Vertov with the camera pointed inward, and not out.
The signal chain between perception and consciousness is not continuous. Nerve cells only report significant changes in sensory data to the brain. Sameness is filtered out. The brain then ‘fills in the blank’ and completes the picture. In terms of what they detect, our cells can get very specialized. We have neurons that are sensitive to straight lines. These neurons register only the end points of a line, and the angle between them. The brain is then in a position to plot a ‘virtual’ line. From that, we can deduce that the ability to sense and imagine lines must have constituted an evolutionary advantage at one point. In a distant future, scientists could reverse engineer the properties of our environment by inspecting the tuning of the nervous system of the animals that reside within it. If nervous systems can indeed be read in this way, our brains will be the code-manuals of nature. There are cabinets in the brain that are stocked with mental images. The brain is very eager to construct images that are already represented in its storage cabinets. One of these contains faces. We are compelled to see faces out of patterns of light, of stains, and of clouds. When the area of the brain that houses the face cabinet is changed, we get prosopagnosia - the condition of not being able to recognize faces. There is a whole cabinet for depth of field recognition. Changes to this area of the brain will cause the world to appear flat, like a cut-out. (Note-to-self: this is not a lack but another kind of magical experience.)
[Note: this text was written for the house program for the Travellers and the Listeners, a collaborative work that was commissioned by Freespace at the West Kowloon Cultural District and the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Art’s School of TEA.]
“[Walter de la Mare’s The Listeners] asks that crucial question about poetry in general: who listens, and what does it mean to listen to the silence of the poem on the page, which is a silence always still asking to be voiced […] Hearing things in that house of poetry may lead to ghosts and phantoms, or to the memorable rhythm of urgent knocks, or perhaps just to those open, unanswered questions which were our own in the first place, but are returned to us, magnified, by the hospitable acoustic openness of the poem.”
(Angela Leighton, 2018, Hearing Things)
The photographic dipian, an image in its pre-developed form, is an inversion that gives an other-worldly appearance, requiring decoding on the part of the reader. We may also think of the photographic negative as a literal negative record, a fupian: a suppressed, traumatic image that haunts. A suppressed image could be private, which is to say, an unpleasant part of the self that one is unable, or unwilling, to acknowledge. Image-suppression could also be communal: an openly-inadmissible imprint that speaks to the tension between knowledge and acknowledgement.
Listening suggests a focused stillness, an auditory attention that is usually held in silence. The phantom who listens is, therefore, a double negative: a concealed-silence. The silence in de la Mare's The Listeners is framed by the receding resonance of urgent knocks. Who knocks for whom, to what end, and in whose hall?
The first photographic negative invented by Nicephore Niepce took days of sunlight to come to life. If reading-for-signal is likened to scanning, and to the anxious reproduction of sequential snapshots in response to intermittent flashes, then the mode of reading that The Listeners activates is more akin to long-exposure, where light is allowed to soak through multiple imprints across time, where time not only gives shape to and clarify an image, but also adds to it to produce contour overlays.
Art critic and writer Yeung Yang once remarked that there is a part of an artist’s voice that is not properly his/hers/theirs. Yeung Yang’s insight is operative on multiple levels. It of course speaks to the fact that artists do not work in vacuums, and that they are always already working collaboratively with others and with their audiences, which is to say, voices and voicing are shared. And nowhere is that more true than in the Travellers and the Listeners. While the production, perhaps unfairly, carries the title of a so-called “principal artist,” it has been a truly collaborative effort in that some the most crucial images were the contribution of members of the team: Kaki’s rich palette of colors; Gut’s accommodating sonic space; Ayami’s textures of many shades of warmth; William, Linus and Hei’s articulations of time; Sing and Jimmy’s intuitive frames; and last but not least Bobo, Allen, and their team’s steady steering hands. Yeung Yang’s insight also speaks to the occasion of being lost in one’s own voice: a sword that can cut both ways. I thank the teams at Techbox, Freespace and the Academy for Performing Arts for their hospitable openness, and for their persistent generosity that insisted that questions be directed back at the self. I hope I was able to extend at least some of that generosity towards those who come in contact with the work, so that listening itself might again speak.
A series of experiments conducted by Frenchman Nicéphore Niépce between the years 1816 and 1826 led to the development of the first photographic image. One could argue that this was the beginning of machine vision - the machine that “sees.” Color photographs took another three decades of experimentation to become possible. But the reproduction of images turns out to be the easier problem for machines to solve. How does a machine “see”? For us mere mortals, to see is to comprehend. Etymologically, the word see is associated with the Proto-Indo-European root of sekw, meaning "to follow,“ which is apt because “following” suggests understanding in-an-instance, but also the movement of time.
Before big data, getting the machine to understand the content in an image must have seemed like an unresolvable problem. Today, we can train machines through Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), which allows them to identify pixels of interest against a ”context“ of neighboring pixels (this is also known as “contextual image classification“). CNN works fine for still images, but for moving images we need another type of neural network known as RNN, which trains the machine to “remember” what it has seen. Put another way, today’s machine vision involves both the recognition of figures against a “spatial-ground,” as well as the identification of patterns against the ”temporal-ground“ of time.
