Musical Violence, Pt.3: Order and Repetition

Violence as Order

"I believe that music should be collective hysteria and spells, violently of the present time."
- Pierre Boulez

In many ways, the shape of Western music history since the Middle Ages can be likened to a gradually sloping hill, followed by a very sharp incline, then terminating in a cliff. Although the last 800 years of music have been marked with periods of relative stasis, the general trend seems to have been towards greater and greater technical complexity with each successive generation of musicians. Like the story of evolution on this planet, recorded Western music started with its plainsong chant (the musical equivalent of single-celled organisms), then added more voices to that, started adding instruments, greater compositional complexity and scope, denser structures, etc. By the mid-18th century, courts all over Europe had their very own collectives of musicians all playing specialized instruments and reading little squiggles on a page to translate the abstract sound ideals of composers into sound. Music was getting so complex that someone even started to have to stand in front of all these musicians and beat his arms around like a bird just to keep everyone in the same place.

About the first 700 years after the turn of the first millenium were the gradually sloping hill: innovations were driving the direction of creation, but tradition and pragmatic use-function kept music firmly embedded in the context of social usefulness, usually church-related. This was before the era of the "Artist Genius" - in fact, many compositions until the Renaissance and even later were written by anonymous composers. Change was slow and steady.

Now let's fast forward to the steep hill. With the notion of the innovating Genius (c.1800) came a steady stream of technical innovations that led to greater and greater compositional complexity. Of course, composers weren't just combining notes together in different ways for the heck of it: the ultimate concern, as always, was with expressing something. In order to tell more and more nuances stories through music, innovative composers of the Romantic era broke down one wall after another, and the game was afoot. Dissonances that were shunned for hundreds of years were liberated; shocking harmonic resolutions were forged (the so-called "Tristan chord" of Wagner being a prime example); symphonic structure opened up like a fan. With all of this rapid innovation, however, came the specter of an end-game - what would happen when every technical barrier posed by the 12-tone, even-tempered system that we as a culture had developed for ourselves had been breached? What then?

The first twenty years of the twentieth century were a blur of newness. Free atonal music by Schoenberg, Berg, and others broke the question of dissonance wide open, but the final technical leap wasn't achieved until Schoenberg put together a new approach to composition based solely on systematic "rows" containing every chromatic tone of the scale. Fundamentally, 12-tone music was based on control over sound. It was the ultimate puzzle music: the composer develops a row of notes, transforms it in different ways (you can run it backwards, inverted, etc.), then uses that as the formal organization of a piece. It is a music of pure control and cerebral discipline.

12-tone music (or serialism) was the first of two conceptual end-games that put an end to the linear teleology of Western music (the other was John Cage's zen-like emancipation of chance in music, 1950-1970). Amazingly, this style that was developed in the Vienna of the 1920s still sounds totally uncompromising and modern, even though the visual arts of the decade are today quite well accepted by a broad audience. Even after all these years, our ears just haven't gotten used to a musical system based on hyper-controlled, super-dissonant combinations of notes. Atonality still makes people cringe, as evinced by its extensive use in horror film soundtracks (think the shower scene in Psycho).

A huge part of this phenomenon, I think, is the simple fact that at some point in music's development, technique eclipsed expression. From all available documentation, Schoenberg wasn't theorizing serialism in order to express a certain emotion or psychological state that had him stymied before. No, serialism was arrived at because it was the final technical hurdle to jump over. It was the summit of our little metaphorical mountain, and technical progress and experimentalism drove its invention, not an expressive need. (For fairness's sake, I should say that many would argue against this statement.) In fact, serialism was a deliberate, self-conscious turning away from the Romantic tradition: it shunned personal expression in the favor of control over musical form, power over sound.

Schoenberg's revolution outlived the man and grew even more virulent and impassioned in the generation that followed him. At the furthest extreme was Pierre Boulez, the enfant terrible student of Olivier Messiaen in mid-late 1940s Paris. Boulez's early works not only serialized pitches, but dynamics, articulations, and all the other contours of music. In his "total serialist" works, not a single dimension of music is left to the vagaries of emotion, chance, or soul.

For a representative example of early Pierre Boulez, check out the second movement of his Piano Sonata #1, "Assez large". Really, for the non-initiated (I count myself among these ranks), the first ten seconds will do just fine to get a sense of the sound world he created in this piece. In a pointillistic spatter of notes, "Assez large" moves up and down the piano like a skittering St. Vitus dance. You won't find a melody, a harmony, or a rhythm you recognize here - all is cerebral density, intended to be grasped best on the notated page than in actual sound. This is music more for the eyes than the ears. And, of course, underlying this aesthetic is a deeply violent control over sound that subjugates human expression to iron-clad rules and formulas. The first movement of this work is marked "violent and rapid," the second "very brutal and very dry." Like the dictators ravaging his continent when he wrote this, Boulez was a brilliant and commanding totalitarian. To many musicians of the day (and continuing to the present time), Boulez became a symbol of the loveless, sneering, and cruel bargain that our musical culture made in the pursuit of ultimate control over sound. (The American John Cage's experiments were a direct challenge to his hegemonic musical paradigm.) Boulez's was a violence of order.

The funny thing to me is that, at this level of control and order, music sounds even more random than the free jazz from part 2 of this post. Although every aspect of these pieces are tightly regimented, and a detailed reading of the score reveals profound symmetries and mathematical epiphanies, you really need the score to appreciate these things. If there is anyone out there who can actually perceive Boulez's music (and late Schoenberg) as being serially derived, who can hear the intense order in it, I haven't met him. Perhaps the ultimate irony of serialism is that a technique developed to exert ultimate control over sound ended up in many ways sounding identical to a toddler pounding keys on a piano.

