Well, in the guitar / guitarist / luthier sphere there’s that never ending quest to finally reengineer the posture. Considering how old the problem is, there’s surprisingly little in way of lateral thinking solutions.
I’ll admit I’ve managed to be ignorant of Paul Galbraith until a few minutes ago, but he does seem to have an interesting solution.
In fact, just to double the article count this month, here’s something cool, strange, painful, funny, silly, as-serious-as-cancer, artful and artless:
This one is a bit of a contrast to last time.
No, I’m not going to do an obituary here, but (via Night After Night)…
Here’s footage of ‘Black Market’ in which you can clearly see Zawinul’s keyboard with the reverse pitch-mapping. I’d heard that the piece, and that twisty, meandering, unusual melody, had been devised/written on an upside down keyboard, but I hadn’t realized that it was also performed that way (although, a little disappointingly, Zawinul reverts to the right-way-around for his solo). A pretty interesting example of a deliberate physical de-familiarization, and maybe an unusual instance of a body-conscious, technologically mediated gesture decoupling.
Now that all that paperwork is done (at least for the moment), I can get back to this much neglected blog. (I haven’t posted anything here in about three weeks!) Thanks to those still reading this despite the sporadic posts.
…And thanks for all the comments (which I’ve also successfully, and with admirable consistency, failed to respond to).
In answer to my question about warming-up, David Ryshpan responds by listing some musical (“a major scale… that you go through different subdivisions of the beat”), borderline-musical (“first few exercises of Hanon”), and some extra-musical (“stretches I learned when I used to play tennis”) activities.
Another pianist Alex Hawkins picks up on the mention of Hanon, but finds that “the patterns [are] too ‘conventional’… they beguile… into complacency…”.
Incidentally, way back, when I did play the piano, my choice of warmup came from Brahms’ 51 Studies for Piano. Some combination of the position shifting exercise:
and changing hand shape:
There’s also the thumb pivot exercise, but this would be a riskier warmup since it could lead to injury if you over did it (it’s number 46, if you’re curious).
The position shifting exercise maps onto the guitar reasonably well. It corresponds to the one string melodies I’ve posted here—Jim Hall makes a similar suggestion in Exploring Jazz Guitar—or some upright bass intonation exercises that can be adapted to the guitar. There’s no real equivalent to the second exercise though (unless you subscribe to a Holdsworth-esque extended position). What’s interesting comparing the Hanon and the Brahms is that the Hanon is a little more mechanical—there’s an assumption that just physically following the tasks will lead to virtuosity—while the Brahms exercises won’t work unless you know what is being exercised.
…My teacher CL, however, swore by the Hanon. Go figure.
David’s reason for warming-up is
…not for any technical or musical reasons—it’s purely physical, to get the muscles primed, to avoid injury, and to get used to the instrument.Seems reasonable, but does anyone disagree? A question might be, do the technical, musical and physical fall into neat discrete chunks? Let’s just say for the moment that they do not. If that’s the case, and warming-up is a combination of all three, what’s the difference between a warmup and a (public) performance? I mean, I’m assuming that none of us would warmup in front of an audience.
…extravagant and extrovert come out of a trombone much more naturally than subtle and introspective. That's does however open the issue of do we chose it because we are the way we are, or does it makes us the way we are….Yes, it does raise that question, but maybe the answer lies in Jeff’s first sentence. What if I reworded it a little: the trombone rewards extravagant and extrovert playing. What I mean by that is that the electric guitar, for example, generally rewards (despite rock machismo theatrics) the delicate touch, maybe even “subtle and introspective”. There’s a kind of rule of diminishing rewards with electric guitars: playing with, say, broader gestures (e.g. picking harder) doesn’t necessarily translate sound-wise—something that guitar pedagogy sometimes neglects. As I’ve said before it’s often better to, turn up the amp, and pick lighter.
File this away with Airto’s tambourine solo, Bennink’s shoe solo, and maybe Prévost’s snare ‘piece’.
I’m not in the habit of writing obituaries here—many bloggers have done better elsewhere—so I won’t other than to add that one of the things I found fascinating about Roach was his complex relationship with pedagogy and technique.
