Junk for Code

music: another history

Bob Dylan's memoir, Chronicles, Vol. 1 is being picked up and favourably assessed.

See here and here and here for Australian weblogs.

Dylan's Chronicles appear to highlight his roots in folk, blues and country music as well as outline the way he tried to deconstruct his 1960s superstar image.

Dylan's memoir chronicles a history of the relationship between folk and rock music, and so works within a particular understanding of the movement of popular music.

There is another kind of history. This is one that is structured around the transgressions of the modernist music project of the 20th century: especially the sixties' phenomenon of minimalism, which can be seen as the apogee of modernism. Minimalism succeeded in deconstructing western music to its basic signifiers--- a beat, a chord, a sound---as can be found in the spartan textures of Anton Weber. The musical purity appealed of a John Cage appealed, but it was generally seen as too academic, too bounded by the musical institution as art, and too divorced from my lived experience.

What was more attractive was musique concrete, which was based on the use and manipulation of real (concrete) sounds. These sounds, as in the work of Stockhausen, were sampled or recorded as part of the creative and composition process. I saw Stockhausen as progressive compared to the conservative "abstract" classical music, which was traditionally composed by writing down the score and later performed by musicians.

The influence of musique concrete can be seen in rock music, (The Beatles, Pink Floyd, The Grateful Dead & Frank Zappa) and in jazz musicians such as Miles Davis. It helped to transgress the old musical boundaries between jazz, rock and the modernist art music and create linkages between the academy and popular music. This legacy is carried on by John Oswald's connections between the pioneer spirit of the 60s with the 90s' postmodern referentiality. His plunderphonics piece Grayfolded (1995), built around The Grateful Dead's Dark Star, links back to the experimentation of the Dead's early Anthem Of The Sun.

Fluxus as an avant garde movement was also important in breaking down the boundaries. The movement impacted on rock music through Yoko Ono's impact on John Lennon in The Beatles and then the Plastic Ono Band.

The significance of this history is the breakdown of hierarchical barriers around music during the 1970s and 80s between Western art music, African-American music, and the genres of rock, folk and jazz. This has resulted in a tendency to embrace music outside of a given genre in order to forge new sounds within specific contexts.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at October 18, 2004 11:17 AM | TrackBack