November 23, 2008: Theoretical Prespectives

Bringing things up to date here, November 25th. Theory-related issues: I am continuing with reading Keith Negus, and hope to get started properly into Iain Chambers. Wrote a bit more on Vulliamy (1977) and added this to existing corpus. In addition, I have been reading on other PhDs in areas such as documentary film in Ireland. So far so good, but I have been surprised by the emphasis on theory in the ones I've looked at. Admittedly, I have not read right through all 2-300 pages of any particular thesis. I am very impressed with Keith Negus' discussion of theoretical approaches to popular music. He makes a very difficult subject very approachable. His first chapter considers audiences, and articulates the mass culture vs active audience debate that began with Adorno and runs throughout the latter decades of the 20th century, culminating, in Negus' analysis, with the work of Iain Chambers. I have borrowed Chambers' book and am looking forward to reading it as it seems well laid out and theoretically engaging, while simultaneously addressing actual musical texts. This is important to me, because I surmise that theories of music as culture often theorise the aesthetics of music. No, they don't: in fact, what they do is aestheticise the practice of theory as opposed to using theory as a basis for examining text or objects from the real world. A good example here is Adorno, and I have had an initial look at Leppert's discussion of the mechanics of wAdorno's writing. I've ordered the book 'Essays on Music'. I started reading a couple of critiques of Adorno, on which focuses directly on his writings on jazz by Witkin. Witkin argues that Adorno's problem with jazz stems from his view of the nature of music. From what Witkin says, Adorno considered music which developed through performance - and which involved a dialectic between the individual notes and the entire piece - as progressive, and music in which the structure didn't develop as regressive. In addition, he wasn't convinced by what we might call 'the characteristics of embellishment' employed by jazz musicians - trills, gracenotes, repetitions, improvisations. Not exactly sure where Irish rock music fits into this at the minute, except to say that in my view key rock musicians were as sceptical of commerciality as Adorno himself. Their music should be read in this way, in the way Witkin and Leppert wish us to read Adorno - as the embodiment of a musical politics which, while realising that perfect articulation of idealised dialectic between notes and the whole is impossible, nonetheless strives to achieve that. Another idea worth teasing out is that of Adorn's utopianism, and how this related to the utopias (or spaces) in Irish rock songs. Listening to 'Hard Nose The Highway' - Van Morrison. High-end, with some distinctive songs. Certainly aspects of Irishness are key here. Am thinking about what an 80-year old chap who bought a keyboard in Savin's (where I work) said the other day: the reason Irish traditional music became unpopular is because it was (a) specialised - only people with a knowledge of the tradition could play it and (b) after a while it all sounds the same, despite the fact that there are stylistic and regional variations, and different categories of music: reels, jigs, hornpipes, slides. Amazing. One other point is that between Rory Gallagher's, Phil Lynott's and Van Morrison's families, there were no sisters. Might be relevant. I attended a challenging talk on the history of theories of evolution this evening, and based on that I want to think about how we could view first wave Irish rock as an evolution - a response or adaptation to a transformation of the Irish socio-economic-political environment, or the overcoming of a certain problem, lack or need.