Science, analogy and criticism

(This post is long, argued in a slow-and-steady-wins-the-race fashion and is not sparkling with original material, I’m sorry. If you’re bored of the nuum debates or only willing to wade through so much Foam today, just skip ahead to my next post on the music formerly known as Wonky, it’s much more exciting).
Simon Reynolds has responded to the recent seminar on the hardcore continuum with a series of semi-theoretical essays, ‘The Nuum and its Discontents’ (1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 is on its way), aiming to parry or elaborate on the issues brought up that day. Given the many-headed resistance to his ideas and the often emotive descriptive vigour with which he constructs and continues to maintain his specific conception of the nuum, it’s not surprising to detect an almost anxiously defensive tone in these latest reflections. The rather playful, light-hearted and subversively satirical pragmatic tone of Dan Hancox’s or Melissa Bradshaw's contributions (which I hoped to continue in my last post by being inane and geeky), and the careful, skillfully cogent meditations of Alex Williams have, with their different approaches, presented alternative models for discourse on UK dance music. Taken as a whole then, the nuum debate raises broader, timely questions about the role and limits of criticism – or whatever it is these writers are doing.


A notable feature of the debate, my last post included, has been the use of analogy in illustrating arguments. I should emphasise again that analogies (and possibly theories by extension) do not constitute reality but merely describe it to a relative degree of (im)perfection. They are not truth, they cannot truly reveal: they can only hope to persuade. To this end, an argument is only as good as the persuasiveness of its analogies, the extent of their recognisability, in the variegated minds of its audience. Analogy is imperfect, but very much has its uses: it makes sense and in many cases it’s all we have.

Though it may not be an entirely conventional usage of the word, we might say that the notion of the ‘hardcore continuum’ is an analogy, one that describes certain activity in British music of the last twenty years. Analogy is (rightly) an important element in Reynolds’s writing, and he has used it to illustrate the nuum – most famously, in aiming to portray the nuum as a coherent and independent object that exists prior to discourse he likened it to Australia. In the second of his ‘Discontents’ posts, Reynolds modified the analogy to Jamaica, due to its largely self-regulating and prodigiously lively popular music culture. Interestingly and rather bizarrely (redundantly?), these analogies can be challenged on their own very same terms: at the seminar Joe Muggs pointed out that the geographical ontologies of Australia could be contested by the many aboriginal nations who live there (long before the predominantly white governors of today were established). One could also wonder, if the analogy is going to be geographical, whether regions like Siberia or Transylvania wouldn’t be more appropriate – with inland boundaries that shift depending on geography, politics, history, geology, culture and ethnicity, the ontological statuses of these places are far from simple cases, and I’d argue that this problematic ontology is more appropriate for describing a ‘macroscene’ or ‘macrogenre’ such as the UK hardcore continuum. Is the nuum really an island? To adapt a famous saying, and venture even further into this orgy of analogy, I’d suggest that ‘no genre is an island’.

While it makes sense to speak of ‘Siberia’, its status as a coherent object is challenged because there are different ways of drawing its borders.

Yet another analogy about the ontology of the nuum? Oh go on then. As Reynolds had to connect disparate sources of evidence together to constitute his notion of a hardcore continuum, consider this one. Imagine the nuum as the constellation of Sagittarius, and the data or evidence involved in the nuum notion (club nights, records, people etc) to be the stars that comprise it. The stars of the constellation Sagittarius are objectively existent, empirically verifiable things, they are data. But the constellation itself isn’t, it’s a human construct. Now the stars of Sagittarius are the brightest in that particular area of the sky and they’re close together, so it makes a lot of sense for them to be discussed as a constellation – useful to stargazers, astrologers and to astronomers. Naturally different constellations could be drawn using some or all of the stars in Sagittarius and other stars (which has happened in different cultures), and if we had more sensitive eyes, a different atmosphere or lived in another part of the galaxy we probably would have drawn a different constellation, but that aside - for a lot of people and not least those who first drew Sagittarius, it makes considerable sense as a constellation. So there is a sort of ‘rough objectivity’ to it. Importantly though, this ‘rough objectivity’, this general ‘sense-making’ aspect of the Sagittarius constellation doesn’t make Sagittarius an objectively existent entity in the sky. And it certainly doesn’t mean there’s an enormous centaur carrying a bow and arrow galloping across the heavens.

The constellation of Sagittarius can be rationalised and reified in three successive stages. 1) The stars themselves, empirically verifiable, data, 2) lines drawn between the stars by human minds create a constellation, a construct, and 3) there’s a massive half-man half-animal monster in the sky (a claim that modern scientists now dispute). See also the notion of Asterism.
The Sagittarius-as-the-nuum analogy is fairly simple, but hopefully it shows how ideas constructed from objectively verifiable but distinct points of data are separate from data itself. Now I will complicate the analogy in an attempt to bring it more recognisably closer to the prevailing notion of the hardcore continuum. Imagine that Sagittarius is not just made of stars, but a tangled mass of very different kinds of objects – these correspond to the different media that constitute the nuum: club nights, tracks, people, events etc. Imagine that Sagittarius is not just mapped onto a two-dimensional plane where the only variables involved are those that describe the stars according to vertical and horizontal position and brightness, but a vastly multidimensional plane – corresponding to the nuum’s occupying a tangle of different historical, geographical and social areas and the complexity of variables in the music itself. Even though it may still be possible to draw a Sagittarius (i.e. to posit a continuum), the grounds for that drawing become more complex and problematic, shakier. It becomes even less valid to think of Sagittarius/nuum as a distinct, objective ‘thing’.

Knowledge acquired empirically is knowledge that is gained by direct observation using the senses, it’s (to simplify horribly) normally thought of as good quality knowledge and is important to scholarship, particularly in the sciences. Like the stars of Sagittarius, the club nights and tracks that make up the hardcore continuum actually exist to be observed by the eyes and ears, but the nuum itself doesn’t. Reynolds sarcastically comments in the second of his ‘Discontents’ essays: ‘I think that things I’ve witnessed and participated in actually… existed’, missing the important distinction between a club night (empirical data) and a nuum itself (the observer’s conclusion – not empirical). You cannot gain objective, empirical knowledge of the nuum because you can only sense the constituent parts of the nuum, which is ultimately a construct, a particular conclusion created by a subjective mind.

So here, analogy has been confused with what can be known empirically (and arguably, the word ‘empirically’ has been used incorrectly*). In a way, ‘Sagittarius’ is an analogy describing a certain group of stars, just as the nuum could be thought of as an analogy of a certain assemblage of British music. The distinction between the analogy-construct of Sagittarius and the empirically verifiable reality of its stars becomes confused in astrology, for example, where patterns of stars become personified objects that affect earthly people and their activities, and so can be used to predict the future. I’ll invite you to consider the parallels between the theorising of scenes in popular music and astrology, but will leave it there as I’m sure we’ve all had enough of analogies by now.

Saturday evenings in 1995 may have been alive with the sound of the best UK dance music for decades around, but also the sound of Mystic Meg going ‘and a group of builders from Dagenham could be celebrating toooo’.
The Australia analogy and many other analogies used in the nuum debates have the effect of reifying the nuum. A certain amount of reification is inevitable, but analogies such as that the nuum is Australia/Jamaica or a political party (a wonderfully thought-provoking but unconvincing analogy from the 4th ‘Discontents’ essay) over-cohere, over-reify the nuum to an impossible extent. Hopefully the analogies above have shown that it’s difficult to describe the nuum as an object, much less anything as coherent as an island nation or a political party. The urge to reify the nuum and the energetic disagreement over the parameters of this reification that is the nuum debate is wholly understandable. Reifying the nuum makes tangible an atmosphere that was enthusiastically felt for over a decade, it personifies, it caters for the desire to possess those moments, to bind them together and place them fondly on our mantelpieces. The image of a highly reified nuum, however, is a limiting one that, intentionally or not, has a prescriptive effect on music, and this is what I described in my last post. I strongly believe that writing on music should be aware of this effect, and avoid analogies that reify excessively, or else simultaneously draw attention to their imperfect descriptive status.

