Ben Watson: Spectrum Festival Preview

Nov 11-12: Paris, College des Bernardins, 20 rue de Poissy- 75005 Paris
Berlin & Bucharest dates t.b.c.
Nov 15-16: London, Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL
Nov 18: London, Warehouse, Threed St, Waterloo SE1 8ST
Nov 20: London, LSO St Lukes, 161 Old St, EC1V 9NG

Ben Watson finds it easy to write a press release (or is that a psychoacoustic warning?) for the Spectrum Concerts in London 15-20th November 2011 (and starts sounding a bit like Raoul Vaneigem).

The Association of Musical Marxists (AMM) is making friends at the moment. Heightened class struggle (the march against cuts on 26th March, the public-services one-day strike on 30th June) proves to be a rich atmosphere for our particular metabolism. People see our banner and walk towards us smiling, full of questions, not all of which we can answer: "What's a Musical Marxist?", "How can I become one?", "What has music got to do with politics?", "What music do you like?". In this context, it's easy to address people because we're no longer jostling with everyone else for another slice of the crummy commercial pie, dredging up superlatives which haven't yet been done to death by the richly-funded think tanks of the South Bank. So in this post, you're not being told about some 'good' music to consume, we're telling you about an environmental given without which the AMM would not exist. Dumitrescu called us into existence.

When Andy Wilson considered working with Ben Watson, he decided to test Watson's claims. The great strength of using commodified music as a test of subjectivity - rather than any number of identity points in the artistic field - is that you can generally download a track and test a music writer's claims. Wilson read Watson on Zappa's guitar solo on 'Yo Mama': "The playing bursts out of linear sanity into a torrid warzone of distortion and sonic event". "Right," he said, "I've read too many of Watson's claims about Zappa over the years, let's play the track and see ….". And he did see! (Repelled by the metal commercialism of Sheik Yerbouti on its release in 1979, Watson had required a session with Dany Houston "Ben, Ben, listen to this … this … THING" before he heard it himself).

So when Watson named Dumitrescu as the composer who proved that the violence of avant garde music was objective, not wilful (Music, Violence, Truth), Wilson listened in - and found a world. He ended up visiting Bucharest to hear a Spectrum festival and meeting Tim Hodgkinson, sax player from Henry Cow, the last time anyone in the UK tried to link Marxism and musical composition ("Dumitrescu is the one modern composer finding solutions rather than problems." TH). Without this mutual enthusiasm for Dumitrescu, the AMM would not have the audacity to smash away at the compromises and pretensions of the 'music scene' as currently (de)constructed by the current list of pundits.

You see, we believe that advertising and market penetration (numbers) are not the only spurs to cultural and political activity. We refuse to push revolution and great music in the manner of double-glazing sales-personnel. Certainly, we grant that we all are born and develop and educate ourselves in circumstances which are not of our choosing. The capitalist media is not something we ignore or blot out. Rather, the reverse, we seize onto its facets and icons and absurdities with a clinical grip in order to diagnose the sickness of our times. But to do so we need its opposite, its contra, its negation, its nemesis. And we find these in having our tired dichotomies and weary concepts blown apart by Dumitrescu's music. Is it a field-recording of some natural process, or an artificial composition? It sounds like quasars exploding in outer space, but it has quirks and wilfulness and unpredictability in it like conversation with a friend. It has moments of shocking high intensity like unexpected sexual arousal in dreams. It includes waste, desolation, outfall. Is it Noise or Classical or Improvisation? We can't tell. It's new to us, and we need more people to hear it so they can tell us what it does to them.

Most music produced today is specially designed to 'fit' some aspect of social organisation. You can hear the intelligence and canniness of the fit, even admire it, while still being slightly revolted at its subservience to what is, its ingratiating efficiency. Dumitrescu's music doesn't fit the social environment, it changes it. It's engineered to attract your sub-conceptual motivations and make you consider them as you would the beauty of an enzyme in a nanographic reproduction, or a newspaper colour telephoto of a dying star; and consider yourself as an organisation of matter doing the considering. The interstitial movements of Dumitrescu's music, a hive of restless activity, are restructuring your behaviour, our behaviour, their behaviour - so we don't quite know where the you/we/they is any more. The social roles unfix themselves. It's precisely the same as reading Sean Bonney's 'Letter On Poetics', where a poet's attention to pronouns maps precisely what we felt recently during those great working-class street demonstrations: we can talk to everyone because at last we're talking about what really matters, what holds us back, what we love, what we hate, how we feel. The necessity of bringing down capitalist separation and distrust.

