Notes on “One Dimensional Music Without Context or Meaning” by Mark Fell
Wear the stupid costume of music as a performance of one’s aesthetic prejudices, maybe to achieve some kind of personality.
Mark Fell’s ‘costume’ idea for music listening comes from his analysis of the cultural values loaded within music’s temporalities and structures. The structure of music compositions and their particular representations of time means we must adopt a sort of ‘costume’ to agree or let in the music. Taking certain notions of linear time for granted means we can absorb linear melodic scores, for example. He outlines ‘method listening’ as a way of listening that foregrounds this role play and performativity required to participate in different music activities. This is his reaction to the pitfalls of Oliveros’ ‘deep listening’ which he claims is an attempt to transcaend one’s culture and personality to experience the world in a deeper manner. ‘Deep listening’ from this perspective is problematic because “we cannot unlearn our cognitive development” (Fell). I’ve always found the capitalising of Deep Listening strange enough.
Fell cleverly avoids aiming for an objective music listening, beyond the fictional constructions of our costume, by saying that method listening is a way to avoid questions like “what is the general structure of the self and who specfically am I?” That these questions may be a burden of infinite inwardness, whereas accepting our performativity with media is to know there is no non-performance, no neutral state.
While he seems to problematise the linear time narratives embedded in Western scored musics, the problem that Fell focuses his writing on is when these narratives in music are used to prove the linear nature of time. By making this distinction between a narrative in itself and the use of a narrative to create objective truths about our reality, Fell leaves the narrative open to our enjoyment. To safeguard it’s lack of objective truthmaking potentiality, Fell simply calls music listening a “stupid costume” His use of the word ‘stupid’ echoes Chul Han’s idiotism, which calls for an “authentic” self expression, uncontextualised in conventional understanding. I see this relationship because both validate a variety of expressions or interpretations of the world and music, while the negative tones of “stupid” and “idiot” avoid those validated expressions being used to produce objective truths about the world. Fell’s costume and Han’s idiot are contained, self-related fictions that say nothing beyond themselves. Yet in the tricky flux of chaos, there may be no truth to come back to. Musics in their own story making they may shape how we see our world, in the sharing of voice.
Relating to my practice: going out with melodica, playing tunes. A terribly silly costume of the protagonist observer, gathering melodies from nature. A naive intention to observe, to imagine a beauty around us. Forcing harmony?
Drone folk: what kind of temporalities are performed through drone musics? Is this the sounding of the eternal now? Melodies fly over the drone, but there is a sense of presence.