Another of Reynolds’s recent nuum analogies, from the first ‘Discontents’ post, introduces a dichotomy in examining the nuum of centripetal (i.e. that which would make a scene convergent) vs centrifugal (i.e. that which would make a scene divergent) forces. In this way Reynolds elegantly defers one of the key complaints of nuum detractors, that non-nuum styles invade the nuum to the extent that any coherency in the concept is impossible – persuasively challenging a lot of what Joe Muggs had to say at the conference, for example. In describing forces and movements rather than objects, this analogy avoids a reifying image while still illustrating a detailed theory. I would say that this was a perfect example of theory being ‘the spice of critical life’, though a simple gravitational or magnetic pull would have sufficed (is there an acting centrifugal force? I was trying to remember GCSE physics, and couldn’t shake the irrelevant, unhelpful image of a whirling ball on a rope).


I’ve previously talked about canons and how reifying musical traditions gives them their horribly prescriptive power, and Melissa Bradshaw has called Reynolds the ‘Harold Bloom of Rave’. Reynolds reacts to such criticism of the nuum in his second ‘Discontents’ essay with more sarcasm: ‘boo, hiss! Critics should never say what’s good and bad, should they?’ But a canon is more than simple value-judgment. It doesn’t look at work on its own merits, and that’s why I called it a value-judgment machine – you put a work in, you crank the handle, the machine compares the work with previously anointed classics and tests for certain ideologically-motivated criteria and ding, you get your value-judgment. A canon is also more than, as Reynolds defines it, ‘the selected masterworks within an art form’. Three of the definitions at Dictionary.com are:

3. the body of rules, principles, or standards accepted as axiomatic and universally binding in a field of study or art: the neoclassical canon.
4. a fundamental principle or general rule: the canons of good behavior.
5. a standard; criterion: the canons of taste.

The word comes from the Greek kanon or measuring rod, an image that reminds us of the Procrustean bed. Canons are based on a necessarily limited set of aesthetic criteria chosen by the canonisers, i.e those with power of aesthetic persuasion, thus it is akin to an authoritarian regime – ‘bourgeois taste’ works in this way. I am repeating myself (and thanks for still reading by the way).

Reynolds takes up the theme of literary canons and suggests another analogy: ‘the nuum is not equivalent to the canon of Western Literature, it’s equivalent… to Western Literature itself’. I’m guessing most of us were aware (I know I was) that the nuum isn’t literally the collection of greatest hits, and I mentioned a ‘canonical resonance’. What’s problematic about Reynolds’s analogy here is that the category of ‘Western Literature’ is itself a canon, not just because it’s ‘Western’, but because an aesthetic decision has to be made as to what is or is anywhere near ‘literature’ in the first place. Even more radically than Mills and Boon never even getting to be called ‘Western Literature’, works like the Radio Times are unlikely to ever be in that category because of the aesthetic filtration process that constitutes a canon. There is also the matter of musical canons being conceptually different to literary canons due to differing modes of production, dissemination and reception between the two: in some cases musical production is a riskier, more difficult process, making musical canons fiercer than their literary counterparts. Now of course canons can’t be avoided (a certain degree of discrimination is usually necessary), but some of their more totalising, prescriptive effects can be.


A canon is like shining a red light or looking through red glasses – everything looks like it’s coloured a variously intense shade of that red, but not only are green things not particularly visible, but you are missing out on the pleasure of their greenness. Canons have necessarily limited angles on aesthetic appreciation and miss or reject things that could be appreciated in other ways. To return to Stockhausen: his music would be roundly rejected from a dance canon because it rarely has a strong sense of pulse, but there are other aesthetic criteria that his work can be fruitfully judged on – form, timbre, innovation – which people do appreciate. It is this limited aesthetic agenda which drowns out some genuinely interesting music simply for being different, and I hope to show that this has happened in part because of nuum discourse in my next post on ‘wonky’. This aesthetic filtration, this canonising process has led to the distaste for wonky and funky due in part to their distance from the conventional nuum tradition, and the less than entirely encouraging depictions of them from authorities: those who are established enough to have their work appear in widely-read publications, and tend to be trusted when they discuss music. I’m not saying that everything has value in its own particular way and that critical authorities should bloody well locate and attend to it, but that there are many types of aesthetic value that deserve to be recognised and acknowledged rather than closed off. (This is getting into Foucault territory, and being one of his foot soldiers and something of a black-flag-waving aesthetic anarchist, I was wishing on a star that when Reynolds promised the topic of ‘power’ in his fourth essay, he was going to discuss the role of power and knowledge in the discourse of and on UK dance music. He didn’t, but wouldn’t that have been an interesting discussion?)

Now of course, much of this post has been an exasperating attempt to split the finest of hairs. And as at the start of my last post, some aspects of the theorising in the recent ‘Discontents’ essays don’t fare well from the point of view of contemporary musicology, but I won’t spend more time and space detailing this (among the issues, in the fourth essay, how exactly can power be ‘really in the music, intrinsic to it’? A text may, in certain circumstances, give rise to certain affordances or resonances for a listener or an audience, but musical effect isn’t a genie in a bottle). But the question of the nature of the relationship between scholarship and criticism, even between science and criticism, comes into the foreground with the debates and these essays, especially when the word ‘empirical’ gets used (or abused).


In the second ‘Discontents’ essay, Reynolds dismisses the quibble with his use of the word ‘empirical’ as the ‘squeamishness’ of the ‘philosophy student’, seeming almost to paint himself as the straight-talking realist in contrast to the absurd ‘philosophy students’, rolling their eyes because somebody at the foot of their ivory tower hasn’t been washing behind the ontological ears, or philosophy graduates, having been reduced to nervous anti-realist wrecks, quaking every time somebody claims to ‘know’ something. What that rather unfair picture conceals is that Reynolds has used an academic-sounding word (perhaps not for the first time, and he’s described himself as a ‘scholar’, described his work as ‘ethnomusicology’) perhaps to give his ideas extra intellectual weight, but has misused that word, and misunderstood or been unaware of the nature of the principles involved in his methods (you don’t actually need to be a philosophy student to see this, and I’m not). When this is subsequently pointed out, Reynolds makes something of a U-turn and claims he was never that serious in the first place.

Though it’s absolutely unfair to judge his work by strict academic standards (but oddly, he’s described the potential relationship of ‘wonky’ to ketamine as awakening his ‘academic interest’), for those fortunate enough to have been educated in academic fields (‘philosophy students’), particular words or methodological concepts are usually avoided because they have become associated with flawed or ideologically suspect thinking, and quite possibly with good reason. As a humanities student, some of the skeletons in my closet are ‘essentialism’, ‘organicism’ and ‘positivism’. Academic opposition to such concepts cannot be reduced to ‘squeamishness’ any more than a contemporary doctor’s shunning of medicinal leeches or lobotomies can. In a slightly separate vein, many words, such as ‘empirical’ and ‘objective’, are really nothing to be squeamish about, but should simply be used, we hope, properly. Where possible, empiricism is considerably valuable to musicological method, for example, and shouldn’t really be invoked lightly. (For more on empiricism and empirical method as it pertains to the study of music including ethnomusicology, have a read of this).


As a non-academic critic, it’s expected that Reynolds doesn’t mind about the bleeding edge of academic thought. His work still makes sense without it, it’s still appreciated by a great many readers, myself included. Nevertheless the occasional problem remains, and the more assertively he makes certain quasi-scholarly claims, the more regrettably imprudent he seems to those who may know (and may have been shown) better.

