Audio Poverty

Ekkehard Ehlers & Björn Gottstein
A Brief Aesthetics of Posteconomic Music

What could have been more fitting to express the brute need for money as an empty and hollow C major chord? This was Alban Berg’s comment in retrospect about a famous passage in Wozzeck in which the ultimate realization of the hopelessness of the “poor folk” is captured in a handful of coins. But Berg composed the passage “wir arme Leut” in 1921 using the chromatic totality, a chord including all twelve tones, a white noise encompassing all frequencies, thus anticipating the means available.

White noise, together with silence, is perhaps the preliminary end where music comes to a standstill. Werner Dafeldecker’s bass, the vinyl discs of DJ Rupture, Hair Police’s wall of noise: these are refined stages of the state where the musical channels of information fail to function.

As the founder of the notion of arte povera Germano Celant put it, “poor life” and “poor art” do not refer to anything, “They present themselves.” They are poor in the sense of a fact of political and musical history. Berg’s C-major chord is a form of musical impoverishment. Helmut Lachenmann brought the theme of musical poverty to a preliminary climax when in Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern he lent musical form to hunger and cold, in a word, to misery.

Now, of course the idea of musica povera cannot only be understood in terms of musical material, but also in terms of discourse, the market, biographies, the listener, and technological development. First things first. We have gotten used to seeing economic relationships primarily from the position of the market. According to this perspective, music has long been the poorest of all the arts. 85 percent of all titles available for purchase on line in 2008 were bought a total of zero times. The theory of the long tail, that the long and little sellers of the archive would replace the hit in terms of capital production, has thus been refuted.

This not only means that musicians today again have to work at the cheese counter or as a lifeguard, but that the economic situation provokes new life models. Think of Harry Partch, who lived for years as a hobo before returning to a life as a middle class composer, or of Moondog, who made a living as a street musician dressed in a Viking costume between 52nd and 54th Streets in Manhattan. Moondog was not a madman, but “dead serious” (Kodwo Eshun) and someone who respectfully shook Charlie Parker’s hand. Someone who, like the Berlin clarinetist Kai Fagaschinski, chooses to work in Berlin back rooms for a pittance makes a conscious decision against other, presumably better paid forms of making music.

Even someone like Keith Rowe, who takes the guitar from around his neck, thus creating a distance to his instrument by moving it to the tabletop, or someone who like Hugh Davies, who looks for musique concrète synthetique in the alienated circuits of everyday electronics, damaging the instrument and declaring the soldering iron an instrument, makes a conscious decision against a ubiquitous functioning. When Alvin Curran with Musica elettronica viva in Rome of the 1960s confronted everyday consumer objects and self-built synthesizers with the concert piano, the conflict became political. The lack became a provocation that challenged the petrified musical tradition. Why is it no longer possible to subject technological possibilities to such a provocation? Where is the emancipatory reflex of the artist who rebels against his instrument?

“Music is more than music” (Ted Gaier). Formats, modes of appearance and distribution are not decided by the musician alone. The audience decides when and where it wants to listen to music. The availability of the digital archive removes music from its original context. The listener and critic are equally affected by this semantic loss. Arts journalism in shuffle mode, the MP3 player promises oblivious happiness. Why do we still listen to music, beyond the mere anthropological drive?

“It does not matter very much if it is folk music or if it is avantgarde as long as it fits the situation. You have it in computer games and all the kinds of sound illustrations. I think what is coming up is a synthesis of everything, where we do not find the differences very interesting.”
—Jan W. Morthenson

The musical event of the year in 2008 was Grand Theft Auto IV. With over 200 original tracks, covering the spectrum from dancehall to hardcore and played in virtually designed radio programs moderated by Karl Lagerfeld and Femi Kuti, Grand Theft Auto IV simulates the spectrum of global popular culture. This computer game presents what the professional music world has been struggling to provide: an ontological view of the music of the world.

Grand Theft Auto IV lends music an exceptional status in that it selects according to personal criteria that cannot be distinguished from the attitude of a good DJ. As limited as the genre-term used here might be, all the more liberating is the possibility of channeled music on demand. The aesthetic of the povera stretches from the up to four chords of punk to the repetition of minimal music, from the refusal strategies of musica negativa to the cassette medium, used by Brian Shimkovitz for his Awesome Tapes from Africa. It is not the atrophied sound or the bank account of the artist alone that manifest musical poverty but the overall range of strategies and facts available.

