ftp.xmission.com/2014.06.ftp.xmission.com.tar/ftp.xmission.com/pub/lists/zorn-list/old/DIGEST27

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    (AND OTHER NYC DOWNTOWN MUSICIANS)

    DIGEST #27, 2-21-95
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
From [e-mail]  Mon Feb 20 11:32:05 1995
Subject:

hello all...just read the last digest and thanks to whoever posted the article
on zorn and the asian-american community's misunderstanding of his album covers
i personally never have seen a problem with the artwork, actually...

does anyone know if mr. zorn, in whatever incarnation,
is coming to
the south?...does anyone have access to a tour schedule?...if so, i know one
guy who will be very grateful...i have never seen zorn live...

also, does anyone know what type of sampler bill laswell uses?...especially on
the painkiller "ambient" tracks (all two of them)...has he ever mentioned a
particular favorite sampler in an interview or something?...hmmmmmm...

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
From [e-mail]  Mon Feb 20 13:33:32 1995
Subject: Zorn Article

From:    CLUSTR::LIB3HANSTTM  "TERRY HANSTOCK - FACULTY LIAISON OFFICER, NOTTINGHAM LAW SCHOOL" 16-FEB-1995 19:44:26.09
To:    LIB3FISHEDP
CC:
Subj:    Zorn tork

From:    CLUSTR::LIB3HANSTTM  "TERRY HANSTOCK - FACULTY LIAISON OFFICER, NOTTINGHAM LAW SCHOOL" 16-FEB-1995 19:42:53.39
To:    smtp%"[e-mail]"
CC:    LIB3HANSTTM
Subj:    mcneilly_195.html


          UGLY BEAUTY: JOHN ZORN AND THE POLITICS OF POSTMODERN MUSIC

by

                                KEVIN MCNEILLY

Department of English
University of British Columbia

    [e-mail]




Postmodern Culture v.5 n.2 (January, 1995)

    [e-mail]


     _________________________________________________________________

   Copyright (c) 1995 by Kevin McNeilly, all rights reserved. This text
   may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of
   U.S. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in
   electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is
   charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of
   this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the
   author and the notification of the publisher, Oxford University Press.

     _________________________________________________________________



    1. I wish to look at a particular postmodern achievement, the music
       of composer John Zorn, in order to assess both the nature of a
       political praxis and to "define" the postmodern pragmatically, in
       the practice of art rather than only in theory. Zorn's music does
       something palpable to its listeners, or at least incites them to a
       form of action, of awakening; it activates the listener in a
       manner that a great deal of conventional and commercially-produced
       music, when it casts itself as soother or anaesthetic, does not.
       But Zorn achieves this affectivity, ironically, by exploiting and
       exploding both convention and commercial form.


    2. Form itself, in so far as it is tied both to social production and
       aesthetic convention, provides a correlative for the dialectic of
       the social and aesthetic spheres, and thus offers an inroad into
       the problem of a postmodern praxis. Music, Jacques Attali asserts,
       manifests by its very nature as an "instrument of understanding,"
       a "new theoretical form" (Noise 4). Music, that is, as Attali
       understands it, can provide a viable, fully realized conjunction
       of the theoretical and the practical, a form of theorizing which
       coincides with a formal practice.[1] To grasp the practice of
       music, then, within a postmodern context, is in some sense to
       arrive at a theoretical position vis-a-vis the postmodern,
       especially--as the aesthetic delimitation of music as a sphere of
       cultural activity is broadened to encompass the
       theoretical--toward a decidedly political praxis (cf. Arac ix-x,
       xxx-xxxi). But where, for Attali, that broadening takes on a
       decidedly utopian character, the "newness" and "originality" of
       Zorn's music, if we may speak in such terms, lie exactly in its
       self-conscious refusal to accept either the original or the new as
       valid categories of artistic expression, in either the
       compositional or the performative sphere. The politics of Zorn's
       music, its affective thrust, emerges from within the formal
       manifestations of a parodic, technocratically-saturated postmodern
       musicality, and also delineates a significant political current
       running through postmodernism in general. In its parodies of genre
       and received form, as well as its antagonistic postures, Zorn's
       music assumes a political force.

