Group 2 - Sang it Gurrrrl.

Listening to music is inherently subjective. Adjectives, however, add another level of subjectivity. By eliminating the adjective and instead identifying elements of the grain, the act of listening remains an individual experience but becomes less subjective in that one looks to factual and physical aspects of the song that elicit pleasure.

"The 'grain' is the body in the singing voice, in the writing hand, in the performing limb. If I perceive the 'grain' of this music and if i attribute this 'grain' a theoretical value (this is the assumption of the of the text in the work), I cannot help making a new scheme of evaluation for myself, individual no doubt, since I am determined to listen to my relation to the body of someone who is singing or playing and since the relation is an erotic one, but not at all 'subjective' (it is not the psychological 'subject' in me who listens; the enjoyment that subject seeks is not going to reinforce him- to express him- but on the contrary will destroy him)" (276). -The Grain of the Voice



Mariah's structurally loose interpretation of the National Anthem using rubato is an example of Barthes' idea of the geno-song and pronunciation over articulation. The liberty she takes with this song is representational of her physicality, the imperfections and deviations from the notated song using rubato and phrasing are indicative of the grain of the voice.

Jessica, Grant, Ian, PFunk

Who Runs the World

In our current musical situation the individual, likewise humanity, is liquidated. The distinction of producer and consumer has become irrelevant, there is only the exchange value of the product. “This explains why individual expressions of preference – or of course, dislike – converge in an area where object and subject alike make such reactions questionable. The fetish character of music produces its own camouflage through the identification of the listener with the fetish” (Adorno, 48). For the listener lost to the fetish there exists an unknown loss of agency and an illusion of choice.

The distinctions of culture/counterculture, and high/low music are illusory in that both partake of the superstructure that is the machine of culture. The superstructure is the circulation of commodities and music has been commodified, processed and packaged to the same extent as a pair of sneakers or fast food. Identity is commodified in the circulation where the individual constructs their identity through purchasing commodities.

The more you buy into the identity that you associate with a particular type of music the more you have to and you are always already going to buy the music. Choice becomes more limited the more familiar you are with music because listeners are continually drawn back to the familiar and comfortable.

This is yet another song telling girls what they are, defining their place in the world, what they do, and who they are. It simultaneously steals their power from them while constructing and positing an identity of power for them, achieved through sexual objectification ("Hope you still like me, fuck you pay me" Lyric). Beyonce claims that her "persuasion can build a nation" and reading her body as text, her gyrating vagina tells us that a woman's persuasive power lies not in her voice, but rather in her ability to seduce, thus completing the cycle of the human fully being realized as a commodity through musical performance.

Group 1: Chris Wong, Nate Smith, Miguel Palmer, Amy Ruland, Angela Torres de Amante

Group Three: Against Regressive Listening

According to Adorno, the question posed seems to be is there a type of music that exists outside of the culture industry that can be used to combat the regressive listening?

For Adorno, certain music “proposes to consciously resist the phenomenon of regressive listening...[this] music gives form to that anxiety, that terror, that insight into the catastrophic situation which others merely evade by regressing.” Within popular music, we unconsciously fall to regressive listening. In this regression, we shield ourselves from being conscious of our “catastrophic situation”–the reality of our condition and our manipulation by the culture industry. In contrast, Adorno proposes that certain music terrifies us and exposes to us our reality. This consciousness of our “catastrophic” makes us anxious and agitates us. We can no longer evade the reality of our condition.

Perhaps Barthes conception of “the grain” answers Adorno’s challenge for this music.

Barthes writes, “This evaluation will be made outside of the law. It will baffle the law of culture but also the law of anti-culture; it will develop beyond the subject all the value which is hidden behind “I like” or “I don’t like.” Barthes’ answer to Adorno’s query regarding music for the non-regressive listener is music that is valued based on enjoyment, what we like or don’t like; also known as the concept of the ‘grain of the voice.’ It is music that we develop an erotic relationship with. Music with a grain of the voice can effect us so bodily that the individual power of “I like” or “don’t like” of the individual defies the laws of culture.

Adorno proposes the music of Anton Webern is precisely the type of music that combats regressive listening. The atonality of the the piece “Five Masterpieces for Orchestra” goes against the Western listener’s expectations and sensibility. Its rubs against the grain of the laws of Western musical culture and therefore has a grain in and of itself. Instruments are not played conventionally. There are sudden bursts and crashes of sound. We cannot predict how the music will move, and if we begin to think we can, what we imagine or long for is disrupted. We are rapt, we become anxious, and our body is constrained in discomfort.