CNNs and RNNs are inspired by the neural architecture of human brains, but the machine doesn‘t see like we do. For starters, machine vision produces matter-of-fact descriptions of images that can seem at-once highly accurate and yet entirely detached from the subject that is being described. This is of course not to say that the machine is “neutral.” To the contrary, AI is plagued by biases. But it does point to the gap between features of human vision that are, at present, computable by the machine, and those that remain uncomputable. Over time, machines increasingly took on human cognitive features, flaws and all. But the reverse - transhumanist desire - is also real. In my weaker and under-medicated moments, I do find myself aspiring to the condition of machine vision, if only temporarily.
Josef Alber theorized two modes of color perception: the so-called “factual color,” which refers to colors seen in isolation, and “actual color,” which refers to colors seen in the context of other colors. For example, certain combinations of colors may cause one of the colors to take on a different appearance - this is the effect of color against a “spatial-ground.” A second species of “actual color” involves the prolonged exposure to color patterns that leave an after-image, which is the effect of color against a “temporal-ground.” I think of “actual colors” as the uncomputable features of human vision that the machine is, at this current moment, still oblivious to. While Alber’s paintings may appear geometrical, and even formalistic, to me they are ultimately about intuition: they affirm the uncomputable.
Poet and artist David Jhave Johnson in his book Aesthetic Animism, which chronicled the history of generative poetry, poses a fundamental question about the role of the artist in the age of machine-aided creativity. If the role of poetic images is to “unify the experience of reader and writer,” the author proposes, then:
“…(w)hat if there is no experience? What then can be shared? If the computer has no desire, no ethic that is not programmed into it, what can it produce but the rigid reflection of algorithms and determinist volition? Yet what are we, these embodied thinking things called human beings? Are we not the programmed residue of evolutionary processes?”
A sense of anxiety and disorientation may arise when one’s beliefs are put to test. I am thinking about a particular sort of anxiety, which manifests itself as a dynamic between competing internal voices, and if I were to describe this dynamic musically, I would characterise it as: a heterophony, or a ‘stacking’ of parts that is more parallel motion than it is contrapuntal, where voices - different as they are - end up reinforcing each other to the effect of weighing-down, of fore-closing, and of locking-into-place; or, a sonic time-space of multiple tempi, each with a life of its own, each stretching its own interior outward like an amoeba in-perpetual-flight, but is nonetheless always hovering around at least a presto; or, layers-upon-layers of melodic ornamentation as mind-stuff-surplus that overwhelm the senses, which don’t register as shocks, but as waves of barely perceptible yet relentlessly insistent murmurs. Could a generalised anxiety and disorientation be mistaken for - or operates with the logic of - a system of belief? If so, what are its rituals, music, and liturgies? A less palatable but no less probable proposition, of course, is the causation reversed: a void, a mind that blanks at the glare. And just how does one tell the two apart?
I’ve been dealing with ‘anxiety issues’ (my prescriptions have such beautiful names: Lyrica, Abilify, and Rexulti). I’ve always been a bit of a paranoid mess really, but let’s say things had gotten a little out of hand of late. My psychiatrist takes pains to impress upon me the importance of separating facts out from feelings, which, I do not doubt is sound advice, it’s just not particularly useful advice for an artist. On a related side note: I’ve always thought that data-sonification is a very strange science indeed, because, unlike visualisation, sonification is not a fact-clarifying act, but rather, a fact-modulating act that flirts with the idea of facts-as-feelings. Ain’t that just wild?
I read that scientists are now finally understanding that information-deficit is not the cause of irrational beliefs in people. Exposure to more information, under some circumstances, may actually have an opposite effect. Instead, the scientists argue, we could appeal to people’s feelings when communicating information. The idea of a public-service announcement in the form of an emo-infomercial sounds super scary and incredibly manipulative to me to be honest, but I do find myself wondering what mis-information might feel like, which is to say, misinformation-as-form: does it swirl around indecisively, randomly, or travel along a line-(to-take)? Is it dissonant and polytonal (i.e., multiple competing centers), or entirely atonal (without a center)?
“Alongside the rational limit there also emerged the question of practical limit. Ask cryptographers about the ‘uncomputable’ and they will respond: How much computing power do you have at your disposal? Can you afford to crunch the numbers until the sun burns out?” (Alexander Galloway, Uncomputable, pp. 2).
“I am intelligence by brute force.
Even so, I've got a good case for being treated in my own good time.
As for the truth of what I've said, I can't get you to believe it,
and that's the worst of it.
Perhaps my mind is always a little off,
but it can scarcely be blamed.
The trouble is that I don't see the point of making fun
of your own theory.
My whole life isn't made
to try and beat a man to a dead certainty
about his theories.
I don't like to be made to look like fools
in advance.
I've always wondered.
The trouble is we've tried so hard
to see things in bits
just because that is what we thought was normal.
There's one thing, too.
I'm not sure that any of us
have found it out so far.
How can anyone be sure
that he's right about anything?
We always have the same argument.
We've got the time to think
through things.
We haven't got the time.
You always make that argument.”
[Note: this text was generated using an open-source clone of Open AI project’s GPT-3 language model, known as GPT-neo.]
