Toop on Musical Conservatism
Today while walking home from work, I was reading the new issue of The Wire (# 261) and in the Epiphanies section on the back page I see a really fascinating article on Korean music. The subject was particularly appropriate because recently I had made a Korean "folk" music and had tackled very similar ideas/problems in constructing it.
I've repreoduced it below for your reading enjoyment.
EPIPHAHNIES
David Toop finds new ways of listening in the silences of shakuhachi master Watazumi, composer Minoru Miki and koto player Keiko Nosaka
In September I lectured in Daejeon, at KAIST, the Korea Advanced Institue of Science and Technology. During questions after my talk, I spoke a little about my passion for Korean traditional music, notably ajaeng sanjo, komungo, p’ansori opera, Buddhist pomp’ae chanting, hyangak court music and Confucian aak. One of the institute’s lecturers challenged me. At first she assumed that I had discovered this music during my trip and so was expressing the innocent enthusiasm of a sonophagic tourist. I explained that I had been listening to Korean recordings and attending concerts for more than 35 years, and what I continue to find endlessly stimulating is the astringent timbres (an audio equivalent of the pungent, spicy kimchee served at every Korean meal), tempi that teeter on the brink of immobility, volatile improvising, and what John Cage called “Korean time”, a mixture of precise, concussive simultaneous hits, or shingled, fractionally delayed accents spread across ensembles of wind, percussion and string. It’s hard to think of any other body of music in which silences gather energy in the same way, as if the momentum of playing is driven by withholding, rather than pushing outwards.
We discussed these silences/not-silences a bit, but what I couldn’t do, she concluded (couldn’t in the sense of not being in a position to do so, rather than shouldn’t), was criticize Korean traditional music for its suspension in a period of pre-modern history. For her, this was an art form that had failed to adapt to contemporary conditions and so exists only as a museum piece. Given the turbulent, repressed history of Korea in the 20th century, this seems hardly surprising. Traditional music had little opportunity to evolve under Japanese occupation, followed by civil war and military dictatorship.
I might agree with her, but the awareness of this alleged fossilization affects me in a relatively dispassionate form, since I began listening to records, initially those released by the late, great recordist John Levy, rather than growing up with some sense that the music was part of my immediate cultural legacy. For me, there was no unpleasant weight of history, no aura of old people and defunct institutions, no unwelcome associations with an imposed exoticism.
Despite the vigorous modernizing efforts of composer-performers such as Hwang Byung-ki and Jin Hi Kim, or Kim Duk-Soo’s shamanistic fusions, along with the inevitable kitsch of “Greensleeves” interpreted on the kayageum, traditional repertoire apparently has little to do with South Korea’s ascendancy in the field of edge technologies, IT infrastructure and violent revenge movies.
Or does it? This is a phenomenon that fascinates outsiders - a country in which it’s possible to buy 16 gigabyte flash memory, then go and eat tofu-like muk jelly blocks made from acorns - but it also raises the contradiction between adhering to modernist ideals of change yet retaining deeply institutional feelings for frozen traditions. Musicians who pass under the radar of the academy, and I would guess this is true of younger Korean players such as percussionist Park Je Chun, may be finding new ways to approach dilemmas of identity and practice, having found themselves isolated from both the international so-called community and the mainstream cultural life of their own country.
The discussion at KAIST made me think again about conservatism. This is an aspect of music making that few people wish to discuss. Conservatism is either good or bad, and that’s it: for neo-conservative music critics, conservatism is the future; for experimentalists and faux rebels, it’s the past. If I’m listening for more than 35 years to music developed within the court of a Korean king in the 12th century, then conservative seems an inadequate word to describe the ossification of that experience. On the other hand, the music springs out at me like a series of controlled explosions. Nothing is familiar, except in my elusive memories of the sound. After all this time, in the hearing, I still make discoveries.
