Phoenix Ensemble: Feldman and Babbitt Clarinet Quintets, Security/Acquiescence, Insecurity/Dissent, Morphogenesis

R    enoir said that the same color, applied by two different hands, would give us two different tones. But in music, the same note, written by two different composers, gives us the same note. When I write a B-flat, and Berio a B-flat, what you get is always B-flat. By contrast, the painter must create his medium as he works. That’s what gives his work that ‘hesitancy’—that ‘insecurity’ so crucial to painting.”
  —  Morton Feldman.

M   usicians are used to spinning a phrase or rhythm in a certain way. There is a kind of common grammar to the musical language that we all get used to. Babbitt seems to knowingly throw a wrench in it, intentionally pulling or tugging the musicians in very uncomfortable directions. It’s frustrating, but in the end it makes you think in completely new and different ways and causes a kind of wonderful tension in the music. As scary as it was, I grew to like the feeling. I think for all of the musicians in the group, this was the most difficult piece we had ever worked on. Babbitt made himself available whenever we had specific questions about the score... In [Feldman’s] clarinet quintet, and most of his late music especially, he has a way of sustaining this beautiful world and keeping it interesting over very long stretches of time, and for some reason it works. It’s a real challenge for the musicians because there is never any technique or ‘flash’ to grab onto or hide behind. It’s just this ‘stripped-to-the-bone’ musical expression, and our ability to spin a phrase at a constant ppp.”
  —  Mark Lieb, interview with Robert Carl.

L isten to these excerpts:


    [50-sec clip, Phoenix Ensemble, Morton Feldman, ‘Clarinet and String Quartet, m. 283’, 1983, 1.6MB MP3]


    [50-sec clip, Phoenix Ensemble, Milton Babbitt, ‘Clarinet Quintet, m. 1’, 1996, 1.6MB MP3]

F eldman’s quintet is like a window—a car window or a window on a train—and you can experience what goes by, what is happening outside: it is the epitome of passive observation.

B y contrast, Babbitt’s quintet is caring-but-confrontational: possibly an intense dialogue between fellow passengers who are on the train.

F eldman, instinctive; Babbitt methodical, mathematical.

B    abbitt’s elegant contours—clarinet and string quartet lines thickly folded into each other at the opening, gradually becoming sparser, with reflective pockets of unaccompanied clarinet—radiate genteel yet incisive whimsy, and his pleasure at creating such delicate musical mechanisms expresses itself shamelessly.”
  —  Philip Clark, Gramophone, MAR-2010.

T he aim of each piece seems to be to convince the performers that they won’t be able to get it ‘right’ unless they’ve understood and accepted the composer’s point of view—even when that point of view is that you have no hope of ‘mastering’ the situation—of “winning”; of living forever; of getting your way. You can influence things while you are alive; you can initiate and change the patterns that develop; you can contribute, laugh, cry. But you are not getting out of here alive.


T he trick in the Feldman piece—with one instrument starting the bar, the next entering on the second beat, and so on until the final note is a chord made up of the motif—is to allow the textural device to do its job. ‘Let it go’ as soon as your note has been played. Otherwise, the building ‘chord’ will tie down the hand and the mind.

I   f you are going to try to learn these pieces, it would be advisable to have a surgeon standing by.”
  —  Ludwig Rellstab (1799-1860), commenting on Chopin’s Etudes.

L aunched into the world, the compositions make their way... wild animals, just weaned. (It’s not like their composer-parent releases them with any didactic or political intention, right?)

A    t this first meeting I brought John a string quartet. He looked at it a long time and then said, ‘How did you make this?’ I thought of my constant quarrels with (Stefan) Wolpe, and how just a week before, after showing a composition of mine to Milton Babbitt and answering his questions as intelligently as I could, he said to me, ‘Morton, I don’t understand a word you’re saying.’ And so, in a very weak voice I answered John, ‘I don’t know how I made it.’ The response to this was startling. John jumped up and down, and with a kind of high monkey squeal, screeched, ‘Isn’t that marvelous! Isn’t that wonderful! It’s so beautiful, and yet he doesn’t know how he made it.’ ”
  —  Morton Feldman, recalling his first meeting with John Cage.