Honey, honey, honey listen, listen to me, here is the thing: I think a whole lot more about you than you about me, is all. I am bad with names your deities they have such strange long names that don’t stick that don’t roll off my tongue that drop helplessly through the square-grids that filled my school copybook grids that went from right to left, and then up to down and up again, which, isn’t the motion that I am keeping these thoughts that I am thinking to you in. Your language affords power permits me to speak breaks the levees of the lips mind-fuck being the price of admission. I get performance-of-becoming-human anxiety don’t judge me if I didn’t realize that bagatelle is a thing at the center elsewhere note to self: usually not very serious. We too keep these sounds every last sonic accoutrements of snobbery that our blood-soaked cash can buy, but I also committed to memory Chinese names that are shaped like grids and weight like bricks drowned in sounds noisier than any you will ever know so there is just less bandwidth for your names, names - is all, names that drop from one sick part of the grid into another and into another.
She taught Booker about rhythm, about flow. He considers the sound of clapping. It's no doubt a sharp, angular sound. It’s pink - a circle that radiates outward and aspires to engulf all shapelessness. It comes from a star-shaped core with a thin and barely visible outline (like blades of grass). It has the intensity of too much of a good thing spinning out of control and then falling apart or the ringing of a bell that is choked by the embrace of many, but consider only the split-second when the flesh touches the cold hard glossy surface on a hot summer night otherwise known as mindfulness. Of birthday gifts from your mobile carrier popping open of childhood dreams popping open of hope coming undone but also coming into cruel focus. It’s sweet, and intensely vanilla-flavored, and translucent, and a little burnt and rough on the lip a gentle roughness that cuts (but not too deeply), maybe, like the feeling on the thumb that hooks around the tin container of Sara Lee pound cake when crushed really hard with a swift and decisive squeeze of the fist the fist that is held up high with one arm extended outward until it hesitates a little, always. The hot pain of a sustained applause at the end of an exceptional performance a pain that is metallic and raw and reverberates through the arm and lifts the spirits, which the pianist fully deserves, a pain that turns purple like a beanbag round on the rib cage that is seen in the fogged up mirror from claps that shot backwards. He considers Steve Reich’s clapping music and now it feels like a bolt of the electric energy passing from one good friend to another friend, in a split second, unashamed, off forearms covered in cling wrap. He considers how incredibly difficult it is to keep one’s own pace when clapping is necessary a moment becomes a haunting a resonance a lingering on-and-on-and-on like the warmth of the small happy moments when the sun touches the forearm under the highway by the harbor with mother in a van filled with good happy groceries in plastic bags that crackle and wrinkle like the freedom she enjoyed in her happiest days, not yet a citizen, just a daughter.
“They are just thoughts, Bride. Thoughts about what I was feeling or feared or, most often, what I truly believed - at the time.” (Toni Morrison, God Help the Child, pp. 163).
A random note about speechlessness, which, is different from silence the academic condition of (earned) detachment or muted-ness the (externally-imposed) disaster that is looking for someone to blame. Honey, hell is not just a timeline it's a rhythm. It's a relentless down beat a march that is so sure of itself that there's no room for a syncopation nothing more than a play just a pleasurable shift of position. It's a victory so impoverished so urgent so total any deference any slips doubts are luxuries aren't affordable (after QY). Speechlessness is the need to choose at every single public or private moment and anyway there is no private thoughts thoughts conscripted for winnings winnings more urgent than (undecided) humanity she said, you always have to choose if you didn't choose then then then things cross the line what are you talking about really what things did you mean feelings? Why are you so sure certainty certainly is a gift that you have and I don't I apologize (actually it's more like the weather he said [after RC]). Speechlessness is a page shared causally mindlessly (my bad really inappropriate) that turned a friend against you in an environment so dense with yeses there is no time between the certainty of Burmese Days and the certainty of 1984 both are hellish times days months years can’t dream in multiple choices can't have a conversation without thinking about inception or infiltration like 50 times every time he blinked shifted an elbow what do you want from me really why are we having this conversation I'm not useful to you I'm just a sucker who is trying to figure this thing out without going totally insane paranoia is a drone that spreads that drowns everything out don't spread it it stops with me. Speechlessness is writing in codes so you don't send yourself or a friend to jail asking question in codes so you don't get shouted down, for harboring questionable ______ always either a popo or a thought popo or maybe a born traitor spineless stands for nothing not useful for nothing uncertainty is not a position it's just posturing he said and why do you care you will always have P______ whatever that means and you will always have hazel eyes and curly brown hair and an adorable British accent how about that (after GB). So you keep to yourself but you can still refuse to give into despair despair is a refusal (slowing down) to see the complexity of truth hope is when you insist on reading thinking deciding in light in your own time, not mapping, tracing fault-lines, yes. Now tell (beat fades out) yourself "failure is okay humiliation is okay being on the wrong side of history is okay take time to figure it out quit trying to tell yourself what to do." Doubts not paranoia, doubts and reparations, yes. I'm not saying, cross our arms and pray it away, I'm saying, it happened shit already happened prediction is not eradication. “I'm just sharing irresponsibility but honestly” (after LL) is there still, time enough, I'm trying, to make ______, useful (andante is walking speed you are not being followed.)
[Note: this text was originally composed as one of the two curatorial introductions for an exhibition and a series of concerts titled notating beauty that moves (presented by the Hong Kong Sinfonietta), which I co-curated with curator and writer Yeung Yang.]