    3. The most immediately audible characteristic of John Zorn's music
       is its noisiness. Abrasive, loud, fast, unpleasant, disjunctive,
       Zorn's musical textures are never sweet or satisfied in the
       conventional sense; one has only to hear the primal screams of
       Yamatsuka Eye (310 Kb .au file) on the first two recordings by
       Zorn's Naked City band, the punk-jazz thrash of his Ornette
       Coleman tribute, Spy vs. Spy, or his slippery, choppy, clanging
       arrangements of works by Kurt Weill or Ennio Morricone (250 Kb .au
       file, arrangement of Morricone's "The Good The Bad and the Ugly"),
       to realize that neither a bathetic Classical prettiness nor a
       pretentious Romantic resolution has any place in his work, except
       as an antagonism. Nor does his work admit the conventions of
       modern and contemporary chamber music unproblematically. A work
       for string quartet, Forbidden Fruit (346 Kb .au file),
       incorporates "turntables" played by Christian Marclay, in which
       random, distorted snatches of pre-recorded music cut across the
       already fragmented textures of the strings themselves. A work for
       chamber ensemble such as Cobra not only uses conventional
       orchestral instrumentation including harp, brass, woodwinds and
       percussion, but also incorporates electric guitar and bass,
       turntables, cheesy organ, and sampled sounds ranging from horse
       whinnies and duck calls to train whistles, telephone bells and
       industrial clanging. Zorn, while affirming his own position as a
       "classically-trained" composer, fuses the materials of the
       "classical" world with pop music, hardcore punk, heavy metal, jazz
       (free and traditional), television soundtracks, and sound effects
       (v. Woodward 35-6). His work is consistently eclectic, hybridized,
       and polysemous.

    4. His music, in fact, comes to consist in noise itself, or rather,
       in the tensions between noises. As a self-declared product of the
       "info age," Zorn taps into the diverse currents of sound and
       background emerging from the mass media--particularly television,
       radio and commercial recordings--that permeate contemporary life;
       all forms of sound, from white noise to Beethoven, from duck calls
       to bebop, become raw materials for the composer; musical sound,
       that is, need no longer be tempered or tonal in any preconceived
       manner (though tempered music, as well, may be used within
       composition as raw material on the same level as any other noise).
       Only the noise available to the social listener determines the
       limitations, if any, on composition. Music, then, as Jacques
       Attali posits, becomes simply "the organization of noise,"
       constituting "the audible waveband of the vibrations and signs
       that make up society" (Noise 4). Zorn, in like fashion, cites
       Boulez's definition of composition as simply the "organization of
       sound" (Woodward 34).

    5. But noise, for Zorn, is not simply haphazard or natural sound, the
       audible "background" that encroaches on a work such as Cage's
       4'33", as the audience is forced by the tacit piano to listen to
       its own shufflings, or to the urban soundscapes that emerge
       through an open window. Such music, which Attali approves as the
       harbinger of a new age of composition and of listener-involvement
       in autonomous musical production, freed from the aesthetic and
       social restraints of the recording industry, Zorn calls the "dead,
       lifeless music" of "boring old farts," of whom, for him, Cage is a
       leading example (Woodward 35). Rather, Zorn includes in his own
       palette pre-recorded music, quotations and generic parodies--all
       of which Attali, following Adorno, suggests are correlative to
       social control, to the consumption of mass replications and the
       "death of the original" (Noise 87, 89). Noise, for Zorn, is always
       impure, tainted, derivative and, in the Romantic sense of the
       term, unoriginal.

    6. Attali sees the appearance of the phonograph record as a cementing
       of the relation between "music and money," and of the
       deritualization of music and the limitations of the aesthetic
       powers of the composer-musician by his or her own technologies and
       tools:

     An acoustician, a cybernetician, [the musician] is
     transcended by his tools.  This constitutes a
     radical inversion of the innovator and the machine:
     instruments no longer serve to produce the desired
     sound forms, conceived in thought before written
     down, but to monitor unexpected forms. . . . [T]he
     modern composer . . . is now rarely anything more
     than a spectator of the music created by his computer.
     He is subjected to its failings, the supervisor of an
     uncontrolled development.
         Music escapes from musicians.  (115)