Elaine, Karina, Jessica, & James

Group Awesome: Adorno's "On the Fetish Character" & Barthes' "Grain of the Voice"

"No less characteristic of the regressive musical language is the quotation. Its use ranges from the conscious quotation of folk and children’s songs, by way of ambiguous and half accidental allusions, to completely latent similarities and associations" (Adorno, The Culture Industry pp. 52).

"Such phonetics (Am I alone in hearing it? Am I hearing voices in the voice? But is it not the truth of the voice to be hallucinated? Is not the entire space of the voice an infinite space? No doubt this was the meaning of Saussere's work on anagrams)—such phonetics does not exhaust signifying (which is inexhaustible); at least it imposes a limit on those efforts of expressive reduction made by a whole culture upon the poem and its melody" (The Grain of the Voice pp. 272).




What are the different conceptions of the two author's understanding of the relation of the audience to music?

Adorno seems to put the audience in a group that consumes the product, shaping and shaped by that consumption. It retards our musical listening ability, but the demand for success necessitates both recognizability and enough difference not to be seen as the same song. All top 20 hits might be the same, but if they were literally covers of the previous top 20 no one would listen and they would fail. Barthes sees the relationship as that of listening being reading, and the music becomes a text to be interpreted within their individuals specific politicized experiences. Despite the limitation imposed by culture on possible significations, the range of "correct" interpretations does not limit the possibility of individual readings of the text.

How is music produced as an artifact, is it language or is it ideology?

For Adorno music is the result of the culture industry as a commodity for consumption, functioning as an ideology in that it's ease of consumption helps to retard the public's demand for anything better. Barthes looks as music as yet another language, albeit one with different rules of signification and possibilities of meaning.

How does reference and quotation work in the musical production?

The atomistic consumption of music, especially in America, highlights for Adorno how vastly retarded the consumption of music has become. It's the fetishization of not just the song, but certain moments and movements within it. Barthes remains silent on this subject and this silence is a loud presence which indicates that, frankly, he has better things to talk about. Like Panzera and his eliding consonants and rolling his R's better than a Canadian could ever hope.

While Adorno's answers sufficiently answers the practical experience of every day life and explains how it is we got here it does not retard the potential truthiness of Barthes' views. Therefore we will engage in the wisdom of Solomon and split the difference, they are both right. Ambivalence, yay!


Go Team Awesome!
- signed -
Sir Birney Richard Young II, KoB
Mitchell Khurin
Sarah Mosby
Dennis Wong

Herbie Hancock, Chameleon

"For while it must constantly promise its listeners something different, excite their attention and keep itself from becoming run-of-the-mill, it is not allowed to leave the beaten path; it must be always new and always the same. Hence, the deviations are just as standardized as the standards and in effect revoke themselves the instant they appear" (Adorno Jazz 126).

Group 3 Post

“It is contemporary listening which has regressed, arrested at the infantile stage. Not only do the listening subjects lose, along with the freedom of choice and responsibility, the capacity for conscious perception of music, which was from time immemorial confined to a narrow group, but they stubbornly reject the possibility of such perception. They fluctuate between comprehensive forgetting and sudden dives into recognition” (46).

• Contemporary regressive listening has lead us to a false consciousness. We become “subjects” to the music industry. In contemporary popular music, we have only the illusion of freedom of choice and responsibility and even worse--we cannot perceive the reality that we are truly without choice vs. the illusion of our agency.
• iTunes is the ultimate example of the music industry’s control over public consumption. Because of the convenience of iTunes and iPods, consumers become dependent on them for their musical consumption; that dependence means that, through iTunes, the music industry can establish and control what is made available to the public, while giving the perception of providing a wide variety of musical products to the consumer, which was not previously possible without iTunes and the internet.

“In regressive listening, advertising takes on a compulsory character... The type of relationship suggested by the billboard, in which masses make a commodity recommended to them the object of their own action is in fact found again as the pattern for the reception of light music” (48).