• Mark Lieb (clarinet), Aaron Boyd (violin), Kristi Helberg (violin), Cyrus Beroukhim (viola), Alberto Parrini (cello), on Feldman
  
• Mark Lieb (clarinet), Aaron Boyd (violin), Alicia Edelberg (violin), Cyrus Beroukhim (viola), Bruce Wang (cello), on Babbitt

T his recording is an absorbing, totally engaging performance by Lieb and his colleagues and a superb, intimate exposition of Feldman’s and Babbitt’s ideas—about music, about life.

• Phoenix Ensemble & Mark Lieb. Clarinet Quintets: Morton Feldman, Milton Babbitt. (Innova, 2009.)
  
• Phoenix Ensemble at AnsoniaMusic.org (Manhattan)
  
• Feldman M. Clarinet Quintet. Universal, 1983.
  
• Feldman M. Clarinet Quintet. Universal, 1983. (via SheetMusicPlus.com)
  
• Babbitt M. Clarinet Quintet. Edition Peters, 1996. (via SheetMusicPlus.com)
  
• Carl R. Musicians are really public servants: An interview with Mark Lieb of the Phoenix Ensemble. Fanfare, 30-APR-2010.
  
• Lange A. Mark Lieb: Feldman, Babbitt on Innova. Fanfare, 01-MAY-2010.
  
• Rae C. Interview with Mark Lieb. Naxos blog, 26-MAR-2010.
  
• Innova.mu
  
• Affenzeller M, Winkler S, Wagner S, Beham A. Genetic Algorithms and Genetic Programming: Modern Concepts and Practical Applications. Chapman & Hall, 2009.
  
• Babbitt M. (Peles S, Dembski S, Mead A, Straus J, eds.) Collected Essays of Milton Babbitt. Princeton Univ, 2003.
  
• Dawkins R. The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design. Norton, 1986.
  
• Feldman M. (Friedman B, ed.) Give My Regards to Eighth Street. Exact Change, 2004.
  
• Maturana H, Varela F. Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. Springer, 1991.
  
• BlindWatchmaker applet at Dept of Physics, Syracuse Univ
  
• Mutatator morphogenesis applet

Musical Ergonomics: Aesthetic Unity, Narrative Control, and Shared Authorship/Readership

A  s for CoCo™, it was a charming, agreeably quiet, and effective companion. The program notes were informative, and for those who simply wanted a visual aide, the live feed of Morgan conducting (shot from the orchestra’s point of view) was an attractive enhancement. The commentary was useful, particularly in a new and unfamiliar piece such as Bunch’s — the texts linked the music to Lichtenstein’s paintings (shown on the hand-held screen) and directed the listener to changes in mood and instrumentation. But even a well-known work such as Beethoven’s 8th yielded an engaging summary of exposition and development. It wasn’t until the second half, however, that the device proved worth its weight in gold. With the Mahler texts on the hand-held screen, it was no longer necessary to search for them in the program (as any vocal recital fan can tell you, the sound of hundreds of audience members turning pages in unison can be a big distraction). Recital lovers also know that presenters often provide the texts but keep the lights so low no one can read them. Here they were in your hand, illuminated and easy to read! Suddenly, I was convinced: The gadget’s a very good thing.”
  —  Georgia Rowe, Andante, 25-FEB-2005.

One of the biggest problems in compositional ‘form’ (or programming ‘form’, as covered in the previous post ) is achieving a ‘unity’ of style, expressive aesthetics, and meaning. ‘Lack of unity’ assaults the mind and emotions. ‘Expressive incoherence’ is aesthetically ugly and annoying.

But the issue of coherence isn’t just whether the ideas and feelings make sense in the sequences or the mashups and overlaps that are composed/arranged. It also has to do with the slew-rate—how fast the transitions are (as Robert Kirzinger put it) in the context of who’s listening or participating, and in the context of what the listeners’/participants’ skills, training, mood, intentions and goals, and other factors are at the time. The question is not just pertinent to the juxtaposition of pieces by disparate composers. The question of coherence is also raised at the level of movements’ relations to each other within works—how coherent are the movements with each other, in the sequence in which they are arranged—and even down to the phrase level, as David Lewin points out. Or even at the ‘ambient’ configuration level, as Jesper Kyd points out.