       Attali's utopian vision, of what he calls a new age of
       "composition," involves a return to the original, liberated,
       primitive noise of the thinking, active individual, to a form of
       personal musical pleasure where the listener, in listening,
       becomes a composer, rewriting music as his or her own noise:
       noise, as music, is, Attali argues, to be "lived," no longer
       stockpiled (133-5). Zorn removes himself, decidedly, from any such
       idealistic primitivism. Parody, simulation and replication,
       developed in increasingly volatile and fragmented forms, noisily
       inform--and deform--the lived experience of music. Rather than
       attempt to dispense with the musical commodity, to withdraw from a
       culture of simulation and replication, Zorn revels in that
       commodification itself, happily abdicating compositional control
       both to the technologies of repetition and to the improvisational
       wills of those who play "his" music. The "score" of Cobra, for
       instance, consists not of notated music per se but rather of a set
       of rules which players, as they interact during the performance,
       must follow. Zorn, just as Attali suggests of all composers in an
       age of repetition, is not interested in maintaining absolute
       creative control over the tonal, harmonic and rhythmic substance
       of his music; that control, instead, remains in the hands of his
       players. His music is not aleatory, in the sense that works by
       Boulez or Lutoslawski or Cage involve sets of "chance operations"
       that remain within the ego-dominated sweep of the composer's will;
       Zorn, rather, abdicates the position of composer in all but name,
       preferring to become himself a performer or a player among other
       players, a participant in a collective noise-making which, despite
       their differences, resembles in practice Attali's vision of
       compositional noise-making: listening, composing and living
       simultaneously in what Adorno would call a "non-identical
       identity," a collective which does not obliterate the individual
       elements it collects.

    7. Noise, in the widest possible sense, is thus central to Zorn's
       aesthetic, especially if we approach that aesthetic with political
       interest. In a 1988 interview, Edward Strickland asks Zorn if the
       duck-calls in his early free improvisations--represented by
       Yankees (387 Kb .au file), his 1983 collective recording with
       Derek Bailey and George Lewis--are an attempt to get back to
       nature, a direction of which Attali would certainly approve. Zorn
       says no:

     I just wanted some kind of raucous, ugly sound.
     . . . I don't think they're ugly. I find them
     beautiful.  It's like Thelonious Monk's title
     "Ugly Beauty."  People used to think his playing
     was ugly, now it's recognized as classic.
     (Strickland 138)


       The abrasive raucousness, Zorn implies, of his duck calls and
       other paraphernalia, used on Yankees and in his early improvised
       trios (recorded on Locus Solus), is an attempt to alter how people
       hear, just as Monk's playing changed the way listeners perceived
       how a melody functioned within an apparently discordant harmonic
       context. Noise, as sound out of its familiar context, is
       confrontational, affective and transformative. It has shock value,
       and defamiliarizes the listener who expects from music an easy
       fluency, a secure familiarity, or any sort of mollification.
       Noise, that is, politicizes the aural environment; Zorn's music is
       difficult in the sense that Adorno finds Schoenberg's music
       difficult--not because it is pretentious or obscure, but because
       it demands active participation from the listener (as well as from
       the players, who are themselves listeners). As organized sound,
       this music

     demands from the very beginning active and
     concentrated participation, the most acute
     attention to simultaneous multiplicity, the
     renunciation of the customary crutches of a
     listening which always knows what to expect,
     the intensive perception of the unique and the
     specific, and the ability to grasp precisely
     the individual characteristics, often changing
     in the smallest space. . . . The more it gives
     to listeners, the less it offers them.  It
     requires the listener spontaneously to compose
     its inner movement and demands of him [sic] not
     mere contemplation but praxis.  (Prisms 149-50)


       The political dimension of Zorn's music, that is, involves the
       creation of a new form of attention, of listening.[2] Noise, for
       Zorn, shocks the listener into awareness, provokes just such a
       creative praxis.


    8. But whereas Adorno's Schoenberg and Attali's Cage both defy the
       repetition inherent in commodification and in forms of social
       control, Zorn embraces that repetition, as he moves from noise per
       se to what he calls his "block" method of composition:

     I think it's an important thing for a musician
     to have an overview, something that remains
     consistent throughout your whole life.  You have
     one basic idea, one basic way of looking at the
     world, one basic way of putting music together.
          I developed mine very early on--the idea of
     working with blocks. At first maybe the blocks
     were more like just blocks of sound . . . noisy
     improvisational statements, but eventually it
     came back to using genre as musical notes and
     moving these blocks of genre around. . . .
     ("Zorn on Zorn" 23)


       Zorn's noise, that is, manifests itself in two distinct, though
       contiguous, forms: the improvisational and the imitative, the
       creative and the derivative, the chaotic and the parodic. And it
       is the second of these aspects of noise, particularly as it
       emerges in chunks of genre-music, that comes increasingly to
       interest Zorn as his career progresses.