• Culture industry creates desire for mass media entertainment which offers propaganda/advertisement (disguised as pleasure) that lulls us the masses (or the consumers) to be complacent with our conditions.
• The music industry has made the public into voracious consumers that hunger for whatever product that it churns out; the product being top 40 hits, such as Britney Spears’ “I Wanna Go”. This consumption of fabricated products creates a demand for more of the same, creating a cycle of supply and demand. The demand has become so mindless that the consumers are satisfied with the musical products that sound like they’ve been cobbled together from previous products.

Group 2: Adorno "On the Fetish Character..." p. 36-39

Musical Fetishism

Within this section of "On the Fetish Character of Music," Adorno suggests musical fetishism eliminates sensuous, or use, valuations of music and replaces them with exchange valuations. Adorno explicates this point, in part, by looking at the relationship between the singer and his voice, noting "In earlier epochs, technical virtuosity, at least, was demanded of singing stars, the castrati and prima donnas. Today, the material as such, destitute of any function, is celebrated. One need not even ask about capacity for musical performance" (36-7). Prior to music fetishism, the value of the voice was linked to the body, the "material" that produced the voice. Contemporarily, however, "One need not even ask" or concern oneself with the body that produced the voice because voice has been disembodied in becoming a commodity. What Adorno is suggesting is that part of the sensuous (use) value of music is related to, or comes from, its connection the "material" (bodies) that produce it.

This is not to say that the sensuous (use) value is erased, but rather eliminated as it was known before. The sensuous value is itself alienated in the same way the voice is from the body. "If the moments of sensual pleasure in the idea, the voice, the instrument are made into fetishes and torn away from any functions which could give them meaning, they meet a response equally isolated, equally far from the meaning of the whole..." (37). The "sensuous pleasure" of the voice is "torn away" from the uses it once had such that its new value is one based on exchange value associated with all commodity: its monetary value.

"The consumer is really worshipping the money that he himself has paid for the ticket to the Toscanini concert" (38). The value of seeing Toscanini conduct an orchestra is determined by the value of the money paid for the tick such that the consumer is "worshipping" the exchange value of the money spent on the ticket. That is, the consumer insofar as he is consuming the concert performance as a commodity worth X amount of dollars (the cost of his ticket) he is valuing the performance on level of the exchange value, how much it cost him and not the level use (sensuous) value.

Pink Floyd was one of the first groups, along with the Rolling Stones, to introduce VIP ticket packages that corresponded to better treatment and better seats at their concerts. The irony of their song "Money" is not to be lost. The lyrics (posted below), present a satirical look at the fixation of money as a value in itself.



Money, get away
Get a good job with more pay and you're okay
Money, it's a gas
Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash
New car, caviar, four star daydream,
Think I'll buy me a football team

Money get back
I'm alright Jack keep your hands off my stack.
Money it's a hit
Don't give me that do goody good bullshit
I'm in the hi-fidelity first class travelling set
And I think I need a Lear jet

Money it's a crime
Share it fairly but don't take a slice of my pie
Money so they say
Is the root of all evil today
But if you ask for a raise it's no surprise that they're
giving none away

Concert--Decade of Difference.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/the-difference/rewatch-decade-difference-concert-081706702.html

"Perfect, immaculate performance in the latest style preserves the
work at the price of its definitive reification...The performance sounds like its own
phonograph record. The dynamic is so predetermined that there are no
longer any tensions at all. The contradictions of the music material are
so inexorably resolved in the moment of sound that it never arrives at
the synthesis, the self-production of the work, which reveals the meaning of every Beethoven symphony."





Adorno to me, seems to suggest that the fetish character of music and its industry drives musicians to compose for perfectly reproducible performances. It is as if the pieces were to be played on a phonograph the same every time, rather than created to be listened to, or to be played. I'm placing these two versions of Kenna side by side. The first is the recorded/produced version off of his album. The second is a live performance. While the musical shape of these two performances is generally the same, in the live version there are stylistic nuances not only in the vocals but also the instrumentals. For these two examples (and for the juxtaposition of many other live/recorded pieces): I'm very accustomed to the album recording, and expects its sonic gestures, so while listening to this live version, I encounter a tension between what I anticipate and what I'm given. As the listener, I was forced into their own process of synthesis and self-production of the work.

Classic Remix

"The practice of arrangement extends to the most diverse dimensions. Sometimes it seizes on the time. It blatantly snatches the reified bits and pieces out of their context and sets them up as a pot-pourri. It destroys the multilevel unity of the whole work and brings forward only isolated popular passages" (Adorno, 41) On the Fetish Character

"You Like Huey Lewis and the News?"

