From Occult to Mimesis

In Doctor Faustus (1947), Thomas Mann (1875-1955) suggests that perhaps music is not meant to be heard, but to be contemplated. What he has in mind is a musician's pleasure of beholding a score, on which there lies a matrix of mathematical signs that can be translated into a sweeping sensation, a cosmic time capsule in which one escapes the chronometric predictability of our factive universe--a possibility that has yet to be realised.

I had a distaste (or perhaps put psychologically, phobia) for writing orchestral music until recently. I must confess that there is something magical to see the score unfold like a fabric that is woven out of many organic layers that have gone through the process of imperfections, anticipations, and reconfigurations. The greatest joy for me, as always, is to contemplate the various ways contrapuntal relationships fall into a certain harmonic structure. Whenever it happens, it always means that there is a mathematical principle that somehow remains constant in every inversion, retrograde, permutation, and transposition. I am not a serialist, and perhaps because of that, the moment I found myself moving into a realm in which that certain principle is found, I am always moved by this somewhat occult quality of the art of composition.

Because of this occult quality, Mann wrote in his novel, through the voice of the "thing," that Mediaeval and Renaissance theologians had the most perverse idea of mobilising it to serve "God." Nevertheless, "perversion," in this sense, is best understood not as a form of deviation; rather, it is the site at which seemingly conflicting ideas are revealed to us as the core of the truth: What Søren Kierkegaard (1813-55) calls the Paradox that makes up every philosophical question, or in fact, every possibility that makes definite the form of being. In the case of music, the very Paradox is, precisely, the meeting point between what we perceive as rationality and irrationality; the vacation of this very tension is possibly where the "God" of Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716) dwells.

About a month ago, I read a comment on my friend's article. In the comment, the reader rather hastily defines music as an organisation of time. For me, a composer does not organise time, she/he creates time, not the mundane and predictable chronos, but a time-image in which chronos is put into play, so that one may contemplate one's relationship with it. Put within the framework of Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), in music, one becomes conscious of one's Profound Boredom, i.e. one's awareness of one's being in time. If we push it further with Giorgio Agamben's analysis in The Open (L'aperto, 2002), this moment of a human being's entering into consciousness of her/his relationship with time does not mark her/his difference from animal; rather, such moment opens up the paradoxical relationship between her/his state of boredom into which she/he is completely absorbed, and her/his consciousness of it that seems to stand "outside" this state of absorption, thus breaking down the distinction between human and animal.

Music, in the human imagination, is often associated with the end of time (the eskhaton). If music were to be an organisation of time, such association would certainly be inconsistent with the cessation of temporal perception (although in theory, such cessation is incapable of being sensed, thus we, by definition, will never know when time ceases). The only theological and philosophical explanation, in this light, is the idea that music creates a new "time," by which we no longer sense time the way we do. In this sense, we simply enjoy the pleasure of "being with" gods and animals as one.

In the end (or chronologically, in the "beginning"), perhaps Plato has not thought far enough, that music is, after all, about mimesis; it is an imitation of something that our eyes alone have yet learned to imitate.

Simon Rattle's Beethoven

I must confess that I am very satisfied by Simon Rattle's 2003 recording of the complete Beethoven's symphonies. I find his interpretations have addressed some of the interpretative impasses from the past. Besides, the precision in time and dynamics of the orchestra literally produced harmonic phasing. Till now, I have not listened to a recording that has combined such mathematical precision with elegance and, frankly, cultural familiarity.

Some online users-commentators complained about the lack of warmth in these recordings, largely based on two counts: (1) Rattle's interpretation emulates the texture and techniques of the orchestra of Beethoven's time, with less vibratos, a thinner touch in the contact between the players and their instruments, a more subtle brass section, and a stronger emphasis on the woodwind; (2) the recording enhances these features by creating the impression of a more three-dimensional space; this is done by the engineers' strategically planting the microphones not necessarily close to every orchestral section, but at a distance that can convey the spatiality of the stage.

I was not a great supporter of playing music with the aim of emulating the performing style of its historical period. The idea of performing Renaissance and Baroque pieces, for example, with period instruments, was still not a popular practice when I studied at music school in the early 1990s. I once told a salesperson at the Virgin Megastore on Sunset that I did not care for period performances of Bach (and I still admire Glenn Gould, who, ironically, treats the piano as a giant harpsichord). Almost two decades later, however, we do know better, and we have better performers who understand how to control these instruments, as opposed to those performers in the early 90s who simply allowed the instruments to control them.

