Re: Spektor...Part I. His/Herstory

2006-06-19T15:14:00.000-04:00

There are a lot of things I want to say about Regina Spektor. There are a lot of things I want to say about a lot of pop music. I tend not to say them in my academic musicamahlogimical writing, so maybe I'll start saying them here, and maybe I'll start with Regina.

Partly because I've recently become a history fetishist, and partly because, for the moment at least, I lack the will to come up with any other organizing principle, I'll start said sayings with questions of history, and I'll try it from a couple perspectives: first, from the "outside in," working from the not-so-effective stories we have about the history of music, towards the position of the contemporary pop artist; then, from the "inside out," seeing what one of Regina's songs says about herstory.

Outside In

Thinking pop music historically is a weird project. Music history, in its musty academic form--or at least the mustinesses I'm familiar with--has tended to focus on a very old, very carefully constructed, very delicate canon. Foggy profs with leather patches on their elbows have supposedly been telling the same strange story for a while now: notches in a chunk of Greek rock somehow lead to (and it's always the "leading to" that's the problem) moaning monks 1300 years later, then to polyphony, then motets, chansons and madrigals, operas, concertos, symphonies, biggers symphonies, god-awful dissonance, the end of the world...and then the Beatles.

O.K.: silly story. And granted: it was probably told, like any good, fake genealogy, to cheer up someone in power (as Bill Maher puts it, W was born in a small town in Texas called New Haven Connecticut). But fake genealogies don't become fake until they're hit upside the head with a good counterstory; and, in this case the counter-story--plenty suspect in its own right, and becoming ever more so as it's parroted without critical reflection--goes as follows: Sometime around the end of the ninetheenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, a hysterical albeit "hegemonic" Western cultural consiousness, apparently dismayed at that fact that it might dissolve into a markedly un-pristine horde, tried to legitimate itself by sifting through what it decided was "the past," and selecting, framing, valorizing, choosing to remember only what made its own position seem logical, legitimate, universal, ultimate. Yada yada. The result, as this story goes, was THE CANON. All roads lead to Rome; if they don't, god help the houses that line them. All musics lead to dead or dying German guys; if they don't, well...

So where's pop in this? From the perspective of the counter story, popular music has been there all along--folk(ish) melody, improvised music, early secular vocal music, early instrumental music: all the musics ignored by the supposedly self-legitimating histories of "high brow" composition. And this same repositioning also makes genres that have been studied as part of the don't-clap-between-movements canon start to look more popular and less "classical"-- Offenbach, Pagannini, Liszt, etc. All were hits: more old news.

What's interesting for the sake of this current ramble is that this would place Regina in a long continuum. Some folks who are infrequently referred to as "folks" have argued--and I like this position--that, whatever the hizzle postmodernism may be, it's not in any way historically new, but, instead, is at most a new name for a current that has alternated with "modernism" as far back as we can see. One could make the same sort of argument about the "popular": it's nothing new--it's not the sudden emergence of the Beatles after the end of the world. Instead, it's a very old historical current that has been dramatically repositioned in recent history, moved closer to cultural (and especially economic) dominance, thus making more apparent (or simply making up, through a re-selection of historically "relevant" materials) the role it's played in other times. This would mean that Regina's ancestors would thus be the keening Greeks, the troubadours, Thomas Campion, Machaut, (especially) Schubert....yada yada, further.

Reading Regina's music this way can sometimes really work; stuff starts to come out of it when you think of it as a descendant of Scubert, and Regina's classical training makes it seem almost silly not to consider connections like this. But the clash between the supposedly old story and the equally suspect new counter story points up some juicy paradoxes, which I think have everything to do with the position of contemporary pop--if not all contemporary music--and which I want to get at in my next post.

First, how is this membership in a long, old tradition to be understood in the context of contemporary pop culture's radical metastis of Romantic revolution and modernist renewal--if one were overly verbose, one might call it continual post-modern hyper-revolution, a willed, giddy jettisoning of history, followed by an equally willed--if not altogether sucessful--amnesia? Pop, in this sense, would be caught between, on the one hand, its participation--whether it be willed, conscious, acknowledged or not--in a very very old historical movements, and, on the other, its constitutive and internal demand for total newness, its break with history prior to itself, even to the point of coming to understand itself as bearing its own history: unwashed record store scholars are more likely to hear Radiohead's ancestors in the Beatles than in Strauss. And, tempting as it is to reduce this problem to its modernist ancestor, the conundrum of "Tradition and the Individual Talent,"the two are not the same: Eliot knew, and in an important way, made his history and tradition--he wrote the Old Story and wrote himself into it. Pop emerged when history went underground--it turns from history, often lobotomizing itself in a macabre effort to forget.

Second, how does this weird double bind (the music's being caught in a tradition that it defines itself by forgetting) leave its mark? How can it be read in the songs? There's a paradox here too, and it appears vividly if one considers tonality: Was Schoenberg right? Did tonality run its course? Did history mandate its end? If this is so then contemporary music like Regina's, which uses a mostly tonal harmonic vocabulary, is either just plain historically "wrong," or must be considered as a tradition apart of Schoenberg's: the sounds that were exhausted in his world could be said to live on in hers. But what if they're the same world? What if we don't have a two stories, but only one?

If so, Regina's music would be a singing ghost, made of a history it love and rejects.

Re-blog

2006-06-19T12:33:00.000-04:00

Between graduate school #2 and graduate school #3, I have this summer, much of which I'm spending as a temp. This is drone work: I soak up cancer-glow from computer monitors and flourescent lights; I try, at worst, to stay awake, at best, to look busy; I wait for a phone to ring. And since, while droning, I have nothing but time, caffiene and internet, I've decided to try blogging again.
For those few of you who read this blog in its old form, I can only apologize for the oddities you endured. It ranged from maudlin to scary to simply weird; it was unfit to be out in public, even the virtual public sphere of the internet. To borrow a simile from la vie temp: writing like that, in a place where people could actually read it, was like showing up to an office job wearing steak. This new version will--I hope--at least wear pants.

Sexy Sexy Wagner

2005-10-24T15:08:00.000-04:00

While doing some research on music and androgyny, I've lately encountered some fairly juicy prose. None, though, has been nearly as out and out rupture-something-sexy as this passage from Wagner:

"As we gaze upon this entrancing measure of the artist's truest and noblest muses, we now perceive all three of them, each with her arm affectionately entwined about her sister's neck; then, now this one and now that frees herself from the others' embrace in order to show them her beauteous form in full independence, merely brushing the others' hands with the tips of her fingers; now one of them, entranced by the sight of her sisters' tight embrace, bowing down gently before their twin beauty; then two of them, transported by the charm of the third, greeting her with tender homage; until at least all three are tightly clasped, breast on breast, limb on limb, melting together with the fervor of love's kiss to create a single, wondrously living human form.-- Such is the love and life, the wooing and winning of art, the one true art whose several parts, ever for themselves and ever for one another, diverge to create the richest contrast and reunite in blissful harmony."

Gotta get me some of that Gesamtkunstwerk! Hegel said that "the truth is the Bacchanal in which every member is drunk," and this used to take my prize (other versions of this prize, offered by other Steves, are still up for grabs) as the most-funnest-soundingest-quasi-aesthetic expression of the absolute. Well, step aside Hegel, that prize now goes to Wagner. Yeah Hegel, who's your Daddy/aesthetico-philosophical bastard heir...

Sometimes Even Music

Re: Spektor...Part I. His/Herstory

Re-blog

Sexy Sexy Wagner