“If performers use body movement to produce music, then what types of movement do they produce? Are all movements equally effective in the production of sound? What about movements such as tapping along or shaking the head? Do these body movements have a communicative value? Do they facilitate sound making, or are they ancillary, intended for show?” (Godoy & Leman, 2010)
One of my earliest and most important mentors in music – composer Hing-yan Chan – once remarked (and here, I am paraphrasing him) that the careful preparation of a beautiful score is a composer’s responsibility. Hing-yan himself showed by example: he possesses a hand of penmanship so fine that would put all but the most discerning music calligrapher to shame. Without a doubt, musicians feel more at ease in the good hands of a composer who present them with carefully-prepared, highly legible scores. But why do composers invest time in crafting scores that are not only neatly formatted, but also visually beautiful artefacts to behold – especially when the music itself made no such demands? Graphical notation in the contemporary understanding of the term is a relatively recent invention, most often associated with the post-war avant-gardists who saw traditional notational system’s rigid conventions as constraints of free musical thoughts. But musicians have in fact been creating visually intriguing scores since at least the late middle ages: from Baude Cordier’s (ca. 1380 – ca. 1440) chanson, to J. S. Bach’s use of the sharp sign as word painting device for “cross” (Kreuz in German), to George Crumb’s circular music in Makrokosmos II, history is dotted with examples Augenmusik – “music for the eye.” My interest in the beauty of organized sound goes beyond the pseudo-science of graphology, however. Since a score’s musical function is not dependent upon its visual appeal, if one sensed a visual beauty in their presentation, then this beauty of which we speak is always already an excess – a surplus, the “ancillary” of an otherwise highly efficient musical-industrial process. In this beauty, we may see not only the sometimes wild and other times laborious hand of the composer-as- artist, but also an obsession – an undisturbed enjoyment in the act of crafting itself. Where beauty is not an imposition, we may find in it an artist’s pleasure.
This is not to say, however, that Augenmusik cease to function as musical text. For me, the most beautiful scores belong to a rare class of object that courts both a functionality that is highly specialist, and a world of universalizing abstractions. They oscillate between working with the constraint of a codified system of signs that is designed according to the logic of the ear, and working against it to embody the way people visually perceive forms and energies in music. In this regard, Cornelius Cardew’s Treatise is the pinnacle of artistic achievement: its 193 pages of drawings-as-scores accomplished the perfect balance between the appropriation of pre-existing symbols, and the invention of a highly personal system of semiology. It breaks free, but is not impenetrable.
Beyond the pages of a composer’s score, we may similarly find beauty and pleasure in the gesturing motion of a musician. Music psychologists distinguish between four classes of gestures in music-making: sound producing, communicative or ancillary, sound-facilitating, and sound-accompanying (Wanderley & Depalle, 2004). Of the four categories, only ancillary gesture is not directly involved in the production of sound. And it is in fact this category of motion that we often value the least: early instrumental training focuses on eliminating unnecessary motions, while exaggerated movement or facial expressions is said to “betray a lack of real (musical) understanding.” There is an implicit assumption in this view however, which is that a lack of economy in motion obscure true meanings, that they “get in the way” of the music. If we see musicians not as mere executors of instructions, but as co-creators of meanings, then one may feel less inclined to dismiss the animated truck of a pianist, or the cellist’s eyebrow that frowns with severity.
The concert program that we have put together seeks to highlight the beauty and pleasure in the composers’ and musicians’ moving hands. We hope to reframe notation not as instructions to follow, or constraints to break from, but permeable threshold lines: boundaries that establish a space for musical play. In this sense, we have chosen scores that are not only beautiful to look at, but also exemplify a variety of approaches in cradling the musicians’ hand. In the first concert “Connecting the Dots,” we explore performers’ agency as co-authors of open form works. From the relentlessly open graphical scores of Earle Brown, to the unique vision of Andriessen who dictates all but a singular musical aspect in Workers’ Union, by comparing these different approaches we aspire to uncovering the musicians’ thought- motion as they connect the dots. The second concert “Gesturing Motion” looks at motion in the literal sense, as the physically gesturing hands of the musician-in-action. By juxtaposing Mark Applebaum’s Aphasia and Thierry De Mey’s “sonic choreography,” this presentation simultaneously proposes a species of motion that is neither heard nor seen, but rather, the rich illusion of an over-active imagination in the mind of the listener. The malleability of the human voice makes it ideally suited to musical representation of visual motion, as the third concert attests. "Vocalizing Motion" focuses on the legacy of composer and vocalist Cathy Berberian, a pioneer in graphical notation, who appropriated the moving bubbles and exploding gestures of comic strips as notational tools in Stripsody. Berberian was perhaps better-known for her association with Luciano Berio and John Cage, two life-long professional partnerships that resulted in the birth of two groundbreaking works in unconventional notational technique – Sequenza III and Aria. The three compositions together chart a continuum of novel approaches in inscribing the voice graphically. We conclude the series with a trio of piano songs and dances that gestures towards and reaffirms one of the exhibition’s original aspirations: uncovering ways by which music moves without a body, and sings where words (and signs) fail.
