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Title: Music & Domestication Author: Ben Olson Date: 2021, Summer Language: en Topics: music, art, cultural resistance, anarchist analysis Source: Fifth Estate #409, Summer, 2021. Accessed Juy 27, 2022 at https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/409-summer-2021/music-domestication/
We need to affirm the value of music, especially undomesticated music,
particularly during the social deprivations of the current pandemic. The
past year has been a blur of social isolation, sheltering-in-place, and
lockdowns.
The muted horrors of 2020 and beyond have led to increasingly isolated
pleasures, fearful desires, little moments of secret forgetting (or
seeking forgetting), private escapes that often only exacerbate the
effects of being alone and afraid. In this situation, for many people,
the experience of media, watching movies, reading, or listening to
music, becomes a coveted refuge, a vain attempt at relaxation and
respite from constant, only half-acknowledged anxiety, a survivors’ kit
for augmenting the effects of collectively (though unevenly)
distributed, and privately suffered, cultural trauma. But the isolation
of music, the intertwining of the musical experience with our increasing
domestication, means that our attempts to heal may fall short.
What we need is to let the air in, not seal off our pain in airtight
moments of longing. It’s important, then, to affirm the value of
undomesticated music—wild in its composition and/or in its listening
format—for the purpose of opening ourselves up at a time when we run the
risk of closing off completely.
Avant-garde and improvisational music, such as that of English
avant-rock guitarists Fred Frith and Derek Bailey, or the experimental
surrealistic art collective, The Residents, stretch the boundaries of
what counts as musical by exploring the potential of atonality and
noise.
People experience music in highly personal ways, shaped by their
individual pasts and presents, beyond and above what can be expressed
with language. It doesn’t need to be discursive, nor must it necessarily
include any kind of regularity beyond the inevitably imperfect rhythms
of a living body, such as a heartbeat. Undomesticated melody has the
potential to resist dominant modes of communicating, by creating a
temporary, imaginary world that allows one to express oneself against
what dominates, against the forces of control which seek to define the
limits of what is possible.
In our society, these forces are embodied and rooted in colonial
ideologies implemented most immediately by police. They normalize the
capture, imprisonment and even murder of subjugated people.
Music is an effective tool for showing solidarity with those who seek to
resist such control. When cities were under lockdown against the
COVID-19 pandemic as well as curfews meant to curtail the protests
against police brutality, many musicians resisted the restraint put on
them by joining anti-racist protesters to show their support and lend
their music as a means of expression. On the internet, within the
surveilled screens of social media, angered musicians posted videos of
wild new songs and performances that sought to transform their world
from the horrors they were witnessing. As an irrational howl against
restraint, the undomesticated melody demands the impossible, a life
without a master, with no authority but oneself.
Domestication is the instilling of submission into individuals or groups
through physical/biological means (such as plant and animal breeding and
other agricultural practices), or through ideological or broader
cultural practices, such as religion and other practices that constitute
truth for a society. The construction of cultural norms and the locking
out of what does not submit to them can be applied to different kinds of
cultural activity. But domestication occurs at the level of experience
first.
The domesticator compels potential subordinates to experience themselves
as docile beings, already submissive. Unruly behaviors—actions that run
against this training—are said to go against their very nature. To be
domesticated is to have one’s experience broken into instinct and
obedience. The goal of domestication is to convince the trainee that
docility is instinctual.
Among critiques of civilization, domestication is usually understood as
an ecological term related to agriculture. Implied in that
understanding, however, is a broader conception of domestication as
resignation to a dominant culture, housebreaking the human mind.
This approach is useful in understanding the limitations of the work of
the musician, but does not exclude or contradict a more pointed
primitivist critique which could be made simply by linking the
digitization of music to the technologizing of everyday life, or, on a
more anthropological level, by observing the historical links between
harmony and hierarchy. Complimentary to this critique is an existential
description of the experience of domestication in music.
Music and the work of the musician have undergone new stages of
domestication by way of a withdrawal of the musical experience from a
shared lifeworld into two immaterial realms: the internet and the
exclusively mental. This constitutes a taming of the experience and work
of melodic performance. Content-wise, too, songs have become ever more
reliant on snap-to-grid timing to be cut-and-pasted and easily
manipulated in computer software.
This affects not only the work of musicians, but the deeper rhythmic
layers of the human being. While this technique makes it easier to
create songs, it also makes music easier to predict, blunting the effect
of anticipation, and locking out anxiety from the listener’s experience,
instead of allowing that anxiety to play out and resolve itself.
Music is not just a cultural activity, but an expression of the rhythms
of being itself. As we restrain ourselves or allow ourselves to be
restrained by submitting to dominant modes of expression in exchange for
participation in culture, we lose access to these more basic rhythms of
being, which need not have any necessary relationship to the culture
whose participation demands such a trade-off.
By replacing the free irregularities of improvised performances that
follow no steady internal time signature, with techniques that more
easily conform to a synchronized rhythm, we give up an essential element
of the musical process for something more compatible with cultural
assumptions about a broader conception of music. This constrains the
idiosyncratic rhythms of being that are integral to the freer experience
of undomesticated timing. The pulsing, metronomic syncopations are
brought inside us, between the ears, in a last-ditch effort to replace
the lost lucidity of our more instinctual, bodily rhythms.
This headphone experience, while often thrilling, frequently both
visceral and cerebral in the same note, is a powerful substitution for
the lived, spatial experience of the body in a shared world, but a
substitution nonetheless. It brings the rhythms inside, rather than
enticing the listener to inhabit a rhythmic world. It makes the body
into a world of its own, which is especially dangerous in a time when
emotional injuries are incubating, growing and feeding off social
deprivations, fueling what could become deep interpersonal inhibitions
which may burden future generations. We must ensure that we and our
descendants are not left unable to truly inhabit the world, unable to
face reality in its unpredictability, to not only tolerate but inhabit
and participate in the wild clutter of reality.
For various reasons, music may not be played out loud, instead pumped
into either side of the listener’s skull, as if it were their own
private experience. This can make listening to music more exciting in
some ways. Things like track panning, fading in/out, and various audio
effects work to make the experience of recorded songs more interesting,
as the production plays with positionality in the body. But the
withdrawal of the listener from an open space wherein the performer
shares spatial perceptual access to the music, or where people listen
together, is a repressing of the dynamic and independent life of the
song itself, in all its rhythmic finitude. It’s a closing of the
boundaries around the musical instinct, where the deprivation is of the
human body in its open space and access to other bodies.
The other immaterial realm where music can be experienced is the
internet, which can, arguably, be a place of shared unconscious. On the
internet, consciousnesses regularly confront each other as though
inhabiting the same open, mental space. Music can even be made together
in this digital realm, between individuals in otherwise geographically
separated locations. But the blunt materiality of the outside, the
being-there, the inhabiting of a fully perceptual, spatial world, is
lacking online.
Perception is synesthetic. Hearing, like other senses, is not separable
from its wider perceptual context. Experience of the world is not
reducible to separable, divided senses, but relies on an open context in
which the senses comingle. The multi-sensed world is the context of
music, and without it, music lives a rigid life.
Hope lies with those musicians who are attempting to break out of the
withdrawal, resist the illusory collectivity of the internet, and break
the monotonous regularity of machine rhythms by embracing the
unpredictability and irregularity of tempo, experiencing the lucidity of
being by playing outside of time signatures, or ditching them
altogether, and reclaiming the rebellious and unruly in melody, and
welcoming the life of music which exists on the outside.
Ben Olson is a writer and musician based in New York City. He is
studying philosophy at The New School for Social Research.