Having the performers controlling their instruments, however, brought about a different set of issues. For example, even though these instruments are not tuned according to equal temperament, their fingering inevitably conforms to our perception of tuning, thus instead of replicating a period performance, many of these recordings have made it easier for us to swallow what could have been considered as "out of tune" or "disorganised" modes of performance. Moreover, recording engineers, with the development of 125-bit technology (one that finally surpasses the faithfulness of analogue sound), have learned how to take advantage of the new dynamic and frequency ranges to create a more three-dimensional and stereophonic impression of space. The result is an emerging new aesthetics in recording spatiality, sectional balance, and timbre. As a consequence, orchestral sections are balanced not according to the way a 17th- or 18-th century Baron von XXX would have perceived the music in his private chamber, but how we expect it to sound in an acoustically well-tuned space. This new aesthetics is definitely not one that embraces warmth, but mathematical precision.

Rattle's performance is certainly driven by our new knowledge on period performances, the more controlled techniques of these performers, and together with new recording techniques (frankly, not so much technology, for, after all, our CD's still play back these recordings with good-old 16-bit decoding, the same that we used to listen to "Beat It" in the 80s). The most important thing, however, is a subtle change in our expectation that accompanies this epistemological and technical shift: we now expect recordings and performances to be cleaner, more precise, and more faithful to our historical knowledge (again, not necessarily historical "truth").

More important, however, is an ontological shift in our musical perception. The recordings of Karajan and Berstein, considered retrospectively, represent the grand finale of the trajectory of European Classicism and Romanticism, with their emphasis on unity, integrity, and expressivity. The recording technique of the time emphasises not spatiality, but perceptual unity. Engineers usually used the front-and-back or the side-by-side technique of two-channel microphone placement in order to capture a unified sonic image of the orchestra, and maintain a balanced "phantom centre" for the ears (i.e. one gets the impression that the sound is more or less coming from the centre). Up until the early 21st century, most self-proclaimed digital recordings were still made on analogue tapes with Dolby SR noise reduction. As a result, the timbre conforms to the performance with the engineers' intention to achieve warmth and perceptual oneness.

We are now, however, on the other side of the ontological scale. With our Web 2.0 informational and perceptual landscape, and more subtle philosophical shifts in our ways of perceiving the world (both intellectually and vernacularly, e.g. in photography, cinema, academia, literature, journalism, etc.), we are no longer used to that kind of integral monolithic perception. Rather, we are constantly aware of our relationships in space, and the multiplicity of our sensorial stimulants, and most important, the mobility of both our bodies and these stimulants. In this sense, Rattle's recordings can be understood as a response to, and a symptom of, our new mode of perception and ontological sense of being.

Listening to the mid string section of the orchestra swelling to the foreground in a way that a Karajan or Bernstein recording could have never done (an instantiation of our mobile ears), I must say that I can no longer be satisfied by being bound to an imaginary chair and listen to an essentially mono recording under the disguise of stereophonic sound.

California Dream

My ontological principle in my iTune is, unfortunately, very conventional: alphabetical order. As a result, after a whole day of listening to Béla Bartók, I am now humming to the tunes of the Beach Boys while having a Heineken. Meanwhile, as Stella (Thelma Ritter) says in Rear Window (1954), the summer thunderstorm in New York does nothing besides making the heat wet.

The Beach Boys always bring me to the PCH, with the ocean on my left, and an anticipation of an afternoon on "my" beach (no secret here, the private part of Point Dume Beach to be exact). I first listened to the Beach Boys with my mother, who usually played for me hours of American hit songs from the 1950s and 60s, though I did not start enjoying their songs until having read about Murakami Haruki's favourite character Watanabe (in his earlier novels), who always did his chores with the Beach Boys in the background. No one can possibly deny the power of their songs to summon the ideal image of Southern California, but a rather peculiar chicken-and-egg issue surfaces: Did the Beach Boys idealise Southern California?

Murakami's representation of the Beach Boys' California (often being compared with Wong Kar-wai's use of the song "California Dreamin'" in Chungking Express [1994]) is often considered as an example of how American idealisation of "itself" (or a piece of "itself"), once exported to a different cultural context, became a synecdoche of the version of freedom, beauty, youthfulness, and para-modernity (notice that the Beach Boys stand precisely at the threshold between the modern and the pre-modern) that the "nation" itself wishes to represent to the "outside world." The problem with this argument, besides the simplicity of its theory of a dominant power overdetermining the semiotic structure of its imagined other, lies in its presumed dichotomy between "America" and the "outside world," as though the US has never belonged to it (a takeoff on Haun Saussy's idea of "China" and the "World" here). Is the ideal image of Southern California so much bound by "national boundaries?"