Hypothetically, unity can be guaranteed simply by using the same ‘material’ from beginning to end, as is done in some fugues or in some of Steve Reich’s or other minimalists’ pieces. Morton Feldman’s ‘Rothko Chapel’ and ‘Why Patterns?’ on the same disc: same composer, similar meditative intent, similar sound intensity, similar acoustic performance spaces and timbres, similarities in ‘vocality’ among the instrumental and choral parts, different orchestrations but nonetheless cohesive. ‘Why Patterns?’ for flute, glockenspiel and piano, a dissonant vegetative proliferation. The work doesn’t seem to have a beginning or ending. A cosmic, zen-like piece of music, where the audience members are incidental. Coming in half-way through or leaving before the end may not detract from your apprehending its meaning. This has unity and coherence with zen-like qualities of ‘Rothko Chapel’. Just one example, but one that illustrates the multiple dimensions around which aesthetic value judgments must be made and are made.



    [50-sec clip, Morton Feldman, Rothko Chapel-3, UC Berkeley Chamber Chorus, 1.2MB MP3]

    [50-sec clip, Morton Feldman, Rothko Chapel-5, UC Berkeley Chamber Chorus, 1.3MB MP3]

You can’t tell what 50 sec of the third movement of Morton Feldman’s Rothko Chapel I excerpted, could you! Shall I excerpt 50 sec of John Cage’s 4’33’’ ? The entire piece consists of silences—silences of different lengths, as they say. As a musical piece, 4’33’’ leaves almost no room for the pianist’s interpretation. As long as the pianist watches the stopwatch, she/he can’t play it too fast or too slow. She/he can’t hit the wrong notes. She/he can’t play it too loud or too soft, too flatly or too floridly. What you hear when you listen to 4’33’’ is entirely a matter of chance—nothing of what you hear is anything the composer ‘wrote’ in any ordinary sense. It’s nonetheless a composition—Cage, the godlike Blind Watchmaker, intended for you to have an antiphonal, aleatoric musical experience, without explicitly specifying what the content of that experience will be—only specifying that it should have a pianist, a piano, and be 4’33’’ in duration. It is symbolically rich and it has its own peculiar aesthetic unity and coherence. Different if someone coughs, say, than if a city bus goes by and is heard faintly through the walls of the concert hall. It would be sacrilege if I excerpted 4’33’’ and gave you a 50-sec clip of it. More than sacrilege, it would be incoherent to do so.

E  ven more telling is a psychological rationale that suggests why something new should happen at this moment. To assert an I-relation between mm. 29-32 and mm. 33-36 has entailed our obtruding the idea of rows into a piece based, so far, on ‘configurations’. This precipitates a critical point in our reception of the music [Dallapiccola’s ‘Simbolo’]. We may not be fully aware of the crisis, to be sure, but perhaps we sense it obscurely, as suggested by the composer’s indication ‘oscuro’ on the dyad {G, A-flat} at m. 33. Given this state of affairs, something ‘large’ should happen just after mm. 33-36. Perhaps a row will appear in the music. Perhaps some new configuration-type will appear—possibly generating a new ‘variation’. Or perhaps the piece will close, as it in fact does, via the references to the original configuration in mm. 37-42 and then in mm. 42-46. The enigmatic effect of those references is not simply due to a ‘stimmung’ inherent in the material itself. Rather, our puzzlement involves a sense of incompleteness; the music withdraws from us, withholding something from us—that is, the row. We are impelled onwards.”
  —  David Lewin, Dallapiccola’s ‘Simbolo’, in Musical Form & Transformation, 2007, p. 14.

Poorly-constructed fugues can be deadly. If we listen to music that continues for too long without enough rhythmic or harmonic texture to hold our attention then we tend to go to sleep. Carnatic and other asian music presents challenges to those of us whose minds were raised in western traditions; in spite of our concentration, attention becomes an effort.

