On the subject of wilful obscurity

 

[I posted last year about some potential difficulties inherent for the serious listener in B's approach to writing music; and I've pointed back to that in subsequent posts, and will continue to do so. This post right here is a sort of blood relative to that one (and will be linked back in the same way from now on, at least that's the idea).]

I came across something interesting in the course of researching for the previous post. The books of Composition Notes published by Frog Peak all include various unnumbered appendices; besides the Catalogue* of Works, the Glossary of Terms and so on, each volume contains interviews and related articles of interest to friendly experiencers. It's been a long time (far too long... not much I can do about that now) since I really delved into this stuff, and in truth it only happened this time by accident... I was flipping through the book trying to get back to the notes for Comp. 92, and something caught my eye: this turned out to be an undated interview with Cadence**, but it was a specific section from that. B. is asked about the books he is writing, and begins to answer that he has "three books which are totally finished", meaning the Tri-Axium Writings. The interviewer interrupts to ask whether he has had any success in trying to get them published. B. replies that he has had several offers, but that he wants to put them out himself. Initially he cites Harry Partch, W. C. Handy and Sun Ra as pioneers in musical self-publishing and says he wants to follow in their tradition, but when he is pressed: "So you'd have control over the way they're presented?", B. is immediately drawn into the heart of the matter. He is "very much aware of what the record companies are doing... on this record I did on Antilles [Six Compositions: Quartet]... they even changed the order of the pieces on the record."***

Now that he is getting into it, B. needs minimal prompting and the briefest of cues starts a protracted explanation:

...I've found that they don't want you to have any idea about how your music should

be packaged. My liner notes... have become a source of irritation for many of the 

journalists. They don't want that kind of input, they don't want a musician defining his 

own terms, especially if that musician is an African or African-American. Because somehow,

for me as a Black creative person to define my own terms... # it's viewed as a violation

of what other African, Trans African pedagogies supposedly do. We are looked at as exotic

creatures with all this natural feeling... no intellectual process happening, we just have this 

great feeling for being able to bugaloo (sic) and to be able to catch the football and to make 

the hip dunk shot. And when we go to play, if a given focus or postulation is viewed as of 

genius or 'genius' (so-called), it's also quickly covered with an "Oh yeah, well, it's natural."

He illustrates this with reference to Charlie Parker - who may well have had a great deal of natural talent, but who also worked extraordinarily hard at improving that talent, and who was most definitely not "unstudied" as a player or composer - but then proceeds thus:

I have found... five million different levels of criticism of my liner notes :- "Did I have a

comma in the right place?"  "What does he mean by this particular term?" Cries of pseudo-

intellectualism, etc. But in the fifteen, twenty years that I've been documenting my music, 

I've never heard anyone challenge some of the liner notes which have been on my records or

on the records of musicians, so-called 'jazz' musicians for the last fifty years. You know,

liner notes written in the most beautiful English, where the Queen herself would have

approved of the structure. But articles which didn't know what the fuck they were talking

about. And so there's very little tolerance for someone like myself defining my own terms.

But there's a lot of tolerance for a so-called 'jazz journalist' who might not know anything 

about what they're talking about, but who can write very eloquently... it' s acceptable. In

fact, it's the standard of the day.##

- A further question and answer makes it clear that B. did not construe this as a straightforwardly racist problem: "If a White... musician tried to define his or her terms in the way that I've been trying to do, I think that they'd be put down too, because the White improviser is in what I call one of the 'sacrifice zones'... in the same position as the Black composer or the creative woman." ### Of course, the entire interview - being conducted by way of intelligent questions from someone who is genuinely interested in the answers - bears close inspection, and raises far more points than I can tackle here. B. also uses the term "cancelled" in a way that is extremely common just lately; but I didn't know anyone was saying things like that in 1982... Anyway, what I want to zoom in on now is this point about wanting to self-publish, refusing to let others speak for him (though of course this did change a little as he got to know Lock, Lange et al - and realised that there were some writers out there who would take the time and trouble to find out what the music was really about).