Violence as Repetition

Our final category is by far the most common in the musical lives of everyday Americans; many of us are so accustomed to it that we don't necessarily perceive it to be sonic violence at all. It is a principle that underlies all music of all people on the planet, except monsieur Boulez (but even bird calls and whale songs exhibit repetition).

To get at the inherent psychological violence of repetition, let's return to a couple examples presented in part 1 of this now exceedingly long post. In detainment and interrogation facilities, not only do US torturers play the music at high volume levels - they repeat the same songs over and over and over again. Prisoners' minds are stuck in a Groundhog's Day loop with no end. This same sort of thing is what all of us go through when we get a song stuck in our heads; take a perfectly good song, repeat it enough, and it becomes an object of hysteria. Like the crazy nanny in that episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm who worked in a Loony Toons park where that theme song playing constantly as background music, repetition can make us unhinged. I made great efforts to avoid certain Japanese electronics stores during my time living there because their background music consisted of one phrase of music repeated over and over again. (Imagine the poor workers!)

But this final category is not only referring to the mad repetition of the same fragment of music, a source of obvious psychological violence. Nor do I mean to say that all repetition in music is "violent." Rather, for the sake of the present argument let's narrow this down a bit to look at two distinct phenomenon in much of contemporary popular music: unvaried repetition of the same rhythm or phrase within one song; and repeating pieces of previously recorded music within the context of a new song through the practice of digital sampling.

The treasure-trove source for both of these elements of repetition is of course hip-hop music. I'd analyze "Crank That," since it seems to be becoming a running theme in my blog posts, but it would inflict too much psychological torture on me. Besides, there is so much hip-hop that I do like out there, that harnesses repetition in such effective ways, that I don't need to go to the bottom of the barrel. Also, since readers are probably more familiar with rap than, say, Pierre Boulez, less contextualization is needed here.

Let's turn to the tune that set the pizzeria aflame in Do The Right Thing, Public Enemy's "Fight The Power" (1989-90). In some ways, the production team for Public Enemy, The Bombsquad, were the Igor Stravinsky of the hip-hop world during the group's prime years (1987-1992). Like Stravinsky (Ballet russes era), the beat in this song is dense with overlapping layers of rhythm; it is also packed with aural fragments drawn from other records, just as the Russian drew upon snippets of folk song for his major works of the 1910s. A perfect accompaniment to the MC's lyrical message, The Bombsquad produced beats that were grimy, urgent, and assaultive.

The first layer of repetition here is the steady, unchanging beat. Behind the kaleidescope of sounds is a rhythmic substratum that is looped through the whole piece (with variations during the chorus). We have perhaps grown so accustomed to looping beats in pop music that this does not strike us as annoying or violent anymore; nevertheless, to many people ("curmudgeons" would be too strong a word), repetition of this nature is akin to being hit in the ear with a hammer. Hence the Italian pizzeria owner's breakdown in the Spike Lee joint.

Beyond the repetitive nature of this beat, however, lies another source of sonic violence that is intimately tied to modern technology. (Shameless self-promotion time: those who are really interested in this topic, go here to download my 200+ page study on the digital revolution and music making.) The popularization of digital sampling in the early 1980s allowed producers to grab snippets of sound from other records and manipulate them at will. At its heart, then, sampling is a technique that does violence to the original recordings by repeating sound fragments in a new context: what were once licks can be turned into looping phrases; short vocal ejaculations (James Brown's grunt, for instance) can be spliced into a track for rhythmic emphasis; a few drum strikes can be manipulated into a whole new beat. On this track, we can hear literally dozens of samples all competing for our attention and begging to be discovered. In addition to the JB grunt (on the "and" of beat 4), this beat contains a woman's voice saying "come on and get down," Afrika Bambaataa from "Planet Rock," and a male saying "get up" this is turned, through the producer's talent, into a jittery, complex rhythmic loop, and many others. We are hearing a whole stack of (black) records being fed into a blender and spit out.

Public Enemy, of course, are not sampling JB because they wish to do violence to his recordings. In the hip-hop community, sampling is a form of homage, a shout-out to predecessors and influences. I'm not arguing that sampling something is doing negative violence to the original; it is, however, chopping up and rearranging recorded music to fit a new expressive aim. It is - to use an economic term - creative destruction.

(Brief) Summary

Behind the phenomenon of musical torture lies the question of what exactly in music can be considered a source of violence and of real, psychological aggression. What makes music so interesting is its constant dialog between order and disorder, noise and euphony. This, after all, is a dialectical process that resembles life itself. Music relates to us because it employs the same patterns, symbols, themes, anxieties, and joys that we are faced with every day. It isn't always as obvious as the lyrics being sung (a topic I have completely stayed away from here), but encoded deep within the fundamental structure of any song is a message. We all know this intuitively - this is why music communicates to us.

Noise, disorder, order, and repetition can all be channeled for the sake of psychological violence. But one final point here, and one I should have made earlier: violence is not a bad thing (except when used by psych-Ops to torment Muslims.) Nature itself is full of violent change. This music may be more difficult than we're used to, but in many ways it is also more powerful. It is impossible to play The Dillinger Escape Plan, late Trane, or Boulez for someone without them forming an immediate opinion. I have never met anyone who feels luke warm about free jazz - it's an all-or-nothing style. So as we listen to these examples, keep this in mind: your negative reaction means the music is working. It is pushing you out of your comfort zone. It is violently exposing you to a new sonic reality. You can turn it off or walk away; but the curtain has already been pulled back.