jwilzewske: I ♥ Different Enchantments: Unexpected Uses of Elliott Carter Recordings as Punk Repellant

Newburyport, MA, perfectly nice punk w/ mohawk hair

A ll the Preludes to Felicity

It is Time that beats in the breast and it is Time
That batters against the mind, silent and proud –
The mind that knows it is destroyed by Time.

Time is a horse that runs in the heart, a horse
Without a rider on a road at night.
The mind sits listening and hears it pass.

It is someone walking rapidly in the street.
The reader by the window has finished his book
And tells the hour by the lateness of the sounds.

Even breathing is the beating of Time, in kind:
A retardation of its battering,
A horse grotesquely taut, a walker like

A shadow in mid-earth . . . If we propose
A large-sculptured, platonic person, free from time,
And imagine for him the speech he cannot speak,

A form, then, protected from the battering, may
Mature: A capable being may replace
Dark horse and walker walking rapidly.

Felicity, ah! Time is the hooded enemy,
The inimical music, the enchantered space –
In which the enchanted preludes have their place.”

— Wallace Stevens, The Pure Good of Theory, in Transport to Summer, 1947.

I ♥ you, too. Among the more unusual things you’ll ever hear is Elliott Carter’s ‘Enchanted Preludes’ being played on streetside loudspeakers as skinhead repellent ambient music, blaring down on the sidewalk from the eaves/soffits outside the Richdale Convenience Store on the corner of State Street and Pleasant Street in Newburyport, MA.

The kids scared the customers away. The kids loitered on the corner, crowded around the door so that you’d have to push your way through them to enter or exit the store. En masse, they filled the streetcorner outside the Richdale and blocked the Pleasant Street crosswalk, making it difficult to cross. The octogenarians were forced to walk in traffic or, better, avoid the location entirely. And then there was the occasional mention of shoplifting in the police blotter.

First the store tried Lawrence Welk polkas. Didn’t work. Too jolly, and maybe just silly enough to be perversely amusing to the intended punker victims.

They tried Beethoven—probably mis-remembering Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange or something; a seat-of-pants reckoning that, if a toxin is strong in one application, then its toxic efficacy will likely generalize to other species. But the Sonata in E major, Op. 109 (1820), and the Sonata in A-flat major, Op. 110 (1821), seem like enchanted gardens of the blessèd, even to skinhead ears. The skinheads stayed put.

Then the store tried Vivaldi. They’d read in the LA Times that Vivaldi was useful for this kind of infestation and had met with wide success in California. Yes, florid variations in dynamics and tempi did disperse the crowd at the Richdale for awhile. The fluorescent Mohawk-coifed punks moved down the street and began hanging out in front of Best of British. But over a few weeks they returned to the Richdale’s corner. They’d been able still to hear the Vivaldi all this time, faintly, from the 50 meters distance. And the fact was, it had ‘grown’ on them. Not to say that they liked it now. But they’d developed a high degree of tolerance for it. They knew the tracks on the Vivaldi CDs that the shopowner queued up, and they were now immune even to the outrageous juxtapositions that blared out when he put the player on ‘random shuffle’. They preferred to be close to their source of food, and to the frailer, more intimidatable souls on upper State Street.

How the storeowner found this ultimate weapon—the super-strength Elliott Carter punk repellant—I do not know. Recordings of Carter are not plentiful, and they do not leap into your hand from record-store discount remainder bins.

[ John McMurtery, flute; Craig Hultgren, cello; video 2006 ]

Carter’s ‘Enchanted Preludes’, for flute and cello, was commissioned in 1988 by Harry Santen for the 50th birthday of his wife, Anne Santen, the musical director of Cincinnati’s public radio station, WGUC. The duet contrasts the flute with the cello and roughly follows the ‘arc’ of the Wallace Stevens poem from which the piece takes its name. Each instrument follows its own moods and logic, and a constant tension pulls each in disparate directions: the world of the intellect and the world of the senses. The flute mostly propels the thing forward, with extroverted, Messiaen-like figures. The cello takes a mostly subordinate role until the end, when it finally accepts and inclines toward the flute’s dynamic.

The flute and cello have ever-shifting roles, but always with a sense of the evolving foreground and background. And the concession that the cello makes to the flute at the end is a gesture that is deeply offensive to the punk ethic of in-your-face confrontation. This is the feature that makes Elliott Carter’s writing so deadly to punks. The music mocks the punks’ poseurly faux dance along the societal fault-line. In a manner that resembles Stevens’s distinctive positioning of prepositions and prefixes and his demonstrative use of copular verbs, Carter plays with the disruptive metaphors and unexpected cadences. He dishes out developments unexpectedly pursued and developments unexpectedly abandoned.