What I do want to do is a little more modest: I want to talk about warming up. I don’t buy the idea that playing, say, scales across the guitar’s fingerboard counts for much of a warmup (those who disagree, please let me know). I’ve used various warmup routines over the years (some of which I plan to write about at some point), but none seem particularly well suited for the task for the improviser- guitarist. However, watching drummers warmup, going though simple rudiments (single strokes, double strokes, flams, etc.), I’ve begun thinking about possible transpositions of these techniques onto the guitar…. I’ll report back with more when I’ve explored this further.
In the meantime, a question: how do you warm up? and why?
Apologies: this is a scatterbrained post that I managed to fit in my break from the paperwork.
Hopefully the above youtubified clip will help all of us (perhaps including DJA who feels he “inadvertently opened a can of worms”) relax after The Keith Jarrett Incident. (…But, no, I don’t know why Williams’ hands are never shown.)
Talking about pianists, thanks to the ‘HurdAudio Rotations’, I got introduced to the music of Paul Plimley who has a track entitled ‘We Got Noh Rhythm’.
This reminded me of when I was a (young and stupid college student) Composer (capital ‘C’), and I had this silly idea that, if I could fuse the ventilated rhythms of Feldman with the dramatic tone-deafness (and I mean that in the nicest way) of Xenakis, I’d have found my niche. ’Course I failed (anyone who’s ever tried even a cursory analysis of the above score-makers’ works will know why). I did eventually manage something a little like this, but in improvisation, not in composition. The sound world I arrived at was on parallel docks with Noh (what Zappa called Science Fiction Music)….
Apropos of nothing, Jeff Albert offers some fine audio recordings for download.
(Incidentally, in light of Paul Rutherford’s passing, a question: what is it about trombonists improvisers? why do they seem (grossly generalizing for a moment) more extravagant and extrovert? and why are half my—a guitar player’s—favorite improvisers trombonists?)
Finally, Andrew Durkin (under the perhaps unfair label ‘navel-gazing’) has a personal/political/idiosyncratic take on bodies and music (something that interests me also, but under a much more straightforward label—‘body’).
That’s my break from my administrative duties over: back to work….
Taylor Ho Bynum can practice while watching television. HTP, a bass player, used to practice by playing along to every spot during a commercial break (which has a kind of scatter-brained, post-modern logic to it). I’m impressed (and a little dizzy with the idea), but, really, I couldn’t do that. I need both sets of ears and eyes: I’m afraid that I’ll miss something and screw-up if I let my attention drift.
Okay, as I’ve said before, I’m a systems junkie.
My routine (which goes through the occasional, irregular shake-up) right now consists of ‘natural’ harmonics; scalar patters that alternate open and stopped strings; clusters and ‘pseudo-clusters’; and ‘touch’ playing. (Did you noticed that this resembles humble lexicon?) Thrown into that mix are articulations via the volume pedal. (I also live by the metronome, but that’s another story….)
’Cause there’s not enough hours in the day, and you can only do so much practicing without hitting a physical / physiological / mental / spiritual wall, my practicing ‘regime’ (maybe ‘ritual’ is a better word) has, at the moment, a four day cycle. This also means I don’t practice the same thing more than once every four days. I do, however, try and cover all the bases each day, so I’ll have four sets of harmonics exercises, four sets of cluster based patterns, etc. to cycle through.
Now that all looks frozen and durable, but of course it ain’t. These elements are “exercises to followup on technically curious… gestures and structurings. …These exercises evolve not through some grand plan, but by adding kinks and extra complications.” In his own post about practicing, Dominic Lash makes a similar point:
A given practice regimen for me tends to last a few months before I rearrange things but the broad categories remain the same…. But the regime has to feel fresh for me to feel excited enough actually to pick the bass up, and the best way to do this is change things about periodically.And recently (and whenever it happens, it comes as a surprise) I’ve found myself at the early stages of going through one of those shake-ups. I’m equal measures excited and anxious about this….
After much delay (caused by various not-very-musical reasons), continued from part 1….
A little while ago Chris Chatham at Developing Intelligence listed ‘10 Important Differences Between Brains and Computers’. I hope Chatham will not mind me quoting item 10 in full:
Brains have bodiesThis strikes me as potentially relevant to the business of theorizing an embodied, or corporeal, listening….