    9. Genre has been taken, as Marjorie Perloff and others have pointed
       out, as anathema to postmodern aesthetic practice, particularly in
       its post-structuralist manifestations (Postmodern 3). The
       dissolution of generic barriers has, after all, been a paramount
       concern of many contemporary writers, painters and musicians. But,
       as Perloff rightly indicates, that dissolution in fact makes the
       concept of genericity even "more important," since genre itself is
       situated at the point of departure for any such negative practice
       (4). Postmodern genre, she asserts, finally attempting to define
       that which refuses definition, is

     characterized by its appropriation of other
     genres, both high and popular, by its longing
     for a both/and situation rather than one of
     either/or.  (8)


       Her key example of such appropriation is John Cage, not the Cage
       of 4'33" but the Cage of Roaratorio (280 Kb .au file), his
       award-winning "play" for radio.

   10. Cage's "composition" is really a sixteen-track sound collage,
       based on a version of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake processed into
       Cagean mesostics through a series of chance operations. In an
       effort to free himself, as he asserts in an interview published
       with the text of the piece, from melody, harmony, counterpoint and
       musical "theory" of any kind, to create a music which will turn
       "away from [codified, institutionalized] music itself," Cage mixes
       together ambient sound, Irish traditional music, sound effects
       ranging from bells and thunderclaps to laughter and farting, and
       spoken words (Roaratorio 89). The finished product is a shifting,
       restless, decentred panorama of sound and human activity. But
       Zorn--for whom, as I have already indicated, Cage serves as an
       antitype, despite their many similarities of method and
       concern--does not wish to dispense with the trappings of "music
       itself" so much as to run music itself through his deconstructive
       compositional mill. Noise, that is, neither cuts across nor undoes
       genre, as Cage suggests it should in Silence (v. Perloff 216).
       Rather, genre becomes noise itself, another form of sound to be
       appropriated, used and abused.

   11. Zorn's Spillane (400 Kb .au file), like Cage's Roaratorio, is a
       collage of sorts, based on text; the contrast between the two
       indicates not only the composers' divergent aesthetics, but also
       their contrary political stances. Where Cage, for instance,
       appropriates and transforms a rather exclusive, "difficult" text
       of high modernism by James Joyce, Zorn uses a cut-and-paste parody
       of pulp detective fiction as the basis for his work. Cage's work
       begins softly, with his own almost chant-like voice at a low,
       subtle level; Zorn's piece begins with an earth-shattering scream.
       Where Cage's collocated noises (musical and "found") meld together
       into a shifting, hypnotic soundscape, Zorn's blocks of genre both
       jar against each other and threaten to come apart from within, as
       each musician plays his or her set of "licks" and parodies, both
       in combination with and in opposition to the others. Cage's piece
       is synchronous, deep, and--considering even the medley of
       constantly shifting sound--largely static; Zorn's work, by
       contrast, is linear, immediate and highly dynamic. Zorn's music is
       somewhat tied mimetically to its "subject," as we travel
       disjunctively through the soundscape of Mike Hammer's mind (200 Kb
       .au file); Cage refuses mimetic links altogether--as Perloff
       points out--preferring not simply to add appropriate sound effects
       to Joyce's prose, but to provoke a sense of harmony in difference,
       through the production of "simultaneous layers of sound and
       meaning" (216). Again, where Cage wishes to dispense with
       accustomed musical sound altogether, in favour of synthetic new
       "field" of musical activity, Zorn is perfectly willing to maintain
       the trappings of soundtrack and sound effect, but he arranges
       those parodic reiterations of genre in a disjunctive, disturbing,
       confrontational manner. Cage's is a politics of exclusion and
       abandonment, his music demanding a wilful participation which the
       comfortable, impatient, media-saturated listener is often
       unwilling to give. Zorn, on the other hand, offers the semblance
       of that comfort, simulates the attributes of popular culture, in
       order to confront and to engage that same listener, whose
       thirty-second attention span, so programmed by television
       advertising, can be accessed directly by thirty-second blocks of
       sound. Cage stands aloof from his audience, at a somewhat elitist
       distance, while Zorn unashamedly baits a hook with snatches of the
       familiar and the vulgar. In "Mass Society and Postmodern Fiction"
       (1959), Irving Howe complains that, as Jonathan Arac summarizes,
       "the post-modern was a weak successor to the vigorous glory of
       literary modernism, brought about because mass society had eroded
       the artist's vital distance" (xii). Cage's preference for Joyce,
       and Zorn's for Mickey Spillane, suggestively reproduce just such a
       rift between high modern and postmodern artistic practices.