The Stevens/Carter formula heightens the self-consciousness of the language/music. By making and unmaking the conventional patterns of language/music, the work draws attention to the temporal—the undeniably mortal, the inescapably transitory—nature of the text, of the performers’ personae, and of the listeners themselves. Twenty-something punks try to ignore this. But when the onslaught persists as an ambient acoustical feature it is like it penetrates their hardened carapaces and causes their systems to begin shutting down. It doesn’t have to be administered at high volume, in large doses that would interfere with commerce and the recreational life of others. No, low-dose continuous Carter is sufficient. Highly selective social death by musical alienation. Yobs, chavs, skinheads, punks, gangstas—gone. Selectively, nonviolently, quietly, voluntarily.

But it’s more than this, and the ‘more than this’ is why I bother to write about the ambient Carter at all. What I mean is, every spiritual alienation takes place within a space, within some enclosure, as does every spiritual union—even if the enclosure is an abstract or metaphorical one; even if the enclosure has no walls, really. When I walk by the Richdale, the ambient music outside defines a space, a space that is just as large as the radius within which I can hear the music. But not all enclosures are oppressive: the Beklemmt section of Beethoven’s Op. 130 is an example, and the Carter ‘Enchanted Preludes’ is also an example. They define enclosures that I long for, that I try frequently to return to. To me, they are ‘home’. In other words, ‘enclosedness’ isn’t alienating or confining; it may be an object of desire, a good place that protects and inspires and welcomes, ‘a place of refreshment for the exhausted hero, a foretaste of rewards to come, or the final goal and reward itself, where the beloved and the blessed society are waiting to receive you into their select company,’ as Auden put it. The door is open. It is not an exclusionary ‘gated community’ or a locked museum. The door is open, it’s a beautiful sanctuary, and there are lots of interesting people inside.

T emenos (τέμενος , from the Greek verb τέμνω ‘to cut’) is a piece of land cut off and assigned as an official domain, especially to royalty, or a piece of land marked off from common uses and dedicated to a god; a sanctuary, holy grove or garden, or holy precinct.”

Baudrillard’s connection between alienation and the hyper-real is cited by Adam Possamai in his chapter in Lynne Hume’s and Kathleen McPhillips’s recent book. Hyper-reality is structured with signs and symbols such that people increasingly seek spectacle rather than transcendance. According to Possamai, hyperreality relocates personal identity within the domains of choice, individuality, aesthetics, and consumption. In Australia, Star Wars Jediism—a simulacrum of a religion created out of popular culture that provides inspiration for believers/consumers—constitutes a hyper-religion. Maybe Carter is, for me, a sort of hyper-religion. It pleases me to think so…

Is there an affinity between heroic characters in music and development of latent abilities? Could this affinity be motivated by a desire for sanctuary and for hyper-real re-enchantment of the world? For me, my taste for Carter’s writing involves a craving for ‘inner adventure’, not literally a search to become divine or super-human. It’s a quest for a higher self—maybe like a Westernized search for Buddhist enlightenment. It’s not a quest for abilities that would be instrumental in achieving other ends. It’s a search for illumination and wonder. How lucky for me that the Newburyport Richdale store owner inadvertently provides me with just the acoustical enchantment and spiritual nourishment I need as he simultaneously doses the multiply body-pierced, scarified and self-mutilated post-card punks, for whom wonderment is—evidently—poison.

“... grotesquely taut, a walker like
A shadow in mid-earth . . . If we propose
A large-sculptured, skin-headed person, free from time,
And imagine for him the speech he cannot speak.”

Imagine, too, the music he cannot play or sing or or write or even stand to hear. Just the same, I ♥ him, too.

T he displacement of music-making by music-listening breaks the connection between creation and inspiration. Inspiration carries a motivation to act. And anyone who sits down and plays at the piano is inspired to act. The creative imagination motivates them directly. But once music is construed as a sonic equivalent of painting, the question arises—how does creativity inspire those who merely contemplate its products? What is it they are inspired to do?”
— Gordon Graham, p. 110.

P roponents of [modernity-as-] disenchantment share with those who lament its loss the assumption that only a [human-centric] teleological world is worthy of enchantment. I contest that assumption. A world capable of enchanting need not be designed or disposed toward human happiness, or expressive of intrinsic purpose or meaning. It seems that there is musicological support for this, for chant is modal music, which means that it doesn’t have the powerful drive modern music has to arrive at a final [explicitly purposeful] harmonic destination.”
— Jane Bennett, p. 11.

jwilzewske

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

I ♥ Different Enchantments: Unexpected Uses of Elliott Carter Recordings as Punk Repellant

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