This is not as trivial as it might seem: it turns out that the brain takes surprising advantage of the fact that it has a body at its disposal. For example, despite your intuitive feeling that you could close your eyes and know the locations of objects around you, a series of experiments in the field of change blindness has shown that our visual memories are actually quite sparse. In this case, the brain is “offloading” its memory requirements to the environment in which it exists: why bother remembering the location of objects when a quick glance will suffice? A surprising set of experiments by Jeremy Wolfe has shown that even after being asked hundreds of times which simple geometrical shapes are displayed on a computer screen, human subjects continue to answer those questions by gaze rather than rote memory. A wide variety of evidence from other domains suggests that we are only beginning to understand the importance of embodiment in information processing.
Towards the end of Chan-Wook Park’s Lady Vengeance (Chinjeolhan Geum-Jassi) there’s a forty second close-up of the main character.
It’s an extraordinary scene in which you see the face of the main character (played by Yeong-ae Lee) crumple and contort, hovering uneasily between expressions of despair (mourning, perhaps?), relief, triumph, and half a dozen undefinable, unspecifiable states. It’s extraordinary also because, as you watch the scene progress, you can almost feel her muscles working under her face. It’s as if your face (not your eyes, not your brain) is responding to the scene; telling you what is happening, what to feel, how to empathize.
Listening to the radio last night and MLM asked if I could identify the type of guitar by ear. Well, beyond the obvious, all I can identify is a cloud of possibilities—probable combinations—that might be deployed to get a certain sound. The obvious: acoustic/electric, nylon/steel strings, finger/plectrum, etc. The probable: how its mic’d-up, pickups used, recording technologies, etc.
What surprised me, however, was that I could hear the string tension. Actually, scratch that, I could feel the string tension. On the guitar of a track on the radio, for example, I could feel that the strings were of higher tension than what I’m used to: an acoustic guitar with probably a higher action, maybe heavier strings. Later, listening to a recording by Bill Frisell, I could tell that he has much lower string tension, on the electric, than I do (even though Frisell tends to tune slightly sharp of Concert): Frisell probably uses lighter strings.
The funny thing is, it really is (almost) a bodily reaction—feeling the string tension—it does register in my fingers, arm, etc. (MLM, being a vocalist, has analogous reactions to recorded voices.) And, like watching that shot in Lady Vengeance, I know—I think I know—that it must be my sensory and cognitive mechanisms (ears-nerves-brain), that is constructing this model, but the (empathetic?) effects seem to be in my sinews and my muscles.
Does anyone else have similar responses? And does it seem to register in your body?
Continued from part 0….
Leaving aside the issue of narcissism for the moment, what is it that you witness at a laptop performance? What does it mean to ‘perform’ in this context?
…In live [electro-acoustic] performance situations, most people in audiences are not clear what us happening when a performer plays a [MIDI] controller. Most listeners, I believe, actually suppose that what they are hearing is an instrument in the traditional sense. They watch the performer, they experience the action/response phenomena, and they imagine that what they see is what they hear.
Schrader (1991), p. 101Barry Schrader was writing this in a techno-historical moment before software plugins (VST, b. 1996), when sampling, on the whole, was done at resolutions coarser than 16-bits, and live computer music, more often than now, entailed the use of ‘alternative’ MIDI controllers (remember those?). Despite this technological distance from our current practices, similar issues, I think, are relevant to laptop performances. Specifically, the issue of decoupling bodily gesture and sound production: what you see is not what you hear.
As each discouragement draws the listener’s identification away from the physical, it directs it towards the imaginative mastery of all possible combinations embodied by ‘the music itself’. Socially mobile, freed from physical work, seeming to encompass all possibilities in a unified whole… a sonic experience of the middle-class self.
Cusick (1999), p. 495.Too often in electro-acoustics practice is one of the last considerations; bodies are one of the least concerns; and audience is a canvas or recipient—an after thought.
Jazz is dead, long live jazz.
This one is a little bit more personal in its politicals than my previous ‘what’s in a name’ posts. As what started off as a comment to ‘Jazz Death?’ at Stochasticactus and ‘Jazz historiography versus jazz reality’ at Soundslope, this is my partial, subjective take on ‘jazz’.
Jazz is not dead, it just smells funny.
Frank Zappa on ‘Be-Bop Tango (Of The Old Jazzmen’s Church)’, Zappa/Mothers (1974).
‘Jazz’ is the name of the political system that controls and dictates African-American information dynamics.
Anthony Braxton quoted in Lock (1988), p. 92.I’m stuck somewhere between the implications of the Zappa quote (in a sense who cares if jazz is dead) and the Braxton (well, if that’s jazz, they’re welcome to it). Yet I head straight to the J-word section in record stores since, for better or worse, right or wrong, much of the music I love and study is to be found there; I find the results of the labor of many of my cultural elders filed under that moniker.