   12. The notion of the musical "block" is taken up by Gilles Deleuze
       and Felix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, when they attempt to
       distinguish what they call "punctual" and "linear" or
       "multilinear" systems. The punctual, for Deleuze and Guattari, as
       cognitive structuration, is organized by coordinates, determined
       points; such systems, they write, "are arborescent, mnemonic,
       molar, structural; they are systems of territorialization or
       reterritorialization," of determination and discrimination, of an
       absolute didacticism. One of their key examples of the punctual is
       the time-line, which, despite its apparent kinesis, represents
       closed historical scheme. Linear or multilinear systems, by
       contrast, are dismantling systems, and oppose themselves to the
       punctual:

     Free the line, free the diagonal: every musician
     or painter has this intention.  One elaborates a
     punctual system or a didactic representation, but
     with the aim of making it snap, of sending a tremor
     through it.  A punctual system is most interesting
     when there is a musician, painter, writer,
     philosopher to oppose it, who even fabricates it
     in order to oppose it, like a springboard to jump
     from.  History is made only by those who oppose
     history (not by those who insert themselves into
     it, or only reshape it).  (295)


       Their example of such a history-maker is Pierre Boulez, whom they
       see as a kind of radical historian--they may have in mind his
       forays as a conductor into the history of Western music, although
       their sense of nonpulsed and serial music here tends to point to
       Boulez's own compositions as acts of history:

     When Boulez casts himself in the role of the
     historian of music, he does so in order to show
     how a great musician, in a very different manner
     in each case, invents a kind of diagonal running
     between the harmonic vertical and the melodic
     horizon.  And in each case it is a different
     diagonal, a different technique, a creation.
     Moving along this transversal line, which is
     really a line of deterritorialization, there is
     a sound block that no longer has a point of origin,
     since it is always and already in the middle of
     the line; and no longer has horizontal and vertical
     coordinates, since it creates its own coordinates;
     and no longer forms a localizable connection from
     one point to another [as in "punctual" systems],
     since it is in "nonpulsed time": a deterritorialized
     rhythmic block that has abandoned points, coordinates
     and measure, like a drunken boat that melds with a
     line or draws a plane of consistency.  Speeds and
     slownesses inject themselves into musical form,
     sometimes impelling it to proliferation, linear
     microproliferations, and sometimes to extinction,
     sonorous abolition, involution, or both at once.  (296)


       What Deleuze and Guattari describe here sounds more like free
       improvisation than Boulez's meticulous compositions, but they
       nevertheless point to a disjunctive form of composition in non
       sequitur blocks which displays a surprising kinship to Zorn's
       method. (Zorn himself practices the kind of proliferative free
       improvisation toward which Deleuze and Guattari gesture.) The act
       of freeing line or block, however, does not occur in the absolute
       dispersal of pulse, tonal centre or convention that Deleuze and
       Guattari find in Boulez's serial compositions, not in Zorn. In
       fact, given that the writers want to maintain a "punctual"
       presence against which they can discover themselves musically
       free, or within which they can negotiate one of their
       deterritorializations, such absolute claims--with their
       a-historicizing move to liberation--are suspiciously reified.
       Rather than play out a complete liberation, that is, Zorn's music
       negotiates the doubling of punctual and multilinear which Deleuze
       and Guattari initially suggest, reasserting--contingently,
       temporarily--familiar generic boundaries as it simultaneously
       seeks to extricate itself from closed system or form. Zorn's
       music, in other words, follows that diagonal trajectory between
       the reified and the liberated, continually dismantling and
       reassembling--deterritorializing and reterritorializing, in
       Deleuze and Guattari's terms--our terms of aural reference,
       inserting itself into the stream of a musical history only to
       dismantle immediately that comfortable historical sense. Whereas
       Boulez, in other words, removes himself from the ironic doublings
       of that diagonal--in a manner which seems to appeal to Deleuze and
       Guattari's need for a complete liberation of sound and mind--Zorn,
       through his amalgam of popular idiom, genre and noise, revels in
       that irony.