In the wake of the nuum debates, it’s my hope that a form of criticism is possible that does not naïvely seek to avoid value-judgment but can practice it on flexible terms, without heavy, limiting ideology, and that is aware of the terms of its own subjectivity; that is not scholarly but will not fall foul of scholarship. A form of criticism that takes place on a case by case basis, rather than as part of a grand, underlying theoretical project; that expands rather than reduces, that avoids fetishising theory. Aiming primarily to show, rather than try to explain, this is criticism as an art form rather than a misguided and inadequate attempt at science.

*Reynolds may have also used the word ‘nominalist’ erroneously. In his third essay, it appears to simply describe a state or process of things being named, rather than ‘the doctrine that general or abstract words do not stand for objectively existing entities and that universals are no more than names assigned to them’ (Dictionary.com)

Addendum: Since I wrote this post, Jeff at There Was Always Doubt elaborated brilliantly on the constellation analogy and how data could be plotted in order to posit continua here. He concludes: ‘While I'm not saying the HCC isn’t/wasn't a ‘real’ phenomenon, it is highly contingent on what musical values and point of view one has. The HCC has gained considerable currency since the sonic signifiers valued by those concerned with the HCC are taken as self-evident. But shift the track-space, add/subtract/subsitute its axes or shift your point of view and I'm sure any number of continua can be spotted.’

'Theory is the spice of critical life'

What role theory can or should play in conceptualising musical style and its change over time (or 'diachronically') has been a major theme in writing on method in music historiography for quite some time. Among the many others, heavyweights of mainstream musicology Dahlhaus and Treitler went there in the eighties, and I can’t help but wonder what they would have had to say about writer on music par excellence Simon Reynolds’s notion of a ‘hardcore continuum’ and the encouragingly lively but often exasperating debate over its existence, relevance and current status. ‘The nuum’ to its friends, it purports to describe a more or less linear if dialectical continuity through various styles of UK dance music including, in order of appearance, hardcore rave, jungle, 2-step garage (at which point Reynolds named the nuum), grime and dubstep. The concept makes a lot of sense, particularly as a body of related work and ‘scenes’ (‘macroscene’?) and it very much deserves to stay, but some of the terms on which it is discussed would certainly have raised the eyebrows of the above-mentioned, fairly venerable musicologists. Because, as some of its proponents would have you believe, the nuum is more than (at the end of the day) a certain assemblage of certain interrelated scenes, institutions and events and a certain assemblage of certain tracks with certain family resemblances, all assembled according to certain parameters and linked in a certain diachronic narrative thread by a certain subjective mind in the pursuit of historicised knowledge, but actually an ‘empirically verifiable’ ‘fact’, and even an ‘objectively existent entity’ (00:39-00:43).

I’d say the hardcore continuum can no more constitute an ‘objectively existent entity’ than ‘the Renaissance’ or ‘Romantic music’ (a much, older, bigger, more powerful continuum in its time) can. But ultimately that’s the nominalist (“categories of particulars are constructs: artificial, arbitrary, and practical, valued for their usefulness in the management of data”*) versus realist (“particulars are grouped together because of properties held in common, and general terms derive their meanings from the real features of the objects to which they refer – for the realist, the common features of particulars by which they are set off in categories are independently “true” and are to be discovered”) debate. I personally believe that the nuum, since its data set is so broad and complex, is best expressed in nominalist terms, but as it’s plain to hear in his Fact talk, Reynolds is clearly a realist, and that’s fine as far as it goes. But the danger of this sort of realism is that it’s the gateway drug to essentialism, in which “works are no longer [merely] particulars that share certain properties; they are individual embodiments of a single essence” - and some of the language that the nuum’s proponents have dressed it up in is at times decidedly essentialist, here at 01:17:40 - 01:18:54 for example, and with that sometimes bizarrely organicist.

Unless you've already got it, the reason behind these pictures from, ahem, epic space opera Dune will become clear if you bear with me.
I’ve come to believe that, apart from in a few specific instances (in particular kinds of feminism and other minority studies, for example), children should be inoculated against essentialist thought from an early age with “Say No To Essentialism” campaigns. Because it plays down the difference, independence and complexity of things by trusting in some hypothetical underlying continuity, it distorts perspectives, it’s reductive, prescriptive and restrictive, it’s ideological, it feels it can predict things and in so doing makes an ‘ass’ out of ‘u’ and ‘me’, and it’s one of the pollutant-spewing engines of racism, sexism, homophobia etc. The nominalist says that all women are different, and that ‘woman’ is just a practical term useful to (though suspiciously required by) the society we live in, while the essentialist, like some dick who gives you that horrible sinking feeling when you realise what you’d invited to the party, says ‘nah, deep down women are all the same, they all spend too much money on shoes! Am I right or what lads?’

Besides which, in formulating the nuum in these realist terms, Reynolds (well-meaning as he surely was), by providing a description and talking about it like it was a thing, inadvertently kick-started a canon: a dodgy, prescriptive/reductive, ideological value-judgment machine, in which there are winners and losers, and even the winners can be losers. It’s this canonical consequence, or resonance, of the nuum idea that led in part to frustration and raised temperatures in the nuum debates, both for those who believed in it (who were often disappointed or angry that new musicians weren’t living up to the rules of its canonical ‘essence’) and those resisting the idea (or the parameters of the canon). Calling the nuum an ‘objectively existent entity’ and then praising its excellence horribly exacerbates the unhealthier consequences of having a canon, and piling on the imperative for ‘progress’, as some have done, makes things still worse.

That's Brad Dourif on the right. Easy to forget he's in this.
This is where music criticism can begin to have a detrimental effect on popular musical aesthetics – on the ways in which music is perceived, received and produced. How many independent, innovative composers were dismissed and banished into obscurity because, when peered at through the ideological lens of the Classical Music Canon, the lack of certain requirements in their music reduced them to a poor, unprogressive version of Beethoven or Brahms (Chopin, too stylised, too Polish, too effeminate, nearly could have been one)? What of the music that the UK Hardcore Continuum’s disciples deem, in the same way, to be ‘bad’ or simply not good enough? (I’ll consider the music of Joker, Zomby, Starkey, Rustie, Moby etc, the ‘mallet to a mountain range’, here sometime soon).

Dan Hancox, in response to k-punk illustrates the shortcomings of excessive theorising (and by extension those of essentialising canons) beautifully by using the analogy of the Procrustean bed. Another beautiful analogy describing the ideal use and role for theory is from Reynolds, who at the start of his Fact talk put it absolutely perfectly: ‘Theory is the spice of critical life’. A teaspoonful of cinnamon in the apple pie, a pinch of jerk seasoning in the soup – a little bit of theory added accorded to taste gives dishes interest and flavour, turning them from swill into cuisine. Since watching Reynolds’s Fact talk, reading Hancox’s piece and attending a seminar on the hardcore continuum last week, these analogies have been ricocheting around the bonce. I was groping for a new one that would illustrate the benefits of theory in moderation but also warn of the dangers of its excessive use. Since the only commonly known danger of overdosing on cinnamon is a mildly annoying dry mouth, I turned to alcohol. To adapt Reynolds’s metaphor slightly, I’m going to imagine theory as the alcoholic spice of a night out in good company.

In a shot that screams 'Look, please pay attention, we've spent a hell of a lot of money on this', Kyle MacLachlan takes on Sting while Shakespearean actor (and star of 3 X-Men films, 4 Star Trek films and 179 episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation) Patrick Stewart looks on.
But even between strangers, a few pints promote an atmosphere of discussion, bonding and understanding. They get the mind going, raise confidence, refresh and satisfy the taste buds. Depending on how well you can hold your alcohol, though, things can soon start going rapidly downhill. Reality becomes strange and unmanageable as your stumbling hands and feet discover that things apparently aren’t where you thought they were or where they’re supposed to be: the real world doesn’t seem to make sense to you, though you may be able to ignore this and believe that it’s making more sense than ever, and this newfound 'clarity' can cause a proportional escalation in emotional state. People seem a lot nicer or a lot meaner than they were before or would be otherwise, and you feel you have to address this. You become over-confident, excitable and randy, so you shout and wave your arms around, drawing attention to yourself, but when you try and act on these new desires, it's awkward, difficult and embarrassing for those who aren't as drunk as you are. And despite all of this, you still think you and your actions are bloody amazing.