Dumitrescu's one-many dialectic, his ability to enter the swarming vectors of his materials, is a DISCOVERY, a technical resource. Not simply an emanation of genius with nothing to teach except dumbfoundedness before the guru (which is why a pea-brain like David Keenan can't rise to think about Dumitrescu). Ana-Maria Avram proves this, by showing us that by understanding his lessons, she can compose comparable earth moves.

Marxist thought has been held back by tail-ending the capitalist discourse of 'rights', the legal discourse which works by arguing for an abstract equality of subjects before the law. This discourse, as E.B. Pashukanis demonstrated in Law & Marxism (Moscow, 1924), is entirely derived from the rules necessary for marketplace commodity exchange and has no place for socialism: working-class transcendence of exchange values, or solidarity. So frightened of 'racism' that you think that some of these people must be racist themselves, such a 'Marxism' becomes a mere restatement of the abstract schemas of capitalism, yet another denial of the fact that people are products of particular communities reproducing themselves in space and time. Such refusal of truths howling in our faces ('political correctness') leaves ample opportunities for racists and fascists to explain what's going on, using their psychotic fantasies. The grand task of imagining whole societies - Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, Medieval Europe, The Mongol Hordes, Tang China, what you will (and what their legacies mean to us) - is left to hacks churning out conspiracy theories. Nietzsche's North-South dialectic - utterly inadequate to the task - is brought in to explain obvious differences 'Marxist' (actually Stalinist) class analysis cannot explain.

Asger Jorn himself got caught up in these snares when he theorised his concept of the Nordic. As did Ernst Bloch when he theorised 'the Gothic line'. But they were both on to something. Listen to Bloch:

"Gothic line, on the other hand, contains all this agitation within itself; this line is restless and uncanny like its forms: the protuberances, the snakes, the animal heads, the streams, a chaotic intertwining and twitching where a warm amniotic fluid and the heat of incubation stands, and the womb of all suffering, all delight, all births and all organic images begin to speak; only the Gothic has this fire at the centre, over which the deepest organic and the deeper spiritual essences bring themselves to fruition. Such a thing could not be more foreign to the feeble Greek life, and at the same time the most complete contrast to Egypt as the mastery of death … Egypt stratifies, the Gothic brings forth; Egypt models the world's structure, the Gothic is symbolically productive in the direction of the embrace …" (Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, 1918; tr. Anthony A. Nassar, Stanford: SUP, 2000, p. 24)

The music of Dumitrescu proves that Jorn and Bloch were not talking about North and South, but about the difference between freedom and oppression, between expressive truth and subservience to the codes of a dead language. In his writings on Dumitrescu, Harry Halbreich makes many insightful points about Dumitrescu's use of traditional Rumanian music, and how their oriental scales enrich Western harmony, which has become impoverished. Writing like Ernst Bloch, Halbreich could hymn a 'Rumanian (dis)chord' which bursts the ear free of the felt-lined cameo-cabinet claustrophobia of Michael Nyman (and even Michael Finnissy). Now, such a local revolt is welcome. But when you add up all the local revolts (and we could add in Blake's criticism of Ancient Greece and Rome - "silly slaves of the sword" - in favour of Judaic and Celtic imagination - "crooked roads are the roads of genius") they amount to revolution - a total critique of 'civilisations' (or are they atrocities?) measured in sheer quantities of surplus value and technical efficiency in pursuit of war.

Dumitrescu's music suggests that the feudal domination of sound by the concept (Thomas Ades's view of composition as "owning a tract of land I can landscape") might be ended - without suppressing human decision and desire in the manner of John Cage. Sure, I've argued for this in concepts, but I can only do so because of things this music has done to me. See you at Conway Hall in November, I hope.

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Full details of this years festival can be found at the  Spectrum XX1 Festival Site >>
Hear the Resonance Programme, Andy Wilson and Ben Watson on Iancu Dumitrescu >>

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Iancu Dumitrescu conducting at The Conway Hall, 2009