"The sacrifice of individuality, which accommodates itself to the regularity of the successful, the doing of what everybody does, follows from the basic fact that in broad areas the same thing is offered to everybody by the standardized production of consumption goods. But the commercial necessity of connecting this identity leads to the manipulation of taste and the official culture’s pretence of individualism which necessarily increases in proportion to the liquidation of the individual. (Adorno 40)"

The Unity of Their Contradiction

In speaking about the lower and higher types of music Adorno writes, "The unity of the two spheres of music is thus that of an unresolved contradiction. They do not hang together in such a way that the lower could serve as a sort of popular introduction to the higher, or that higher could renew its lost collective strength by borrowing from the lower" (34). Here I agree and offer this clip of I Can by Nas which includes the repetition of Fur Elise by Beethoven; a piece familiar to anyone who has had piano lessons. Although this song may not rekindle an interest in Beethoven or open up the world of Hip Hop to Classical listeners it does serve a purpose. Adorno goes on to write about the commodification of just these types of songs. By using the Beethoven selection I believe that Nas has awakened his listeners ears to something new and unfamiliar and helped himself sell more records in the process.

Adorno - Taste is Obsolete

"Nothing really new is allowed to intrude, nothing but calculated effects that add some spice to the ever-sameness whithout imperiling it" ("Popular Music" p. 26).



"The sacrifice of individuality which accommodates itslef to the regularity of the successful, the doing of what everybody does, follows from the basic fact that in broad areas the same thing is offered to everybody by the standardized production of consumption goods" ("On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening p. 40)

This project, taking two "different" songs and cuting them at various points to interchange them, reavels that the two songs are exactly the same. Taking Adorno's theory of the schema of pop music requiring strict adherance so as to produce the same "standardized" form of song is here furthered. Not only do they abide by the rigid mold of pop music, but they are in fact the same song, with minute differences in lyrics and artist. That both of these songs were independantly popular and gained a lot of success, exemplifies Adorno's argument of taste having vanished. The songs themselves are consumer goods, rythmically the same, yet both are consumed by mass culture. This also emphasizes the "liquidation of the individual", as taste is manipulated.

Adorno's Fetish Character from Culture Industry: Metallica & San Francisco Orchestra

“The illusion of a social preference for light music as against serious is based on that passivity of the masses which makes the consumption of light music contradict the objective interest of those who consume it. It is claimed that they actually like light music and listen to the higher type only for reasons of social prestige, when acquaintance with the text of a single hit song suffices to reveal the sole function this object of honest approbation can perform. The unity of the two spheres of music is thus that of an unresolved contradiction. They do not hang together in such a way that the lower could serve as a sort of popular introduction to the higher, or that higher could renew its lost collective strength by borrowing from the lower. The whole cannot be put together by adding the separated halves, but in both there appear, however distantly, the changes of the whole, which only moves in contradiction. If the flight from the banal becomes definitive, if the marketability of the serious product shrinks to nothing, in consequence of its objective demands, then on the lower level the effect of the standardization of successes means it is no longer possible to succeed in an old style, but only in imitation as such. Between incomprehensibility and inescapability, there is no third way; the situation has polarized itself into extremes which actually meet. There is no room between them for the ‘individual’. The latter’s claims, wherever they still occur, are illusory, being copied from the standards. The liquidation of the individual is the real signature of the new musical situation” (Adorno’s Fetish pp. 34-35)

In 1999, Metallica released its S&M album in which they recorded their songs with additional symphonic accompaniment. The idea was to combine heavy metal with an epic classical approach—mixing the low-brow with the high-brow. In Master of Puppets, there are moments where there is absolute brilliance between the band and the orchestra such as during Kirk Hammett’s solo; however, there are other moments where the orchestra isn't all that effective and the end product sounds cacophonous. The symphony really rocks when Metallica and the orchestra are blended at a good volume, so that the orchestra does not overshadow the band. Here, Adorno would see the symphony as merely imitating Metallica’s style rather than accompanying it with its own unique style. Master of Puppets is a clear representation of Adorno’s problem with mainstream music colliding with the serious, intellectual classical music: it creates yet another mainstream song without regard to the symphony’s potential to create their own masterpiece.

To the extreme I rock this blog like a vandal. . .