   13. Zorn's method, as he has stated, is "filmic." Many of the
       composers he admires--Ennio Morricone, Carl Stalling and Bernard
       Herrmann especially--work exclusively on soundtracks for popular
       movies and cartoons. The blocks of sound emerge in the context of
       developing shifting moods for soundtracks; Zorn's recent Filmworks
       1986-1990, for instance, assembles from three different films a
       series of blocks of diverse, genre-based compositions. But Zorn's
       composition, as we have seen with Spillane and others, also
       involve genre-shifts within themselves. The use and abuse of quick
       blocks of genre to shock the accustomed listener dominates, for
       instance, Zorn's arrangement of "Hard Plains Drifter" (564 Kb .au
       file), a composition, or rather series of compositions, by
       avant-garde guitarist Bill Frisell. The piece, played by Frisell's
       instrumentally-mixed quartet (cello, electric guitar, electric
       bass, percussion), shifts abruptly over thirty-six blocks among
       twelve different keys (suggesting, peculiarly, a block-oriented
       serialism), numerous tempi and instrumental combinations (trios,
       duos, solos), "from r&b, to country & western, reggae, hardcore,
       free-form squalls, and Morricone western psychedelia" (Diliberto
       18). At no point does Zorn's arrangement attempt to abandon its
       generic or conventional musical ties: those ties, rather, are
       exploited and segmented, to the point where, while retaining their
       ironic, parodic thrust and remaining recognizable to the
       t.v.-and-radio-saturated ear, they throw the accustomed listener
       off balance; the listeners who know their pop-culture, that is,
       have their expectations jolted, scattered, smashed and
       re-arranged. Zorn's work is never quite unrecognizable, "boring,"
       or estranging to such a listener, as Cage's--for instance--may
       tend to be. Rather, the well-worn, commercially-exploited genres
       remain intact. Zorn himself exploits the expectations of a
       repetition-hungry consumer culture, turning those expectations, so
       to speak, on their ears. Zorn's organization of noise consists not
       in the dismantling or disabling of genre by noise, but rather in
       the stream of cross-talk between noise and genre.


   14. The use of genre within the context of a mass consumer audience
       thus gives Zorn's music a socio-political character which the
       music of Cage can only attain, as Attali has indicated,
       negatively, by forcing the listener away from music per se (as an
       organ of institutional power) and toward the individual, to a new
       order of music. Zorn, by contrast, uses the "old" order, the
       status quo of popular culture, to shock his listeners into an
       awareness of their mired condition. Cage's music, from Attali's
       perspective, lays claim to a utopian thrust which Zorn's work,
       unremittingly ironic as it is, will not accept. Composition, then,
       as the arrangement of sounds (generic, noisy or otherwise), does
       not necessarily offer us an authentic, contemplative access to
       "what is," as Cage's Zen-oriented pieces are somewhat
       pretentiously intended to do; rather, Zorn disrupts all forms of
       contemplation (especially the listener-passivity encouraged by
       electronic reproduction and anaesthetic stereo background), and
       calls instead for an active, deliberate, offensive engagement with
       the world, a praxis, as Adorno says.

   15. Despite Zorn's claims to dislike notation, his music is in fact
       meticulously structured both in its conception and in its
       execution. He does not, as Stockhausen has, force musicians
       unaccustomed to improvisation merely to think about "the
       vibrations of the stars" and to play what they feel. He composes,
       he says, for players he knows to be capable of stretching
       musically without much notated music; his model--surprisingly
       perhaps--as he repeats in various interviews, is Duke Ellington,
       whose music is "collaborative," according to Zorn, as it melds the
       diverse, distinctive voices of Ellington's orchestra into a "kind
       of filmic sweep" (Santoro 23). Zorn asserts that, when he composes
       for his "family" of players, he writes in such a way as not to
       limit the potentials of those players, while providing a structure
       within which they can work; the tension between
       noises--intentional and chaotic, parodic and expressive--which we
       have been examining in Zorn's music is thus reproduced on a
       compositional level, as Zorn seeks to balance improvisational
       freedom with the parameters of a notated structure, a balance
       discovered, for that matter, within structurality itself.