At college, you learn that critical theory and alcohol are quite similar in that they're both really great up to a point, but too much of either can turn good people into twats. Director David Lynch's own cut of Dune was three hours long - the scene above, though it was one of his favourites, was cut before general release.
Drunk on theory perhaps, but then another thought occurred to me. What if theory, as the spice of life, was actually the Spice from Frank Herbert’s series of Dune novels (and the film – 1984 and most certainly counting – and the obscure Sci-Fi channel TV series oddly staring a young James McAvoy), melange? In this analogy, theory is a psychotropic drug made out of the dung of colossal sandworms that live on the desert planet of Arrakis. A little bit of it in coffee tastes splendid and gives the eyes an attractive shade of azure. A valuable commodity and a sign of considerable wealth, it gives you heightened awareness, a longer life-span and the ability to predict the future. Prolonged exposure to the spice gives you the power to warp space and time with your mind alone, so that two incredibly distant points in space can become close enough together that an entire fleet of spaceships can pass through this fold in space-time without moving and thus travel through an enormous and complex universe with the greatest of ease, but the downside to this is that at this point of exposure you’ll die if you go without it, so you have to be kept permanently in an atmosphere of the spice in its gaseous form, which mutates your body until you look terrible, and, with a face like a giant pair of bollocks, you have to be carried around in an enormous canister by weird fellers with extreme speech impediments and bad dress sense.

The final resting place of theory: a hermetically sealed sarcophagus full of gaseous, psychotropic worm turd. No, I'm deadly serious.
Consider those two close analogies (theories themselves) of the consequences of excessive theory - recognisable, sense-making but naturally imperfect narratives with a merely analogical relationship to reality - to be 'empirically verifiable'. It could happen to you.

And if you haven't seen Dune yet, you really should.

*I'm quoting from Leo Treitler’s Music and the Historical Imagination, Chapter 4: ‘On Historical Criticism’ (1989). I’d recommend veterans of the nuum debates give this and the two subsequent chapters (‘The Present as History’ and ‘What Kind of Story is History?’) a look, as he shows that the idea of organically evolving musical continua is hardly new (to the point where eyes will widen considerably with déja vu) and clearly explains the bases for these conceptions of music history and why they’re to be discouraged.

How could we talk about aesthetic equivalence across different art-forms and creative contexts?

In Fear of Music: Why People Get Rothko but Don’t Get Stockhausen David Stubbs proceeded more or less on the assumption that art and music could ultimately be regarded as aesthetics parallels. This was the major flaw in the book and its premise, and what understandably led to his protesting that experimental music isn't appreciated by the public to the degree that experimental art is (an imbalance that was exhaustively described but wasn’t very lucidly or thoroughly explained in the book). The reality is that the aesthetic experiences of art and music (and film, architecture etc) are, psychologically speaking at least, wholly different, and the dream of meeting autonomous art objects of any and every medium similarly and with detached contemplation is a myth.

But as anyone passionate about music and art or any writer on music (such as Stubbs) will tell you, music inevitably will - must even – be understood by a listener in terms other than the purely sonic. Such ‘synesthetic’ adventures may not be enough to motivate grand histories of aesthetics, but they are able to radically enrich aesthetic experience in certain instances. So in what ways might such an ‘aesthetic equivalence’ between a work of art and a piece of music be (objectively) talked about? Specifying some terms on which these aesthetic comparisons might be made allows us to imagine a number of possibilities for enriching the experience of works while preventing relatively imprecise, misguided or prohibitively subjective comparisons.

Neuropsychology has discovered some exciting evidence for the visualisation of sound and the kind of overlap of sensory-aesthetic responses that allows us to dance and understand metaphors but I'm thinking on a much more casual, generalised level. I’m not going to claim there is some literal, objective neuro-aesthetic ‘truth’ or any other kind of truth inherent in a comment like ‘this bassline oozes’ (as I should really be using an FMRI scanner for that and the family next door is borrowing mine at the moment). The related concept of synesthesia has been used and abused in writing about art and music as, at best, an alluring but vague metaphor for aesthetic equivalence, sometimes misguidedly leading to the belief that there is some similar aesthetic ‘truth’, kudos or Holy Grail in it, but ultimately it’s only a particular neurological condition affecting certain individuals, the consequences of which are subjective and restricted to those individuals. So I’m leaving neuropsychology to the neuropsychologists.

FMRI scanners know about the bad thoughts.
What follow then are four suggestions for paradigms or heuristics describing aesthetic equivalence, hopefully specifying the ways in which works or collections of works can be thought of as aesthetically comparable even when they are very unlike in medium and/or context. Naturally they are not mutually exclusive, in fact the more paradigms apply to a particular aesthetic comparison the richer and more reasonable the equivalence (and if there’s been any writing on this before, I haven’t found it yet).

Topical equivalence

When works are topically equivalent they handle relatively similar subject matters. The term is derived from topic theory in musicology, which itself is imperfectly derived from rhetorical topoi. How these subject matters are defined or divined, either by author or audience, would be a matter for debate – telling whether and on what level a work is ‘about’ something can be complex, especially where supplied texts are relatively unforthcoming or non-existent. But in many cases, this can be sufficiently unambiguous: Poussin’s painting Et in Arcadia Ego and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 (known as ‘the Pastoral Symphony’) are topically equivalent because they both explore the pastoral genre, along with many works of literature, and more specifically, they show negative ideas and emotions interrupting the pastoral bliss (death in Et in Arcadia Ego, a storm in the Pastoral Symphony). The subject matter of a work can be an emotion but that, though very similar, would technically be somewhat distinct from an equivalence of emotional effect on the audience experiencing the works, which would be better described as functional equivalence (see below): a work can clearly portray happiness but then have a very different emotional effect on an audience: indifference, sadness or anger at its artificiality perhaps - some listeners might hear The Boo Radleys' Wake up Boo in this (admittedly cynical) way.

Poussin's Et in Arcadia Ego and Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony. The bittersweet portrayal of Utopia is perhaps where the contemporary appeal of the Pastoral genre is at its strongest.
Topical equivalence in itself doesn’t necessarily make for a fascinating insight if the subject matter is related only relatively vaguely. John Martin’s epic painting The Great Day of His Wrath is topically equivalent to Ultravox’s Dancing With Tears in My Eyes because both describe the Apocalypse, but any similarity of significance arguably ends there. If Martin’s painting had two tiny figures ‘lov[ing] to the sound of [their] favourite song’ as in Ultravox’s lyrics, that might be something to think about. But it doesn’t.

Topical equivalent of Rothko: Difficult to say that Rothko is ‘about’ anything, as his paintings are usually non-representational and named after the colours and shapes involved. To this end, a somewhat facile topical equivalent would be something like Michael Torke’s Color Music. Slightly more high-mindedly we could say his work is ‘about’ emotionalised perceptions of space and form, so something like J. G. Ballard’s short story The Enormous Space might be, to a certain extent, a relevant equivalent, or ‘about’ the straightforward juxtaposition of potential emotional resonances - so perhaps the more minimal poetry of William Carlos Williams.

Topical equivalent of Stockhausen: Again, as Stockhausen was a bit of a formalist, subject matter doesn’t really apply. Spiritual, cosmic, mystic awareness is something that figures in his later work, so something like Jodorowsky’s film Holy Mountain seems appropriate.

Socio-historical equivalence

Socio-historically equivalent works originate from a relatively similar social or historical context. The works themselves or their authors or audiences could be from a similar time, place or social background, or both associated with a social or historical event, idea, discourse or institution. For example, some of Egon Schiele’s paintings and Arnold Schoenberg’s song cycle Pierrot Lunaire were created around the same time, 1912 in Vienna (more or less).