If the rhythm and/or harmonic textures change, though—not excessively frequently or precipitously, and not too infrequently or glacially—then our attention is captured and remains in focus. We listen to the succession of messages with pleasure, or angst, or whatever emotions are consistent with the content and intent of the music. Each new message must last long enough for it to be meaningful and aesthetically effective. If it doesn’t last long enough, or if it violates our expectations (as Robert Kirzinger said in his email response to the previous CMT post), then it’ll frustrate and irritate us or wear us out. Continuous change or scatological change makes it impossible for us to remember what’s gone before, or to relate one part to another. Inevitably, the lack of completion or fulfillment leaves us dissatisfied and forgetful of what we’ve heard. Do not put your iPod on ‘shuffle’ and expect fulfillment or aesthetic coherence, unless you have a very tiny, already-coherent iTunes library on that iPod.

Human factors engineering for avionics and cockpit-design has many of these same ‘durability of attention’ cognitive issues. In conditions of poor visibility, inexperienced pilots get into spiral dives in several ways, but this is the most common: While the pilot (John Kennedy Jr?) is looking for lights on the ground or other horizon reference, the airplane slowly rolls into a banked attitude. With no horizon visible, the pilot looks at the ‘artificial horizon’ indicator in the cockpit and notices that the horizon bar is not level. The initial reaction is to roll the horizon bar back to level, which rolls the airplane into a steeper bank. This is known as a ‘horizon control reversal’.


In a steep bank, the nose of the airplane drops, and it starts to lose altitude. To maintain altitude, the pilot pulls back, which tightens the turn and steepens the spiral dive. At this point the pilot is confused, disoriented, and no longer in control of the airplane. Such a sequence can and does happen rapidly, and the resulting crash is invariably attributed to ‘pilot error’. No doubt the pilot made the error, but what caused the ‘error’ is never determined nor the probable cause reported.

The term ‘pilot error’ is misused when such errors can be prevented by an experimentally proven equipment modification. In the case of flight attitude control, all that is needed is to cause the ‘little airplane’ symbol on the artificial horizon gauge to rotate in direct response to aileron control inputs. So, to return to a wings-level attitude, the pilot merely has to align the airplane symbol with the displaced horizon bar and maintain that alignment as the real airplane and the artificial horizon bar, rotating in opposite directions, both return to wings-level.

To illustrate, if the airplane rolls to the right, the horizon bar rolls left. The pilot notices this and applies left aileron to align the airplane symbol with the horizon bar, causing the plane to start rolling back toward wings level. As this is going on, the pilot gradually reduces the left aileron input to maintain alignment until the ailerons are neutral when the wings are level. Thus, straight-ahead flight is restored. The three display modes all indicate a bank to the right. The left indicator is rotated counterclockwise. In the center indicator, the airplane symbol is rotated clockwise. In the right indicator, the horizon is the same as on the left, but in addition the airplane symbol is rotated clockwise by the pilot’s aileron input, indicating that the plane will continue to roll to the right. The instrument represented on the left is the standard system in today’s airplanes including John Kennedy’s Piper Saratoga II. With the display at the right, pilots maintain wings-level flight merely by aligning the airplane symbol with the horizon, a natural response.

Each of the three gauge designs has the advantage of ‘judgment-neutrality’. That is, none of the gauges strongly says at any time that the pilot is making a wrong decision—they simply show the fact of pitch-yaw-roll (right-banking/left-banking and nose-up/nose-down attitude) with respect to the ground. You may have your reasons for piloting the plane in the attitude it is taking—that’s up to you; the gauge doesn’t tell you you are wrong to do so, and it doesn’t prejudicially tell you that something bad is probably going to happen if you keep steering that way. That’s just the way a gauge should be!

So, maybe orchestras and presenters should try ‘musical avionics console’ graphical PDAs or VR heads-up goggles to hand out to audience members who want them, to give the audience notice of aesthetic turbulence ahead, or advance views of the aesthetic terrain below. You thought the CoCo™ ConcertCompanion™ text-plus-video RF PDA guides that’ve been tried in 2003-2007 were distracting, aesthetically disturbing? Well, get a load of ConcertFlightSimulator™.

My cup of tea? No, no wireless virtual consoles or PDAs for me. Technophile though I am and alternative-venues classical/newmusic person though I am, I don’t really want more ‘gear’ when participating in a live ‘meat-world’ performance. And I don’t want to hear or see other concert-goers fumbling with the glarey little gizmos either. Not even nice Studierstube PDAs. People dropping their programs on the floor is distracting enough as it is. And I don’t want to be subjected to other people ‘crashing’ their augmented-reality concert flight-deck hand-helds. I don’t want a concert hall full of ‘gamers’ to intrude on my listening (or performing).


