Department of Music, University of California, San Diego for its SEARCH initiative. The TEXT is copyrighted and appears in its original publication here. While links TO this TEXT from other sites are welcome, the TEXT itself may not be reprinted for any reason without express agreement in writing from the copyright holders [Please contact Roger Reynolds: info@rogerreynolds.com to facilitate this.].
Excerpt 1 from A Collective Cleansing 2:55, 2730K
Lisa Bielawa, composer/vocalist/producer
Text by Aeschylus
© 2000 Lisa Bielawa
Excerpt 2 from A Collective Cleansing 2:18, 2199K
Lisa Bielawa, composer/vocalist/producer
Text by Aeschylus
© 2000 Lisa Bielawa
The piece you just heard was developed in collaboration with video artist Cynthia Cox. Its title is A Collective Cleansing, and it is based on fragments of text from Aeschylus' The Suppliant Maidens. The original version, on a ten-minute loop with video, was commissioned by the World Conference on Breast Cancer in Ontario. The Suppliant Maidens were the Danaids, 50 daughters of King Danaos. After their father lost a decisive battle, the Danaids were made to marry the 50 sons of the victor. Danaos instructed them all to kill their husbands on their wedding night, but only 49 obeyed. The 50th daughter decided she actually liked the guy. In any case, the other 49 daughters were sentenced to pour water for eternity into a bottomless cistern.
Many of my works are responses to literary works, even those that do not use voices or text. This is the natural result of the fact that I find reading one of the greatest pleasures in life. Today a little later I will talk about private reading and listening, and why I believe they are so integral to the self-care of artists as we enter a cacophonous future.
I am the Co-Artistic Director of a festival in New York with my friend and fellow composer Eleanor Sandresky called Music At The Anthology, and we have been commissioning, premiering and producing the work of young composers for five years now. This festival allows me the great honor of witnessing new directions in music from very early stages and at very close proximity. Because we focus on the work of heretofore largely "unrecognized" composers, we have access to work that is not available otherwise. I do believe that this privilege also makes me conversant on the Future Of Music in a unique way, and I hope to do an adequate service to my colleagues, some of whose music you will hear at the end of this talk, by articulating some of my thoughts about our future. I do not claim to be the spokesperson for an entire generation of creative musicians; I seek only to be responsible to my felicitous position of enhanced access, by observing this work on its own multifarious terms.
A Collective Cleansing is a good example of a piece that was written for and is only really performable by the composer. Every year, because of the vast number of composers who are writing works for themselves to perform alone, we have a concert called 'Solitary Confinement' -- soloists only. The practice of composing for oneself is certainly not new. Whereas during the classical era music had a certain social function that frowned on total exclusivity, Liszt wrote for himself, and believed he was writing music that only he could play. He did not anticipate that technical standards would rise to meet him and that every self-respecting concert pianist would attempt to meet his challenges someday. In any case, this self-perception changed his social relationship with his audience. Others before him may have achieved fame and wide admiration, but Liszt was the prototype of the pop icon. The phenomenon of Liszt was a symptom of the relationship between artist and audience at that time. This relationship is in constant flux in the public and private imagination. Much has been written and said about the relationship of artist to society throughout history, so that even a thumbnail sketch is unnecessary here. There have been Classicisms, characterized by their use of a formal language shared and understood by artist and audience, and Romanticisms, characterized by the role of the artist as an individual force in a society that is docile or hostile or anything in between -- so long as it is defined as being in contrast to the artist. To some extent these arrangements come and go in cycles. I would venture to say that we are currently enjoying another Romanticism.
A work like A Collective Cleansing uses recorded material, digital processing on my own voice. This piece is truly hermetic, by classical standards it is even anti-social. One could say that it has no future outside of myself. One could also say that this piece is indebted to modern technology not just for its compositional process but for its future, since after my demise it will only be possible to hear it on recording. Happily, I can inform you that I am very little concerned with how you all might be able to hear this or any of my pieces after I leave this place. I actually think the hermetic aspect of this piece, as well as the trend towards works like this among my peers, is a symptom of our own time, of our relationship as individuals to an increasingly unified world. To conjure a more complete picture of this relationship, and what it can tell us about the future in music, it is necessary to take a closer look at the world as we encounter it.
