MDDM background music

[Doug Millison]

"[...] Music has played a highly problematic role in the history of
Manifest Destiny, to the extent that it has commonly served to aestheticize
the violence that accompanies westward expansion. It is not by accident
that a concern to link nature to music arose in Western history even before
the dawn of modernity which, for convenience, we might date at least as
early as the 17th century. Modernity emerges through a self-reflexive
conjunction of space and time, whereby time is altered in Western
consciousness. Time's primordial cyclical repetitiveness is thrown over in
favor of a linear conception of chronos: time ceases to spiral-time now
marches on. The past is not repeated; there is only the future. In short,
time emerges as a developmental parameter of human experience, just as
space emerges in modernity as a terrain for development. [...]

The sonoric landscape results from cultural practices-in short, from the
history with which it engages. Acoustic landscapes at their best introject
themselves on the grid of human subjectivity as expressions of the desire
for inter-subjective connection and reconciliation with nature in the broad
sense of which the human subject remains a part in spite of itself. In
short, musical sound evokes the angel of history. History's angel "wants to
go back and fix things, to repair the things that have been broken. But
there is a storm blowing from Paradise and the storm keeps blowing the
angel backwards into the future. And the storm, this storm, is called
Progress."

40.	I'm quoting Laurie Anderson who herself paraphrases Walter
Benjamin's 9th aphorism from his "Theses on the Philosophy of History"
(257-58).  The song is titled "The Dream Before"; it connects historical
time to the mythic time of a violent children's story and thrusts the
story's characters, little Hansel and Gretel, into the real time of the
aftermath of their escape from the primeval forest and its wicked witch.
Now grown up and living in the postmodern metropolis, they take on more or
less menial work, and survive-but not happily ever after. They went flying
backwards into the future, and history intervened. The historicity of their
condition was not a pretty prospect, and it caused them to drown in
alcoholic stupor. What keeps faith in the future-to which they're blind-is
not the dystopian text that narrates their pathetic circumstance, but the
minimalist fragment of a sonoric landscape into which it's set. Anderson's
song, in fact dedicated to Benjamin, honors the messianic import of his
seemingly hopeless hope: the claim, made in the last lines he lived to
write, that any moment in time could serve as a gate through which the
Messiah might enter, leading the way towards human emancipation-towards
what Adorno termed reconciliation with nature, without which, he insisted,
neither emancipation nor a realized human subject was possible. Anderson's
music is so minimalist as barely to qualify as music, and precisely by that
means effectively evokes music's discursive agency while sonorically
engaging a history that posits all too effectively the opposite of the
historicist dream of Progress. What's left of music, she seems to suggest,
is the barest minimum of what constitutes music, though like Benjamin,
Anderson's work taken as a whole makes clear her belief that through that
narrow gateway there might eventually still pass a cause for rejoicing in
the possibility, however remote, of Paradise.  "

from:
Paradise, Nature, and Reconciliation, or
A Tentative Conversation with Wagner, Puccini, Adorno, and The Ronette
by
Richard Leppert, University of Minnesota

http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/echo/volume4-issue1/leppert/index.html


and check out:

http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/echo/volume4-issue1/archives/index.html
"What I hear is thinking too: Deleuze & Guattari go pop"


http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/echo/volume4-issue1/archives/index.html
SOUND REVIEW
Knitting Factory Reissue Series of Ronald Shannon Jackson and the Decoding
Society, KnitClassics KCR 3027 - 3035