In 1976, Toronto was in the throes of a vibrant punk moment parallel to scenes in New York City and London. Toronto was distinct for its particularly intense involvement with the art world, queer-friendly sensibility and minimal courtship from record labels. “New York City” on Talk’s Cheap (Ready, 1979) touches on the pain of alienation from mainstream society, contrasted with the grass-is-always-greener thought that New York City is the “place for me.” There’s something typically Canadian about this feeling that the action is forever going on elsewhere. In 1996, Chart magazine nominated “New York City” as the greatest Canadian song of all time. – Jakub Marshall, graduate student researcher Originally published as part of an article for The Conversation by Carleton University faculty and students, songs for your Canadian summer playlist.
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“One of the things hippy and punk had in common… was an oppositional impulse. For both, politics and culture were, or could be, or should be, the same thing.” –John Mckay “There is no authority but yourself” –Crass Mckay’s highly original book Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance since the Sixties has served as one of several key texts that have been an important jumping off point in my thinking about music and politics. In a slightly unusual move for academic work, he treats various musicultures; hippy, punk and rave most specifically, not as isolated segments and individualized topics of study, but as a theoretically united whole. Although there are obvious stylistic differences between the three (as well as some cultural overlap that would be to complicated to pick up apart here) they share a similar orientation towards an oppositional impulse. To varying degrees, as I will demonstrate, they were all involved in a sort of cultural rupture in the dominant symbolic system of expression. What I am interested in then, coming from the manifest left-leaning position that I choose to write from, is how, or if these cultures of counter-hegemonic impulse can manifest direct political action in the individual and collective. Where I find John Mckay succeeds most is as a storyteller, weaving a thread of history through various 20th century countercultural movements, and showing how they are united in the depth of their refusal. This generalized “Great Refusal” was theorized explicitly by Marcuse in his 1964 book One-Dimensional Man, as being the only adequate opposition in a society that exercises all-encompassing methods of control. For many so called “radical” cultural writers such as McKay, Marcuse and many others, historiography is always a latent background concern. Marcuse theorized that the material and intellectual resources of our society have far outgrown our institutions, which theoretically should increase our capacity for liberation as a society. However, rather than reaching this new liberation, capitalism has reasserted control through the creation of false needs and a large scale reshaping of human consciousness along consumer-commodity lines. The oppositional forces in this new consumer society, originally located in the working masses, are then diffused upwards through the youth and intelligensia, as well as the persecuted minorities who are forced into the oppositional role by pure necessity. It is amid these tightening social controls that the former category is tasked with an imperative to create new ways of knowing, being, feeling, experiencing; we are tasked with creating a new culture. This is all to put into theoretical jargon what the hippies already knew by impulse. Furthering the commonly held position, that the 60s counterculture was simply a reaction against the stodged conservativism of the previous decade, I’d argue that more than simply being reactionary, the hippies were profound cultural experimenters, creators, and builders. Partly this has to do with their prestige as the first subculture to adopt an explicitly psychedelic program to their art and culture. Much of the later musical style of psychedelia was influenced by the lifestyle experimentation of Ken Kesey and The Merry Pranksters. The Merry Pranksters provided a link between the beat poets of the previous generation and the incoming youth counterculture. This is evidenced by the Pranksters inaugural 1963 bus trip, where the motley collection of writers, artists, and musicians - driven by the character of Neal Cassidy, as mythologized in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road - criss-crossed America, heads full of acid, and bodies full of song. This roving counterculture grew more solid by 1965, when the collective settled into hosting regular parties/concerts in the San Francisco Bay Area. These parties, dubbed “Acid Tests”, were centered around creating a unified psychedelic experience for the participants. For a brief few years prior to the outlawing of LSD use in America in 1967, these acid