At around the same time I encountered Korean music, in the early 1970s, I was given a cassette tape by a Japanese artist named Toshio Sekiji. On one side of the tape was music by the shakuhachi player Watazumi; on the other side was a collection of pieces for 20 string koto, composed by Minoru Miki and performed with breathtaking virtuosity and subtlety by Keiki Nosaka. Perhaps it’s too strong to describe this moment as an epiphany, but I was affected profoundly. The articulation of silence was revelatory, particularly in Watazumi’s slow pieces and in Miki’s Tennyo, but maybe what pulled me up even more sharply was a realization that experimentation existed outside of the avant garde.
On the surface, perhaps this wasn’t so different from the approach of British experimental composers such as Howard Skempton, Ivan Hume-Carter, Michael Parsons, Gavin Bryars and Cornelius Cardew. Once the post-Cage, post-Fluxus air had been cleared, all of them, in very different ways, were looking for meaningful ways to engage with tonality, which is another way of saying that they were looking for meaningful ways to engage with a particular history.
The difference lay in the origins of this strategy. For the British composers (Christian Wolff in the US), their encounters with tonality and tradition were determined by a desire to communicate beyond the limited possibilities of the avant garde context. For Minoru Miki the desire to communicate seems to have been conditioned by a rejection of modernism, a more direct desire for simplicity. Koto pieces such as A Young Sprout and Hanayagi by miki are disarmingly lyrical, though heard in the context of Nagisa Oshima’s Empire of the Senses, [Also known here in the states as In the Realm of the Senses - Mus.] with its graphic sex, cruelty and violence, their attractiveness emphasizes the film’s themes of desire and possession and so adds another layer to this difficult issue of memory, history, conservatism and progression.
What I question now is not so much whether it’s decadent, reactionary or critically indulgent to be listening to Minoru Miki’s rather pretty koto pieces, or 12th century Confucian music from Korea, but why music in general has become quite boring. The institution of music - all music - is more conservative than any individual examples. Hearing sound, or finding new contexts in which to play music, is what seems more interesting than any argument about certain musics being right or wrong, conservative or progressive. I don’t have a theory to resolve any of these thoughts; simply the desire to maintain an open way of listening.
I've repreoduced it below for your reading enjoyment.
EPIPHAHNIES
David Toop finds new ways of listening in the silences of shakuhachi master Watazumi, composer Minoru Miki and koto player Keiko Nosaka
In September I lectured in Daejeon, at KAIST, the Korea Advanced Institue of Science and Technology. During questions after my talk, I spoke a little about my passion for Korean traditional music, notably ajaeng sanjo, komungo, p’ansori opera, Buddhist pomp’ae chanting, hyangak court music and Confucian aak. One of the institute’s lecturers challenged me. At first she assumed that I had discovered this music during my trip and so was expressing the innocent enthusiasm of a sonophagic tourist. I explained that I had been listening to Korean recordings and attending concerts for more than 35 years, and what I continue to find endlessly stimulating is the astringent timbres (an audio equivalent of the pungent, spicy kimchee served at every Korean meal), tempi that teeter on the brink of immobility, volatile improvising, and what John Cage called “Korean time”, a mixture of precise, concussive simultaneous hits, or shingled, fractionally delayed accents spread across ensembles of wind, percussion and string. It’s hard to think of any other body of music in which silences gather energy in the same way, as if the momentum of playing is driven by withholding, rather than pushing outwards.
We discussed these silences/not-silences a bit, but what I couldn’t do, she concluded (couldn’t in the sense of not being in a position to do so, rather than shouldn’t), was criticize Korean traditional music for its suspension in a period of pre-modern history. For her, this was an art form that had failed to adapt to contemporary conditions and so exists only as a museum piece. Given the turbulent, repressed history of Korea in the 20th century, this seems hardly surprising. Traditional music had little opportunity to evolve under Japanese occupation, followed by civil war and military dictatorship.
