Foucault: Fascism and Freedom

“The strategic adversary,” wrote Michel Foucault, “is fascism. . . . And not only historical fascism, the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini—which was able to mobilize and use the desire of the masses so effectively—but also the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.” (Foucault, “Preface to Anti-Oedipus, xiv.) Elsewhere, Foucault wrote that “men have dreamed of liberating machines. But there are no machines of freedom, by definition. (Foucault, “Space, Knowledge, and Power”, The Foucault Reader, 247.)

Fascism is an unpopular word these days, perhaps because of its grandiose overtones. It is equated with the terrors of Nazism, terrors incommensurable with the petty fears and bitternesses of day-to-day life. Among jaded liberals, freedom may be equally unpopular for its pompousness: it has become a right-wing buzzword lacking substance. We are right to be wary of these lofty words, which evoke large parades and delusional political fantasies.

But they remain useful words to describe the opposing forces of smaller-scale battles that we fight every day: battles against boredom and frustration, irritation, and intolerance, either of ourselves or of others. These are the battles that Michel Foucault was interested in, and that interest us as composers and composition teachers.

Composition has two moments. In its first moment, it reflects our everyday behavior. It shows us where we stand and what we care about; what we believe about ourselves, our identity, tastes, and fears. This first moment—the moment of revelation—is ethically neutral, but it exposes the battlefield upon which ethics operates. It exposes the perpetual war taking place in our heads: the war between the fascists and the freedom-fighters. In its second moment, then, composition compels us pick a side. We must choose either to practice fascism, or to practice freedom. In its small but not insignificant way, then, composition is an ethical practice, precisely because reason cannot account for this choice. It is, rather, a matter of courage.

I hope to prove to you that the metaphor of war, heavy-handed as it may seem, is appropriate for what we do. I hope to prove it to you by contrasting two teaching methodologies which, I think, highlight what is at stake in our practice. The first, traditional methodology is based on discipline, authoritarianism and intolerance: on instilling the values of fascism in the name of musical tradition and culture. The second methodology is, in a word, experimental; it eschews discipline and authority, in the name of letting students fight their own battles and come to terms with freedom on their own terms. Although narrow minds will interpret this as an evasion of composition responsibility, we believe it is the only way to teach composition responsibly.

Traditional Compositional Pedagogy

Traditional compositional pedagogy is conservative and infantilizing. Its attitude towards the student is fundamentally contemtuous. It forces the student to submit to the authority of masters: master composers, masterworks, and master theoreticians. These masters treat their students as idiots who need to “understand music” before they can compose. A harmony textbook that I despise presents this situation in no uncertain terms, using the condescending and humorless tone that veils all mastery:

This book offers no shortcuts. There are no shortcuts in learning music theory—especially in the development of writing skills. If twenty-first-century students wonder why they need to master such skills—why they need to take the time to learn a musical language spoken by composers of the past—they can be reminded that they are learning to form the musical equivalents of simple sentences and paragraphs. The purpose is not to learn to write “like” Mozart or Brahms, but to understand the language the great composers spoke with such matchless eloquence, the language that embodies some of the greatest achievements of the human spirit.

—Edward Aldwell (Curtis and Mannes) and Carl Schachter (Mannes and Juilliard), Harmony and Voice Leading Edition III (2003), “Preface”, xiii.

These words, written eight years ago, fuel an academic industry of musical mastery. The authors, who have taught at Curtis, Mannes, and Juilliard, believe that they are the heirs of a glorious tradition of Western compositional craft: the tradition of Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms. But they belong instead to a parallel tradition of pedantic explicators, crotchety theorists who had to lean on a crutch of musical principles. Johann Joseph Fux, who wrote the Gradus ad Parnassum in 1725, is perhaps the master of this tradition of mastery. He wrote:

Some people will perhaps wonder why I have undertaken to write about music, there being so many works by outstanding men who have treated the subject most thoroughly and learnedly; and more especially, why I should be doing so just at this time when music has become almost arbitrary and composers refuse to be bound by any rules and principles, detesting the very name of school and law like death itself. To such I want to make my purpose clear. There have certainly been many authors famous for their teaching and competence, who have left an abundance of works on the theory of music; but on the practice of writing music they have said very little, and this little is not easily understood. Generally, they have been content to give a few examples, and never have they felt the need of inventing a simple method by which the novice can progress gradually, ascending step by step to attain mastery in this art. I shall not be deterred by the most ardent haters of school, nor by the corruptness of the times.

. . . I do not not believe that I can call back composers from the unrestrained insanity of their writing to normal standards. Let each follow his own counsel. My object is to help young persons who want to learn.