B. is of course the expert on his music, and his palpable disgust at having writers hired to make uninformed statements about it, based on guesswork or false assumption, is completely understandable and justified. While I was reading this material last weekend, I was reminded of something I learned as a philosophy undergraduate. I went up to university with (among other things) a cheap edition of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, an outdated translation. I soon learned that students were encouraged to buy a more expensive edition, in the translation by Norman Kemp Smith; the problem, I was told, lay in Kant's highly idiosyncratic German, giving rise to numerous passages where the text was susceptible of multiple interpretations. Translators had been forced to make their best guess as to what the writer had intended, in such cases; but, being themselves not trained philosophers, their guesses were just that. Once Kemp Smith had delivered his English translation - the first to be produced by a philosopher who was also thoroughly familiar with German and well placed to make properly-informed decisions about what Kant had really intended, out of the various plausible options - it was found to be so illuminating that (so I gathered^), not only were English-speaking students encouraged to work from his text, German philosophy undergrads were themselves encouraged to read the book in Kemp Smith's translation, not in their own native tongue, as it was thought to have rendered the text much less ambiguous than it was considered previously.

The problem here is: in this analogy, B. himself is as much Immanuel Kant as he is Norman Kemp Smith. That he knows his music better than anyone else, understands it more clearly and fully, is beyond any possible doubt; but his manner of discourse - written and indeed spoken, to a fair extent - is fundamentally esoteric: accessible only by initiates. Hence, he has written at considerable length to explain not only the principles of his work, but also the stated intentions of a great many of his compositions; however, he has done this in language which not only eludes (and therefore alienates) the less patient reader, but tends to confound even the reasonably-patient and well-intentioned reader as well^^. I've said before - including just recently - that B. has no mandate to make his writings easy to understand, and every right to make the reader work very hard at them; don't forget, the maestro himself quickly jettisoned his plans to major in music upon discovering that the Roosevelt music faculty was still bitterly at war with itself over whether or not Schoenberg was "valid"; he then decided to major in philosophy instead, and presumably began germinating right then the ideas that would eventually coalesce into an integrated system. He has every right to create his own tailored vocabulary for that system, indeed; but with this inevitable consequence: most people will not be able to follow him there, and thus will very quickly abandon the attempt. Worse, because his music has always generally been perceived as impenetrable and incomprehensible, for a long time it seemed to be a "free hit" for people who wanted to grab a bit of unearned credit - by saying things that sounded like profound insights, but weren't anything of the sort - since nobody was likely to be able to call this behaviour out^^^. Nor was this latter frippery confined to music fans / listeners: jazz critics may not have been asked any more to write liner notes for this music (which they had no intention of trying to understand on its own terms), but they could take their revenge easily enough, by spouting all manner of platitudinous nonsense in reviews and in their own books~. 

We could argue, or at least speculate, about the extent to which B. has deliberately propagated his discourse in a manner which is abstruse and obscure. When we hear him speak, after all - on pretty much any subject, not just on music - he does so in a way which is closer to his writing style than to most people's spoken English. This must be a habit of long years, and is now just ingrained to the point where no effort has to be made to sustain it; indeed it must probably have reached that stage some decades ago. But it must have been obvious to him, in his younger years, that the people around him generally did not talk (or write) like that, and his continuing to do so represents on some level, at a certain point in B's life, a decision to set himself apart from them. It goes far beyond - but is undoubtedly linked to - affectations such as the smoking of a pipe in public (as seen on various album covers and in publicity shots); it has to be seen as part of a calculated plan to reinforce the image of an intellectual (as if in anticipation of the same objections he raised later, with regard to the music business and its attitude towards black composers and improvising musicians). It's not lost on me how much this conclusion tends to imply that B's struggle to shake off the label of a "purely cerebral" musician is to a fair extent a problem of his own making~~.

