Strings in the Earth and Air

Abstract

Strings in the earth and air Make music sweet; Strings by the river where The willows meet. James Joyce, Chamber Music The opening poem in Joyce's Chamber Music evokes an ideal of ubiquitous, sourceless, air-born music that reaches back, via the Aeolian harp, to Pythagoras and the doctrine of the music of the spheres. Joyce himself would give Leopold Bloom the opportunity for a parody of his rather perfumed little volume of poems in the 'Sirens' episode of Ulysses, in which he hear-thinks about another kind of chamber music: 'Chamber music. Could make a kind of pun on that. It is a kind of music I often thought when she. Acoustics that is. Tinkling. Empty vessels make most noise ... Diddle iddle addle addle oodle oodle. Hissss'. Rather than thinking directly about what, at this time of day, postmodernism might mean in or for music, I want to think about ubiquity, amplitude, spread, diffusion, reach. More specifically, I'd like to think about an antinomy between two principles, both of which have respectable claims to be thought of as characteristically postmodern. The first is the ideal of what might be called a general or unrestricted economy of music--the principle that, having no essence to restrict it, music can and should be anything. The second is the ideal, or at least the prospect, of an auditory ecology, which would insist on an acknowledgement of limit or finitude. I will be using the work of R. Murray Schafer, the great inaugurator of the idea of acoustic ecology in the 1970s, to focus this argument. In 1992, Schafer proposed that 'it would be possible to write the entire history of European music in terms of walls, showing not only how the varying resonances of its performance spaces have affected its harmonies, tempi and timbres, but also to show how its social character evolved once it was set apart from everyday life'. (1) For Schafer, music, like theatre, has become an intramural occupation, pursued behind closed doors. In a sense, all music has become a kind of chamber music, requiring closed spaces for its performance and the closure of space itself. Music has become more and more architectural, a matter of infinite riches in a little room. It has required and enacted envelopment, condensation, convergence, intensity, synchronicity. The orchestra has become the staging of the occupation of space by music and the preoccupation with space in music. The point of music has precisely been that it comes to a point, whether that be the tip of the conductor's baton, the stylus, or the play button. The development of recording technology, which might have been expected to have mobilised and deterritorialised music, in fact made it for a time even more sedentary and sequestered, merely diversifying the occasions of its pocketed apartness. If radio broadcasting allowed music to escape the confines of the concert hall, for example, the music funnelled into and clung around the form of the radio apparatus itself, which, by the 1920s, had achieved its characteristic massiness and monumentality, enjoining a kind of deferentially frontal listening. This frontality is retained in the epic era of stadium rock and outdoor concerts, in which, however huge and diffused the audience may be, the music nevertheless is made to erupt from a kind of vanishing point constituted by the stage. But the expansion in what Schafer called 'schizophonic' apparatuses--for separating sounds from their origins in space and in time--along with the increasing miniaturisation and impalpability of musical devices, has now brought about a vast propagation of the idea and experience of music, which increasingly can arise anywhere and on any occasion. Just as architecture has itself become more and more suffused with air, so the architecture of music has more and more taken to the air. Schafer wrote in his Tuning of the World that 'the blurring of the edges between music and environmental sounds may eventually prove to be the most striking feature of all twentieth-century music'. …