"What is incessantly boosted as exceptional grows dull, and the festivities to which light music permanently summons its adherents, under the name of feasts for the ears, are dismal everyday fare."

- Adorno, Popular Music (25)

To those of us who have never enjoyed Vanilla Ice save with irony this may come as a surprise; he was popular music once. The success of rap/hip hop as an original outgrowth of inner city discontent and racial frustration with systemic injustices (to do the scene gross injustice and rob it of all it's vitality) led to popular music labels trying to reproduce within their own formula that which was original in rap.

If I may, I will indulge myself in some tongue and cheek close reading, Vanilla, despite being a delicious flavor, carries the figurative connotation of being plain, consumable. When something is described as vanilla, like in software circles when you say you are using a vanilla version of Mozilla, you are saying that it is unadorned. No extra flavor, no spice, as it were. Ice, of course, is considered cold as well as plain and unadorned. Someone who is icy does not have an affect, they are not lively or vivacious. So, Vanilla Ice is the unadorned unlively repetition of the highly adorned and highly lively aspects of an encroaching music, he was the turning of rap/hip hop into popular music. His presence, his repetition of tropes but abandonment of what made them meaningful, made rap music safely consumeable.

Word to your mothers, Birney out.

Rage Against The Machine - 'Guerilla Radio'

"The hits not only appeal to a 'lonely crowd' of the atomized; they reckon with the immature, with those who cannot express their emotions and experiences, who either never had the power of expression or were crippled by cultural taboos....Socially the hits either channel emotions--thus recognizing them--or vicariously fulfill the longing for emotions." Theodore Adorno, 'Introduction To The Sociology of Music,' pp.27

Imitation

'At its most passionate, musical fetishism takes possession of the public valuation of singing voices. Their sensuous magic is traditional as is the close relation between success and the person endowed with 'material'...Today, the material as such, destitute of any function, is celebrated. One need not even ask about capacity for musical performance.' (On the Fetish Character 36-7).

Bathes: The Grain of the Voice

“It is this shift that I should like to sketch here, not with regard to all music, but only with regard to a portion of voice music (art song, lied, or me’lodie); a very specific space (genre) in which a language encounters a voice. I shall immediately give a name to this signifier on the level of which, I believe, the temptation of ethos can be liquidated – and the adjective therefore dismissed: this name will be the grain: the grain of the voice, when the voice is double posture, a double production: of language of music”
-Roland Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice”, (p. 269)

“The “grain” of the voice is not – or not only – its timbre; the signifying it affords cannot be better defined by the friction between music and something else, which is the language (and not the message at all).”
-Roland Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice”, (p. 273)







Music is given a voice when it encounters an artist singer. The voice of the song or the artist voice is very unique and can form identification or trademark that work well with the star’s image. There are few voices that you encounter that have this signature sound. One of the most distinctive voices in the industry is that of Aretha Franklin. Barthes theory of the “Grain of the Voice” can be related to this. He sees the singing voice as an expressive instrument and therefore able to make associations of its own.

For my posting I have chosen one song, “The Prayer” sung by two sets of artist, Celine Dion & Andrea Bocelli and Yolanda Adams & Donnie McClurkin. These artist represent three different genres of music (Classical, Pop and Gospel). This demonstrates the distinctive sound of each artist as they inte

"They cannot stand the strain of concentrated listening and surrender themselves resignedly to what befalls them, with which they can come to terms only if they do not listen to it too closely...it is not attended to except during conversation and, above all, as an accompaniment to dancing...All that is realized is what the spotlight falls on – striking melodic intervals, unsettling modulations, intentional or unintentional mistakes, or whatever condenses itself into a formula by an especially intimate merging of melody and text" (Fetish Character, 22).

Chimaira - Severed

"The geno-song is the volume of the speaking and singing voice, the space in which the significations germinate "from within the language and in its very materiality"; this is a signifying function alien to communication, to representation (of feelings), to expression; it is that culmination (or depth) of production where melody actually works on language–not what it says but the voluptuous pleasure of its signifier-sounds, of its letters: explores how language works and identifies itself with that labor. Geno-song is, in a very simple word which must be taken quite seriously: the diction of language" (Barthes, 270-271).