   16. I want, in conclusion, to examine the political implications of
       one of the most notorious of those structures, the game. Zorn's
       game pieces, bearing titles derived from various sports and
       board-games like Lacrosse, Archery, Pool, and Cobra, involve
       complex and often difficult sets of rules to be followed by
       musicians and freedom. When asked if he has an "overall view" of a
       game piece he was composing in 1988, Zorn was typically cautious:

     No. Not at all. The thing is not written in time,
     it's from section to section and in that sense it's
     being created spontaneously by the players in the
     group. . . . I have a general idea of what's
     possible in the piece, the way somebody who writes
     the rules to baseball knows there'll be so many
     innings and so many outs.  But you don't know how
     long an inning is going to last and how long the
     guy's going to be at bat before he gets a hit.  So
     there are a lot of variables, and it should be that
     way because these are improvisers and that's what
     they do best.  (Chant 25)


       Zorn offers a set of rules, and lets the players complete the
       melodies, tempi, harmonies and transitions. His "composition," in
       this sense, becomes--to borrow a term from Miles Davis--controlled
       freedom, or structured freedom, the contradiction-in-terms
       indicating a both/and rather than an either/or situation in
       performance.

   17. Cage, again, provides an illustrative contrast to Zorn. Whereas
       Cage's computer-generated mesostics move toward the obliteration
       of compositional intention almost entirely by establishing strict
       rules for the processing of phonemes and morphemes of language, as
       Cage himself indicates, for instance, in his introduction to I-VI,
       Zorn transfers compositional intention largely to the performer,
       such that he or she is permitted to function within a
       predetermined context of group interaction, whose only expressive
       constraints consist in that interaction. Cage, again, moves toward
       obliteration of the creative will, while Zorn engages that will
       differentially.

   18. The "score" of Cobra (371 Kb .au file) illustrates this push
       toward engagement. It consists of a series of hand signals, each
       of which corresponds to a type of interaction ranging from
       quickly-traded bursts of sound to aggressive competitions. Any one
       of the players may choose at any time to change the direction of
       the piece and to alter the type of interaction; Zorn's function as
       conductor is merely to relay that change to the rest of the
       players, through a hand signal, and to offer a downbeat. Players
       may also, individually or in groups, engage in "guerrilla
       tactics," for which there exists a whole new set of signals, by
       which they attempt to wrest control of the group from the
       conductor and to conduct their own series of interactions (for a
       more complete description of the piece, see Strickland 134-37 or
       the sleeve notes to the HatART release of Cobra). The game itself
       is thus antagonistic and collaborative, at once reproducing the
       composer-conductor hierarchy of traditional "classical" music and
       subverting that hierarchy from within the "composition" itself. No
       two performances are the same, as the recent double-edition
       release of the piece indicates, but all performances exist within
       the same parameters, as collective communal works.


   19. Zorn, by refusing the score from within the context of score-bound
       composition, thus creates, on stage in performance, a functional
       community, a group interaction in which the individual creative
       will cannot be subsumed by the collective whole in which it
       participates; confrontation and shock, while still present in the
       blocked genre-and-noise-based structure of the piece, give way
       strangely enough to a form of "utopian" promise, a promise which
       Zorn--always incredulous--has rather steadfastly refused to admit.
       But, unlike Attali's utopia, Zorn's community of creative will
       does not remove itself from the arena of technological
       replication; rather, it moves from within the economies of
       consumption and repetition that characterize the mass media and
       the mass-market to fracture and remake creativity itself. As Linda
       Hutcheon has asserted of postmodernist parody, a category in which
       we may include Zorn's generic replication and mass-media noise
       making, it is "not essentially depthless, trivial kitsch," a
       replay of empty forms to satisfy the hollow consumer strategies of
       the music industry, "but rather it can and does lead to a vision
       of interconnectedness" (Poetics 24). Cage has indicated that he
       too wanted to move toward a notion of the non-constraining,
       communal and participatory score, the score which serves not as an
       absolute but as a provisional "model" for performance:

     That's what I'd like.  It's a fascinating thing and
     suggests at least, if not a new field of music at
     least a new field of activity for people who are
     interested in sounds.  (Roaratorio 91)


       Ironically, Zorn, not Cage, has established just such a "new
       field," but from within the very forms of consumer and political
       regulation which have threatened--according to both Attali and
       Adorno--to obliterate the creative will altogether. The praxis
       Zorn's music encourages is not new, in the sense that the
       exhausted avant-garde of modernist practice requires that we "make
       it new." Rather, that praxis, as Zorn's music demonstrates, exists
       as potential within all fields of human activity, even
       those--especially those--which the mass audience, for its own
       anaesthetic comfort, has consistently managed to turn against
       itself. Zorn's music, that is, turns its own form against itself,
       becoming what he calls a stimulating, uncomfortable, "ugly
       beauty," and emerges remade, having reshaped the fundamental ways
       in which we listen, both to each other and to the world around us.