No, you [concert presenters, artists, composers, recording/broadcast producers] have the ‘con’. The aesthetic unity and musical ‘safety’ of your ‘flying’ are fine with me just as they are, even when you deviate from the flight-plan or ‘normal’ sequence of movements. I can live with it. I may prefer some other unity, some other coherence. But, then again, I may learn something from you, and from the choices you make. Or I may learn something about the reasons for my deep preferences for hearing all of the movements of Brahms’s Op. 111 Quintet in G major together, with respectful/meditative silences before and after. Either way, I’m happy. Citizenship includes following others, enabling others and just simply trusting others to lead. I would not come down on you for failing to make the best aesthetic decision, and you know that I have every confidence in you, that you will successfully complete our aesthetic/experiential ‘mission’.

Different story, though, in SecondLife or classical music in other VR realms. If some ‘aesthetic avionics gauges’ were available in SL and I could configure my own in-world virtual-concert cockpit the way I want, I might in fact use them. Happy, in SL, to have you as co-pilot. The SL script language isn’t quite up to that yet, though.

[Laurie & Fry, on linguistic coherence]

• InvisibleTrain augmented-reality PDA
  
• Handheld augmented-reality at Studierstube ES
  
• Microvision.com
  
• Abel D, Rosenck K, Winant W, UC Berkeley Chamber Chorus, California EAR Unit, Stone D, Jarvinen A, Mowrey G. Morton Feldman: Rothko Chapel; Why Patterns? (New Albion, 1992.)
  
• Boy G. Cognitive Function Analysis. Ablex, 1998.
  
• Campbell R, Bagshaw M. Human Performance & Limitations in Aviation. 3e. Blackwell, 2002.
  
• Child F. Digital Companion for Concert Fans. NPR, 30-SEP-2003.
  
• Foyle D, Hooey B, eds. Human Performance Modeling in Aviation. CRC, 2007.
  
• Harris D, ed. Human Factors in Civil Flight Deck Design. Ashgate, 2004.
  
• Harris D, Muir H, eds. Contemporary Issues In Human Factors And Aviation Safety. Ashgate, 2005.
  
• Jensen R, Dolgin D. Aviation Psychology. Gower, 1990.
  
• Kamata E. Influence of Psychological Factors on Product Development. Springer, 2002.
  
• Lewin D. Musical Form and Transformation. Oxford Univ, 2007.
  
• Kosman J. What's that you're hearing? A new device helps out at concert hall. SF Chronicle, 23-FEB-2005.
  
• North C. Oakland East Bay Symphony tries latest in PDAs for concerts. ANG Newspapers, 25-FEB-2005.
  
• O'Hare D, ed. Human Performance in General Aviation. Ashgate, 1999.
  
• Wise J, Garland D, Hopkin V. Handbook of Aviation Human Factors. 2e. CRC, 2008.
  
• Boston Modern Orchestra Project BMOP.org
  
• DSM. The Rest is Not ‘Noise’: Can Concerts with Performers’ Explications between Works Be ‘Mashups’? CMT blog, 19-JAN-2008.
  
• DSM. Pomerium: Carnatic Christmas? CMT blog, 14-DEC-2006.

Visions of Tondal: Paroxysms of Identity

I am willing to grant that [transcendent experiences] feel real, but that comes back to the question: Why does anything feel real? It is because your brain creates a model of what feels real. So just as you can have sensory hallucinations, you can have hallucinations of importance. You can have hallucinations of reality, because this is the system that normally tells you what is important. Ordinarily it does so in a gentle and more lawful way, but if it goes amuck, what you get are feelings of awe, wonderment and portentousness. You can accept the subjective reality [of transcendent experiences], without going the extra step and accepting that it was real outside of the internal theater of the mind.”
  —  Barry Beyerstein PhD, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, BC.

CMT: Members of the Dialogos ensemble sing with the vibrato-free purity typical of good early-music choirs. The solo work from within Dialogos is excellent. Overall, Dialogos’ Tondal is an exuberant and loving performance of intricate music, frequently in multiple overlapping lines that put the singers to the test. The variety of affects donned by the soloists and chorus is remarkable—the more so for taking place within the timbral restraint of the chant form. Dialogos performs on Saturday, 24 February, in Kansas City .


