Table of Contents for White Musical Mythologies
Prelude: A Silence Filled with Speech
We begin inside the Maverick Concert Hall during the premiere of John Cage's 4'33" and end with Hegel's ontological metabolism. This Prelude introduces the main themes and theses of the book: (1) music embodies the philosophical question of the "now" or of presence; (2) as twentieth-century modernists sought to intensify the performed presence of their music, they forged an ontological understanding of the nature of sound that persists in the pages of sound studies; and (3) ontology—the belief in pure sound, pure presence—is a white mythology. The Prelude includes a close reading of Derrida's essay "White Mythologies" through the lens of Lévinas's critique of ontology, thinkers of Blackness like Sylvia Wynter and Tendayi Sithole, as well as Fuoco B. Fann's This Self We Deserve: A Quest After Modernity.
1.The Ontology of the Ineffable: Satie and Bergson
Chapter One examines Satie's music through Bergson's writings about time. While Bergson mused that the movements of a hypnotist's pendulum and musical rhythm seem equally effective to induce heightened aesthesia, Satie composed repetitive, hypnotic music in a fin-de-siècle Montmartre hotbed of mystical symbolists and occultists. The composer and the philosopher each believed that oscillating rhythms invoke a deeper, truer condition: musical illusion educes truth. However, Satie and Bergson's respective legacies bespeak a movement toward disillusion, and specifically toward ontology, that characterizes twentieth-century thought about sound. I start with Satie's early mystical music and move by way of Deleuze's Bergsonism, Pierre Souvchinsky's theory of ontological time, and Kandinsky's Great Realism toward sound studies. Recent theories of sonic presence and vibrant matter unwittingly owe something to late Satie the cynic. Caustic, Satie banalized his music, envisioning "sonic fluxes" and "ontological" vibrations rumbling under his Furniture Music.
2.Ontological Machines: Varèse and Bataille
In "Base Materialism and Gnosticism," which appeared in a 1930 edition of the Parisian journal Documents, Bataille dubbed archaic Gnostic icons depicting part-human, part-animal deities as "base matter," a kind of materialism "external and foreign to ideal human aspirations, [refusing] to allow itself to be reduced to the great ontological machines resulting from these aspirations." This chapter examines Varèse's endeavor to create musical "ontological machines" through forms of primitivism, re-envisioning the New York cityscape, Paracelsus's cosmos, and Miguel Angel Asturias's surrealistic visions of ancient Maya, in sound. Varèse shared Bataille's fascination with avant-garde violence and forms of alterity, but I argue that the composer was a sonic ontologist, utterly distinct from the philosopher.
3.Ontological Appropriation: Boulez and Artaud
Chapter Three follows Boulez on a voyage to Brazil during the early 1950s where he witnessed a Candomblé practitioner in the throes of spirit possession, incorporating the poetics of the Candomblé into Le Marteau sans maître. Though Boulez insisted that new music ought not simply "reconstruct" the ethnographic other, I show that he did a lot of reconstructing, taking sounds from Candomblé and from Antonin Artaud's exoticized vocal outbursts in a 1947 radio drama during which the theater guru mimicked Rarámuri peyote ritual. I argue that Boulez's philosophy of musical writing (écriture) was always premised on a self–other binarism, and that his insistence that new music should "dematerialize" and "absorb" the sounds of the other was a moment of ontological appropriation: turning the other into sound. The concluding section interrogates the idea of ontology during its recent rebirth in sound studies and the anthropology of ontologies.
4.The Written Being of Sound: Cage and Derrida
This chapter begins with an excursus on the philosophical nature of phonetic language, drawing from Foucault's "Language to Infinity," Derrida's critique of logo/phonocentrism, and the case of Chinese writing. This excursus sets the ground for the main claim of this chapter: that Cage's bid to "let sounds just be sounds," which was the central idea in his philosophy of sound and performance, was an expression of the metaphysics of phonetic-alphabetic writing. I describe several performance events in which Cage and David Tudor sought the "being" of sound through collaborative event-performances and technological media, joining Cage and Derrida by way of Wiener's Cybernetics and the expansion of écriture, and interrogating Cage's use of Eastern thought.
Postlude: A Simulacrum of a Presence
The Postlude describes a conversation about voice and singing between Cage, John Lennon, and Yoko Ono, suggesting that each of these artists foregrounded liveness, "being there," in their own ways, and also signaled the waning of the literate tradition in western music. Cage and Lennon seem to represent two sides—maybe avant-garde and kitsch—of a technologically revived oral tradition. I end by playing with a Derridean phrase to suggest that the closure of the literary musical tradition might mean the beginning of a new written sonic tradition, leading from Cage and Lennon's 1970s toward the digital inscription of sound in the mp3 file and the democratization of sound via user-friendly production software like GarageBand, global media powerhouses like Amazon, or seemingly transparent ontological machines like YouTube.