Classical musicians and advocates for classical music often describe Bach or Mozart as the feeling of everything good and whole and in the world, but, while I still love that music, I hear it as something complicated and morally ambiguous. The music that really gives me that feeling is John and Alice Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Sun Ra, or Horace Tapscott. It’s significant that while European avant-gardes were hoping for a clean slate, a break from the past and tradition, these musicians were interested in establishing themselves as part of a lineage—for example in the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s use of “Great Black Music,” or the Arkestra’s effortless blending of all parts of canonical jazz history with new textures and tunings that still sound surprising and radical decades later. I mean, you can see a direct a line between “strange strings” and Antoine Beuger’s approach to writing for strings! Activism always involves a kind of coalition building, but the kind of community art is capable of building extends further, to the dead and the unborn.
Historian Alexander Etkind refers to these as “software monuments” in contrast to “hardware monuments” (statues, museums). They exist because the circumstances that would permit “hardware monuments” are not there yet. Historians aren’t close to knowing how many victims there were of Soviet terror, or of American slavery (and the 100 years of terror that followed), let alone their names and genealogies. The Russian state still uses the language and iconography of Stalinism, and ethnic minorities in the US are still murdered with impunity. The DAPL is violating treaties made in the 1850s! I think about Joe Hill’s phrase “Don’t mourn, organize,” and I wonder if organizing isn’t the work of mourning, or if organizing isn’t what’s necessary to create the conditions that make mourning possible.
Morton Feldman described his musical world as a “haunted house with no ghosts,” but for me making art, especially sound-based art, means living with ghosts; it’s vibrations call forth spirits. That doesn’t mean it’s possible to speak for them. Stanislaw Lem, at the end of His Master’s Voice, describes this as an indecipherable howling, but music is the sphere of activity that creates a space where it’s possible to listen. That might be the most radical idea coming from Pauline Oliveros (or Wandelweiser), that music making is foremost an art of listening, or helping others to listen. What you describe in your question is a kind of apocalypse, and in thinking of an impending apocalypse it’s important to remember it’s dual meaning, not just an end, but a revelation, the vindication and resurrection of the dead.
Leo Svirsky
(as told to Michael Pisaro / B.O.M.B. / Feb 2017)
credits
released June 5, 2019
Recorded live at Pyramid Atlantic, Silver Spring, Md / January 25, 2009
Thomas Stanley: synth/efx
Leo Svirsky: keyboard
special thanks to Jeff Surak and Sonic Circuits for continuous service of contemporary audio culture.
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