Later this morning you will hear performances of three of my Kafka Songs for voice and violin. They respond to fragments of Kafka's personal writings and miniatures, not the more extended allegorical writings for which he is best known. You will hear in the second song one of my favorite utterances of Kafka's: "the world...is known to be uncommonly various, which can be verified at any time by taking a handful of world and looking at it closely." Let's keep this image in mind as I grapple with a large topic in a short time.
Because MATA's home is Lower Manhattan, we were shaken and destabilized by the events of September 11 last year, both individually and as an organization. In November, we convened a composers discussion group to talk about if and how we were working, and what the crisis did to our relationship with our work. Some experienced a surge of new work, others were paralyzed, some found their music and/or their process to be suddenly angrier, others found themselves to be more insistently joyful in working. Looking through the transcript of this discussion, I discovered a short but very telling exchange between three composers who are also friends:
Composer A found the after-effects of the attacks galvanizing, and felt a surge of energy and purposefulness in his work: "I have a renewed sense of vocation if anything. I am irritated by those who find their own work pointless now. If you have a problem with it now, then what were you doing before?"
Composer B, who was felled by the events and couldn't work at all for a while, responded, "But this is another kind of not-being-able-to-work. I wasn't paralyzed by a feeling of pointlessness, but by a collapsed psychological and emotional infrastructure."
Composer C was able to be active, but more in advocacy than in her work. She commented, "Certainly, as artists we need to look inward, and when there is not enough strength within, it's like going down into a collapsing cave." Several issues come to the fore in these comments, and I will touch on all of them today: the artist's sense of purpose in the face of large-scale crisis; the fragility of the private self in the face of such collective anxiety; and the importance of advocacy and mutual support among artists. What are our expectations of ourselves and of each other as artists at times like these? What can or should we expect of ourselves and others as we negotiate an increasingly uncertain future?
Another young composer friend who lives in New York looked back a year after the Trade Center events and shared the following observation with me:
Perhaps the only successful way to deal with September 11 is to focus on the details. Like the owner of the jeans store downtown who preserved a whole window display of neatly folded, completely dust-encrusted jeans. In these cases of large scale human catastrophe -- and perhaps in general, in the small-scale catastrophes of daily life which make up the bulk of our art -- the grit of art is in the smallness of it, the microscopic head of it, the humility of it in the face of death and destruction.
Our world is changing in irreversible ways, but we as human beings and as artists are made of the same stuff as we always have been. As inhabitants and as artists we negotiate our relationship with the world, sometimes fitfully, as we work. The perils of sustaining both human life and artistic life in an increasingly impersonal environment were made especially vivid to me over the last few years because of certain experiences, including my morning at home in New York on September 11, my work in Eastern Europe, and my contact with young composers from all over the world through MATA. I have found some answers for myself, many of which I realize I have known all along but hadn't ever articulated. I am grateful to you and to Roger Reynolds for giving me the opportunity to articulate them here.
The first concept I want to consider is globalization, or world unification.
In 1924, Bertrand Russell wrote a concise booklet entitled ICARUS, or The Future of Science, a copy of which I happened upon while I was beginning to think about this topic before us today.
Science, Russell observes, favors and fosters an increase of organization. Larger and larger economic organisms become possible. "The world becomes more and more of an economic unity," he says. "Before very long the technical conditions will exist for organizing the whole world as one producing and consuming unit." [ICARUS, or The Future of Science, by Bertrand Russell. New York: E.F. Dutton & Company, 1924, 40.] He warns that as centralization of power and information is achieved, free competition at the local level buckles under the weight of conglomerate entities. Before long, he predicts, the only true rivalry that will remain will be between States by means of armaments. His vision of what happens next is, of course, apocalyptic, although he thinks a true democracy may become possible after a cruel and despotic world-rule by one nation, probably the United States.