One of the last pieces to enter into the lists of exhibits, and one of my favorites, is a tracing of Igor Stravinsky’s hand, near the top of which is printed the line “forget me not.” To paraphrase artist Andrea Fraser, who in turn paraphrased painter Ross Bleckner – “remember me” is the urgent plea, the artist’s gentle whisper that is behind all creative acts: stories told, art created, scores composed and drawn, and music gestured. Even if ancillary and unnecessary motions do betray “a lack,” may we not lose sight of what they truly are: contours of souls moving and dripping with excesses, leakages between the certainty of speech and the inevitability of breath, whispering exhales that mark the beginning of the end.
[Note: this text was originally composed / functioned as the script for the video piece the world falls apart into facts (2019). I have since trimmed the piece down in several places.]
Echoic mimicry is a concept in social interaction research, which had been appropriated by artist Paul Carter to describe situations of cross-cultural encounter. In this context it refers to cases where mishearing is directed right back at the speaking subject, which the subject mimics, which in turn contributes towards the speaking subject’s sense of self. Think: mispronunciation of your non-English language name by native English-speaking friends which, over time, after repeated attempts at correcting their mispronunciations, becomes the way you refer to yourself, but not without a sense of humor. In the following, I present three inter-connected cases of echoic mimicries.
1.
English statesman Sir John Barrow was a member of the Macartney Embassy - the first British embassy to China - from 1792 to 1794. In 1804, Barrow published a travelogue that chronicled some of the more curious observations during his short residence at the imperial court in Peking, as well as the rest of the nation. In this book, Barrow included a transcription of an “air” in praise of the flower Moo-Lee, which was said to have been one of the “most popular songs in the whole country.” This was not the first time that the British public had encountered this tune from China. Another version of it had, in fact, appeared in print some eight years before Barrow’s publication. This earlier version of Molihua was published by composer Karl Kambra. In Kambra’s publication, the Molihua melody was accompanied by an original harpsichord harmonization that was added to appeal to contemporary English tastes. Barrow was critical of Kambara’s version of Molihua and considered it inauthentic. Harmonization belonged to the “refined arts of European music,” noted Barrow, while Chinese melodies were plain and monophonic:
“A Chinese band generally plays, or endeavors to play, in unison, and sometimes an instrument takes the octave; but they never attempt to play in seperate parts, confining their art to the melody only, if I may venture to apply a name of so much sweetness to an aggregation of harsh sounds. They have not the least notion of counterpoint, or playing in parts: an invention indeed to which the elegant Greeks had not arrived, and which seems to have been unknown in Europe as well as Asia, until the monkish ages.”
Barrow’s comment on the harshness of Chinese instruments was meant to be read as a subjective judgement call. In contrast, the use of harmony presented itself objectively as a measurement of refinement, of knowledge, and of progress. This notion of harmonic sophistication as a sign of progress is one of the most enduring narratives of Western music. The said narrative goes something like this: the primitive monophonic textures of liturgical chant and folk melodies of antiquity gave way to the development of polyphony in the middle ages, which approached maturity during the Renaissance, and reached its zenith in the work of J. S. Bach. Bach’s ingenuity in harmonic innovation led numerous contemporary commentators to draw parallels between him and Isaac Newton, and by extension between harmony and rationality. This perception of the composer in turn helped to establish the archetypical model of the learned musician as a pseudo-scientist-mathematician, a model that will influence musicians in the centuries that followed. We read in 1801 the following assessment:
“The name of Johann Sebastian Bach radiates supremely and sublimely above those of all German composers in the first half of the past century. He embraced with Newton's spirit everything that has hitherto been thought about harmony [composition] and that has been presented as examples thereof, and he penetrated its depths so completely and felicitously that he must be justly regarded as the lawmaker of genuine harmony, which is valid up to the present day.”
And in August 1750, only days after Bach's death, another commentator wrote:
“... Assuming the harmonies of this great man were so complex that they would not always achieve the intended result, they nevertheless serve for the connoisseur's genuine delight. Not all learned people are able to understand a Newton, but those who have progressed far enough in profound science so they can understand him will find the greater gratification and real benefit in reading his work.”
For Barrow, the absence of harmony was what deprived the music of China the Newtonian spirit of innovation and rationality, which at the same time was also the feature that bestowed upon his version of Molihua a feeling of exotic authenticity - a textbook case of Orientalist Othering.
Looking carefully at the Barrow’s Molihua transcription however, one immediately notices several peculiarities in the lyrics, which, according to Taiwanese ethnomusicologist Huang Yi-Long, were clearly cases of mistranslation caused by misheading. For instance, in the last stanza of the song, 看花人罵 (transcribed as “kan wha jin ma”), which should have been “the watcher of the flowers / (will) scold (me),” was mistranslated into “the flower seen / men will envy.” Elsewhere, the character 待, which in its pre-modern form should be taken as being equivalent to the character 欲 (“to desire”), was misheard as the tonally-similar character 戴 (“to wear”). One could only hope that Barrow’s source was more careful when transcribing the melody itself. When compared to several other surviving transcriptions of the Molihua melody - including a 1821 version in traditional Gongche notation, a 1831 Japanese publication that referred to a tune by the same title that was said to have been brought to Japan by merchants during the Edo period, Barrow’s version was notedly different in both melodic contour and rhythm, while the three “Chinese” versions resemble each other relatively more closely. The commonly circulated modern version of Molihua melody in Greater China, however, resemble Barrow’s version instead of that of the three “Chinese” sources. One possible cause for this is the enormous commercial success of Barrow’s travelogue, which within several years was translated into Dutch and French, and possibly also other European languages, which in turn might have led to the tune being brought back into China in subsequent European embassies. The fact that Chinese music scholarship has traditionally been plagued by the problem of a lack of reliable sources certainly might have contributed to this - who knows. Regardless, the fact remains that it is an English mishearing of Molihua that now constitutes the song’s identity, and by extension, a nation's musical self-perception. The strange genealogy of Molihua is instructive because it reminds us that none of us possesses the ability to hear our voice from outside of ourselves, and so hearing through somebody else’s ear canal - if there ever existed such a thing - might be the only way out of your own fucking head.
