I had to open the bruise up to let some of the bruise blood come out to show them
Celeste recently wrote a very interesting post about Steve Reich’s piece, Come Out. I’ve been listenting to it a lot again lately in the context of my Electronic Arts Overview course, and in fact, I’m listening to it right now. The beginning makes me grimace or shiver every time I hear it and leaves me feeling motivated to do political work. Come Out has always been a one of my favorite pieces, and it’s influenced my compositional life as a writer and sound artist.
In the paper I wrote while at Wesleyan on the general ineffectiveness of experimental music in engaging with social movement, I identified Come Out as an exception. In addition to being a rare example of an experimental work that was productively engaged with a social movement, it retains political currency and is still effective. And it goes beyond the general outline of my proposal for Kent State, in that it’s not just a straightforward documentary or narrative sound collage, it’s a major early minimalist composition and has plenty of aesthetic integrity.
Zowee.
In my Wesleyan paper, I also discussed Come Out in the context of the status-quo affirming way of writing and speaking that characterizes much discussion of experimental music:
While the content of much experimental music is either explicitly or implicitly left leaning, the writings of many composers and their critics seem to strive toward apolitical denial of any substantive content. Composer and music critic Michael Nyman discusses Reich’s Come Out for 3 pages in his definitive history of experimental music, Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond. He does this, however, without once mentioning the political context for the piece’s construction or even the source of the speech material. Instead, Nyman’s discussion is limited to the process of the piece’s construction as it relates to greater trends in minimalism. (1)
Another example of this denial of personal or political content is Alvin Lucier’s piece, I Am Sitting in a Room, which consists of a text read by the composer re-recorded sixteen times in the same room, so that the speech is eventually subsumed by the room’s resonant frequencies. Lucier, who has a stutter, writes in the text for the piece about how the process will “smooth out any irregularities [his] voice may have.” (2) Yet despite the apparent allusions to his own voice characteristics and the personal meaning of this smoothing out, Lucier describes the piece only in terms of the technical processes involved in its construction.
This tradition of silence about the political messages in experimental compositions tends to bleed over into a sort of antiseptic aesthetic in commentary and, at times, in the aural qualities of compositions. In a term project I composed while studying under composer Ron Kuivila, I fell victim to this tendency. In a piece composed to explore the possibilities of varying a process that created a sound I found beautiful, I focused my commentary on the technical process by which I synthesized the music. Instead of writing about the rich texture of the sound I had created, I chose to emphasize the “reverb pattern [I applied] in both temporal directions to a series of pitch-bent pulses of terraced decreasing lengths from 0.1 seconds to 0.001 seconds.” (3) This sort of scientific technical language serves to distract from the political and emotive qualities of compositions and gives rise to a conception of experimental music as status quo affirming. The musical aesthetic of some pieces, in combination with this massing of pseudo-technical commentary, affirms this sense of experimental music as cold and antiseptic. The machined sounds of digitally synthesized music and the drones in pieces by composers such as LaMonte Young, David Behrman, Tony Conrad and others, are examples of aesthetics that can sound detached in this sense. This detachment also resonates with the “apolitical” notion of experimental music that develops parallel to the rich political tradition of the genre.
- Nyman, pages 153-155
- Lucier, class notes, Music 109, Fall 2000
- Pearlman Karlsberg, in “New Music Concert: Program Notes.” Assembled by Kuivila. Spring 2001.
Celeste discusses Come Out, in relation to her Kent State proposal, as a piece that is “a sucessful piece of protest music, one that is not easily co-opted, and continues to have political and musical significance.” While not easily co-opted, I argued that Come Out is easily depoliticized, and can thus become status-quo affirming, probably in part because (as Celeste writes) “it does require one to read the program notes to understand it.” More easily understandable work with more of a documentary or narrative flavor might be able to resist this reduction to merely musically meaningful, but might have trouble being musically meaningful.
This strikes me as an important trade-off to negotiate when making artwork out of political source material.
Undoubtably, though, Reich’s Come Out was a politically effective composition.