At the same time, the loss of differences mourned by Jan W. Morthenson is precarious. The digital revolution monadized the hit, the work, the piece, the track, the record, the concept and double album, and even the author. Music is ripped from its team, its significance, its producer: in a word, its context. Capitalism, to put it crudely, was never very interested in the niceties of musical history. Whoever surrenders music to it has to accept taking a loss, and that today this loss cannot be balanced out by sales. Bach’s entire oeuvre as a monophonic ring tone: counterpoint disappears in file sharing. Profit-oriented listening is accompanied by a functionalization of music that does not allow us to doubt its purpose, but cannot belie the fact that the never-ending party is not a promise, but a nightmare. Only a DJ with a sense of vocation can solve this dilemma with a musical pedagogical ethos: excavating, caring for the repertoire, and spreading the word.

Even the nightmare toy has up until now been given too little attention as a device for musical data storage. Moving the regressive “I am Barbie” of the Barbie doll to the dark bass register and changing “Speak-and-Spell” machines to warm circuits only takes the commercialization of music to its logical conclusion. Modified Toy Orchestra is not a parody of plastic culture, but a strange synthesis of humor and seriousness that first allows for genuine critique.

“Music will probably continue to exist for a very, very long time. Perhaps not as a historical event, or a treasured cultural product, but simply because it exists. It is a commodity, a consumer good. I don’t have the feeling of being part of a musical current going through history. I have had my time. I have nothing to do with what happens beyond that.”
—Gottfried Michael Koenig

Even if we wanted to, it would be impossible to get rid of music. In the worst of all cases, it would be administered by the municipal theaters of the world. In the best of situations, it would find a better place where its magic can still work. Someone who today calls cities like Dakar, Luanda, Buenos Aires, and Paramarebo today’s musical centers is not a victim of social kitsch, but on the wire. Music, it seems, at least pop music, has long escaped to the favelas from Eurocentric arrogance. If there is anywhere where post economic music can be grasped, then it is in those places where the economic value of music is practically nothing, for consumer buying power, however it might be measured, simply does not exist.

Let’s take cumbia, which has roots in Colombian accordion music and today exists as a mix of folklore with a sound design of Western provenance and dance rhythms of the African diaspora. In the major cities of South America, cumbia can literally mobilize hundreds of thousands. Parties take place in former factories and warehouses and, for security reasons, never last more than three hours, which in turn leads to a current of partygoers moving through the night. British DJ Vamanos is a traveler who seeks out and explores musical styles like cumbia, tropical, and dance hall no longer in the local record store, but with an ethnological eagerness. And Brian Shimkovitz also gathered his Awesome Tapes from Africa in the course of long travels and extensive explorations.

With the care and love that DJ Vamanos and Brian Shimkovitz bring to the repertoire, they resist the redundancy of listening that retains the memory of a first kiss for a lifetime and blocks the development of one’s own listening habits. The terrabyte of music today on my hard drive changes nothing about the fact that my playlist does not surpass the status of a photo album. The record collection was at least still a musical fingerprint that had to be worked at over the years. The sheer accessibility of the musical archive, in contrast, makes the processes of appropriation that help us to write own biography impossible. Terre Thaemlitz’ recognition for the musician, “We don’t have to be unique anymore,” should be considered a loss for listener.

If Gottfried Michael Koenig states that he is not “part of a musical current” and retreats to “limited time,” he raises the question of aging. Not only the listener is working on his own biography as he listens. The artist and his work is also subject to a certain process of aging. Time is gnawing away at the work. If in his old age a composer with a status like that of Koening, who helped to invent electronic music in the 1950s, no longer finds himself belonging to history, modernism’s view of history is falling apart. The archive is transhistorical and suggests timelessness, and the music world reacts to this with the automatism of the retro-movement, which in turn blocks a true renaissance. Can we still feel the gap that is represented by a viola da gamba or a dulcimer in a Stockhausen performance?