Russell's world of the future seems to be a dystopia at first, but since he foresees an ideal society emerging after a cruel and despotic rule, he is actually utopian in the end. Even the conquest of science and technology seems to be ideal and perfect in all its evil, in his vision. His soberest warnings apply to the long period of increasing unification, the period in which we currently find ourselves.
Russell's booklet was conceived as a response to an enthusiastic and ultimately completely negligible pamphlet by one Mr. Haldane entitled Daedalus, or Science and the Future. The Presbyterian Advocate had fervent praise for Mr. Haldane's project: "The story of what is being accomplished in the laboratories and how it can be applied with sensational results in daily life." [Russell, ICARUS, 7.] Russell takes issue with this triumphant vision, and with prescience and rigor he describes the perils of a world in which scientific advancement results in an exponential increase in man's ability to fulfill his own collective desires "without altering men's passions or their general outlook."
Science has not given men more self-control, more kindliness, or more power of discounting their passions in deciding upon a course of action. It has given communities more power to indulge their collective passions, but, by making society more organic, it has diminished the part played by private passions. Men's collective passions are mainly evil; far the strongest of them are hatred and rivalry directed towards other groups. Therefore at present all that gives men power to indulge their collective passions is bad. That is why science threatens to cause the destruction of our civilization. [Russell, ICARUS, 62-3.]
Russell attaches a moral value to these various passions of man -- the collective is evil, the private is good. Science only has currency in the collective passions, therefore its ends are largely evil, unless particularly well-rounded scientists in the future find ways to enhance or influence the private self through a sort of kindliness serum, or the like. These ideas seem spurious and even ridiculous in Russell's otherwise cogent thesis. His analysis begs the question, "If science cannot alter men's passions or their kindliness, what can?" Can anything? He doesn't answer this question for us, but there is a general hopelessness to his stance. From within Western society, I believe it is nearly impossible to believe in moral evolution. Like Russell, I see that scientific advancement is cumulative while spiritual and moral wisdom are not. An individual consciousness may evolve, but no matter how much knowledge is passed on through successive generations, the collective moral wisdom of humanity does not seem to improve. I read the news, I look around me at home in New York or in my travels in Eastern Europe or Southeast Asia, and I see our current acute troubles as the inevitable result of a deadly combination: the absence of moral evolution and an explosion of scientific advancement.
It is no wonder that Russell prophesied that scientific advancement would not touch the moral fiber of individual people: "Science is no substitute for virtue," he says. "...the heart is as necessary for a good life as the head." [Russell, ICARUS, 58.] Or, elsewhere, "Technical scientific knowledge does not make men sensible in their aims, and administrators in the future, will be presumably no less stupid and no less prejudiced than they are at present." [Russell, ICARUS, 55.]
Perhaps Russell came up empty-handed precisely because he attached a moral value to the private passions. Do the private passions need to result in good acts for them to be of value? Is the private self less stupid, less prejudiced, more sensible than the collective self? I agree with Russell that technological advancements are causing collective concerns to overwhelm the private self. But I don't think the private needs to justify its virtue by resulting in good deeds and kindliness. The private is of value because it is the habitat of the individual consciousness. Personal awareness of the world is sacred. The more privacy we feel, the more richly and deeply we feel our own consciousness. The vitality of this private self is the dominion of artists of all kinds. Inasmuch as the collective passions threaten to extinguish our private selves, I believe that artists in our times must struggle in their work against trends towards unification and centralization, in favor of authenticity to the private self.
Allow me to explore some of these trends in our lives, and how we might negotiate our relationship to them.
