(Image alt-text: a well annotated copy of Walter Benjamin's 'One Way Street' resting on top of a well annotated copy of Derek Bailey's book on Improvisation.)
To celebrate having completed the first full draft of my thesis I thought I would share another chapter. This is the second of two chapters discussing issues that arise in the discussion and practice of free improvisation. In this chapter I discuss the argument that recorded works are secondary to live events and analyse these claims using Walter Benjamin's ''The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.' Aura and Authoritarianism: Tradition as a Theme Within Free Improvisation.
The previous chapter dealt with issues regarding the inaccessibility of the position ‘free improvisor’ and the hierarchical nature of the artist/ audience dichotomy within free improvisation. This chapter deals with two issues which lie outside the limits of that chapter but none the less display the hierarchical nature of free improvisation. The primary subjects of consideration within this chapter will be the distrust of recorded media and Derek Bailey’s model for the perfect recorded medium. I will examine these issues through the utilisation of Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.’ (Benjamin, 2009)
Free Improvisation and Recording / Ritual and Aura.
In his interview for The Wire’s ‘Invisible Jukebox’ Bailey was asked to review several records and ‘Recording’s fine if it wasn’t for fucking records.’ (Watson 2013, 414) This is sometimes seen as a playful or contrarian position such as when David Grubbs describes Bailey as ‘the Invisible Jukebox ur-curmudgeon’ (Grubbs 2014, 106) but it can be seen as a continuation of a hierarchical tradition towards recorded works which can be traced at least as far back as the 1970s in Cardew’s ‘Towards an Ethic of Improvisation’ (Cardew, 2006b) and continues to be discussed in relation to free improvisation as it is practiced now. (Lowndes, 2013)
The insistence that live performance is the most acceptable and ‘real’ component within a dichotomy of live/ recorded works[1] can be argued to show free improvisation in the process of enacting a hierarchical relationship where the live experience is the only true way to experience the work[2] in much the same way as it assumed a hierarchical position in relation to who could and could not be a free improvisor.[3] Viewed through the lens of Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (Benjamin, 2009)these arguments assume an even darker tone regarding the political-aesthetic project of free improvisation and link back to the ways in which membership of the group constituting ‘free improvisors’ is formed and maintained.
Benjamin argues that art finds an early manifestation in cult or cult like objects that do not themselves need to be seen but that are fixed in place and unreproducible. As he argues ‘Artistic production begins with images that serve cultic purposes. With such images, presumably, their presence is more important than that they be seen.’ (Benjamin 2009, 237) Benjamin argues that, through inventions such as the printing press, photography and film the ability to easily reproduce a work of art reduces its ‘aura,’ that is the sense of remoteness from ourselves it is imbued with, its sense of uniqueness and its place within ritual (be that the ritual of religious practice or the ritual of tradition) and that ‘the singularity of the work of art is identical with its embeddedness in the context of tradition.’ (Benjamin 2009, 236) Benjamin argues that the act of reproduction becomes a way of removing the aura from art as ‘bringing things closer in both special and human terms is every bit as passionate a concern of today’s masses as their tendency to surmount the uniqueness of each circumstance by seeing it in reproduction.’ (Benjamin 2009, 235) To remove the aura, the uniqueness and place within tradition, of an art object is an act of ‘bringing things closer,’ and way of usurping tradition.
The argument, comment in the discussion of free improvisation, that the only true record of an event is the event itself, that ‘too little of improvised music survives recording’ (Bailey 1992, 103) or that ‘there’s only the room’ (Lowndes 2014, 39) seeks to limit the ability to reproduce, it attempts to regain the aura of the work or to give to the work an aura it never possessed. Further, given that the route towards membership of the group ‘free improvisors’ is policed by opaque rules regarding duration of practice, difficult to achieve levels of virtuosity and vague mysticism then it is arguable that free improvisation attempts to not simply return the uniqueness to their work, to imbue it once more with aura, but to return art to a mysticised, premodern era. If those to be marked with the designation of ‘audience’ must gather at a given place to watch a ceremony in which they cannot take part in, are forever barred from membership of the group enacting the ceremony and only given vague answers when they question the nature of the ceremony then are we not in the presence of a ritual? Is this not, by some measure, a cult enacting ‘cultic practices?’
The question then arises as to who would seek to inject a contemporary art form with this pre-modern aura. Benjamin answers this question in his discussion of early attempts to analyse film. The early film critics he examines attempted to read the cultic elements which Benjamin identified with the earliest art back into film. (Benjamin, 2009) That free improvisation seeks to reinstate the mystical into art is telling or, to quote Benjamin, ‘It is most instructive to see how the endeavour to annex film to ‘art’ requires such critics to throw caution to the winds in reading cultic elements into their subject’ (Benjamin 2009, 240-241) In seeking to claim the status of ‘art’ for free improvisation its practitioners reduce the form to a re-enactment of ‘cultic elements’ the created themselves.
The Record that Never Repeats: Technologically Mediated Mysticism and Derek Baily.
Before beginning this section, I must return to my earlier argument regarding Derek Bailey’s ‘Invisible Jukebox’ interview: the opinions Bailey offers in this interview are little different to those voiced by Cardew nearly thirty years before this point and also match those offered by Bailey in his book on improvisation published in 1992, six years before the time of this interview. Rather than being a contrarian position adopted for the purpose of satire Bailey is stating long held views. Further, if we are to assume that Bailey is making some point with these observations, as David Grubb does when he argues that Bailey is ‘entertainingly, undeviatingly, diabolically on point’ (Grubbs 2014, 107) then we must ask what this point may be.