     _________________________________________________________________

[IMAGE] Talk Back


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Notes


   The direct correspondence between theorizing and music assumed by
       Attali may be illuminated by Adorno's commentary on Mahler.
       Arguing against programmatic and thematic analyses of Mahler's
       symphonies, Adorno asserts that:
     Ideas that are treated, depicted or deliberately
     advanced by a work of art are not its ideas but
     its materials--even the "poetic ideas" whose hazy
     designations were intended to divest the program
     of its coarse materiality. . . . In [Mahler's]
     work a purely musical residue stubbornly persists
     that can be interpreted in terms neither of
     processes nor of moods.  It informs the gestures
     of his music. . . . Mahler can only be seen in
     perspective by moving still closer to him, by
     entering into the music and confronting the
     incommensurable presence that defies the stylistic
     categories of program and absolute music. . . . His
     symphonies assist such closeness by the compelling
     spirituality of their sensuous musical
     configurations.  Instead of illustrating ideas,
     they are destined concretely to become the idea.
     (Mahler 3-4) Back



   Discussing the filmic or "picaresque" shape of his compositions, his
       uses of blocks of sound and rapid-fire shifts from texture to
       texture, section to section, Zorn suggests that his music demands
       a similar attentiveness:
     It's made of separate moments that I compose
     completely regardless of the next, and then I
     pull them, cull them together.  It's put together
     in a style that causes questions to be asked
     rather than answered.  It's not the kind of music
     you can just put on and then have a party.  It
     demands your attention.  You sit down and listen
     to it or you don't even put it on. (Strickland 128) Back



     _________________________________________________________________

Works Cited



          Adorno, Theodor. Prisms. 1967. Trans. S. and S. Weber.
          Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981.


          ---. Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy. 1971. Trans. E. Jephcott.
          Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.


          Arac, Jonathan, ed. Postmodernism and Politics. Minneapolis:
          University of Minnesota Press, 1986.


          Attali, Jacques. Noise. 1977. Trans. B. Massumi. Minneapolis:
          University of Minnesota Press, 1985.


          Bailey, Derek, George Lewis and John Zorn. Yankees. Audio
          Recording. Celluloid OAO, 5006, 1983.


          Cage, John. Roaratorio. Ed. Klaus Schvning. Kvnigstein:
          Athendum, 1982.


          ---. Roaratorio. Audio Recording. Athendum, 3-7610-8185-5,
          1982.


          ---. Silence. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1961.


          ---. I-VI. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1990.


          Chant, Ben. "John Zorn--Game Plan." Coda 221 (August 1988),
          24-25.


          Deleuze, Gilles and Filix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. 1980.
          Trans. B. Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
          1987.


          Diliberto, John. "Bill Frisell: Guitars & Scatterations."
          Downbeat 56.5 (May 1989), 16-19.


          Frisell, Bill. Before We Were Born. Audio Recording.
          Elektra/Nonesuch, 9 60843, 1989.


          Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism. New York:
          Routledge, 1988.


          McGowan, John. Postmodernism and Its Critics. Ithaca: Cornell
          UP, 1991.


          Perloff, Marjorie, ed. Postmodern Genres. Norman: University of
          Oklahoma Press, 1988.


          Santoro, Gene. "John Zorn: Quick-Change Artist Makes Good."
          Downbeat 55.4 (April 1988), 23-25.


          Strickland, Edward. American Composers: Dialogues on
          Contemporary Music. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991.


          Woodward, Josef. "Zornography: John Zorn." Option (July/August
          1987), 32-36.


          Zorn, John. Filmworks 1987-1990. Audio Recording.
          Elektra/Nonesuch, 9 79270, 1992.


          ---. Spillane. Audio Recording. Elektra/Nonesuch, 9 79172,
          1987.


          ---. Cobra. Audio Recording. HatART, 60401/2, 1990.


          ---. Spy Vs. Spy. Audio Recording. Elektra/Musician, 9 60844,
          1989.


          ---. Naked City. Audio Recording. Elektra/Nonesuch, 9 79238,
          1989.


          ---. Torture Garden/Naked City. Audio Recording. Shimmy Disc,
          S039, 1990.

          "Zorn on Zorn." [Advertisement] Downbeat 59.3 (March 1992), 23.


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