Barthes - God Is Trying to Tell You Something

The contrast between the two singers, I think, exemplifies the difference between "pheno-song" and "geno-song" (The Grain of the Voice p.270). The first singer sings with clarity and articulation. Her voice is clear and supported with the breath, "here it is soul that accompanies the song, not the body" (p.271). Further, the first singer is technically sound, and articulate. "Articulation, in effect, functions abusively as a pretense of meaning: claiming to serve meaning, it basically misreads it" (Music, Voice, and Language p. 283). When Shug Avrey sings, it is loose and material, I hear "the tongue, the glottis, the teeth, the sinuses, the nose", the focus in on the vowels where there is "'truth' of language, not its functionality" (The Grain of the Voice p. 272). Shug sings with pronunciation, which "is music which enters the language and discovers there what is musical, what is 'amorous'" (Music, Voice, Language p. 283). She sings "full throatdedly: like a schoolboy who goes out into the countryside and sings for himself", with the "naked voice" (p.284). The "naked voice" orginated from the folk song, "because it was important to understand the story: something is being told, which I must receive without disguise: nothing but the voice and the telling" (p.284). Shug's singing embodies that idea; the proununciation and the phrasing tell the story of the song completely (and of the scene in the film). She conveys "what is at once outside meaning and non-meaning" (p.284)

Cocteau Twins - Cherry Colored Funk

"Then what is music? Panzera's art answers: a quality of language. But this quality of language in no way derives from the sciences of languages (poetics, rhetoric, semiology), for in becoming a quality, what is promoted in language is what it does not say, does not articulate. In the unspoken appears pleasure, tenderness, delicacy, fulfillment, all the values of the most delicate image-repertoire. Music is both what is expressed and what is implicit in the text: what is pronounced (submitted to inflections) but is not articulated: what is at once outside meaning and non-meaning, fulfilled in that signfying [significance], which the theory of the text today seeks to postulate and to situate." (284)





In reading Barthes' analysis of voice, music, and language, the only music I could think of that distinctly embodied his ideas to me was that of Cocteau Twins. The music of the Cocteau Twins is marked by the vague, syllabic, and Barthes would perhaps say, pronounced expression of Elizabeth Fraser's singing voice. It is a singing that revels in the purely oratorical elements of language without being marked by any conventional idea of "meaning." Her phrases are barely words at all. It is a singing of the body, devoid of any denotative content, yet it speaks without articulating.

Stella Soliel's take on "A Warm Place"

“Music, like signifying, derives from no metalanguage but only from a discourse of value, of praise: from a lover's discourse: every “successful” relation – successful in that it manages to say the implicit without articulating it, to pass over articulation without falling into censorship of desire or sublimation of the unspeakable – such a relation can rightly be called musical. Perhaps a thing is valid only by its metaphoric power; perhaps that is the value of music, then: to be good metaphors”(284-285).

I think it is necessary to throw out there that I have used a version of this song on the blog before. This mix simply adds a layer of vocals but changes it pretty dramatically. If I understand the concepts correctly I think this piece may serve as an that works against "articulation".

Fad Gadget "Collapsing New People"

"...it is the 'secret': that which, concealed in reality, can reach human consciousness only through a code, which serves simultaneously to encipher and decipher that reality. Listening is henceforth linked (in a thousand varied indirect forms) to a hermeneutics: to listen is to adopt an attitude of decoding what is obscure, blurred or mute, in order to make available to consciousness the 'underside' of meaning" (249).

Barthes: The Sensuality of Musica Practica

"The music you play depends not so much on an auditive as on a manual (hence much more sensuous) activity; it is the music you or I can play, alone or among friends, with no audience but its participants...it is a muscular music; in it the auditive sense has only a degree of sanction: as if the body was listening, not the soul..."