One of Egon Schiele's self-portraits and Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire. Whoever posted Pierrot Lunaire on youtube chose some suitable images to accompany the music, one of which is another Schiele self-portrait.
Socio-historical equivalence should be unlikely to constitute an aesthetic by itself. It’s only when it’s particularly detailed, or another kind of equivalence comes into play that it becomes aesthetically relevant. Both Schiele’s paintings and Schoenberg’s music from 1909-1918 could be said to respond to a certain Zeitgeist characterised by, among other things, madness, the self, the unconscious, modernity and modernism, which can also become described in terms of a topical equivalence in some respects. There is little to say when comparing Schiele’s paintings, and say, some of Mozart’s music other than that they were both created in Vienna (the intervening century gave rise to a lot of crucial dissimilarities).

Ethel Smyth’s opera The Boatswain’s Mate and Virginia Woolf’s first novel The Voyage Out were both written in the same two year period (1913-1915) by middle-class white English women. Moreover they're also topically equivalent as they both involve sea-faring, and functionally equivalent as they’re both comedic social satires (these factors may also give rise to socio-historic resonance).

Rothko: composer Morton Feldman. Like Rothko, he was a jewish man working with the avant-garde in New York in the fifties and sixties.

Stockhausen: somebody like artist Joseph Beuys, who was a German from roughly the same generation. Beuys’s work relies on symbolism while Stockhausen’s generally doesn’t, but that aspect could be variously described as pertaining to any or all of the other equivalences.

Functional equivalence

Functional equivalence means works have or have had (intentionally or not) relatively similar functions. This category is broader than it may appear, stretching all the way from similar original purposes for the works to causing similar psychological effects and states (fear, disorientation etc) in present audiences. For example, music, art and poetry can both serve the function of making aristocratic life pretty or aiding religious worship, or excite similar feelings (of course emotions can also variously be excited by subject matter – the apocalypse, socio-historic context – racist Nazi propaganda, or perhaps form, but here it is strictly in its directly functional sense). An ensuing discussion would compare the ways in which the works fulfilled that function. Strictly speaking, any art is functional if it’s consumed as art but sometimes that’s irrelevant: Philip Guston paintings serve the function of being appreciated and filling up walls in galleries, but that in itself wouldn’t usually be the basis for an aesthetic comparison with Raphael – something else would.

Rothko: Since a lot of people these days use reproductions of Rothkos to promote a mellow, mildly cerebral atmosphere (whether or not doing this is ‘correct’ is beside the point), I’m thinking piano music by Debussy, or 'chillout', maybe acid jazz. Today Brian Eno’s Ambient series would be unlikely to feature on the CD player of a place that hangs glossy Rothko posters, but it would make a good functional equivalent too, since both can be used to relax and their forms are rather similar (anyone who appreciates Rothko's paintings as artifacts of an eventually fatal bipolar disorder - for which an equivalent might, according to popular belief, be found in late Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann or Scott Walker - would be unlikely to find them relaxing, but ultimately there shouldn't be correct answers in appreciation).

Two musical works which could have a similar function to Rothko's most famous paintings, one meditative or ambient, '2/1' from Brian Eno's Music for Airports and one highly expressive: the Lento Assai from Beethoven's String Quartet No. 16 op. 135 (one of Beethoven's very last pieces - he was famously staring his down own mortality while writing the late quartets).
Stockhausen: You wouldn’t normally describe Stockhausen’s work as functional. He sometimes wrote commissioned works, but this is a weak basis for equivalence. Today his work is often used to teach composition students so an equivalent work, interestingly enough, could be something like Bach’s Well-tempered Clavier or Art of Fugue, and I don't know if there are any specific works of art used to teach art students (at art school some friends of mine were once made to stand in a room with a corpse for inspiration - this isn't a snide comment on Stockhausen's music).

Formal equivalence

This one is perhaps the sexiest to talk about, but for all that is also the most difficult to discuss validly. It’s the one people are usually referring to when they name-drop synesthesia, so how far objective formal equivalence can reasonably be taken will ultimately be up to neuropsychology. Works with formal equivalence have relatively similar structures and processes, so how this works depends entirely on the analogies involved. Both sounds and shapes can be low, high, rising, falling, busy, minimal, distorted, fragmented etc (it may not be a coincidence that Martin's Great Day of His Wrath and Ultravox's Dancing With Tears in My Eyes both feature prominent descending forms in depicting the end of the world). It becomes more complicated when sounds and shapes can be likened more exotically, such as with words like ‘brittle’, ‘gloopy’, ‘abrasive’, ‘delicate’, ‘chaotic’ and ‘plastic’, because it’s difficult to pin down the aesthetic bases for these descriptions (valid and inspiring though they may be) as they often involve a messy, subjective mixture of mental visualisation, conventional connotation and musical onomatopoeia.

Many structures and processes can be likened relatively unambiguously however: few would dispute that collage is a form that occurs in both art and music, see for example collage in the album covers and music of Julian House aka The Focus Group. Mathematical structures may also dictate form in art or music, such as in certain minimalist works, or in the case of the golden ratio (apparently someone sat down and started this list of works designed with the golden ratio).

Rothko: As Rothko’s painting have small amounts of large, simple, plainly deployed colour then (taking colour to be pitch or timbre) non-repetitious ultra-minimalism or drone music could be a suitable formal equivalent, such as the work of La Monte Young, Charlemagne Palestine, Phill Niblock or even, again, Morton Feldman (a close formal equivalence could be drawn between his 'fields' of chance sound operations and Rothko's juxtaposition of areas of colour, as his work and that of contemporaries such as Barnett Newman could be associated with the movement fittingly labelled 'colour field painting'.)

Stockhausen: his work explores a wide variety of forms and processes, but I think the shapes of Kontakte are similar to those in small sections of paintings by Matthew Ritchie or Julie Mehretu: complex, three-dimensional and superficially chaotic, but cleanly carved (few Stockhausen compositions have, in a relatively short amount of time, the frantic, overloaded complexity of their paintings taken as a whole). Any non-minimalist geometrical abstraction.

Stockhausen's Kontakte and a painting by Matthew Ritchie. I'm not claiming to be a synaesthete or to fully understand the processes of perception involved - but at 0:16 don't these two 'look' and 'sound' alike? It's quite possibly just me and my big fat subjectivity.
So hopefully these are some ways to look for and describe aesthetic equivalence between different art forms. The best kinds of aesthetic comparison are those which can draw on all four paradigms of equivalence. All I have done is outline some heuristics for the purposes of orientation, so this is in no way a watertight theory. If a piece of music and a work of art give rise to the same connotations, something like ‘war’ for example, that could be down to a inextricably complex mess of topical, socio-historical, functional or formal reasons. The topic of ‘War’ could even be connoted in an abstract painting for socio-historical reasons (maybe WW2, Vietnam) and connoted in Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem for functional reasons, and on the back of that compared and discussed in terms of formal equivalence (busy, violent, clashing textures). None of that would be invalid. The four paradigms could be seen as food groups, primary colours or physical dimensions – abstractions that combine in various ways to constitute real-world stuff.

If there’s anything I’ve missed, anything reminiscent of something else, or any plain bad thinking, leave me a comment.

Rouge's Foam

A few weeks ago I spent most of a day wandering around Zone 2 with industrial extremists Whitehouse being piped straight into my calmly interested ear canals the whole time by way of an iPod and those earphones that serve as the equivalent of a ten foot concrete fence. That evening, perhaps feeling that all that industrialised angst hadn’t been quite enough, I curled up in front of David Cronenberg’s very early feature Crimes of the Future. Here I was introduced to a substance called ‘Rouge’s foam’. The narrator Adrian Tripod, floating under the brutalist ceilings of his dermatological clinic ‘The House of Skin’ (a name coined a decade and a half before Hellraiser, in those innocent times), ruminates:

Before the disappearance of Antoine Rouge, there were many strange creatures here, but for some time now there has only been one, and he... I believe... I have noted a whitish, aerated, amorphous effluence oozing from his ears. I am not quite certain. My interns have also noted the deadly emergence of this secretion, which we call “Rouge's foam”.

