{"id":941,"date":"2016-07-18T09:49:52","date_gmt":"2016-07-18T13:49:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/?p=941"},"modified":"2016-07-18T09:49:52","modified_gmt":"2016-07-18T13:49:52","slug":"doing-violence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/2016\/07\/doing-violence.html","title":{"rendered":"Doing Violence"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"smash140-100x100\"<\/a>Alex Ross\u2019s thoughtful essay on vicious uses of music<\/strong><\/a> left a few interesting stones oddly turned.\u00a0 At the conclusion, he asks us to \u201crenounce the fiction of music\u2019s innocence,\u201d citing the damage that music can do.\u00a0 \u201cEither music affects the world around it or it doesn\u2019t,\u201d he says.\u00a0 It\u2019s a curious dichotomy, as is this one: \u201cIt is a mistake to place \u2018music\u2019 and \u2018violence\u2019 in separate categories\u2026sound itself can be a form of violence.\u201d<\/p>\n

John Cage opened up new ways of hearing with his exhortation to find music in all sound.\u00a0 It\u2019s a call to freshen our ears and minds to novel sonic sources and juxtapositions, to listen to everything in our environment with a sense of wonder.\u00a0 Once that step is taken, it is logical to claim there is no distinction between music and sound.\u00a0 Logical, but not accurate, necessary, or even useful.<\/p>\n

Sound predates our species, and will certainly survive it.\u00a0 But music is sound that is particularly animated, as far as we know, only by humans.\u00a0 We harness sound to help us survive, to help us make sense of ourselves and our sonic environment.\u00a0 The result of that process is music.\u00a0 Even Cage\u2019s call to listen differently to the sounds of our surroundings is a way of harnessing sound, making them musical.<\/p>\n

The distinction helps separate some of the threads of Ross\u2019s argument: certainly music may be blasted through loudspeakers in an effort to cause aural and psychological damage, but this has little to do with the nature of music, but rather the nature of sound amplification.\u00a0 It\u2019s a slight distinction in this case, I believe, but it\u2019s important when that conflation is used to make points about the category of music.<\/p>\n

Humans, as all-too-ample evidence shows, are capable of extraordinary cruelty and remarkable tenderness.\u00a0 We are capable of guilt and innocence, if we understand innocence to be freedom from specific wrong.\u00a0 It is difficult to imagine anyone among us who is unremittingly cruel or kind from the instant of conception to death.\u00a0 Those capabilities exist in all of us, to be called forth as frequently as our circumstances, genetic recipes and choices demand.<\/p>\n

As music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives, it connects to every facet of our existence.\u00a0 It\u2019s only natural that its uses cover the entire spectrum of human capacity.\u00a0 Music can be innocent; it can be guilty.\u00a0 It can enliven the spirit or it can crush the moral compass.\u00a0 It can\u2019t be everything at once, but it certainly can be pretty much anything anytime.<\/p>\n

As for the use of music in torture: the portability of recorded music has encouraged us to create soundtracks for our existence, to lose ourselves in the song or composition that best reflects or directs our mood.\u00a0 As Ross indicates, the specific choices of songs used for torture are often a result of the torturers\u2019 soundtrack needs and preferences, regardless of their effect on the target of the torture.\u00a0 In that sense, this military use of music is more propagandistic than torturous — no less pernicious, perhaps, but nonetheless different \u2013 which is where Slayer\u2019s \u201cAngel of Death\u201d is very much in keeping with the spirit of World War One\u2019s \u201cOver There\u201d: \u00a0its usage is meant to absorb the mind, focus the attention on the task at hand, and deflect thoughts of personal choice, using a musical language that has the urgency of the new.\u00a0 Ross rightly acknowledges music\u2019s ability to invade our thoughts, and our inability to shut it out \u2013 no eyelids protect the ear canals.<\/p>\n

Much has been made and little understood about the impact music has on words.\u00a0 We are all familiar with songs lyrics that have little effect when spoken.\u00a0 Yet, when these words are intoned in just the right way, with just the right play of pitch and time, their meaning is amplified, even morphed into something unimaginable from the written page.\u00a0 Yet the words remain words, with a literal significance music doesn\u2019t convey on its own.<\/p>\n

So when \u201cmusic\u201d is used in torture, there are three elements in play.\u00a0 There is the volume achieved through amplification, which is distinguishable from music, to the degree that any amplified sound would achieve the same effect.\u00a0 Then there are the words, which frequently convey more of a message to the perpetrators than to the objects of torture.\u00a0 Finally, there is the music, which, in Ross\u2019s most cogent point, is in the ear of the beholder: the cultural associations of the listener determine what is pleasant and what is unbearable.\u00a0 Bel canto, country western, hip hop \u2013 each has its rapt listeners, each its cowering cringers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Alex Ross\u2019s thoughtful essay on vicious uses of music left a few interesting stones oddly turned.\u00a0 At the conclusion, he asks us to \u201crenounce the fiction of music\u2019s innocence,\u201d citing the damage that music can do.\u00a0 \u201cEither music affects the world around it or it doesn\u2019t,\u201d he says.\u00a0 It\u2019s a curious dichotomy, as is this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-941","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry","8":"has-post-thumbnail"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/941","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=941"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/941\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":944,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/941\/revisions\/944"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/curves\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}