I might agree with her, but the awareness of this alleged fossilization affects me in a relatively dispassionate form, since I began listening to records, initially those released by the late, great recordist John Levy, rather than growing up with some sense that the music was part of my immediate cultural legacy. For me, there was no unpleasant weight of history, no aura of old people and defunct institutions, no unwelcome associations with an imposed exoticism.
Despite the vigorous modernizing efforts of composer-performers such as Hwang Byung-ki and Jin Hi Kim, or Kim Duk-Soo’s shamanistic fusions, along with the inevitable kitsch of “Greensleeves” interpreted on the kayageum, traditional repertoire apparently has little to do with South Korea’s ascendancy in the field of edge technologies, IT infrastructure and violent revenge movies.
Or does it? This is a phenomenon that fascinates outsiders - a country in which it’s possible to buy 16 gigabyte flash memory, then go and eat tofu-like muk jelly blocks made from acorns - but it also raises the contradiction between adhering to modernist ideals of change yet retaining deeply institutional feelings for frozen traditions. Musicians who pass under the radar of the academy, and I would guess this is true of younger Korean players such as percussionist Park Je Chun, may be finding new ways to approach dilemmas of identity and practice, having found themselves isolated from both the international so-called community and the mainstream cultural life of their own country.
The discussion at KAIST made me think again about conservatism. This is an aspect of music making that few people wish to discuss. Conservatism is either good or bad, and that’s it: for neo-conservative music critics, conservatism is the future; for experimentalists and faux rebels, it’s the past. If I’m listening for more than 35 years to music developed within the court of a Korean king in the 12th century, then conservative seems an inadequate word to describe the ossification of that experience. On the other hand, the music springs out at me like a series of controlled explosions. Nothing is familiar, except in my elusive memories of the sound. After all this time, in the hearing, I still make discoveries.
At around the same time I encountered Korean music, in the early 1970s, I was given a cassette tape by a Japanese artist named Toshio Sekiji. On one side of the tape was music by the shakuhachi player Watazumi; on the other side was a collection of pieces for 20 string koto, composed by Minoru Miki and performed with breathtaking virtuosity and subtlety by Keiki Nosaka. Perhaps it’s too strong to describe this moment as an epiphany, but I was affected profoundly. The articulation of silence was revelatory, particularly in Watazumi’s slow pieces and in Miki’s Tennyo, but maybe what pulled me up even more sharply was a realization that experimentation existed outside of the avant garde.
On the surface, perhaps this wasn’t so different from the approach of British experimental composers such as Howard Skempton, Ivan Hume-Carter, Michael Parsons, Gavin Bryars and Cornelius Cardew. Once the post-Cage, post-Fluxus air had been cleared, all of them, in very different ways, were looking for meaningful ways to engage with tonality, which is another way of saying that they were looking for meaningful ways to engage with a particular history.
The difference lay in the origins of this strategy. For the British composers (Christian Wolff in the US), their encounters with tonality and tradition were determined by a desire to communicate beyond the limited possibilities of the avant garde context. For Minoru Miki the desire to communicate seems to have been conditioned by a rejection of modernism, a more direct desire for simplicity. Koto pieces such as A Young Sprout and Hanayagi by miki are disarmingly lyrical, though heard in the context of Nagisa Oshima’s Empire of the Senses, [Also known here in the states as In the Realm of the Senses - Mus.] with its graphic sex, cruelty and violence, their attractiveness emphasizes the film’s themes of desire and possession and so adds another layer to this difficult issue of memory, history, conservatism and progression.
What I question now is not so much whether it’s decadent, reactionary or critically indulgent to be listening to Minoru Miki’s rather pretty koto pieces, or 12th century Confucian music from Korea, but why music in general has become quite boring. The institution of music - all music - is more conservative than any individual examples. Hearing sound, or finding new contexts in which to play music, is what seems more interesting than any argument about certain musics being right or wrong, conservative or progressive. I don’t have a theory to resolve any of these thoughts; simply the desire to maintain an open way of listening.