DSM: Yet more striking is the canticle-like intensity that Dialogos achieves. And the soloists, representing angels and Tondal’s displaced soul, singing antiphonally with the principal group! Rather than theatrical, the effect is genuinely ethereal, climaxing an evening whose serene dignity stands at variance with the violent conflict in not only medieval Croatia and bygone plague- and war-ravaged eras, but also Croatia in the 1990s.


CMT: What about the out-of-body experiences? Tondal’s Vision, the story of an unconscious man whose soul leaves his body, was a popular mystical tale from the 12th century. Some regard it as anticipative of Dante’s Divina Commedia. In the story of Tondal, the soul visits Hell guided by the voice of an unknown angel and gets lost on winding, narrow paths. The soul crosses dark bridges and finally returns to its body. This near-Death “out-of-body” experience seems endless to Tondal but lasts clinically only a few minutes. So we listeners are confronted by the question that Tondal constantly repeats to the angel: “For how long a time was I dead?” The Croatian collection, Vartal, written in the 16th century for a women’s Benedictine community on the Dalmatian coast, is a faithful rendering of the Tondal story.


DSM: There’s dissonant Glagolitic polyphony, juxtaposed with softer motives from the south of Dalmatia, Gregorian melodies and Latin polyphony from regions where Tondal’s Vision was translated and performed. Dialogos’ Tondal puts this in a new context where faces and hand movements and dance all contribute to the artistic effect. The multi-faceted, multi-lingual character of the work contributes to their evocation of floating, ethereal, detached, out-of-bodyness—very convincing.


CMT: I think the inherently multi-lingual, inter-textual character of medieval Croatian music and sacred texts is evocative in yet another way. The inter-texuality invites us to wonder about the conventional distinctions that separate medieval, traditional and contemporary music. How arbitrary are those distinctions? Aren’t the distinctions inscribed by (and ‘inscribing’, in Foucault’s sense or Deleuze’s and Guattari’s sense) the values of major European powers? The conflict-ridden Balkan peoples are clearly not the ones who have articulated/inscribed those distinctions. The wanderings of Tondal’s soul are also the depersonalized, out-of-body wanderings of the Balkan societies. The whole region has been challenged by intrusions and it’s understandable that ego boundaries for everybody there might be a bit diffuse as a result . . .

DSM: Remember that Dalmatia (Serbo-Croatian Dalmacija) is an historic region of Croatia, extending along the Adriatic Sea, approximately from Rijeka (Fiume) to the Gulf of Kotor. Split is the provincial capital; other cities include Zadar (the historic capital), sibenik, and Dubrovnik. Except for a small coastal lowland, Dalmatia is generally mountainous, rising to the Dinaric Alps. The coast, famous for its beauty and resorts, has many bays and harbors protected by a chain of islands. The bulk of the population consists of Roman Catholic Croats; there are also Eastern Orthodox Serbs and some Italians (mainly at Zadar and nearby cities). Dalmatia was definitively subdued by Augustus (35 BCE–33 BCE) and was incorporated with part of Illyria as a Roman province. It was overrun by the Ostrogoths (5th Century), reconquered by the Byzantine Empire (6th Century), and resettled, except in the coastal cities, by the Slavs in the 7th Century. By the 10th Century it was divided between the kingdoms of Croatia (north) and Serbia (south), while Venice held several ports and islands.


CMT: After several centuries of struggle, the coastal islands and most of Dalmatia, except Dubrovnik, were under Venetian control by 1420. Hungary retained the Croatian part, which in 1526 passed to the Turks but was recovered by the Treaty of Karlowitz (1699). The Treaty of Campo Formio (1797) gave Venetian Dalmatia to Austria, and the Treaty of Pressburg (1805) gave it to France. It was first attached to Napoleon's Italian kingdom but in 1809 was incorporated into the Illyrian provs. The Congress of Vienna restored it to Austria(1815). By the Treaty of London (1915) the Allies promised Dalmatia to Italy in return for Italian support in World War I. In 1918 it became part of the newly established kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (after 1929 Yugoslavia), but Italy continued to claim Dalmatia. The Treaty of Rapallo (1920) gave Dalmatia to Yugoslavia, except for Zadar and several islands, which subsequently passed to Italy. During World War II, Italy held most of Dalmatia, and after the war it was returned to Yugoslavia. The Italian peace treaty of 1947 gave Yugoslavia the islands that had been ceded to Italy after World War I. Following Croatia's secession from Yugoslavia in 1991, fighting broke out between Croats and Serbs. Many of the port cities in southeast Dalmatia were heavily shelled as the Serbs, backed by Yugoslavian federal forces. It is more than just the contention of cultures! One can imagine that each person (each Self!) in these regions has always had to fight and defend herself/himself!