Bailey argues that the best form a recording of free improvisation can take is that it can be played only once: ‘When they [listeners] listen to it, they better get a hold of it while it passes – it’s not recordable, it’s not saveable. But if you haven’t heard it before you can hear it if you want to. At the moment I’m waiting for someone to show me how to do that.’ (Watson 2013, 423) Indeed Bailey argues for attentive listening when he argues ‘if you could only play a record once, imagine the intensity you’d have to bring into the listening.’[4] (Watson 2013, 417)
If free improvisation demands a reinstatement of aura in art and attempts to enact this process through transforming performance into ritual then Bailey is asking for a return to a pre-modern art, a return to the art object as a site of cultic ritual where the presence of that artwork ‘is more important than the fact that [it] can be seen.’ (Benjamin 2009, 237) In effect Bailey is seeking to reproduce the cultic ceremony in a displaced, recorded form.[5] That this is to be done using technological mediations (‘I’m waiting for someone to show me how to do that’) leaves us with a melding of the fetishisation of tradition and aura with technology. This is precisely what Benjamin identifies as a component of fascism when he argues ‘The Violation of the masses, which the leader cult Fascism forces to their knees, corresponds to the violation exercised by the film camera, which Fascism enlists in the service of producing cultic values.’ (Benjamin 2009, 257) The enlistment of modernity, the means of mass production and technological reproduction, in the creation of cultic rituals is at best reactionary and elitist, taken to its extreme it is not unreasonable to argue that in this Bailey is engaging in something akin to aesthetic fascism.
Finding a Way Out, Finding a Way In.
Benjamin wrote ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ with explicit anti-fascist ideals in mind.[6] While it is arguable that the position of free improvisors seeking to forcibly (re)create aura and cultic ritual (and, even more directly, Bailey’s technologically mediated aesthetic fascism) ‘serves imperialism’ (to borrow part of the title of Cardew’s famous polemic.) As a critic of the forced mysticism of free improvisation as it is practiced by many in the community, as a free improvisor and a politically committed performer I feel that Cornelius Cardew’s comments on Stockhausen can be applied just as easily to free improvisation:
‘Mysticism says, ‘everything that lives is holy,’ so don’t walk on the grass and above all don’t touch a hair on the head of an imperialist. It omits to mention that the cells on our bodies are dying daily, that life cannot flourish without death, that holiness disintegrates and vanishes with no trace when it is profaned, and that imperialism has to die so that people may live.’ (Cardew 2006a, 168)
I will now turn, then, to the question of how I will begin to speed up the process of decay by discussing the formation of a methodology for my practice led investigation into the possibilities for non-hierarchical forms of free improvisation.
[1] Cardew writes that ‘What a recording produces is separate phenomenon, [from a live performance] something really much stranger than the recording itself, since what you hear on disc is indeed the same playing [as the live event] but divorced from its natural context.’ (Cardew 2006b, 128) [2] This can be viewed using deconstructionism and its critique of these types of dichotomies. I discussed Derrida and the first stage of deconstructionism in my first chapter but a brief explanation of deconstructionism can be found in Lawlor’s entry on Derrida at the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2021/entries/derrida/ (Lawlor 2021) A discussion of the nature of Presence which is pertinent to this issue but which is beyond the scope of this chapter can be found in David A. White’s ‘Derrida on Being as Presence: Questions and Quests’ (White, 2017) and Françoise Dastur’s ‘Derrida and the Question of Presence’ (Dastur, 2006) [3] See my chapter ‘Mounting a Guard on the Border: The Formation of Group Identity Within Free Improvisation.’ [4] The insistence on a model of listening that is borrowed from western classical music displays a eurocentric bias within free improvisation. This can be seen in the rejection of jazz as found in ‘Improvisation: its Nature and Practice in music’ in the two chapters on Jazz, (Bailey 1992, pp. 48-58) the chapter ‘Free’ where Bailey specifically points towards European art music as superior to jazz, (Bailey 1992, 84) and in the chapter on ‘Joseph Holbrooke’ where Jazz improvisation is described as ‘stilted, moribund and formal.’ (Bailey 1992, 87) Indeed Tony Oxley’s comment in this chapter that freeing himself from Jazz was realising that he had been ‘wearing chains’ (Bailey 1992, 89) is a little tone deaf given the links between Jazz and racial oppression in America. Likewise, Keith Rowe rejects Jazz on what seems a more explicitly but still coded racial basis when he says ‘we’ve got to invent our music like they invented their music’ (Lowndes 2014, 32) before his partner in the interview Mayo Thompson explicitly places improvisation within a timeline including Mozart, Hayden and Cage. (Lowndes 2014, 32) I feel it is valid to ask to what degree racism and white supremacist thinking form a part of this rejection of Jazz but as a white person I do not feel it is my place to do this however I feel that this question does need to be examined. [5] It is arguable that we are seeing in Bailey’s ritualisation of the act of listening a grotesque mirroring of Debord’s observation that ‘the economy transforms the world, but it transforms it into a world of the economy.’ (Debord 1994, 28) Where Debord critiques leisure becoming an economically productive site via consumerism Bailey sees our leisure time as a ritualistically productive site via the intrusion of the ritualism of free improvisation into it. [6] ‘The Following concepts here introduced into art theory for the first time, differ from more familiar ones in that they are quite useless for the purposes of Fascism. They can, on the other hand, be used to formulate revolutionary demands in the politics of Art.’ (Benjamin 2009, 229)
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