Later Adrian Tripod, unable to begin repopulating the world through procreation with a 6-year-old because she has succumbed to the skin disease of which Rouge’s foam is a symptom, smears said foam onto his lips and sheds a single cobalt blue tear. I know what I’m watching next Valentine's Day.
I then thought it would make a good name for a Whitehouse-like industrial band who while at art school in 1979 had gotten hold of Crimes of the Future. I quickly realised that the name wasn’t entirely fitting as it wasn’t radically taboo, just an obscure Cronenberg reference and without that... just a bit weird really. But the foam and its name could have been an interesting metaphor for the music itself, and its effect on listeners: a messy, primal, biological matter secreted involuntarily by stricken listeners from the very organ that was supposed to facilitate genteel appreciation, while an onslaught of white noise and claustrophobic cyborg commentary engulfed them. Very Cronenberg, very Tetsuo.

Eww, gross. This image is one or two fairly significant leaps of association from an aesthetics blog that will generally aim to be neutral and liberal, but I was looking for a good name and I grabbed it quickly as I was hoping to post my review of ‘Fear of Music’ as soon as possible. In the short term, ‘Rouge’s Foam’ seemed a fitting mask to wear for an anonymous polemical review, with its connotations of ‘seeing red’ and ‘oozing a whitish, aerated, amorphous effluence from the mouth’. It also suits an aesthetic I hope to talk about here, one of psychological ‘over-stimulation’.

This blog is a place where I’ll try to explore various aesthetic responses and ideas too whimsical, wild or plain indulgent to be entertained in the usual course of funded research. I say aesthetics because I’ll generally try to avoid objective interpretation, or hermeneutics – the goal won’t be to discover, understand and classify, but to suggest insights into appreciation. Neither will value-judgment figure strongly in my approach. Of course, aesthetics and interpretation are certainly not separate activities: you can’t experience a work without interpreting it, and mindfulness of a certain relative ‘validity’ of readings, once in place, can play a crucial role in appreciation. For example, now that I know that Beethoven was elderly and dying when he wrote this music, I won’t attribute its characteristics to youthfulness, and my appreciation could be richer for that. Not only this, but one's awareness of a ‘validity’ in reading a work can become (an) aesthetic in itself. I only mean to say that I will not be implying any objective accuracy for my readings, or that I have discovered some ‘truth’ inherent in the works involved.


As it was at least six years before either Throbbing Gristle or Whitehouse could have been available to provide the soundtrack for Crimes of the Future, Cronenberg made do by noisily repeating low-quality sound effects alongside the chillingly calm observations of a mentally disturbed narrator.
To this end I’ll also hope to avoid excessive theorising. I may comment on theories, but I won’t really be inventing them myself, believing in them for ever more, and hoping that this humble blog will be added to the knowledge banks of the human race. That would be formal research work. I won't be positing, for example, a full-blown theory of over-stimulation so much as an ‘aesthetics’ of over-stimulation. I just hope to explore ways of looking, listening, reading and creating. As research can enrich this however, I’ll write as well as possible against a backdrop of academic thought, particularly as a student of musicology. This is also as an insurance and a reaction against a lot of recent critical writing about music that has sometimes been painfully ignorant of current thinking in mainstream musicology.

If this all sounds ambivalent, contradictory and muddled, that’s because it may well turn out to be. We’ll see how it goes. Maybe in a year’s time I’ll be posting weekly soup recipes for under £1 a day.

Review: David Stubbs, 'Fear of Music: Why People Get Rothko But Don't Get Stockhausen'

I was hoping that the provocative title and blurb of this book would lead to a discussion about the mass consumption of art and music that compared and contrasted differing aesthetics, but I also feared that they would kick off a flawed, idealistic tirade from a paranoid modernist, bitter about populist aesthetics and over-enthusiastic about the equivalence of art and music. It soon became very clear that the latter was more the case, and that the flaws were also much deeper and more basic than I’d expected. I won’t spend time here dancing upon the multifariously deformed corpses of sentences like ‘However but with magnetic tape, it was now theoretically possible, in the realms of sound, to make anything out of anything’ (p. 42), but it suffices to say that ‘Fear of Music’ is not a polished, elegant, entirely accurate text.

As I read on I struggled to find a coherent answer to the challenge of the book’s cover – why people don’t get Stockhausen and not just that they don’t. That came only at the very end. For most of the book, Stubbs charges through his own tangential, highly twisted whirlwind tour of twentieth-century creativity, listing artists, composers and their neatly packaged schools, cramming cool anecdotes into a dizzying mass of commas and clauses, making sweeping statements and arbitrarily tossing in his own value-judgments as to ‘success’ and ‘failure’. Flashy but unsustainable romantic and modernist historiographical errors and clichés abound, such as that jazz can have an ‘evolutionary arc’ (p. 46) and ‘reach its own Schoenbergian moment’ (p. 48), and they will appear gratingly quaint and naïve, particularly to any reader of contemporary musicology.

We’re left feeling like we’re playing a kind of cultural bingo in which our favourite canonical figures are reeled off by a hyperactive, muddled but highly opinionated announcer. These are a few hundred of my favourite things, and these are a few hundred awkwardly bitter-tasting rants about the things I can’t abide. Vast sections of the book, such as the all-too-familiar hymn of praise to post-punk, lack any aesthetic comparisons and don’t mention visual art at all, seeming entirely irrelevant to the promise printed on the cover.

Stubbs’s account is highly distorted and uneven, even given his own stated subjective, non-academic terms. British Free Improv, much as the movement deserves it, is awarded nine pages of breathless romanticising, while Schoenberg, a towering figure in twentieth century music, is left a few sketchy paragraphs of highly debatable accuracy (p.20). Powerful arch-avant-gardist Boulez appears only three times, only ever as a listed name check or dismissed, sadly, as ‘over-developed’. Miles Davis, too, is frequently alluded to and never discussed while three pages are given over to Sun Ra – a worthy focus indeed but weren’t we talking about the masses? It’s also a shame that Stubbs limits his discussion to the twentieth century: an assessment of previous avant-garde atmospheres such as the ars subtilior or the Ferrarese court could have been quite illuminating, and the general confusion that initially greeted Beethoven’s late quartets would have been grist to his romantic-modernist mythological mill. For Stubbs pursues an exaggerated claim that modern art lovers and everyone around him are highly repulsed by and out to discredit experimental music, and cartoonishly paints musicians as perpetually hard done by while their ‘equivalents’ in art wallow in decadence and success - a handful of synaesthetic flirtations over the years, however, does not make music the long lost fiancé/e of the plastic arts. His tract reads less like a measured critical account and more like frothy, cynical propaganda gushing from the podium of a sneering demagogue (actually, any reader who has encountered Stubbs's hilarious, thoroughly entertaining work as a reviewer and columnist will be gratefully familiar with this style, but it feels very out of place here).

No mention of Schoenberg's earliest atonal pieces which expressed fear and madness. This is from his Erwartung of 1909 (see below).
While Stubbs clearly enjoys extensive knowledge of the subject matter (and it is very easy to conclude that large sections of his book are casual streams of memory punctuated by the odd trip to Wikipedia – or not, as in the case of spelling Roy Lichtenstein’s surname on p. 62), the book lacks a coherent, compelling account or argument that presents and utilises evidence convincingly or at all empirically. Stubbs doesn't seem to control his critical ideologies openly and effectively either, instead letting them run riot as unannounced, unaware, unexplained waves of vitriol. There’s nothing at all wrong with a Marxist perspective used well, but tossing around the word ‘bourgeois’ and that cliché ‘coca-cola capitalism’ as apparently a priori pejoratives (p. 51), just undermines any confidence we might have in Stubbs’s messages, and makes him appear to us as an embittered adolescent, scowling into a rollie behind the English faculty library, itching to pontificate about his record collection.

