Music and Civilization

A dark corner on the roof of a downtown office building. In the flickering light of a tin can rocket stove: the surreptitious N-arrow circle graffito made by squatters. Four figures loll about, drinking forties.

A quick zoom in and out on a copy of the Oregonian: September 24, 2009.

j(A)de: That was beautiful!

Rainer: Chris Thile was stunning, a virtuoso. I'm still hoarse from shouting "Bravo!"

Mary: Yes, he was the glittering young newcomer, eager to impress his "father" figures. Béla was at once drawn into battle and aloof, I thought. But Zakir, ah, Zakir! The wise uncle! The sage! The prophet!

Jax: Generations. I was thinking about youngers and elders the whole time, from the moment we turned the corner and watched the audience streaming in. Gray-haired season ticket holders and hippie hipsters dressed up halfway for the evening. This weaving of "classical" 19th century orchestral ballads with contemporary artist/composers coming from a much folksier tradition; I'm fascinated by what it does to the self-image of the audience!

j(A)de: How'd you all sneak in, anyway? After I climbed up to that bathroom window I lost track of you.

Jax: Oh, I know one of the ushers.

Mary: I followed a big group of kids, looking like one their moms.

Rainer: Well, oh, well I didn't, actually. Ended up paying. Quite worth it in the end, I must say! That improv was the best I've seen in years.

Silence, perhaps awkward. The sound of malt liquor bubbling down throats. Horns, gently rising.

j(A)de: Speaking of Zakir... you know, I was hanging out at Powell's after a Local 5 party the other night, and reading this article about the ecstatic experience of tabla players in San Francisco.

Mary: They lose their themselves in their music?

j(A)de: Well, yes. But it was an ethnography, and I think the specific point of the book as a whole is that anthropologists should forget about objectivity and immerse themselves in the experiential life of their hosts. That way they're better bridges of the cultural divide.

Jax: So, the anthropologists lose themselves -- their ethnocentrically-formed selves, coming from and through the Western academy and some variant of Empire culture -- for the period of their immersion in the life of the studied people?

j(A)de: Yeah. Particularly in trances or ceremonies or other ways of experiencing that are, well, tough to reconcile with Western consciousness.

Mary: Hmmm. I'm getting a bit confused by this definition of "Western". If we're talking Eurocentric, well heck, there's a very high proportion of religious experience in, say, the US.

Rainer: That's true. But I think we're talking about Western civilization, which has been moving on a track of stripping us of religious illusions since the Enlightenment. So in this sense, "Western" refers to the knowledge produced by the sciences and serious arts and humanities.

Mary: In Eurocentric universities.

Rainer: Er, yes. And other cultural institutions.

j(A)de: Like the Schnitz, the Symphony?

Rainer: Yes, precisely. And this is where I have some concern about the thesis of this book you've been browsing, j(A)de: witness the cultural intersection we experienced tonight! In the very heart of the Western establishment!

Jax: What, you mean the completely alien experience of watching a young, vibrant artform seek approval and integration into the established aesthetic regime?

Mary: No, silly. He means the profound richness woven by integrating the peak of Western and Indian musical composition. Zakir! Béla! Chris! Edgar!

j(A)de: Yeah, compared to the pieces that started and ended the Symphony's set, Zakir and the others were really something else. There was a way that these three or four men, from different traditions, watching each other and allowing a common music to live through all of them -- it was really like watching the best kind of solidarity at play.

Jax: A very different kind of "solidarity" than that of the Symphony itself, which is quite something. Think of it: a hundred extraordinary musicians, trained over years and years to follow one man's waving baton, one vision, one mind. And that man, himself trained to express the "truth" intended by one of just a few dozen men of the last five centuries. It's an extraordinary defiance of mortality -- refusing the living experience of music, in the service of the privileged refinement of the past.

Rainer: Chris premiered a new piece today!

Jax: Ah yes: generations.

Silence.

Rainer: Well, your snideness is easy, Jax. But this music is profoundly beautiful, at least for those of us cultured enough to understand it. Zakir's music is beautiful, too. And I don't believe there's ever been another age in which such profound traditions could coexist and interact in the way we saw tonight. Truly, for all the sorry sordid details of our long path to democracy and civilization, tonight was a testament to the good things that Westerners have brought.

Silence.

j(A)de: Whoa, dude.

Mary: (chuckles) I suppose multiculturalists should consider it a victory that the infiltration of Indian classical music to the inner sanctum of the Symphony is now considered obvious, even a victory for the West. That's the last stage, right, starting at, "Clearly absurd! It's all right for them, I suppose, but really! Compared to Mozart? to Haydn? to Beethoven?"

j(A)de: The last stage of what? Co-optation?

Mary: Well, who's co-opting whom?

Jax: I'd say that's a very good question. Let's look at multiculturalism, for a moment. Consider the material base of the university --

Mary: Oh no, here we go!

Jax: No, come on, seriously, this is important. We can talk about it another way: let's look at who's really wielding power, and what has happened as a result of the inclusion of hundreds of multicultural studies departments throughout the country, the world. What has it gotten us?

Mary: Well, a respected place for the study of other cultures, other ways of knowing, other concerns than that of purely the old dead white men.

Jax: And, I suppose, not incidentally, a place for "multicultural studies" academics to get paid for their work.

Mary: Yes, that too I suppose. And that payment has produced some really amazing work that has influenced the very way we think about gender, about society, about history and labor and ethnicity and meaning itself.

Jax: Who do you mean by "we" here?

Mary: Well, specifically of course I'm referring to the consensus perspective among social theorists. But, you know, that trickles down.

j(A)de: (laughs) Trickles down to who?!

Jax: And we're talking here, I imagine, about social theorists on a particular side of the ol' Culture/Science Wars divide.

Mary: Well, everyone has to at least a little be self-critical and reflexive these days, I think.

Jax: OK, sure. Is all this worth it?

Mary: Worth what? What on earth is the alternative?

Jax: (with vehemence) All these multicultural studies academics are people who could otherwise be the movement thinkers, even the organic intellectuals of a truly radical grassroots revolutionary current in this country. Instead, they're plucked away at an early age, seduced by the one-two punch of promised acclaim and pretended revolutionary impact. Sucked out of their communities: racial, ethnic, class, gender, etc. Turned by the inexorable social pressure of the Western university into a little froth-spouting functionary of the tenure-making specialty-staking quarantined elite appendage of capital that is the academy now. Do you deny it?

Rainer: Oh, for heavens' sake.

Mary: (taken aback) Jax, is that what you really think?

Jax: Well, yes, Mary. I do, and no offense but it's true.

Mary: But Jax, you know I use my university job as a way to fund my activist work. I'm part of ...

(Need to to get to multiculturalism as not addressing political economy of cultural difference. Then: does the revolution require a single frame/field of action? Ie. does the one "no" help? And what does it mean to have many "yes"es? How much difference is tolerated? And how do we weave coordination and connection if things are really different? How can people speak together? Is the "West" good for that or not?)