tests provided a hotbed of cultural foment, giving birth to the careers of The Grateful Dead and (arguably) Jefferson Airplane. Although the San Fransisco music scene in the 60s was never explicitly linked up to established leftist politics, many of the participants held views that were synergistic with what was called the “New Left” at the time (Marcuse’s work was very influential on the ‘Free Love’ concept). However, the overriding message of the hippies was ultimately not a positive one but a negation. The counterculture was a negation of established modes of morality, a refusal of participation in a capitalism they understood as profoundly unjust, and a drive to experiment with new ways of being. What this symbolic resistance did achieve then, was a reshaping of cultural discourse that opened a space for organic intellectualism that could be spontaneously drawn from by future would-be cultural and political radicals. Thus, enters the next generation, with their youth movement that will forever be the epitome for any sort of rupture in the cultural hegemony; punk rock. Punk engulfed America and the UK like a full force tidal wave, creating an explosion of new expressions of style. Based off of the stories of those who “were there”, for a brief moment in 1977 it felt like a musical and cultural style was primed to topple decades of sterility in western society, and create a mass movement for social change. However, seemingly as soon as this capacity was reached, punk had already fractured into dozens of warring tribes; hardcore (and its British cousin Oi!), art rock, new wave, no wave, and the many strands of post-punk all competed for the title of legitimate successor to the original movement. To some like esteemed rock critic Simon Reynolds, this successor period from 1978-84 has been tragically overlooked by many, and in fact was the most innovative period in rock music since the psychedelic era of 63’-67’. The politics of this period were extremely varied and often esoteric and ephemeral in nature. There was however, a general tendency towards left-leaning views, and an across the board anti-authoritarian streak. Explicitly radical politics could be found in the post-punk time period through Anarcho-punk and its derivatives, of which there is no better representative group than the East Essex radical outfit Crass. Crass was a commune, artists collective, and sometimes punk band that purposefully existed to disseminate their ideological program. They were heavily inspired by the work of Murray Bookchin (1921-2006), who synthesized anarchism and libertarian socialism into what he called Communalism. Bookchin’s model was highly localized, and stressed communal ownership of goods and property within independent communities. The ideology has been criticized by some as it rejects traditional leftist notions of class warfare and class consciousness, but works well as a way to create what Hakim Bey would call a “pocket of resistance” within the larger capitalist framework. Crass shows themselves were often an occasion where the micro-politics of the age were played out in real time. Neo-nazi skinheads would rub shoulders with the anarchist and socialist Crass fans. Indeed, many of the Direct Action tactics of antifascist movements today were honed and refined in the moshpits of 1980s England. Little research has been done by musicologists on this deep connection between punk and antifascism, a situation I hope to remedy with some of my own work. I have chosen for the moment leave rave culture out of my discussion of musical cultures of resistance, as it requires a slightly different approach and theoretical lens. Many have derided Techno as simply a drug fueled escapism rather than a cogent movement the way punk was. I do not disagree with the central point to this criticism, as rave is a form of escapism. But, what I find relevant about this escapism is the way it enables individuals to experiment with new identities and enact new aesthetic modes of experience. A useful concept is found in Brian Wilson’s (no, not that one!) book on rave culture in Toronto, ‘Fight, Flight or Chill’. Wilson conceptualizes rave as existing on a Continuum of Resistance. This concept gives nuance to the connection between music and politics; making the question no longer “does this music resist capitalism or does it not?”, but rather “to what degree does this music show signs of refusal? Does it have any oppositional impulse?” These sorts of questions intrigue me immensely, and I’m excited to be pursuing them. Much of the best work in musicology I find is that which takes music very seriously. Music is a culture that is molded by social processes, but also in turn it can act upon and shape these processes. Thus, it is an easy leap to see how music can be responsive to and molded by political movements, but also in turn it creates them; building the political capacity of the individual, and cultivating the great societal refusal.