Some of the central aesthetic assumptions of the book are highly problematic. For all the romantic and modernist metaphors, stoked by generations of aesthetes, that illustrate the supposed parallels between music and the plastic arts (however fruitful and inspiring they may be), the cultural, personal and psychological experiences and contexts of the two remain vitally distinct in ways that Stubbs only briefly acknowledges. The crucial reason that the unwashed masses he paints thronging the free-entry Tate Modern don’t follow their experience by wandering down to the South Bank to listen to Stockhausen’s Klavierstücke is that – even if they were not being charged £15 each for it – they would be effectively locked into two hours of silenced, static contemplation and heavily implied socialised reverence. In today’s culture comparatively few people are inclined to bother with this nineteenth-century ritual, even if the music they were sat in front of was teeming with signifiers that intelligibly suggested cultural or emotional meanings to them – and Stockhausen’s formal, sonic explorations, compelling though they can undoubtedly be, do not conventionally have this going for them.

Unlike in the experience of music, to walk in and view Rothko's Seagram Murals is not to participate in a highly symbolic socio-cultural ritual.
Outside the concert hall the situation isn’t much different: buying a recording of Stockhausen necessitates, especially on its own modernist terms, a commitment of time and attention that is many times more psychologically demanding than wandering in off the street and past Rothko’s Seagram Murals with your mates, or putting up one of those ubiquitous Rothko calendars (‘because we had Kandinsky last year’). I get the impression that Stubbs wouldn’t be satisfied with bits of Kontakte heard dimly from car radios and elevators around the land. If Stockhausen’s or any vaguely similar composer’s work were seen to be as undemanding of our time, effort and attention as the Rothkos we widely appreciate and allow into our lives (I’m avoiding the unfortunate positivism that Stubbs’s titular ‘get’ implies) or had their potential for casual readings of cultural meaning, then I’m sure audiences would be willing to turn their attentions to their efforts more frequently. But music is a wholly different animal to art in these respects. These issues are touched upon briefly and in a rather abstract, awkwardly romantic sense on page 114 ('we can close our eyes but we cannot close our ears'), but really they are the elephant in the room for this book.*

The experience of music departs from the experience of the plastic arts in even more significant ways than time management or the ease of casually forming a favourable reading. As Stubbs admits, there are important, deeply ingrained reasons as to why a person reacts more strongly to dissonant harmony than to Stubbs’s analogue in art (dated circa 1910), visual abstraction. In a relatively brief section (pp. 113-120) on ‘the distress’ that avant-garde music causes Stubbs raises a few somewhat relevant ideas, although they’re still rather abstract and discussed in an abstract sense. Finally a psychological / anthropological perspective is touched upon on page 119, and it’s a clumsy, offhand attempt at evolutionary speculation. This is rejected in favour of the opinion that ways of listening are just cultural conventions, and Stubbs then appends a highly appropriate narrative of Japanese gagaku music. In many respects listening is culturally conditioned, but throughout his book, Stubbs is very anxious that listeners are finding avant-garde music to be frightening or ‘crazed’. In fact many listeners inevitably perceive meanings that they ‘aren’t supposed to’ according to high modernist aesthetics of absolute form and autonomy, and find experimental music chaotic (nonsencial - not making normative sense) and yes, frightening. Is it a coincidence that atonality is most familiar to many as the soundtrack to horror movies, and is such a visceral, emotional response really to be simply rationalised away as a cultural convention? During his section on ‘distress’, Stubbs unfortunately waves this aside curtly as bad criticism and Stanley Kubrick’s lack of faith in avant-garde music.


One of the more important aesthetic movements touching both art and music to be missing from Stubbs’s frenetic commentary was expressionism, embodied perhaps in the work of one of his own champions, Schoenberg. Stubbs doesn’t narrate how the so-called ‘emancipation of the dissonance’ Schoenberg enthused over and musical modernity as a whole was consistently driven by the desire to express the extreme states of psychological anxiety, tension and madness that preoccupied the central European imagination over the turn of the twentieth century. This is shown in Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (another crucial work missing from Stubbs’s sagas), and is still intact in Peter Maxwell Davis’s Eight Songs for a Mad King. The expressionist movement is at the core of this tradition, and Schoenberg’s earliest and (would you believe it) most popular atonal works – Erwartung, Pierrot Lunaire, Die Glückliche Hand, and Berg’s Wozzeck – were deliberately written with the intention of expressing fear and madness, unlike the more formalist poetics of Schoenberg’s later serialist works, and the subsequent work of Boulez and Stockhausen. It’s no wonder that this cherished body of work, the codes of which found their way into film music, is neglected in Stubbs’s book – it manifestly expresses fear using avant-garde sounds and that’s perhaps one of the main reasons why its audiences (including myself) love it. Stubbs cries foul as his masses find atonality and complex rhythms to be sinister, but this is how those meanings are most naturally and fundamentally represented to the casual, emotional listener. In fact, like a Boulez with his fingers in his ears, Stubbs offhandedly declares that ‘all music is abstract i.e. non-representational’ (p. 114), totally ignoring the vast train of writing on musical meaning that has just thundered along right past him (where for decades the question has not been whether or not music signifies extroversively, but how it does this).


Two representational pieces representing railways, one avant-garde (Pierre Schaeffer's Etude aux Chemin de Fer, 1948), the other not so avant-garde (Charles-Valentin Alkan's own Chemin de Fer, 1844). See also Honegger's somewhat futurist work Pacific 231 of 1923, or Steve Reich's minimalist work of 1988 Different Trains (barely any mention of the mainstream minimalists here either - too popular.)
Perhaps it’s unfair to expect Stubbs to have engaged in this debate, or to have remembered representational pop classics such as The Four Seasons or Carnival of the Animals, and actually in the final pages of the book the snowstorm of abstract, political-aesthetic speculation dies down and we’re given a compelling take on avant-garde music’s necessary meaninglessness, which is what audiences looking for meaning don’t ‘get’. Unfortunately the ability to experience music meaninglessly is arguably not just rare, but impossible. And besides, Stubbs had just spent the previous hundred pages hurriedly interpreting his favourite examples of this supposedly non-representational art-form with highly exotic, startling, and yes, emotionally meaningful metaphors (Stubbs describes Varèse's Deserts as 'like muffled intimations of the outside world as distantly heard from deep in the lonely interior of the soul' p. 52 - perhaps not how Varèse or the experts would have put it, but a wonderfully inspiring reading nevertheless).

Another very simple reason for the supposed success of art in comparison with music that doesn’t really materialise in ‘Fear of Music’ is that disseminating music, for much of the twentieth century, was an arduous process of training, acquisition of the necessary instruments, music and technology, and the organisation of concerts and rehearsals (and even then new music was and is very often poorly realised). It required the persuasion of those possessing money, influence or any means of distribution. In most cases all a plastic artist needs are her/his comparatively non-complex materials, and the small rented space and brief time needed to be seen. Stubbs rightly touches upon art’s usual predication upon marketable, expensive objects glowing with aura but again, only relatively briefly, without originality and with a discouraging veneer of bitterness. You’d have thought that he would have hailed the ease of producing avant-garde music in one’s bedroom with software and then publishing it on Myspace for all to hear, but with all his invective concerning nefarious corporate machines, I’m not so sure.