The Polish-Lithuanian poet Czeslaw Milosz took a stab at the Future of Poetry in 1983 in his book, The Witness of Poetry. I was not surprised to find some points of agreement between Milosz and Russell, even though they are separated by six decades and radically different backgrounds. Milosz observes a trend toward the unification of the planet, which is proceeding already in the realms of science and technology but may spread to other areas as well. He sees the sovereignty of the dominant mega-civilization as destructive of the more "static" civilizations. In essence, he is vilifying the collective here, as does Russell, but Milosz has introduced a new element that Russell did not: other civilizations outside of the centralized system.
Earlier I stated that I share Russell's skepticism about moral evolution, but I acknowledged that I do so from within Western society. It is important to consider that some of these nearly-destroyed civilizations that Milosz deems more static may actually have traditions of wisdom that provide for moral evolution of a sort that we cannot understand within Russell's model. A civilization is more static if it does not participate in the expansion of scientific advancement, in all of its forms -- information exchange, commodity exchange and centralization of economic power. Of course, a civilization that does not value this participation, and values instead an active participation in human life of a highly-evolved moral or spiritual sort, will be overwhelmed and overpowered by the conquest of technology. We who grew up in the United States, or in any other technologically advanced country, cannot live our lives without being active participants in this conquest. We fly across the country to give talks at universities, we call each other on cell phones and do research on the web. We are always connected to this growing superstructure, and to claim to stand outside of it is inauthentic. Here is this word again -- authenticity. For better or for worse, we are inescapably products of our own society. Although we may admire and even study the disciplines of other societies whose traditions stand outside of this conquest, these disciplines are not native to us. They require the renunciation of American-European values. Of course, it is too late for that, since these values accompanied our formative development. We stand firmly within our society, with its overwhelming glut of collective passions. We can move to one of the few remaining outposts of civilization that adheres to a non-commodity-based value system, but the future of such civilizations is dubious, and our entry into them would be morally problematic, encoded as we are with the value systems of our own society.
So what is the antidote to the dehumanizing effects of global unification? For us, for those of us who are products of its burgeoning hub? We must establish a very delicate balance.
Let us further define collective passions as those which can be measured, influenced and traded on, within the super-system of information. Commodities are the units of collective passion. If we live in a society that expresses value through money, how do we situate ourselves in relation to it if we believe that our role as artists is to create things whose value resists being defined in terms of supply and demand? I believe that every work of art that is conceived and carried out independently of marketplace concerns is a small act of anarchy. As far as I'm concerned, this act is enough to earn my advocacy. Even if I don't have any idea what you are trying to accomplish in your work, if I am confident that it is a small act of anarchy, I will do what I can as an advocate to seek a sane environment and a forum for that work. Of course, within that definition there is even more we can and should demand from our own work than that, for it truly to reach its mark artistically. But we may not always be able to receive each other's work -- the gulf between us may be too wide. That's okay. We extend our support to each other anyway, in good faith.
But even if we leave out the issue of understanding and receiving another artist's work, how do we know if our work, or another person's work, is fulfilling the basic standards of integrity? How do we ascertain its purity as an act of anarchy? The words "standards" and "purity" herald a contentious topic.
Milosz sees negative results of globalization within the hegemonic societies as well as in the civilizations outside of it. Unification has high costs everywhere, he says. The sheer magnitude of communications systems separates people in modern states from their own local concerns. They may be literate, in a standardized sense, but they no longer learn shared intellectual and cultural values in their communities. Thus unprepared for a more substantive kind of exchange, they receive instead a kind of false sustenance from mass media. In an elegant metaphor, Milosz likens these media -- television, magazines, etc. -- to the tiny slippers that adorned women's feet in old China.
And so we encounter the ubiquitous stumbling block in any discussion about art and hegemony: elitism. How can we claim that some kinds of cultural information on a lower level than others? Why is it lower? If it is the part of our lives that participates actively in centralized information exchange, doesn't it represent the more politically powerful force? If we feel that we are pursuing a virtuous path when we resist participation in the trend towards unification and globalization in our work, does this mean that our work suffers from snobbism and pride, because it wants to hold itself to a higher moral standard?