“The medieval village is the space in which my electronic organ playing functions. The organ and leslie speaker together weigh 120 kilograms and I pull them out with the generous help of fellow musicians and we wheel them to the concert. The concerts are all within a two-kilometer radius of home in Berlin. My organ playing means nothing to people in the next town nor should it. There is probably an organ player in that village anyway.” (Thomas Meadowcroft)

The melodies of Giuseppe Verdi were, as we know, not only popular on the opera stage, but also on the street, where organ grinders performed the arias the best they could. Of course, the pinned barrels and reeds are no replacement for voice, stage, and orchestra. But to deny thee atrophied appropriation of the organ grinder an aesthetic value would mean adopting a questionable concept of authenticity, whereas the barrel maker and the organ grinder rather deserve acknowledgement.

We also have to distinguish between structural and transitory poverty in music. When Stockhausen for his piece Goldstaub lets the performers starve for four days, he creates an exceptional state that has more to do with the egomaniacal nature of the artist than with any economic considerations. Alan Hilario, in contrast, depicts the musical life of poor countries and regions, which find their expression in the surrogate of Karaoke tracks, and helps to do justice to the “bad version” (Hilario). This is indeed one of music’s tasks. If a family in the US loses its house in the course of the current financial crisis, there is an algorithmic DNA is involved in this process on which music software is also based. This analogy needs to be reflected by music. The relationship between the binary code and poverty: these algorithms make people poor, we call it music.

Someone who only uses the presets of the computer has already lost. Thomas Meadowcrofts’s decision for Yamaha’s living room/backroom instruments is also a decision against a normed interface. With his encroachments on a repertoire that he locates between pop classics and pop obscurity, he listens to the electronic organ for artful effects and puts the aesthetic value of the solo entertainer to the test.

With this, not only is something said against the programming of the software, against the production norms of a sound administration program like Garage Band or even Ableton Live and Logic, but also against the reduced experiential horizon of iLife. It can only be about putting the computer aside, and again occupying sites that again allow a social communication that allowed the subculture into the 1990s to be a central social corrective and that allowed for collective dancing, a language beyond discourses, and not least the tenderness of actual touch: something that is not possible on MySpace.

The vastness of the repertoire, the monadism and nomadism of the track, the regionalization of the genre, all this can be synchronized in the beat, at least within the framework of pop cultural conditions. DJ Rupture is therefore more than just a DJ, because he makes the heterophony of discourses commensurable, because he places Missy Elliot, Luciano Berio, and Oval in relation to one another in his sets in a a way that is not exhausted by the sparkle of the illustrious names, but betrays something of the scorn and laughter that lies at the basis of all these pieces.

Up to a certain degree, at issue here is also the self-empowerment of the artists, who have to seize things for themselves. What we need is a theory that again makes history plannable. “Whoever doesn’t go under, although others plan for it, could just as easily take up the reigns” (Dietmar Dath).

“All, I’m afraid, will be lost, if we don’t get rid of these last two or three sounds.”
—Walter Marchetti

In 1890, the possibilities of producing sound in the framework of European art music were limited. The transfer of meaning that Claude Debussy achieved in 1890 cannot be overestimated. Debussy heard the music of the Javanese Gamelan for the first time at the Paris world exhibition, and overcame the exotic gaze of the nineteenth century with awe. In comparison to the counterpoint of the Gamelan, he noted, Palestrina’s counterpoint is a “child’s game.” Debussy’s illumination led, as we know, to an expansion of the timbre palette. He began a process that in the twentieth century would lead to a paradigmatic shift, to the emancipation of the sound timbre and the magic of the unheard. The archive in which the music of Debussy is contained just as that of the Gamelan has today been abandoned. This process came to an end at the moment when Chris Watson slid across the arctic ice with a microphone to record the cracking of the ice. The abandoned microphone left in the rainforest, in Patagonia, in a New York office building, these are the last two, three remaining sounds, an eschatology of sound.

The epiphany that the Gamelan became for Debussy took place numerous times in the twentieth century: the discovery of electroacoustics and recording. The frustrating thing is that the possibilities that have come with the digital revolution have not provided music with a similarly strong impulse.

Those who speak about music and poverty with the future of music in mind find themselves subject to the accusation of cultural pessimism, which, as Diedrich Diederichsen puts it, comes on like a bad cough. Maybe we should formulate it in these terms: the cultural concept of those that express such an accusation might just not fit. More can be demanded of music than a satisfied present. Things can and should change. But we want to have a part in a future that is not rich, but beautiful and just. The idea of musica povera is not a threat, but a promise, that of music coming out of its self-imposed immaturity.