…It [jazz] was seen as that [subversive and culturally corrosive] a long time ago because of race. That’s the only way you could see Louis Armstrong as a subversive figure, or Charlie Parker, or Duke Ellington. Their message was always one of humanism….
Wynton Marsalis on The Daily Show, March 7th 2007 (watch the video).So Marsalis claiming that, once stripped of its historical, political and, yes, racial specificity, jazz can stand for a universal humanhood. But is Marsalis also arguing that, having developed colorblindness, we can now appreciate the colorless message underneath the black faces? And isn’t this identity-free, discorporate, humanism a luxury of the wealthy? the white? the male? the heterosexual? Is Marsalis in fact saying that underneath the black faces is the music of/for whites?
…Jazz is the product of the whites—the ofays—too often my enemy. It is the progeny of the blacks—my kinsmen. By this I mean: you own the music, and we make it. By definition, then, you own the people who make the music. You own us in whole chunks of flesh.
Archie Shepp (1965).What motivates Marsalis’ odd-ball desire for colorblindness (‘once we get rid of the race element, we shall see the universal value of the music’)? Of course this music was subversive and culturally corrosive. Surely you’d have to be come kind of reactionary, wingnut not to want it to be. Why would you want to neutralize this music? Does Marsalis want it to smell less—to smell better?
You have to give Wynton [Marsalis] and those guys credit for insisting that black people should have a very important voice in outlining what African American culture is all about. I think that’s a good thing to do. But then, I have a pretty expanded view of what the African American tradition can be. I’ve learned from some really amazing individuals representing a pretty diverse take.
George E. Lewis quoted in Corbett (1996), p. 40.But whether or not jazz is dead, I don’t share many of the feelings underlying expressions of pessimism. And if the youthful musicians of today appear timid, maybe that has more to do with the fossilized tradition’s elder guardians’ constant proclamation that there will never, ever be another genius of the status of Duke, Parker, Monk, Coltrane. Ever.
What’s important to me is that my work is seen in a particular context, coming from a particular tradition. I don’t really care what people call it but I would want is to be clear that I was inspired to play by listening to certain people who continue to be talked about mainly in jazz contexts. People like John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Cecil Taylor—these were people who played music that excited me to the point where I took music seriously myself. That continues to be the case. That’s where what I’m doing has to make most sense, if it makes any sense at all.
Evan Parker quoted in Lock (1991), p. 30.I’m happy to be labeled under the J-word; I’m happy not to be. The musicians I work with orbit the traditions of improvised musics (free or otherwise), the Blues, of Rock, of R’n’B, folk musics (regional or nomadic), and Experimentalism (from its various forms, branches and chapters). However, it may be that the single most common cultural lineage we hover around and intersect with is encapsulated by that J-word. That, to me, is the testament to the legacy of African-American… actually, let’s not tip-toe around this in our current Obama fueled condition: the legacy of Great Black Music.
To simplify things, there’s basically three ways to change the pitch on a chordophone like a guitar: change the tension of the string, change the mass of the string, or change the effective vibrating length of the string. On the guitar the tension of the string is altered by ‘bending’ the strings or via mechanical means (e.g. tuning machines, a mechanical ‘detuner’ or whammy bar). In the context of position playing, however, it’s the latter two (mass and length of the vibrating string) that we’re interested in.
You can view the fingerboard as a two dimensional space in which pitch is dependent on the position both longitudinally and transversally in relation to the strings. Pitch is altered by moving up and down the string (changing the vibrating length of the string) or by moving perpendicular to the string, across the fingerboard (selecting strings of different mass and, to some extent, tension).
In our exploration of playing in position, thus far, we’ve really only concentrated on the first of these dimensions, but we’re about to extend playing in position across the fingerboard. (Or, recalling my earlier metaphor of the guitar fingerboard as “a set of single-pole, multi-throw switches”, having concentrated our efforts on the individual switches, we are about to practice moving between the switches.)
One of the interesting side effects this 2-dimesional arrangement is that the same pitch may appear at multiple coordinates on the fingerboard:
Another is that shapes derived from the comfortable hand shape (the diagonal fretting pattern that, from first to fourth finger, moves bass to treble across the strings, and bass to treble up the frets) tend to maximize the pitch interval available, while the reversed diagonal shape tends to minimize them. (These factors will become significant in, for example, the playing of clusters.)