Contextulised within its historical setting, the music of the Beach Boys can be considered as the last attempt of the LA music industry (in 1961) to offer clean, homey, and wholesome entertainment for the young generation. The idea of listening to these young men expressing their sexual desire under the blessing of their "parents" renewed the already broken connection between the older and the newer generations in American families in the 1950s in popular music and cinema (Elvis Presley, Rebel without a Cause, On the Waterfront, etc.). The Beach Boys tried to portray a Southern California as a home that was desirable to live, precisely in a decade in which neighbourhoods were torn down and freeways were constructed for the purpose of building a futuristic model city. This whole picture, if we study it more carefully, is one gigantic paradox, for not only that family relationship was seriously in question by 1961 in urban California, the state itself was considered as the epitome of such systemic collapse. The intended conservative agenda of Capitol Records was therefore quickly turned inside out, and the Beach Boys were also seen by Americans and non-Americans alike as the representatives of the carefree, discrete, new generation who celebrated sexual freedom and individualistic lifestyle in "liberal" California.

In this sense, it was not that California was indeed "free" (from the perspective of pre-Civil-War international law, maybe, but that would be a different discussion), nor did the Beach Boys idealise California; rather, a "California," detached from its geographical boundary, became an imagined free agent that acted as a cohesive force between conflicting notions of an ideal life: familial harmony versus individual freedom, celebration of sexuality versus cleanliness and health, nonconformism versus observation of social boundaries. The curious thing about all these contesting notions, however, is the imaginer's oblivion to political troubles. In other words, with the Beach Boys, the social body is tactfully detached from the political body, and are thus allowed to mediate these conflicting notions "outside" the political boundaries, in a world "outside" our physical world.

No one can possibly resist the very ideal of being carried away by a surf, against the sunset off a golden beach. Despite my abstract analysis here, those beautiful beaches indeed exist.

Opium and the Law

My vampiric existence continued last night, though I forced myself to wake up early this morning in the hope that I can start adjusting my sleeping pattern. I forged ahead with my composition. I wasn't terribly inspired, though the passages I wrote sounded 'right.'

I finished reading Opium and the People (Virginia Berridge and Griffith Edwards). The project is essentially Foucaultian, though the writers never quoted him, because in a way, as social historians (at least as far as this project is concerned), Berridge and Edwards try to resist accepting any figurative model. For them, their book suggests a way to investigate the issue of opiate use and public policies with the epistemological space of Foucault in mind (again, suggested, but not named), but the reader's consciousness of the actual physical and material conditions of the biopolitical structure in British drug politics and policy-making (and in relation to it, the formative elements of the British polity at large upon the basis of the biological lives of the 'people') in today's society (in terms of the book, post-1968 society) is one that cannot be easily negotiated simply through an ontological question.

Policy-making in the twentieth century (and arguably, since antiquity) presupposes an ontological turn that transforms animal lives into humans, and vice versa, and the underlying presupposition of public policy is in fact the management and execution of human lives as animals. As long as the book stays within the concern of policy-making as a symptom of this ontological question at large, the reader is left with two choices: either one must abandon tentatively, for 'pragmatic' reasons, the ontological impasse that the Foucaultian thesis has propounded (and later on, developed by Agamben), and continue to make policies based on the assumption that our democracy is founded upon the execution, exclusion, and management of animal lives in the name of the law, or one must seriously rethink the question how a new way to approach the negotiations of drugs, and our epistemological space that gives forms to their beings (and hence, our understanding of them, their effects, the social, political and monetary values), that would forever suspend the violence of the law and the community that sustain themselves upon the exclusion of lives without any percepts of beginning or an end.

Eclipse

For a cat, the joy of life can be derived from such subtle things as a touch of the human finger on the fine hair of her scalp, the gentle rubbing of her paws, or simply falling asleep while looking into the depth of the human eyes--the kind of intimacy a child shares with her mother, an absolutely pre-linguistic and unconditional jouissance. Unlike me, my cats never worry about my being on Californian schedule all month, something that has been making me rather uncomfortable these days: going to bed at 4 am, waking up at 10 or 11 am. In truth, the schedule doesn't bother me as long as I don't find excuses not to go to the gym or finish a certain task because it has passed a certain hour; but having said that, I do miss the morning. There is something 'hopeful' about the angle of the sun and the scent of the air, about smelling the first cup of coffee at an appropriate hour, or perhaps even being at the gym without worrying that the sun is going to set by the time I get out of there. Alas, perhaps I am temporally conservative.