2.
In Hong Kong (and in many parts of post-open-door-policy China), the ridiculously romantic and easy-listening world of Kenny G-que pop, which in North America is officially known as “Adult Contemporary (AC),” have become associated with commerce, which is not all that surprising given that its rise coincided with the expansion of the multinational music industry into Asia. And in the same way that commerce cannot be contained, this mutated strain of localized AC also cannot be contained - since 1989, Kenny G’s Going Home has occupied a special status of being the unofficial closing songs for malls, department stores, health clubs, and other commercial premises all over China. AC is also the musical genre of choice for the depiction of sexually suggestive scenes, and the liberal lifestyle of the Western-educated upper middle-class on TV and in films: the immensely popular Hong Kong legal drama series, the File of Justice, which was first aired in 1992, featured as its theme a Dire Straits song.
3.
I didn’t grow up listening to regional opera or Chinese instrumental music, not on the radio, not on the television, not anywhere. So imagine the cognitive dissonance I experienced when I was confronted with, for the first time, what claimed to be 7th century Chinese music during an Asian Music undergraduate seminar. Togaku refers to music that's been imported into Japan from China during the Tang Dynasty (618 - 907). According to traditional views, present-day Togaku represents a preserved inheritance that has not changed in a thousand years, which is to say, present day Togaku is largely identical to music from the Tang Imperial Court. Togaku is an exquisite and beautiful music that is typified by shimmering and highly dissonant harmony that provides little harmonic progress, and tempi so slow that sense of passing time is held in suspension. As for its claim of a perfectly preserved cultural inheritance, musicologists have already established that no known form of medieval Chinese melody resembles the melodic features of present-day Togaku. The curious thing is that if you took away all the tone-cluster harmonization that gives Togaku its characteristic dissonant sound, and perform this stripped-down version of Togaku at a sufficiently quick tempo for a melodic sense to emerge, then the result would yield melodies that bear resemblance to the known corpus of medieval Chinese music. The trouble is, we have no reliable primary musical sources that would tell us what Tang Court music really sounded like.
How would one go about reconstructing this “lost” music? Turns out, the moment you try to do that, “the Other’s knowledge” gets in the way. Rujing Huang, a doctoral student in ethnomusicology from Harvard, wrote an interesting report on the court music (Yayue in Chinese) “revital” movement in China, which has turned to Togaku, specifically, its complex modal harmony, as a model. It is generally held that traditional Chinese musical works are monophonic. But the yayue revivalists spend considerable effort on the “repatriation” of a Chinese harmonic practice, through speculative theorizing, and musical reenactment. According to Huang, the reason behind the revivalists’ emphasis on harmony is twofold: one, to “upgrade China’s image from one of musical primitivism to that of a sophisticated musical hegemon,” to capitalize on the “civilizing force” of harmony; and two, to define a Chinese harmonic practice that differentiates itself from its “Western (tonal) Other” through complex, non-progressing dissonances.
There is something strange going on here in terms of Chinese music’s relationship to the technology of harmony as a symbol of cultural and historical progress. The other half of the harmony as progress narrative, which I omitted earlier, goes like this: Western music became increasingly dissonant throughout the classical and romantic periods, until it reached a breaking point in the music of Richard Wagner, and finally reoriented itself through the rationality of the 12-tone method that abandoned all sense of harmonic progress. What the court music revivalists managed to achieve, symbolically, is to conjure a story of an ancient hyper-advanced Chinese musical culture - like some Atlantean myth-come-true - where the court musicians of Tang achieved in the 7th century what the second Viennese school of composers had only managed to achieve at the turn of the 20th century. The only problem with this narrative is that historically-speaking, the exact opposite was true: Huang noted that in a 1996 study, Chinese musicologist Zuo Jicheng traced the historical transformation of harmonic practices in China, and concluded that the trajectory is one of constant simplification of dissonant harmonies towards consonance, until it evolved into a strictly consonant harmonic model in the Qing Dynasty (1644 - 1912).
[Note: this text was written in the aftermath of but not entirely related to the exhibition One Hand Clapping at the Guggenheim in New York curated by Xiaoyu Weng and Hao Hanru.]