Keep these ideas in mind as you approach the 2-dimensional fingerboard: you’re about to take a step towards what some players describe as the fingerboard ‘lighting up’….
It’s been a little while since the last paraphrase, but here’s a potentially provocative one:
First, the improvisative can be understood as a drive, an impulse or form of propulsion, directing a subject toward an object. …Second, the improvisative can also be understood in terms of an act, a series of practices and behaviors involving bodies, organs, and pleasures…. Third, the improvisative can also be understood in terms of an identity. …And fourth, the improvisative commonly refers to a set of orientations, positions, and desires which implies that there are particular ways in which the desires, differences, and bodies of subjects can seek their pleasure.
As a concept, the improvisative is incapable of ready containment: it refuses to stay within its predesignated regions, for it seeps across boundaries into areas that are apparently not its own. As drive, it infests all sorts of other areas in the structures of desire. …As a set of activities and practices, it refuses to accept the containment [of place and context]…. It is excessive, redundant, and superfluous in its languid and fervent overachieving. It always seeks more than it needs, performs excessive actions, and can draw any objects… any number of subjects… into its circuits of pleasure.
paraphrase of Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. viii.Replace ‘the improvisative’ with ‘sexuality’, and you’re back to the original text.
I’m taking a little detour from the bread and butter subject matters of this blog, and having a look at laptop computers in the context of live, and, in particular, improvised, performance.
Before I start, as my position is partial, and by no stretch of the imagination ‘objective’, let me sketch out a few background details. I’m a guitar player—an improviser. Nine times out of ten, that’s my identity (function, assignment, designation) on stage. On the other hand, I have worked around, from, and within, the loosely defined field that enrolls laptops for live, music performance. I’ve intersected with these practices long enough to witness various monikers and prefixes—‘plunderphonics’, ‘EAI’, ‘new media’—come onto the scene, and others—‘live’, ‘real-time’, ‘interactive’, ‘new media’—fall out of favor. I’ve performed several times with laptopiteers. I’ve even sat behind a laptop on stage a few times, although not recently (and if you think I have an axe to grind, maybe it’s in my self-conscious abandonment of that last position).
However, I feel alienated from performances with laptops on stage despite (or maybe because of) my background—my prior experience, my prior contact, with these practices.
There’s two issues I will be hovering around in my discussions (I’ve already posted a version of these, and they originally started in discussions with AF):
After confidently kick-starting this thread, by the very second entry I had to admit difficulty in writing about the solo context, and I still can’t quite figure out how to crack this. Well, gotta start somewhere (I’m prepared for this ending up as the most confused and lamest of entries…).
Our idom is an open field. If I were to play bebop guitar, well, it’s pretty crowded in there….
John Scofield quoted in Mandel (1988), p. 33.At It Is Not Mean If It Is True there was an interesting discussion that touched on the crowdedness of instruments. sjz asked if “all the instruments [are] crowded now,” and I think the answer is yes, but they’ve always been crowded—they’ve always come with personal and collective histories.
I prefer the kind of object which… have some kind of inner life. …The ‘conservation’ of certain contents in objects which people touch under conditions of extreme sensitiveness. The ‘emotionally’ charged objects are… capable of revealing these contents and touching them provides associations and analogies for our own flashes of the unconscious. Thus, in several of my films I used an object or a whole group of objects which I ‘heard.’
Jan Svankmajer quoted in Hames (1995), pp. 110-111.This intersects with cyborg identities (Haraway, 1991) in which, perhaps, “the guitar forms the interface (both the surface boundary and communication channel) between the guitarist and techno-cultural narratives. Narratives that enroll trans-corporeal characters such as tastes, sensibilities and tradition, and corporeal characters such as luthiers, audience members and other guitarists.” Whatever the case, however, let me, for the moment, talk about this crowd.
…I thought about the space, the niche that I could look for was somewhere between Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders, with… the way John Tchicai played. …not exactly a synthesis, but I could work my way through the gaps that were left between what those people were doing. …It sounds very mechanical but I was actually emotionally moved to want to be in that space. It wasn’t just a calculation, I felt an impulse.