Change has been good for Juno-nominated composer T. Patrick Carrabré (b. 1958). His different roles as an administrator, educator, composer, and radio personality have kept him in tune with musical trends in Canada and abroad. For this concert in honour of Canada’s 150th birthday, I interviewed Dr. Carrabré to talk about his career, Canadian music, and changes over the course of his lifetime. Carrabré’s career can be divided into two broad stylistic periods that roughly coincide with a modern and postmodern perspective:
I do consider myself to have two periods, both from technical and aesthetic viewpoints. When I was young, I was very interested in the notes, the musical language itself. I was interested in trying to come up with a technical analogue for what tonality could do in terms of structuring music. Carrabré initially became an aficionado of “twelve-tone tonality,” a technique developed by composer and theorist George Perle. When Carrabré became WSO Composer-in-Residence around 2001, his style became more postmodern with influences from popular and world musics. He recalls the specific moment that his old style “broke” while writing his second piano trio: Somewhere in the middle of the first movement I just didn’t hear it anymore. I wanted a chord and I couldn’t figure out in my brain how to get it where I wanted it. A lot of things have not changed about how I write now, it’s just not as stringently technical. I still think I write very rigorous music, just not in the same way. It’s not as mathematically-oriented as my first period. There was a certain letting go of the obsessive nature of some of my earlier music. As a result, I can express a broader range of feelings because my language is more free and flexible. Through his long association with the WSO, the Winnipeg New Music Festival, and arts councils across the country, Carrabré has programmed, reviewed, and spoken with many established and emerging composers working in Canada today. When asked about the changes he has witnessed in the Canadian scene, and specifically how it has been impacted by new media, he responded: We’re at an interesting time historically, partly because of changes with media, and how people access music… When I worked with the New Music Festival, many people I talked to were concerned that Canada had no shared repertoire. At that time, it was hard for composers to know what was happening across the country. There was never a unified style of Canadian music because we were all so diverse and dispersed across the country. There is so much more new music now than there was back then. Canada’s composition programs are producing more young composers, more of them are getting doctorates, more are becoming professional. It can be a lot of music to catch up on! But the great thing about Canada is that there is no one voice. We are a country of many voices, and that’s the beautiful thing about us, we are not cliquish. We respect each other’s music, we are interested in what others are doing. Magnificat Carrabré has always admired the Magnificat, the biblical text spoken by Mary when she visits her cousin Elizabeth (who is pregnant with John the Baptist). He wrote his first Magnificat in his undergraduate days and revisited the text in 1994 in a more technical, dissonant, and rigorous style. He sought to be more lyrical while maintaining the twelve-tone tonality that grounds his early work. Written for string quintet and chamber choir, Magnificat’s texture is sparse, yet complex and evocative. After a short string introduction, a soprano voice emerges to announce the Mag-ni-fi-cat text. The choir takes up the line in unison before splitting into a complex divisi polychord. The dissonant harmonies are coupled with melodic and quasi-lyrical vocal lines, showing Carrabré’s concern with creating emotional content even in his technically-oriented first period. Magnificat captures this beautifully, creating a musical event as affective as it is technical. Today the work is performed by BU’s Chorale chamber choir, who have been working closely with the composer in developing their interpretation. Firebrand Firebrand was commissioned by the Manitoba Arts Council for the Gryphon Trio. The title refers to BU violin professor Francis Chaplin, who originally commissioned the work but died tragically before its completion. Carrabré notes, A firebrand, someone with so much talent breaking the trail… Francis was like that in his early years when he was a young violinist in Canada. I wanted to write something that was super virtuosic and rhythmically challenging. The Gryphon Trio was fantastic at capturing it. A piano trio in three movements, Firebrand features twelve-tone tonality in a dizzyingly virtuosic and fiercely-paced work. The first movement employs loud scattered rhythmic figures contrasting with a reposed middle section with soft pizzicato string figures. The first-section material returns to solidify an ABA’ structure, common in classical sonata form. Carrabré often referred to classical structures and modes in his earlier work to show a philosophical link to the great works of the past, rather than providing a clean cultural break. The second