Thursday, July 19, 2001

Only in termination can we locate authentic music

The only analogy I can think of in relation to music is positively communal and historic in nature. Instruments in music are the means of distilling essences. The instrument is not itself the reification and purpose of music, but rather the means by which mythology is dispelled from materiality -- like a telescope which, upon seeing the ship sail into the horizon, dispels the mythology of a flat planet Earth. The nice thing about the instrument is that it must be public in its function; it needs reception in order for it to be ontologically coherent. (Tragedy lies in the fact that few listeners can distinguish the true beauty of music as separate from its fetishistic consumerist function, and thus see through the lens, as it were.)

Only when death, termination, a punctum of nothingness, simultaneously obliterates and creates all meaning in the note do we find authentic music. For example, Chopin demonstrates an innate knowledge that music is always-already a decadent historical artefact which exists in its subjective immanence as a fragment of memory and is immediately destroyed. It is this fact which leads in Chopin's music to the many abrupt terminations at the end of brisk cascading passages. John Coltrane placed a similar demand on his saxophone, as he continually sought the unification of presence and annihilation -- a point of zero-degree signification.

Ultimately, we must view such gestures as ontologically monotheistic in nature.