Evan Parker quoted in Lock (1991), p. 33.Who’s in this crowd? In my case, there’s a trinity of improvising guitarists who I look towards in navigating this space—this particular socio-cultural intersections of guitar and improvisative performance. In no small way I get my bearings (technically and culturally) from this constellation. Additionally (non-guitarist) improvisers inform my socio-musical approach and position within the performed ecology (there is, for example, a trombonist who I think of every time I play in a group situation). There’s also an assortment of pianist whose techniques and strategies I’ve begun to transpose into the context of the guitar(ist). And somewhere in that crowd—a group that is very much partial and not innocent of issues of identity (class, gender, race, nationality, etc)—is me. In retrospect, this might be a good reading of the title I gave the first entry on the ‘solo’ context: “alone together.”
Well, it’s nice to finally be back here. I would have returned sooner except for having to finish off that ‘real’ writing task, and then having to fish for funding (I don't expect anyone became a musician because of their love of bureaucracy and red tape). Anyway, I’m much better now, so let me gently break into 2007 with not, I think you’ll be glad to hear, another list, but a proposed outline of what I’ll be writing about….
Okay, as far as pedagogical topics go, I’ll continue with the studies in playing in position (with, despite my reservations, an excursion into talking about posture), with the eventual goal of returning to natural harmonics (which was really the exciting stuff), and then clusters.
In addition, I want to open a thread on group improvisation. Specifically, I’ll start with a set of schemes for quartet. These schemes hover somewhere between exercises, training and tactics. Nothing particularly original or earth shattering, but I have found these schemes useful, and they bring up, for me, problems of conceiving interactions and issues of pedagogy.
On the flip side, I will continue to discuss (or at least try and find out how to discuss) solo improvisation. (I say “on the flip side”, but of course that’s a false dichotomy.)
Back on sociological ground, I want to tackle in more detail the idea that improvisation is ‘society-in-miniature’. Topics that I hope to address are utopias and the distinctions between the micro-social and the macro-social. I got into a bit of a twist in regards to ‘diplomacy’, and I hope Peter, sjz and others will continue to keep me on my toes, and prevent me from making broad generalizations.
I also want to flesh out the subject of the body. Recently, MLM, PE and myself, among others, have got ourselves into rhetorical funk trying to talk about bodies in the context of music and performance. It’s tricky to avoid that neo-Cartesian impulse (our language conspires to reinstate that distinction and that hierarchy), but bodies, as Butler might say, surely do matter.
I’m sure more stuff will present itself as the year ambles on (I hesitate to say ‘progresses’), but as a starting point, these suit me fine… for the moment (and that’s the important thing).
I came across this interesting entry at Mixed Meters. The performance in question is by Debora Petrina—a self-identified ‘polymorphic artist.’ (Incidentally there’s an un-YouTubified version of the video in question on her site. YouTubified video.)
I’ve got no special insight into the specific whys or whats of Petrina’s performance, but what I find fascinating about this is the idea of self-consciously engineering the body and movement into the (concert) performance ritual.
Much of performance ritual gets handed down, and, perhaps in European Concert Music more than in any other tradition, without thought or critique. “Well, that’s how we’ve always done it”—never mind that, as anthropologists will tell you, such statements are (powerful) fiction. A stark example of this might be in acousmatiques in which the concert hall context and metaphor was accepted and (super-)imposed without, apparently, discussion or dissent.
I’m sympathetic to the idea that these rituals and context can (should?) be (re)examined, and the process of opening up these black boxes might reveal the unfamiliar, the unorthodox, and the complex (all good creative stuff).
I also find the self-conscious visibility of the body in this performance compelling—the body in motion as a site of creation, maybe. As discussed by Suzanne Cusick, European Concert Music has come to value the mind over the body, attempting to exorcise the body out of the Concert Hall:
The ideology of listening… strongly discourages physical engagement when listening. Even more, it discourages identification with the bodily work of performers. [my emphasis]
Cusick, 1999, p. 495.Again, think of the ‘all ears,’ discorporate, mind-to-mind model embedded in much acousmatiques.
As each discouragement draws the listener’s identification away from the physical, it directs it towards the imaginative mastery of all possible combinations embodied by ‘the music itself’. Socially mobile, freed from physical work, seeming to encompass all possibilities in a unified whole… a sonic experience of the middle-class self.
Ibid., p. 495.By making the body invisible, we’re positing a vanilla, mayonnaise, ‘universal’ human, but the result is, ironically, very much gender, race, class and culture specific.