movement opens boldly with a pair of clashing open fifths in the piano that resolve to an A-flat major chord that rings, unimpeded, for four measures. The effect of this surprising “resolution”—the insistence of the open fifths in a dissonant context—is radically evocative, like a call to action, a firebrand. The third movement is built on a series of quick rhythmic figures and a section of rising string glissandi. Listen for the return of an altered theme from the first movement. This indicates an ABA structure at several different levels in the piece. The movement ends on a surprising C major chord, perhaps indicating the firebrand’s ideological triumph over oppressive forces. Clear Lake at Dusk One of the newer pieces on the program, Clear Lake was composed in 2015 for the Clear Lake Music Festival. Written for violin, clarinet, cello, and piano, it is a tranquil, reflective meditation on natural scenery familiar to many Brandonites. This piece showcases Carrabré’s more recent interest in slowing down harmonic motion. He states, A lot of the idea behind Clear Lake is to have a long line melody, and long slow chord progressions that don’t change fast. You can get a lot of emotional content from that. Combining cello and clarinet in a post-tonal style is reminiscent of Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. The full emotive range of the piano is used throughout the piece, especially around 4:00 when the other instruments drop out. At this point, the piano starts a beautiful cyclic chord progression that lasts over 50 measures. This piece foregrounds the mood of dusk; musically, the last reaches of sunlight are heard, along with the impending darkness. After the last repeat of the piano’s chord cycle, we hear the moment when the sun sets, which is represented by a repeat of some of the opening material, but in more serene repose. Clear Lake has no triumphant final chord as in Firebrand. The last six measures simply wind down and sputter into nothingness as the night takes hold over Riding Mountain National Park. Orpheus 2 The Greek myth of Orpheus (who could charm all living things with his music) has haunted Carrabré since his days as an undergraduate. In one of the most popular tales about Orpheus, his wife Euridice is killed on their wedding day. Orpheus travels to the Underworld to convince the gods to return her to him. Softened by Orpheus’s beautiful singing, the gods agree on one condition: that Orpheus walk in front of Euridice and not look back until they both reach the upper world. Tragically, Orpheus does look back. Carrabré points out that, Orpheus is such a fascinating character, mythologically. There’s such conflict between good and bad choices, and such musicality in everyday life. Orpheus 2 is the second of Carrabré’s Orpheus pieces and is based on a text by Margaret Atwood that begins with the striking line “whether he will go in singing.” Atwood puts a more contemporary spin on the story of Orpheus. Carrabré notes, For this piece, I wanted to explore that whole connection of how music fits into society. There’s reference to a Chilean singer from Pinochet times who was tortured and killed. While imprisoned, he would protest by singing. Carrabré’s preoccupation with the place of music in society is made evident in Orpheus 2. While it is a solo piano composition, the pianist must sing or speak the text at certain points. A prominent audio track with samples derived from the voice of the composer himself is also featured. The audience is even asked to hum along. Crazy Crazy is a song cycle for soprano and chamber ensemble. Each movement is based on musical quotes from composers such as Schumann, Gesualdo, and Grainger, but their music is mutilated in some way. Two primary ideas influenced this piece. First, the postmodern notion that chronological stylistic development of music has ceased, freeing the 21st c. composer to draw freely from all times and places to construct their own artistic vision. Second, this piece is a commentary on the idea of the tortured creative genius so prevalent in the historiography of the classical canon. According to Carrabré, The Romantic image of the composer is of this weird, broken, bizarre character. I think that, for anybody who dares to write music, there is the possibility of crossing over into those truly dark places, and some don’t come back. As musicians, we have to recognize and be sympathetic to that, but not necessarily believe it’s the only way to be creative. On the other hand, sometimes you need to give up a part of yourself to be creative. This piece is about walking that fine line on the edge of being creative but not falling into the dark pit. Crazy is very interactive. The soprano is required to whistle and play bass guitar, harmonica, and glockenspiel. It also features an electronic track organized into several audio cues, allowing the performer more creative freedom. -- notes by Jakub Marshall, 4th-year BU B.Mus. student Program Notes originally commissioned for the Brandon Chamber Players for their Feb. 10th, 2017 concert. This week I caught up with Felipe Munoz to discuss his DJ nights at S.U.D.S., and where he hopes to take this project.