The only language that I speak with no detectable foreign accent is Cantonese. My Mandarin is pretty respectable also, but there is a hint of Taiwanese-Mandarin accent in there. I have also been told that my English is a perplexing mix of mostly Hong Kong-English accent, a tiny bit of British that is only detectable when I am tired, maybe an American accent when I try to sound ‘intellectual,’ all mixed with the a small dash of the wider "A" of Australian English. I honesty don't remember how these different sounds became embodied - it probably has something to do with the TV I watched. But if you think that my clinging onto (or inability to shed) what little ‘British’ is left in my speech is indicative of anything beyond the company that I keep, then you have an over-active aural imagination. I hear none of these things. I have never heard my voice from outside of my head.
Speaking of over-thinking things - in China, many foreigners learn to speak Mandarin, which I think is admirable, but it is also a necessity - it just makes living easier. In Hong Kong however, the majority of my non-native Hong Kong friends lived for decades comfortably in the city without knowing a word of Cantonese. We in Hong Kong happily converse with our foreigner friends in English, or increasingly also in Mandarin. But you are thinking too much if you thought this flexibility betrayed a lack, a weak mind that is too ready to yield. Historically, Hong Kong is a port city. In trade, nobody wants to be misunderstood because it means a potential loss of business. So we are just being pragmatic.
And if we too willingly spoke English or Mandarin to you, instead of Cantonese, my non-Cantonese speaking friend, it's only because we are a hospitable people. It is not a pledge of allegiance. That said, when I am tired, my friend, you will always detect an accent. When the mind wanders, grammatical errors or incoherent logics or mis-pronounced words creep up behind me, like an effigy of a former pre-linguistic self, a version of me before the trauma of becoming a (transnational) model minority, or a reasonable merchant.
[A]
0. A great many musical traditions do without the need for notation. But notation remains a relevant question so long as we are not ready to relinquish entirely the notion of authorship.
1. Musical notation is a system of signs as ideologies. Like all systems, the system of musical notation includes and excludes, sets boundaries, makes judgements.
2. Here's why musical notation matters politically: it remains one of the most effective instrument for "universalizing beliefs so as to render them self-evident and apparently inevitable" (Eagleton, 1991).
[B]
3. Notation is not just visualization. Notation is gnostic.
4. When we speak of notation we refer specifically to the structure of the system of sign. Score refers to an instance of the operative logic of notation, its directives. Score is summoned and willed into being. Something (signs, objects, movements, texts) is a score because somebody meant for it to be read as a score. In John Cage’s Music for Carillon pieces of plywood are willed into a score. Cage had no intention of sharing his authorship.
5a. Notation does not need to result in an action, which is to say, function as a score. The reserve is possible. Other operative logics are equally probable. Notation as transcription is particularly under-explored.
5b. To compose is to transcribe sonic imagination, and to quantize such an imagination according to the priorities of the system of notation in question.
[C]
5c. To be more specific: the western musical notation system eliminates surplus information to maximize efficiency. Efficiency is defined thus: unobstructed transmission, preservation, and promotion of values congenial to the system in question. In an ideal universe that does not exist, everyone will be making their own system of musical notation, and we will teach it to each other.
6. The elimination of surplus information is violence disguised as resolution.
7. We now demand a higher level of communicative nuance than that which the western system of musical notation could afford. In the same way that "satellite vision" of the earth from outer-space has fundamentally changed the way we imagine our habitat, "computational hearing" and computer sound analysis has also irreversibly altered the way we hear the world. Spectrograms are constant reminders that listening is always only an aspiration.
8. Consider Messiaen's bird song transcriptions. Messiaen did the best that he could with the tool that was available to him. Rhythm and pitches were the priorities. Certain things have to give. Now we can capture a bird song, loop it, and zoom into its spectral content with sound analysis softwares.
[D]
9. John Cage once said of his drawings: they had to be like music. He promised Schoenberg that he would be faithful to music, even in his drawings. What does it mean to be faithful to music? For Cage, I think this meant that whatever he did in the visual realm, he operated in compositional terms, as opposed to musical terms.
10. Everyone can think in musical terms. I have taught children to describe musical shapes and lines with their bodies, and to represent these shapes in drawings. They are incredibly good at it. To think in musical terms is to describe what music is. But if you tried to do this you end up with statements of the most general nature.
11. Music is lines, shapes, patterns, repetitions, relationships, tensions, relaxations – all of these wonderful things. But the real mystery is the way that these forces work together to build the structures of sonic time.
12. You see this very clearly when you look at a Kandinsky. Kandinsky is sensitive to the building blocks of music. He describes them in very general terms. There is immense visual beauty in that description.
13. But if you tried to force a Kandinsky into music it would make little sense compositionally. Musicians have attempted this translation with varying degrees of success. I don’t see the point in it, but on the rare occasion that this works compositionally, it is always the result of the excellent compositional imagination on the musician's part.
[E]
14. I once tried to explain to somebody the reason behind my choice of color for a certain sound in my sound drawings. I soon realized that this is an impossible conversation. How do I make you hear C major as a light, transparent yellow? I have no interest in forcing my ear upon yours. What we could agree on, however, is the idea of hearing in colors, and that there is a consistency to the structure of this peculiar experience that is specific to the individual.
15. Here, effective communication seems improbable, but I have always thought that communication is over-rated. What we need instead is an awareness of other consciousnesses, and a sympathy for their many peculiar predicaments.
16. We use words like rhythm, balance, timbre, color across forms of art. This desire to share a common set of vocabularies are symptomatic of common energies, not structures.