Anthony Braxton's music is an extension of his thought, and is inseparable from it - at least for him. There is nothing wrong with his developing a specialist vocabulary for his system, as many others have done before him - especially where existing language did not seem to cover the exigencies of what was to be explicated. But we've already seen the effect that has had; ultimately, he could never be his own Norman Kemp Smith: he needs someone else to fill that role. Graham Lock filled it extremely well for a while; Lock himself was not a musician, but his close access to B. for a prolonged period allowed him to make up for that, to a very great extent. Mike Heffley probably had the best opportunity, being both a musician and a student of B's, but his book was only in print very briefly, and I am no position to vouch for how successful he might have been in making the music more exoteric. In any case, that few people have ever seen the results of that experiment provides the question with its own answer... Ronald Radano wrote in language almost as dense as the maestro's, and thus was never really in a position to help spread the message more widely; since then, we have had other works by the likes of Stuart Broomer and Timo Hoyer, but I know that B. thought the former had raised interesting questions without really furnishing any answers~~~, and the latter's book has yet to be translated from the German. Superior liner notes over the years from the likes of Art Lange and Bill Shoemaker have never (yet) been developed into anything more substantial.

As for myself: the number of comments I received in the blog's first few years suggests that I did in fact succeed in penetrating (some of) the music and unpacking it in such a way as to help (some) listeners get closer to it; but as we've all seen, I was unable to sustain this and have only recently been able to come back to the work. Much as I would like to think that I still have a role to play in this regard, it very much remains to be seen whether or not I can reach enough people to make a real and lasting difference. (It also remains to be seen how long I can keep it up, this time...)

There may yet be others, though... indeed, as I suggested just this month, word seems to be ever so slowly getting around, and as more musicians get bitten by the bug, there is more of a chance that someone will yet be able to construct the definitive bridge between the maestro and the music-loving public. In the meantime, the best way to make meaningful contact with B's world is simply to listen and listen. 

* Unlike last time out, I'm spelling this word the way *I* would write it. Yes, B. writes it Catalog - because he is American. It is not necessary for me to render it the exact same way he did in order to be "authentic" or whatever - it's not a matter of citing the title of an artistic work, rather the name is purely descriptive and functional. Of course I will continue to quote from his writings exactly as he wrote them. But in this case, I am using the same word, we just happen to spell it differently. Hope that makes sense, but if it doesn't... tough ;-)

** Several points about this. One, the interviewer is listed solely as "Cadence" (thereafter CAD). It's been a long time since I saw any of those Cadence interviews in the original format etc, and I can't remember if they are always presented that way, but in any case I think I'm right in saying that Bob Rusch conducted them himself. [More about him coming soon, funnily enough...] Two, I thought that these articles were usually (notoriously) long, whereas this one is - well, maybe it's fairly long: I suppose by music mag standards it is pretty long, at that. I just would have expected it to be longer... Three, there is no date given. However it is clear from context that it must have been some time in 1982: B. refers to a performance "in April" - meaning April of the same year the conversation was taking place - and [1982] is slotted in afterwards. Also he talks about working on (what eventually became) Comp. 103 (for seven trumpets) - and the publication date for that is given elsewhere as 1983. His referencing the Antilles album - recorded in October 1981, released 1982 - further helps to narrow this down.

*** The archival entry for this album on Restructures notes that "the graphic titles for 34 and 40 A are transposed in the sleevenotes", and cites Lock for this. This could itself be indicative of what B. is saying in the interview: he presented the pieces in a certain order, but the label changed that because they thought they knew better how to sell it to their putative demographic; maybe they just didn't bother to switch the titles as well, since - I mean, who the hell was going to notice, right? This does feel like the kind of decision a record label would (still) take without missing a beat.

# Aposiopesis is present in the actual text here - I didn't put this one in. (Yep - contrary to what most people think, it's only an "ellipsis" if something is missed out; if the same "..." indicates a lengthy pause or a tailing-off, that is different, and thus has a different name. Not a lot of people know that, these days...