—Johann Joseph Fux (trans. Alfred Mann), The Study of Counterpoint (from Gradus ad Parnassum) (1725), “The Author’s Foreword to the Reader”, 17.

If there is a glorious compositional tradition, it is not to be found in Fux’s treatise or Aldwell and Schacter’s textbook. These works have one objective: to fuel the students’ fear that understanding what one is doing is essential for composition. This is true only from the fascist perspective. To compose freely, however, the opposite is true: we must leap into the void.

Cage and Feldman

As Foucault said, “there are no machines for freedom.” That means no particular methodology can teach a composition student to be free. At best, a teacher can simply confirm that “musical understanding” only leads so far—and less far than we probably think. Morton Feldman happily recounts his first composition lesson with John Cage, in which the teacher did not criticize, but rather celebrated, the student’s insufficiency of understanding:

At this first meeting I brought John a string quartet. He looked at it a long time and then said, “How did you make this?” I thought of my constant quarrels with Wolpe, and also that just a week before, after showing a composition of mine to Milton Babbitt and answering his questions as intelligently as I could he said to me, “Morton, I don't understand a word you're saying.” And so, in a very weak voice I answered John, “I don't know how I made it.” The response to this was startling. John jumped up and down, and with a kind of high monkey squeal screeched, “Isn’t that marvelous. Isn’t that wonderful. It’s so beautiful, and he doesn't know how he made it.” Quite frankly, I sometimes wonder how my music would have turned out if John had not given me those early permissions to have confidence in my instincts.

—Notes on recording of Durations, Morton Feldman. Time Records 58007, reprinted on covers of Feldman's scores published by Peters Edition. (See footnote 22 of Morton Feldman Interview by Fred Orton and Gavin Bryars)

And Feldman, in turn, celebrated the ethics of composition in his own teaching practice, by helping the student find the courage to make a musical decision:

Gavin Bryars: So what kind of teaching do you do? What sort of thing would you do with a student?

Morton Feldman: I don’t do anything.

GB: You would give him the time and freedom to do some work, then, and see what resulted?

MF: I take the terror out of some idea, the idea of a finished piece. They come to me, I’m well-known and the only guy they’ve ever brought a piece to, and I don’t ask them: “Where did you get your intervals?” That alone is tremendous.

—Morton Feldman Interview by Fred Orton and Gavin Bryars

Ten minutes of Cage and Feldman in conversation:

• Cage and Feldman in Conversation (14:00–23:31)

We cannot help wanting to know, and wanting to substitute the facts of knowledge for the uncertainties of action. Knowledge, however, is only half of the compositional problem, as the conversation between Cage and Feldman makes clear. Your compositional thought can understand the gap separating it from compositional action—can grasp it in all its raw terror. But try as it may, it cannot bridge this gap. To compose, first you must think; then, sooner or later, you must act.

Surrealism

If you are not yet convinced, let the history of creative unreason compel you. [. . .]

We are still living under the reign of logic, but the logical processes of our time apply only to the solution of problems of secondary interest. The absolute rationalism which remains in fashion allows for the consideration of only those facts narrowly relevant to our experience. Logical conclusions, on the other hand, escape us.

—André Breton, “First Surrealist Manifesto”, in Avant-Garde Drama 563.

We are all at the mercy of the dream and we owe it to ourselves to submit its power to the waking state. It is a terrible tyrant garded in mirrors and flashes of lightning. What is pen and paper, what is weriting, what is poetry before this giant who holds the musicles of clouds in his own muscles? You are there stammering before the serpent, ignoring the dead leaves and glass traps, fearing for your fortune, your heart and your leisures, and in the shadow of your dreams you look for all the mathematical signs which will restore to you a more natural death.

—J.-A. Boiffard, P. Eluard, and R. Vitrac, “The Surrealist Revoution”, ibid., 573.

Thread Chorale

Once, having lost my compositional nerve, I tried to recast composition as a science of pure thought. I dreamt of “machines of musical freedom”: compositions that were determined completely by attractive algorithms; crystalline mathematical structures unblemished by vulgar decision-making. I spent two years learning how to program, learning to abdicate decisions to random variables and automatic processes. Eventually I designed a program that could generate the abstract structures I had imagined. The realization of my dream, however, was also its destruction. When all was said and done, I still had to choose specific sounds to turn my abstractions into concrete pieces. What I had envisioned as the success of compositional logic was its failure to produce any particular decision whatsoever: a clear failure, for which I am extremely grateful, for it convinced me better than any argument I could devise that the essence of compositional freedom is not understanding why.

• Thread Chorale

Outro

[. . .]

Light one up before you mosey out that door,

Once you cuddled ’em and kissed ’em,

But we’re bringin’ down Their system,

And it isn’t a resistance, it’s a war. . . .