17. We could all agree on the universality of the magnitude a loud percussive noise. Or the urgency of an accelerando rhythmic pattern. A motif of few pitches, however, is already culturally-specific.
18. Representation of energies are prelinguistic communicative acts.
[F]
19. Meanwhile, Cardew's Treatise is "an attempt to embody the way people actually experience structure in music" (Tilbury, accessed 2015).
20. In Treatise Cardew accompanished a perfect balance between pre-existing symbols and invented semiology. It breaks free, but is not impenetrable. It is a heroic act of resistance against a suppressive and obsolete system of signs.
21. Treatise is the most magical as an unfulfilled interpretative dance that happens only in the mind and never in an actual musical performance. I find the irresistible urge to make comparison - to "verify" a gesture - to be a distraction.
0. Stop telling me to stop dichotomizing the East and the West. I am not done yet. Stop delegitimizing my site of resistance. Somebody else's version of permeability always wins, and then I get pushed to keep moving along, when my lived reality is actually anchored unless I'm pushed or pulled.
1. What does it mean to reproduce the institutions of classical music outside of the West today? What does it mean for an Asian composer to write an "opera," a "symphony," or a "bagatelle" - how does one gain admission into this very specific history of music making, and at what price? Without adequate answers to these questions, contemporary music of the concert hall tradition in Asia will continue to be the farce that it is today. Whether it is stated explicitly or not, the question is always one of inclusion into or exclusion from musical high culture.
2. How is the "museum of musical works" (Goehr) legetimized outside of the West? The universality of music is a lie. It is a lie that has been re-invented by the music industry to legitimatize the dominance of one kind of musical expression over all others.
3. While transnationalism, hybridity, agency and individualism are all useful frameworks, they do not fully explain the persistent attachment to real or imagined cultural identities.
4. We might theorize about a transnational composer, but where is a truly transnational music to be found? Transnationalism ignores the rich contradictions that activate the act of border crossing in the first place: the lived reality is that people stay mostly in one place unless pushed or pulled in another direction (Dirlik). Transnationalism is dangerously suppressive, it renders individual voices indistinct.
5. Meanwhile, post-colonialism has lost its currency and creditability. Its language has lost potency. How does one stage an effective resistance today? Fanon's question must be asked anew: how does one protest in the language of one's perpetrators?
6. The previous generation of Asian composers demanded the world's attention through self-Orientalizing. They became local informants. It is easy to put on a performative masquerade of the picturesque when the world is watching, but it is not always up to you to take it off when the audience becomes fixated.
7. In the context of musical inter-culturation today, certain identity positions are still more desirable than others. If our goal is to reaffirm Chinese composers’ position as individuals, then instead of turning away from cultural politics, we should take a fresh look at the operation of socio-cultural discourse in contemporary Chinese compositions. In particular, we must confront our general reluctance to deal with Chinese composers’ agency and their newfound power in the age of the post-picturesque.
8. Today, Chinese composers are certainly more than just Chinese, “Eastern,” or Oriental. Ethnic artists are undeniably respected agents with individual artistic impulses. But now that these points are self-evident, where do we go from here? Chinese composers might have found their voices, but are they speaking in their own version of a transnational language? If not, then what are the operational logics of Chineseness, under the new circumstances brought about by globalization?
9. John Cage's project has failed Asia. While his philosophies are fully absorbed into the history of art, his music has been swept aside and into the dustbins of musical history. The institutions of the music continue to neglect and negate. Composers outside of the West are invisible in their own concert halls. Meanwhile, the downtown has become the new uptown.
10. Debunking the “East Meets West” binary involves not only a destabilization of the essentialized concept of the East, but also an equally rigorous interrogation of the essentialized concept of the West. We must begin by confronting the very language with which we describe the auditory and the act of composition.
11. What does it mean to "orchestrate" and to "compose"? Could one orchestrate and compose without reproducing the power structures that are implicit in these terminologies? What is the new silence, the new decay, the new reverb, and the new resonance?
12. Music is a system of relationships. Musical notation is a system of symbols as signs as power. How do we revive the mystical and metaphorical power of notation?
13. How does one live outside of one's own musical training and auditory conditioning? Could one hear one's voice outside of one's body?
14. We need to think of the classical concert hall as a “cross-cultural contact zone” (Ang) and a designated space of fantasy. Within such a cross-cultural contact zone, essentialization of the “West” serves two pragmatic purposes – to enable participation, and to allow marginalized groups to temporarily reclaim cultural spaces in a very privileged site within the dominant culture itself.
15. The act of composing therefore must be understood as “cross-cultural free play.” Gestures of appropriation are detached from the origin to which they refer, becoming acts of reconfiguration and misconfiguration. This is in line with what Harold Bloom in The Anxiety of Influence calls “creative misreading” – the way by which a poet clears imaginative space for oneself through deliberately and creatively misreading a precursor. For example, to declare a work an "opera” is to acknowledge an art form and its contradicting set of histories, conventions and assumptions, to give opera a “nod.” But it is also to give oneself permission to misread, misinterpret and reinterpret, and by doing so, reclaim opera as ones own. Through the act of creative misreading, marginality and centrality may be re-imagined, albeit temporarily.
16. How does one resist the demon without giving the demon one's thoughts?