Indeed, aside from its indulgent tangents, aesthetic problems and incoherency, the dodgiest aspects of ‘Fear of Music’ are its heavy-handed use of political theory and elite, chauvinistic modernism. Stubbs is often careful to try to distance himself from aspects of musical modernism and its adherents’ elitism, but on page 13 he writes, ‘There are prominent figures in the world of art… who are known simply to have no idea what is going on in contemporary music, in the realms beyond rock and roll, pop and mainstream jazz and classical. Such ignorance is the equivalent of an experimental or avant-garde musician whose tastes in art ran to framed depictions of dogs playing billiards and poker.’ Never mind the Pandora’s box of aesthetic questions he opens every time he uses the word ‘equivalent’, this assumption of high cultrue and disgust with kitsch is something out of Clement Greenberg. Like any traditional high modernist, Stubbs attaches the greatest amount of value to experimental musics, believes that readings of them can be incorrect and consequently chastised, and associates this high art music with the future, taking the avant-garde metaphor (and with it the idealistic rhetoric of twentieth-century art manifestos) quite literally. This is in evidence when he makes the alluring but ultimately bizarre and unsupported claim that music’s ‘capacity to evoke the future is much more potent than that of the visual arts’ (p. 115), and goes on to specify Webern. Stubbs also rejects very old ideas of listening to high art music as being culturally nourishing at one moment, and embraces them the next. His modernist position only ends in dogma, ugly value-judgments and oxymoronic elitism (as in his account of AMM: their performances were a metaphor for a free society apparently, but as Stubbs explains if you didn't have the right skills or aesthetic sensibilities - you couldn't join in. You just had to sit down, shut up, worship at the altar and hope the, er, 'idiots' didn't show up - p. 68).
Clement Greenberg, 1972 - contemplative pose, modernist gravitas. His 1939 essay 'Avant-garde and Kitsch' was a significant work of theory in its time, but it can seem quaint and idealistic today.
In fact Stubbs does not mention the ways in which avant-garde music thrives even to this day in the somewhat hermetic environments of academic institutions, where it's still received with a decidedly high modernist fervour, going hand in hand with advanced post-graduate musical analysis. There is no discussion of the very real, well-funded places where Stockhausen and Schoenberg were/are gods, such as IRCAM, Darmstadt or for Milton Babbitt, who wrote polemics about how avant-garde music need only cater for an educated circle. In the world of the young composer this modernist, autonomous, formalist, ‘rational’ aesthetic is very powerful and can be discouraging indeed – but its practitioners aren’t the masses Stubbs describes. His legend-like narrative of the faltering, rejected avant-garde musician seems to come from experimental rock and jazz, while the situation within the vestiges of ‘classical music’ can be quite different.

Stubbs might have ended his book with a call for the kind of public aesthetic leg-up that works so well at the Tates but for avant-garde music, though he’d hardly be the first and he seems more or less content with his despondency and sense of superiority. Actually he may be interested to know that the only Western art music on Edexcel’s GCSE curriculum other than expressionism, serialism, minimalism and experimental music (yes, all the way up to Stockhausen) is from the baroque era. Although I find this highly laudable I know from experience that students struggle the most at connecting with experimental music, while teaching about dance music sticks instantly, as if to flypaper. Because anyone can enjoy experimental music if they're able to adjust their expectations (to say 'simplify' or, particularly, 'lower' could be seen as blasphemous). Listeners to Stockhausen who expected Beethoven's Ninth Symphony or Coldplay's Rush of Blood to the Head are going to cry 'what the fuck?!' for the same reason as gallery-goers who expected art to be Michaelangelo, Jacques-Louis David or the Mona Lisa will (and do) say it in front of that perennial whipping-boy of 'modern art', Tracey Emin's unmade bed.

David's The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of his Sons (1789) and Emin's My Bed (1999). The somewhat bigoted cries of 'but I could've done that' betray an art-class aesthetics based on technical skill and narrow, problematic conceptions of intellectual content, which blocks any genuine appreciation of that uncomfortably confessional bed dumped bizarrely, even satirically, onto the hallowed ground of the gallery floor. Not my favourite work of art, but not the dystopically absurd gesture people sometimes believe it is.
Moreover I agree that some people seem ready to accept and enjoy the simple sensuality of a few choice blobs of paint, but are less likely to do the same for a few choice blobs of sound. This isn't down to some lamentable shallowness, false consciousness or lack of faith - this is because even for the everyday listener, music has always been a complex, highly ritualised social game steeped in centuries of convention, which cannot interact with, modify or reject the external world through anything as direct as art's visual iconicity. Music is certainly not the 'equivalent' of art, and one shouldn't expect it to be - it's a socio-cultural game, not an object. In this context, a music that seems to purely explore the possibilities of sound does not seem to do enough and the simplest route towards the appreciation of this music is to put aside instinctual baggage and savour the variability of rhythm, pitch, texture, harmony, duration, volume (and many others) as sensually satisfying aesthetic categories in themselves. We've been highly advanced listeners all along, so surely this kind of listening isn't too taxing - unless you believe the best and only way to 'get' your Stockhausens is with an introductory lecture detailing the formal procedures involved, an oversize score on your lap and a whopping pitch-class set analysis. A simple, sensuous mode of listening would certainly have been advocated by John Cage, and it's interesting that Stubbs placed Stockhausen (who is seen by fans and haters alike as the more serious and intellectually formidable, his elaborate German name helping him even further towards the mad scientist stereotype in the popular imagination) in this ring with Rothko and not Cage, who would in some ways have been the more suitable candidate. So down with hierarchies of knowledge, power and value in listening! And if that isn't the kind of call that politically agitated fans of experimental music can rally around (a healthier option than constantly beating our brows over MOR), I don't know what is.

Amongst the awkward polemics, incoherency, speculation and frantic narration, ‘Fear of Music’ contains some brief but fascinating insights into some exotic musics, and illuminates some unjustly neglected areas of interest – I’m grateful to have been left with plenty of things to look up. But sadly in taking on such a grand and serious project, the rich, messy joy of Stubbs's work is drained away, and this book becomes another (here horribly concentrated) example of a current atmosphere in some areas of music criticism, one in which lofty hermeneutic and sociological claims and pretensions are rarely supported to an appropriate degree (sometimes this work is to contemporary musicology what new age medicene is to contemporary biology) and some cumbersome, decidedly grand narratives are brought to the table, invented wholly or endlessly thrashed out. With optics and rhetoric mired compulsively in a cynical, armchair, sometimes teenage kind of Marxism and romantic modernism, when this work isn’t cataloguing and canonising the heroes of the past with emptily ostentatious turns of phrase (narrating their struggles and exploits with all the modesty and empiricism of a fireside viking) and an embittered nostalgia, it’s twitching those curtains and checking under the bed in a paranoid hunt for the monsters of conservatism, capitalism, kitsch, ‘regression’ and middle-brow taste. Outside of this crowd and their fans (who may devour it so as to remind their egos that, whatever this dystopian society thinks, they are brave and cool for listening to Stockhausen) ‘Fear of Music’ is unlikely to have much of an impact. Perhaps 'Fear of Listeners' would have been a more suitable title.

*On dissensus I elaborated on the ways in which music is a different animal, a socio-cultural ritual: 'One of the latest ideas in the psychology of music is that with any music, the distinction between subject and object is much more blurred than with experiencing traditional art objects (paintings, sculptures). People often imagine versions of themselves reflected in or enacting the music, so with music the psychological stakes are higher. Hence why a record collection traditionally has more personal and social currency than a postcard collection.

That's why I say that music is a socio-cultural ritual and not an art object. In a lot of "world music" music is something you DO, not something you listen to. You sing it, perform it, dance to it. This was still the case in Western classical music up until the beginning of the nineteenth century, when suddenly music was an artistic object you contemplated in silent reverence - but the ritual still applies psychologically even if physical participation was diminished. The illusion that music is an autonomous object is a very recent one particular to modern Western culture. Music is a different game to art - it involves and possesses us in a way that art doesn't…art and music come in through the eyes and ears but the reception is all in the mind (which has its own agendas); visual perception and sound perception are different tools that entail different cognitive processes, and are consequently mapped differently onto human requirements and behaviours.'