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Title: Notes on Musical Order Author: Musical Nihility Date: June 13th, 2022 Language: en Topics: Musical Nihility, Nihilism, Music, Western Civilization
This is the one song everyone would like to learn
The song that is irresistible
The song that forces men to leap overboard in squadrons
Even though they see the beached skulls
The song nobody knows because anyone who has heard it is dead
And the others canât remember
Shall I tell you the secret?
And if I do, will you get me out of this bird suit?
I donât enjoy it here squatting on this island
Looking picturesque and mythical
With these two feathery maniacs,
I donât enjoy singing this trio, fatal and valuable
I will tell the secret to you, to you, only to you
Come closer
This song is a cry for help: Help me!
Only you, only you can, you are unique
At last
Alas it is a boring song
But it works every time
âMusic produced in Europe as well as those musics derived from the
European ancient times to present day.â
"Moses was instructed by God to make two trumpets. They were to be made
of hammered, or beaten, silver. The priests used them to announce many
events associated with the temple and various festivals. Trumpets and
horns were blown to call people to worship and to signal momentous
events. Harps and lyres were plucked and strummed to pacify royalty.â
Ancient civilizations entered historical times with a flourishing
musical culture. That the earliest writers explained it in terms of
legend and myth, strongly suggests the remote beginnings of the âartâ of
sound. Among the speculations about its origin, the more plausible are
that it began as a primitive form of communication, that it grew out of
a device to expedite communal labour, or that it originated as a
powerful adjunct to religious ceremonies. While such theories must
necessarily remain speculative it is clear, despite the prehistoric
musical artifacts found in central Europe, that the cradle of Western
music was the Fertile Crescent cupping the eastern end of the
Mediterranean Sea. There the Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Hebrew nations,
among others, evolved political, social cultures that were absorbed by
the conquering Greeks and, in turn, by the Romans, who introduced
elements of that Mediterranean music to much of western Europe. In all
of these early cultures the social functions of music were essentially
the same, since their climate, geographic location, cultural pace, and
mutual influences produced many more social similarities than
differences. The primary function of music was apparently religious,
ranging from heightening the effect of âmagicâ, to ennobling liturgies.
The other musical occasions depicted in both pictures and written
accounts were equally functional: stirring incitements to military zeal,
soothing accompaniments to communal or solitary labour, heightening aids
to dramatic spectacles, and enlivening backgrounds to social gatherings
that involved either singing or dancing or both. In every case musical
sounds were an adjunct to song, and/or bodily movement: dance, march,
game, and work. To support its fundamental role in society, an intricate
scientific rationale of music evolved, encompassing tuning, instruments,
modes (melodic formulas based on certain scales), and rhythms.
In the mid-nineteenth century, printed sheet music was the music
industries primary product. Publishers marketed songs for use 1.) by the
growing number of private piano owners 2.) by touring musical reviews.
[Blackface] Minstrelsy was the most popular form of live entertainment
in the US through much of the 19th century, and companies became
celebrity through touring established theatre circuits. Their
endorsement of a song would often result in the popularization of a
certain sheet of music.
When the phonograph came to be in 1877, few initially imagined it would
be used primarily for music. Yet by the 1890s, ânickel-in-the-slotâ
talking machines reached urban arcades, introducing the US to
mechanically reproduced music. Companies controlled the patents to
compelling phonograph technologies, and Thomas Edison controlled his wax
cylinder playback technology (licensing it to the fledging Columbia
Phonograph Company, thus introducing the first talking machines designed
for home use in 1896). By this time, the competing gramophone disk
machines and records made by Emile Berliner had already been
distributed. Firms raced to establish their technology as the consumer
standard throughout the US - âVictors Talking Machine Companyâ
eventually came out on top by focusing on the home consumer, creating
celebrity recording artists, and expanding globally. In 1919, the âRadio
Corporation of Americaâ (RCA) was founded and began to market millions
of consumer targeted radios - phonograph companies soon began
advertising the new medium. In 1929, RCA acquired Victor & the
phonograph, and the radio industries continued to increase their ties.
Recording artists demanded compensation for the broadcast of their
material through organizations such as the American Society of
Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP).