In fact, today, things have been feeling like an eclipse. Since I always fell asleep around 10 pm on my couch (and then ended up reading until 4 am after I woke up), I decided to put my blanket next to me and read on my couch at 1 am, in the hope that I would somehow drift off of my own accord. No, life doesn't work that way. My eyes adjusted themselves to the dim reading light and I felt absolutely awake around 4 am. I surrendered to my physiological impossibility (whatever it means), and again, I woke up around noon. I got a peculiar email from Olga (I hope that she wasn't offended by my asking her about the new translation of Shklovsky, or my being too boring), made my music, and didn't bother to use the gym afterwards. Alex came over for dinner, and I made my English curry to entertain him with half a bar of butter (not recommended for myself, or anyone above the age of 30).

The only productive thing today was my music. Yes, Dance, Dance, Dance is finally working as an ad lib. piece for a solo zhongruan and a chamber orchestra (ad lib. aurally, but mathematically calculated). Please let me finish this piece.

Let me see if I could manage ending my vampiric life today.

La Fée verte

I have rather translucent curtains on my windows, so does my neighbour across the street. Judging from the way he is dressed, he has an office job somewhere during the day, and he stays up until pretty late at night. He has a piano room, and a mosaic lampshade. I never thought twice about him until I saw him peeking through his window, with his face mostly covered by his curtain. Perhaps he finds what I do in my apartment objectionable, or perhaps he eagerly waits for me to masturbate in my apartment with utmost excitement. Either way is fine. We all need amusements in our humdrum lives.

Imagining stories behind our neighbours' windows from the titbits of actions passing in front of our eyes is the foundation of urban modernity, of photography, and of cinema. However, in order to truly appreciate the beauty of such fleeting instants captured in the image consciousness, one ought to be able to afford to be free from any human praxis, and the fetishising effort of our social attachment of ethical and monetary values to any human production, or for him, the lack of it. His job is to be frozen in time, in an ex-stasis that defies chronometric time, and it is in the disclosure of such 'temporality-outside' that he can arrest an escaping instant as a consciousness, savour it, live in it, and partake of its 'caring of'' the world he shares, but stands outside this world of excitement. The flâneur is, in this way, not an aesthetician; for what captures his interest is not the form of artistic production, but the rhythm of life beyond the chronometric sense of time--the death of life that defies the definition of an instant.

It occurred to me today that my creative impasse with Dance, Dance, Dance is not formal, it is one of poesis. When I thought of a rewrite, I was thinking about an 'improvement' based on the structural framework of what I wrote in 1993; but no matter how hard I try, I cannot create a 'better' piece than what I wrote in 1993, unless I leave that piece untouched. I worked on the third section first, and then broke up the three sections into three movements. I then took away those contrapuntally chaotic moments that really bothered me in the first section. After an hour of work, I gave up. In reality, the only section I feel passionate about is the first section, and that section drives me to ecstasy because it is the soundscape that I admire so much in the music of Takemitsu or Salonen, something that has always been in my head since the first measure I wrote fifteen years ago, but have constantly violated by regulating it with all the rules and rudiments I learned from my academic training. I need to give up the metric system that I have observed so diligently in the first draft, and carry on the soundscape that has the violation and suspension of time as its very foundation.

I have started working on the opium section of the dissertation, and am quite absorbed by all the stories about child doping, opium suicide and all the wonderful elixir of life that late Victorians had enjoyed but denied us by paving the way of modern drug control--a little break from football.

As for now, a little drop of absinthe wouldn't hurt; but a writer dreaming about absinthe at 2 am, instead of flirting with la fée verte herself, i.e. my poor little soul, is, in my opinion, by definition, ontologically contemptible.

Harvey

June is almost over, and I worked like a horse this month, didn't I? Starting from 1 July, I will have a whole year off just to write. The idea that I would have nothing more than a few hours of commitment per week in the city for the rest of the year so that I can concentrate on writing is quite a novelty, especially after labouring myself for eight years in this alienating city. I still remember that years ago, I vomitted in the 2nd Ave F train station as I couldn't stop coughing on my way to tutor my students at Park Slope, and the hour-long ride on the J train to give cello lessons to a pregnant Korean lady. She never rode the train herself, and she didn't realise how frightening that journey was. Ah, how can I not remember that 70 y.o. Korean woman in Chinatown who was so eager to learn the piano, that she would compare my lessons to her mother's milk. I admire her. I really do. She would finish playing the entire book in one week. She stopped her lessons after a month or so, claiming that her heart condition wouldn't allow her to be stressed out by the practice anymore. A strange feeling told me that she probably knew that she was dying, and she wanted to learn how to play before her time came--her childhood dream.