DSM: Well, again, what about the out-of-body experience in Tondal? What about the Self that experiences itself out of its Body? You know, researchers recently have begun to explore the neurophysiology of the self and of abnormal states where the sense of self is altered, like out-of-body experiences (OBEs), using functional neuroimaging, PET scanning, and so on. There are to date only a few robust scientific investigations on OBEs, probably because they occur spontaneously, are of short duration, and happen only once or twice in a lifetime for most people. Investigation of OBEs in seizures and psychiatric disease is not much easier, given the rarity and paroxysmal nature of them. But Brugger in Zurich and Pascual-Leone at Harvard and others have recently localized the part of the brain that is most strongly implicated in out-of-body experiences. It is a set of structures in the region of the brain known as the temporoparietal junction.


CMT: Transcendent hallucinations like OBEs are probably more common than generally acknowleged. While they may be a sign of pathology, they occur in 10% or more of ordinary, healthy individuals over their lifetimes. Many of these people associate their experiences with supernatural or religious meaning.


DSM: Partly, I think, this is because it is so sudden, unexpected and uncontrollable. The alteration of consciousness is so intense as to be overwhelming. It is fundamentally different, and perceived to be so, from ordinary consciousness. While the biochemistry and neurophysiology that causes it may be entirely natural and occurring within the person’s head, it’s understandable that such a profoundly unusual experience—being alienated from your own body, having perceptions that are not controllable and located at some distance from where you perceive your body to be—would lead people to ascribe to it some spiritual or transcendent significance. Dawkins and Dennett and others may find that tendency appalling. But it’s just part of our innate response—people in all cultures respond this way when they’re confronted with overwhelming, profoundly frightening altered consciousness . . .

CMT: We know that transcendent experiences may be achieved through behavioral, psychological, chemical and pathological means. Transcendent states can be triggered by either over- or under-stimulation in the brain. The CIA (and, later, researchers at the University of Michigan) developed water floatation systems to precipitate transcendent experiences through sensory deprivation. The world literature describes methods involving physical manipulations such as fasting, meditation, and breathing exercises to obtain altered states of consciousness. Rhythmic drumming and chanting—the production of the mental state is engineered so that believers affirm the spiritual message being taught. The Protestant evangelist, John Wesley, included these techniques in his manuals on how to run a revival meeting. Sadly, similar methods are even used at political rallies. The Nazis raised these manipulations to a high science with chanting, music, and psychological manipulations of fear and rhetoric at their rallies . . .

DSM: Transcendent experiences are often accompanied by feelings of awe, contentment and wonderment that last long after the experience has faded. Such an experience can fundamentally change the way the person views reality and interprets the world around them from that point forward. This is what happened to Tondal. It’s part of the Upanishads and Vedic traditions, too. Dialogos provides us a musical glimpse of that kind of awe and wonderment. I wonder whether Katarina or other members of Dialogos have themselves had an OBE first-hand. The conviction of their performance seems too great to derive from second-hand impressions or merely academic or actorly musicianship . . .

CMT: The profundity of an OBE often leads the person to believe that she/he has experienced a higher or ‘deeper’ reality. The clarity and compellingness of the experience persuades the person of the experience’s meaningfulness and convinces her/him that what was revealed is something they can rely upon and put credence in.


DSM: Beyond that, consider that the emotions associated with transcendent and out-of-body experiences cover a spectrum ranging from blissful ecstasy to utter terror. Individuals having joyful experiences often come away from the OBE feeling they are in some way special, that they have been chosen to receive this message for a purpose. But terrifying experiences are often interpreted as a wake-up call to change one’s ways.