This piece demonstrates the embodied-ness of musica practica that Barthes speaks of. In this piece, hree men stood over three massive drums called “daiko,” each holding two sticks, called “bache” in their hands. They began by standing incredibly still and upright as they took their uniform positions in synchrony. Positioned in a triangle formation, their stance was wide, and their knees were bent deeply, bringing them close to the earth. Their right legs were slightly behind their left, rooting them in a stable cross-lateral pattern. Their arms began low, in line with their hips. They began to strike the daiko with the bache in a left-right left-right cross lateral pattern, first keeping the movement small and the bache close to the drum’s face. But as their tempo quickened, the movements became bigger and the force exerted on the drum was stronger which sent a thunder-like sound throughout the concert hall. Viewing the lead drummer from the back, I noticed that the motion of striking the daiko moved successively through the drummer’s body. He would first yield into the earth with his back leg then push down the leg. The power from the yield-and-push would flow through the rest of the body, up through the back, through the core, down the arm, and through the elbow and wrist, finally connecting with the bache and the drum face in one movement phrase. It seemed as if the drum responded to this strike because once the bache made contact with the daiko’s face, it seemed to throw the drummer’s arm back into the air with reciprocal force as if the drum and the drummer were equals in a conversation. There was a circular continuity to how the drummers moved. As one arm fell to the drum, the other rose in a mesmerizing pattern. I could not believe how long the performers were able to maintain their rhythm and with such vigor.

The power of the drummers’ movement translated into the rhythms they created. The deep sound of the drums completely filled the theater and I could feel the reverberations come up through the floor and into the soles of my feet. I felt as if the sound was so full bodied that it took up a physical space in the room. It seemed as if there was almost no space for me and I felt physically pushed in by the weight of the sound.

Great Gig in the Sky, Pink Floyd

"The human voice is, as a matter of fact, the privileged (eidetic) site of difference: a site which escapes all science, for there is no science (physiology, history, aesthetics, psychoanalysis) which exhausts the voice: no matter how much you classify and comment on music historically, sociologically, aesthetically, technically, there will always be a remainder, a supplement, a lapse, something non-spoken which designates itself: the voice. This always different object is assigned by psychoanalysis to the category of objects of desire: there is no human voice which is not an object of desire—or of repulsion: there is no neutral voice—and if sometimes that neutrality, that whiteness of the voice occurs, it terrifies us, as if we were to discover a frozen world, one which in which desire was dead. Every relation to a voice is necessarily erotic, and this is why it is in the voice that music's difference is so apparent—its constraint to evaluate, to affirm" (Music, Voice, Language pp. 280)

Dwight Yoakam - A Thousand Miles From Nowhere (Video)

"In this fragmented world, distorted by whirling appearances (the whole world is carnival), a pure and somehow terribly motionless element occasionally breaks through: pain" (Music, Voice, Language 296). Barthes goes on to say that there is no way to name pain, that it exists completely as itself. That "pain without object, the essence of pain, is...a madman's pain" (296). Barthes, says that Schumann suffers because he has no conflict, no "confrontation" (297). To capture a thing's essence, namely that of pain, one loses the rhythm of the sensation. This idea makes me wonder if the expression of pain through music is like the drinking of water when thirsty. Is the pain soothed by dint of being expressed through music, which has no "sign" but instead is purity felt through the body (311)? Dwight soothes, not only through the sight of those gorgeous leather pants but through his closeness to melancholic angst. This song causes a tremor through the heart strings as loneliness and sadness are felt through the high, whippoorwill-esque, longing of his voice.

Mid-Term

Alone- Ben Harper: Music, Voice, Language

"Articulation, he used to say, is the simulacrum and the enemy of pronunciation.. [articulation] seeks to give each consonant the same phonic intensity, whereas in a musical text a consonant is never the same: each syllable must be set in the general meaning of the phrase" (282). and also "Artliculation, in effect, functions abusively as a pretense of meaning.. it involves the singer in a highly ideological art of expressivity- or, to be even more precise, of dramatization: the melodic line is broken into fragments of meaning, into semantic sighs, into effect of hysteria" (283)

I am not sure whether Ben Harper's song "Alone" would fall under pronunciation or articulation. I would like to say that he pronounces, more than he articulates. Clearly, each consonant is not given the same phonic intensity- His voice expresses a whole different range of intensities. Fall and rising, twirling, etc. However, I would say his rendition is very dramatized and this imparts meaning on the song. His voice embodies the sadness/darkness he feels of being alone. So, I am at odds with whether or not this is pronunciation or articulation.

Barthes: Music, Voice, Language

"Music is both what is expressed and what is implicit in the text: what is pronounced (submitted to inflections) but is not articulated: what is at once outside meaning and non-meaning, fulfilled in that signifying [significance], which the theory of the text today seeks to postulate and to situate."
-Roland Barthes - Music, Voice, Language, p284



This song was written by, gospel artist, Kirk Franklin after the crisis in Haiti. Mr. Franklin gathered several of his friends to sing this some to raise money for the Haitian relief. Barthes says that music is expressed, the message of the song is; "Is there anybody out there listening?". Barthes also states music is implicit. The implicit message, as I see it, why does it take a disaster for us to notice the injustice in the world. Haiti has always been an impoverished country, however the world does not take notice until a massive earthquake hits. Music is able to address an issue directly while bringing attention to another indirectly.