Felipe is a DJ and producer under the name TubeScreamer and a member of a collective called Cerkuz Familia that presents shows in both Winnipeg and Brandon. I’ve attended the last couple of these ‘EDM nights’ and had quite a wild time dancing to some hard hitting Drum and Bass and Jungle tunes. Brandon University Jazz Piano Prof. Michael Cain also takes the stage as SOLA to spin some seriously groovy hip-hop tracks as an added bonus for all of us admiring music students. I had a blast, but I couldn’t help but wonder if this is the sort of music that would fit best in a club setting as opposed to the relatively small space of our student bar. Explaining, Felipe said that he has “been blessed by SUDS and their wonderful staff” and that “some (other) venues prefer to maintain their strict music code”. The two major nightclubs in town, Houstons and Roadhouse, do indeed have fairly strict routines. Any Brandonite knows how a weekend of clubbing works in The Wheat City. Thursday you go to Houstons for ladies night, maybe get free cover. Friday you head over to Roadhouse (hopefully after attending a SUDS social), and then Saturday it’s back to Houstons. The venues will sometimes hold special events, but these are often on their off days. The routine, and the resident DJs are mostly set in stone. What Felipe and his Cerkuz Familia are trying to offer is an alternative, underground, sort of club experience. In Winnipeg you can find these underground club nights if you look hard enough. Felipe, a Columbian native, says one of the reasons he moved to Canada is “Canada's incredible developments on their electronic music community and industry. With festivals. like Shambhala, and MEME.” MEME (standing for Manitoba Electronic Music Expo) is a multiday festival held right in the downtown core of Winnipeg, in the past they’ve had major international DJs such as Noah Pred (Berlin) play. These events are always well attended, and are an increasingly important part of the Canadian music scene overall! I asked Felipe how he sees the Brandon scene evolving over time. “The way I see it this scene rests in the hands of a supportive community of friends that support (eachother). This is pure love and so there is always this small but constant support that helps nurturing the scene. With more efforts like this. In the future I see a very interesting and diverse electronic music scene in Brandon.” I think this gets to the heart of what is great about alternative music. It’s all about community, and nurturing eachother by supporting whatever creative projects your friends may be working on. Check out TubeScreamer, SOLA, DJ Red and many others this Saturday Feb. 13th at 8pm for “Electric Valentine’s 2.0” at SUDS. There will also be clothing, hemp jewelry, and the artwork by Kaytlyn Burke for sale. And it's free. Listen: http://tubescreamermusic.bandcamp.com/ Originally published in The Brandon Buzz. What is contemporary classical music, and where is it going? As a musician, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about exactly what music is and what its purpose is. One conclusion I have come to is that it’s all about intent. Intent is the major difference between the genres; folk music is made to hum to, electronic music to dance, classical to appreciate. Or put even more simply, music is either made with the purpose of being entertainment or art. That being said, the primary function of music for art as opposed to music for entertainment is to elicit some sort of emotion or idea in the listener, or challenge the listeners perceptions of what music can be. In this sense, “art music” is now almost completely ignored by the modern public audience. It still exists, and composers are still tirelessly trying to make a living composing with the intent of making music for art, but no one listens to it anymore. Why? The problem is that modern art (classical) music has become so completely embedded in its traditions that it has become almost totally incomprehensible to those who are not familiar with the classical tradition. Even the label of “contemporary classical music” carries with it an assumption that this music is aspiring to an ideal that’s well over 300 years old, even though the genre has moved pretty far past Beethoven by now. That’s why I personally reject this label of contemporary classical, and have been using the term art music instead in this column. It’s like if you called the entire body of modern literature “contemporary elizabethan literature”. It makes absolutely no sense! What all this means for modern composers is that it may take a revolution of sorts to put music back in its place in the artistic food chain. And in fact, this revolution may already have started. A revolution not from the aging classicists who still cling onto Mozart, but in the underground bars of big cities where rock and pop groups are continuously pushing the envelope on what you can and can not do in a rock band setup. A lot of my inspiration for “classical” music has actually come from some of my favourite rock bands. From a Godspeed You! Black Emperor track, where they’ll often compose to such length and scale that it feels symphonic in its epic proportions, to that one Fleet Foxes song, “The Shrine/An Argument” where there’s this crazy saxophone solo that is so abrasive it could fit right in in some mid-20th century serialist noise music, there’s a lot of neat stuff going on. These examples represent glimmers of a new way of creating classics whose artistic value can span the ages. Now maybe all we need is the rock band Beethoven to come along, and we’ll have a completely new aesthetic for musical art for generations to come. Originally published as an opinion piece contribution to The Uniter. |
Jakub M.
I have written for a variety of music and student publications including The Uniter, The Quill, Brandon Buzz, written program notes for a Brandon Chamber Players concert, and most recently, contributed to an article for The Conversation. I regularly write articles for the website Study.com |