During The Great Depression record sales plummeted from 150 million in
1929 to 10 million in 1933, and the industry was again comprised of a
few powerhouse corporations. ASCAP, overseeing royalty collection for
the vast majority of published music, continued to demand for radio
broadcasts. In 1941, they forbade radio stations to play the music they
represented. Their rival, Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI), offered stations
its collection of music that had not been accepted by ASCAP. The result
was a wave of decentralization within the industry. Throughout the music
industries postwar expansion, musicians organized in attempt to protect
their rights and promote their careers. But presumably, unions failed,
only garnering rights for their members (including closed shops and
union pay scales in established theater circuits, symphony orchestras,
society dance networks, and recordings studios), losing employment to
new technologies and garnering higher royalty rates for record sales.
The role of the music is much less to produce the trance than to create
conditions favorable to its onset, to regularize its form, and to ensure
that instead of being a merely individual, unpredictable, and
uncontrollable phenomenon, it becomes, on the contrary, predictable,
controlled, and at the service of the group.
Although it is conceivable that a subject can enter into trance without
music, it is inconceivable that a subject could experience the trance
itself without music. Let us say that, in [musical] possession, music is
the condition of the trance experience. This is so for a few reasons.
First, because possession trance is a change of identity, because that
change of identity has no meaning for the subject unless his new
identity is recognized by [others], because it is the music that signals
it, because this new identity must be manifested. Provided, then, that
it is not absolutely fleeting (I am thinking of Malkam Ayyahu's trances,
described by Leiris, which often lasted no more than an instant, just
long enough to express it with a gesture, word, pose), provided that it
has duration, this trance, which is the experience of another identity,
has an absolute need for music in order to continue to exist, since it
is music that, through its identificatory character, maintains the
illusion and that, enables it to be manifested.
The major function of music thus seems to be maintaining the trance,
rather in the way an electric current will maintain the vibration of a
tuning fork if tuned to the same pitch frequency. Here, however, music
is not just physically (on a purely motor level) âin tuneâ with trance.
It is even more âin tuneâ on the psychological level, since its action
consists in putting the individual experiencing his transitory identity
âin phaseâ with the group that is recognizing this identity, or imposing
it upon him.
To dissect for a moment, yet another absolutely horrendous CrimethInc
article, let us take a brief look at the preface from âMusic as a
Weapon: When Punk Was a Recruiting Ground for Anarchyâ:
âThere are countless reasons not to tie the fate of a revolutionary
movement to the fortunes of a music scene. Coming into anarchism via
punk, people tended to approach anarchist activity in the same way they
would participate in a youth sub-culture. This contributed to an
anarchist milieu characterized by consumerism rather than initiative, a
focus on identity rather than dynamic change, activities limited to
leisure time of the participants, ideological conflicts that boil down
to disputes over taste, and an orientation towards youth that made the
movement largely irrelevant upon the onset of adulthood⊠Yet during the
decades of global reaction that followed the 1960s, the punk underground
was one of the chief catalysts of the renaissance of anarchism. Were it
not for punk, anti-capitalists in many parts of the world might still be
choosing between stale brands of authoritarian socialism⊠Granted, the
average punk show was as dominated by patriarchy as a college classroom.
All the hierarchies, economics, and power dynamics of capitalist society
were present in microcosm. And anarchism was not the only seed that
utilized this soapbox: countless ideologies competed in the punk milieu,
from Neo-Nazism to Christianity and Krishna âconsciousness.â
Whilst one might find the off-statement to be true, CrimethInc fails to
provide any incite as to why these hierarchies were able to incubate.
They fail to acknowledge or even question what it is about the
organizational aspect of their anarchism that allows for such
eurocentric reflections to fester. They continue the entirety of the
piece in constant vacillation. Somehow at times even gushing over how:
âall of this makes it that much more striking that anarchist ideas fared
so well!... We can attribute this success to structural factorsâ, and
that music and punk âoffer a rare model for organizing the affairs of a
network, and community defense mechanismsâ:
â...punk helped keep anarchist ideas alive between the 1970s and the
21st century in the same way that monasteries preserved science and
literature through the Dark Ages... Although the demands and influence
of the capitalist economy recreated the same power imbalances and
materialism that punks had hoped to escape â limiting the punk critique
of capitalism to a variant of the liberal maxim âbuy localâ â but the
anticapitalist DIY underground displayed a remarkable resilience! In a
cycle that became familiar, each generation expanded until profit driven
record labels skimmed the most popular apolitical bands off the top,
setting the stage for a return to grassroots independence and
experimentation. So the punk scene provided the music industry a free
testing and development site for new bands and trends.â