I stayed home all day today. I didn't bother to watch the Euro 2008 final. My original plan was to invite Alex to come to watch the game, but we played phone tags all morning. After having teased by two Spanish fans about my allegiance to the Azzurri in Nevada Smiths on the day of Italy's defeat, I didn't have much appetite to watch the German boys getting humped. I'm sure I can easily fall in love with Spain some day when I have a chance to visit there; but for now, I really can't care less.

TCM showed some of my favourite films today: All About Eve, Notorious, and Harvey. I was moved to tears by the scene in the alley behind Charlie's, in which Elwood talks about how people from all walks of life bring their troubles to him and Harvey:

Harvey and I warm ourselves in all these golden moments. Uh--we've entered as strangers--soon we have friends. And they come over and they--they sit with us, and they drink with us, and they talk to us. And they tell about the big terrible things they've done--and the big wonderful things they'll do. Their hopes and their regrets, their loves and their hates. All very large, because nobody ever brings anything small into a bar. And then--I introduce them to Harvey. And he's bigger and grander than anything they offer me. And--and when they leave, they leave impressed. The same people seldom come back, but--that's--that's envy, my dear. There's a little bit of envy in the best of us. That's too bad. Isn't it? (Mary Chase, http://sfy.ru/sfy.html?script=harvey)

What beauty; what monstrosity!

The fugal section of the Dance, Dance, Dance keeps expanding, and I can't seem to find a way to end it. The piece still lacks details and some sections feel flat. Talked to Bob for quite a stretch of time about the old soirées, and how much we miss those neighbourhood bars in which life is not just a matter of sharing seeds.

I'm hoping to sleep at a decent hour tonight. I feel rather tired and am eager to start my week afresh.

Dance, Dance, Dance

A mosquito kept me up last night, and I didn't doze off until 7:30 in the morning. When I became conscious again, it was already two.

It was a rainy day, and I felt completely lethargic. The work on my music Dance, Dance, Dance went well. I wrote the piece in my Freshman year at Eastman. I was trying to come to terms with the idea that what I dreamt about the ideal separation between love and sex when I was a teenager would actually take a lot of pain to realise. On my birthday this year, I briefly recounted my story with Joe to John. John called it my 'kittie love.'

I penned Dance, Dance, Dance that year in my deep depression. I was in my 'existential' state. 'To see through the meaninglessness of life in order to live through it,' I told my therapist of the time, who only saw me once after I had destroyed the school's double-bass as a substitute for murdering and making love to a man (now I understand why I love Hitchcock). Now, I've finally read up my Nietzsche and Sartre to begin to understand the ontological problem behind these blanket statements, and how much we used to abuse them as justification of our self-indulged depressions; but who am I to look askance at the solitude and sadness of youth, a consciousness that we have all corporeally apprehended? Do I not envy that leap from being into nothingness that in my younger days I was so close to with my chest and skin? How can I not remember how I looked into the other side of the wall, the very instance at which I determined to rescue myself from a complete denial of human reason?

After all these years, Sartre never fails me, though Murakami Haruki does. I named my piece after his novel (which he named after a song by Chic), and I remember the delusional 'low' I would get myself into when I read that work over and over again in my cubicle-like dormatory. I think that I re-read the book a few years ago and couldn't care much about it. The chauvanism turned me off, and by now, there are more interesting narratives of people sorting things out--real, concrete, physical, existential impasse (Murakami Ryu, I would say, have more suffering to share than Haruki does in his early works), or, perhaps I myself have come to terms with the dolorous fact that nothing can be sorted out in this little interlude called life.

Dance, Dance, Dance (I will probably give it a new title), is about chaos. The rewrite is challenging because you can't take the chaos out of it and retain its spirit, though the reason for rewriting it is to fix structural issues, an act that is supposed to 'contain' the chaos that gives the piece life; but structure is essentailly roared out of the chaotic clashes of the cacophony of energies, the jumping, hopping, lawlessness which we call our world.

I don't know how the rewritten piece would eventually sound like as an entirety. The work has been going pretty decently. I'm now in the third section. There are still many things to be reworked and perfected. It is so easy to call myself lazy and 'untalented' (and I think I am), and it is so painful to labour your work without knowing and trusting yourself that whatever imperfection of blemishes would be fixed and healed. Maybe they won't be, and the worst imperfection are the many possibilities and many ideas that bubbled up in my mind or passed through my fingers as I ran them through the keyboard. I always wonder where those ideas would go, and how I can preserve them, for how many times would I regret the sacrifice of those fascinating sounds and voices in order to maintain the integrity of my piece.

I hope that my mom would feel better tomorrow with her cold; meanwhile, the mosquito has returned.

PS: Reading my post yesterday reminds me of Zhu Ziqing's essay 'Bei ying' (〈背影〉 The Shadow of My Father's Back).