## Quoted material in this post is taken from Anthony Braxton, Composition Notes Book D (Synthesis Music/ Frog Peak, 1988) pp. 495-

### - Not straightforwardly (or exclusively) racist, no. This is absolutely not to suggest that B. didn't think there was a very strong current of racism running through the whole situation - he goes on to make it perfectly clear that he did. I am also certain that he was completely right about that. It's too big a subject for me to get to grips with it here. 

^ Several points to make about this: 1. Not wishing to bang on about something I have mentioned many times before, I was an undisciplined and easily-distracted student, and learned far less at university than I might have done... when it came to Kant, as it happens the only part which I found really interesting was the very first bit ("Transcendental Aesthetic"), and I never found it necessary to buy the recommended edition; everyone I knew who really got their teeth into Kant swore by the Norman Kemp Smith translation, and this was the story everyone told about it. Was it true? I don't know. It doesn't actually matter whether it was true or not, for the purposes of this post; 2. It goes without saying that anyone studying Kant at a higher and/or deeper level would eventually need to deal with the original text, rather than any translation (however excellent). Nobody ever meant to imply that the improved translation rendered the original redundant; it was just thought to be sufficient for a undergraduate course, where Kant is only one element of the syllabus. 3. I did also think of another example at the same time - that of a martial-arts master of my former acquaintance, the first proven fighter to translate some core classics on taijiquan (tai chi chuan) from Chinese into English; in this instance, previous translators had no experience of using tai chi for combat and were therefore not qualified to... etc. This felt like one example too many, hence its being tucked away down here (and not fully explained)...

^^ I did try, a number of years ago, to read the Tri-Axium Writings. I didn't manage to get very far, although I took this more as a reflection on my shortcomings as a serious scholar than as a judgement on the original material; I may try and make a second concerted attempt this year. But I don't know how many people have really read this stuff, never mind understood it. I've mentioned before (musician and Youtuber) Brian Krock's video on the maestro, for which he claimed to have taken a deep dive into the written material; the conclusions he reached, as far as I recall, were not really of a sort that he could not have gleaned pretty easily from other sources. This is not said with a view to undermining Brian - rather it highlights how difficult the writing is, if even trained composers can struggle to get to grips with it. (One would also suspect that only so much reading and research was ever going to be done for a thirty-odd-minute video presentation.)

^^^ That did change a bit, in some circles at least, when I started my work here; some people who had been exploiting B's forbidding reputation to make themselves look cleverer than they were had to cut that out once they realised there someone around who wouldn't stand for it, or let it go unchallenged. I am also sure that one of the things B. liked about what I was doing was the fact that I did voice (considerable... ahem) dissatisfaction with certain critics, and their facile glosses on music which they were not really engaging with before passing judgement on it. Whether those same critics ever knew about that is another matter...

~ I eventually got rid of my fifth-edition paperback copy of The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD - not just because of what those guys were saying about B's music; but my understanding how far they fell short of properly understanding his music was what allowed me to see their more general shortcomings. It must be said, I received a fair amount of resistance from the online community at the time for some of the things I said about those critics, who were still quite revered by most people (apparently). There's no doubt they know jazz; possibly they were unwilling to recognise their own limitations (or more likely still, figured they could get away with a lot when discussing music of strictly minority appeal).

~~ This does not excuse the people who have reached for that lazy assumption, repeatedly, over the years. Assuming that an intellectual must always make cerebral, unemotional music is more or less the same as the very prevalent tendency among the music-buying public to allow their impressions of music to be prejudiced by the appearance of the packaging: if an artist's last album had a dark and sombre cover, and their latest is presented in bright colours, amateur reviewers will immediately and inevitably say that the "new album is much more positive and upbeat" than the last one. 

~~~ I know this because that's what B. told me, shortly after the book's publication, the last time I spoke to him on the phone. It is also the case that Broomer was not exactly trying to unpack or explain B's music anyway; rather he set himself a very specific remit - and one which probably very few people were qualified to judge as regards the results. (Nevertheless, a number of online reviews suggest that not a few readers were largely unimpressed.)