Barthes: Music, Voice, Language & Led Zeppelin

"Since then, I have not stopped listening to his voice, on the rare, technically imperfect records he has made: Panzera's historical misfortune is that he ruled over French art songs between the wars but no testimony to the reign can be directly transmitted to us: Panzera stopped singing at the very advent of the long-playing record; we have only only some 78 rmp's of his work, or imperfect recordings. Nonetheless, this circumstance retains its ambiguity: for if listening to these records may disappoint today, it is because these records are imperfect, and perhaps more generally because history itself has modified our tastes, so that this way of singing has lapsed into the indifference of the out-of-fashion, but also, more topically, because this voice participates in my affirmation, my evaluation, and because itis therefore possible that I am the only one to love it." Roland Barthes, 'Music, Voice, Language,' pp. 280.



It seems here Barthes is suggesting the voice, disembodied by its recording--the medium on which it is recorded and then presented--loses its import, its eros when that medium falls out of fashion, which is to say, when the technology that created the medium is seen as obsolete or inferior or "imperfect" and thus the voice contained therein. The 78 rpm records were "imperfect" in comparison to the newer 33 rpm long-plays and so Panzera's voice became imperfect. Here, the performance of "Babe I'm Going to Leave You" by Led Zeppelin is "imperfect": the film is blurry, black and white when compared to the high definition color "film" of today; the sound too lacks, the decibel levels peak beyond the capacity of the equipment recording it. The bass distorts in its lowest octaves, the gain of the guitar bleeds over the other tracks; the vocals fight the hiss of the magnetic tape; the drums are subdued in the mid and high ranges of the frequencies; And as a live recording the performance lacks the expected 'polish' and preciseness of real time auto-tuning, processing and backup tracks. However, these imperfections are no longer entirely of the contemporary. We are in a time of over-production, where perfection is seen as over articulation, and thus inauthentic. This performance is then more valuable than it was perhaps a decade ago, perhaps even more than when it first aired on television. Today it is more 'raw,' more authentic because the "imperfections" signify as much, its eros was reduced in history then made stronger and more potent. In this way, the disembodied voice is susceptible to degradation and amplification, strength and weakening only in relation to it disembodied self. This can be both positive and negative, it seems Barthes is saying, and yet never quite the original.

Pheno-Text and Geno-Text

An explanation of the two terms:

http://www.signosemio.com/kristeva/semanalysis.asp

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!?!?

once again, cheers has uncannily paralleled Rhet 108. See 5:15 (or watch the full thing its awesome).

Mona Lisa

A song about a "cold and lonely, lovely work of art".
Art commenting on art.
I wonder what Schopenhauer would say about this one...Being that it is a piece of music, which he saw as superior to all other forms of "fine art" but the lyrics are a direct representation of a phenomenon (the painting of Mona Lisa) in our reality. Sorry Nat King Cole, this may not be a "Schopenhauerian" example of music in its perfect universality, but it sure is catchy.

my soul needs rest

After a week of essaying, today marks the due date third and final paper of my midterm season, Part I. After exhaustive close listening to Wagner's Prelude to Act I of Tristan und Isolde for my paper, I'm reposting it back here to rest and stop the sleep-deprived turmoil of my being.

Midterm Selection

A Harmony of Dissonance

Because, Paige, you were right and I can only stand so much peace. Dissolution must be resolved with resolute unremitting reference . The world is, we are, this essay is due. Some things are just true. . . Sing it brother:

Essay Reprieve

I don't know how many people will check the blog this week, but I hope some of you will. I was looking through the blog to find a post of mine to put in my paper, and I noticed that a few people posted on Nietzsche claim of music making the spirit free. Suddenly, I was struck with a vivid memory of the following scene from Shawshank Redemption. As I watched the clip on youtube, I was painfully aware of the comparison between writing a paper and being in jail, and that for the minutes I spared to watch this video, I felt the computer dissolving from in front of me, the papers strewn around me disappear, and every last student on Derby St, felt free.

Hope you all enjoy.