CMT: People report that during the OBE they felt ‘melded with the Universe,’ that they were no longer encumbered with a physical existence, or that they were nowhere or everywhere at once . . .

DSM: Of course, clinical psychiatry interprets transcendent experiences as meaningless or as signs of psychopathology and applies DSM-IV codes and dismissive labels like depersonalization, derealization and ‘loss of ego boundaries.’ That alternative perceptions that’re transient could be aesthetically pleasing or valuable in some way doesn’t seriously occur to them. They try to medicalize everything, hell-bent on eradicating or rationalizing-away anything unusual. Thomas Szasz and Gilles Deleuze and others have written extensively about this. And that pathologizing, value-loaded, medicalizing tendency is partly why healthy people tend to under-report their OBEs. It’s stigmatizing. People may think you’re crazy if you say you’ve had an OBE. Revealing to your doctor or others in gentle society that you’ve had an OBE goes nowhere good . . .

CMT: The sociologist, Nicholas Fox, wrote a useful book that explains Foucault’s and others’ post-modern [or post-structuralist] sociology of health and illness, including behavioral disorders and hallucinations. He illustrates how that differs from modernist sociology, and he reveals the politics that inheres in health talk or illness talk as sociological phenomena. You can easily generalize this to any talk of experiences that are unusual or abnormal. Fox postulates that illness is never merely or just illness, and that language is the primary field for constituting culture. While the stance that illness is never just illness doesn’t restrict the study of illness to the study of the politics of illness, it’s a productive move for Fox, one that sidesteps the dominant ideologies of illness to explore the interests served by those ideologies.

DSM: Fox locates his postmodern social theory of health at the intersection of bodies and social institutions, and opens his account with a theorizing of the Body. He draws his inspiration from Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the Body-without-Organs, a kind of pure surface on which narrative ‘inscriptional practices’ operate. In brief, Bodies are texts. And, by implication, in an out-of-body experience, if one’s self is dissociated from the Body, then there is a crisis of authorship and subjectivity. Who is the subject?

CMT: Fox moves from the Body to the institutions that organize power for the inscribing of Bodies, especially in the health/medical domains. Fox says “all organizations are mythologies constituted discursively to serve particular interests of power, and contested by other interests of power” (p. 49).

W  e may understand the organization of care as the organization of technologies of expertise, the (attempted) organization of subjectivity itself.”
  — Nicholas Fox, p. 65

DSM: Fox challenges the conventional poststructuralist assumption that a person’s ‘resistance’ comprises a positive response to repressive uses of power, patriarchy, and capitalism.

C are is power, and the possibility of resisting that power entails a refusal of care qua care, and of the very meanings which are associated with professional carers.”
  — Nicholas Fox, p. 71

CMT: Anxiety, out-of-placeness, and loss of direction, though, are hardly positive prescriptions for a new sociology, nor do they necessarily entail any specific compromise between the poles of recovering modernism (seductive, but coercive) and promoting post-postmodernism (anxiety-producing, but liberating). To turn an analysis of the past into a prescription of what we should do in the future, as Foucault did, is to perform a conceptual gymnastic double-inversion of event and theory—a maneuver that repoliticizes action. This is what happens in Tondal. So Tondal’s Vision is not merely a medieval narrative, a museum-piece of beautiful historicity. Instead, it’s a full-blown Foucauldian post-postmodern spiritual gymnastic event that challenges the ruling social order, that challenges each one of us to be responsible for our personal and spiritual identity!

DSM: Hmmm. We may wonder whether a concept such as the Person, the site of construction of a Body—of Body interiorities and the Self—would be more productive theoretically and more accurate ethnographically. But, regardless, I think it’s productive to problematize subjectivity and Body discourse—to force us to critically rethink these things. ‘The desiring machines’ of the Deleuzian Body-without-Organs are responsible for the production of ‘docile Bodies’, the concept put forward by Foucault. Yet there seems no good theoretical reason to locate desire, free will, or docility in the Body, with or without organs. Think of Alan Feldman and his Formations of Violence: it was different subjectivities that produced the docile bodies of criminals in Irish prisons, and the aggressive, resistant bodies of political prisoners—and mystics and visionaries, like Tondal or members of Dialogos or you or me.

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