meet me in the green glen (again and again)
why feeling stuck can be a good thing, plus a note about John Clare
Those of you who have been following for a while know that my current research involves the electroacoustic harp (specifically this one) and topics of materiality, affect, and gender. In a previous post, I've written about struggling to reconcile intellectual and creative interests with what I'm doing/being asked to do as a performer. Much of that feeling of being stuck comes from juggling practical concerns: right now, I get paid more as a classical musician1 than I would playing other genres
For self-managed musicians, mixing art and business is complicated. On the one hand, it's necessary to be savvy; the music industry has no sympathy and will cannibalize great ideas without compensation, swallow talented people but leave them to ferment in contractual purgatories. On the other hand, assigning a dollar value to the creative process means chasing trends, which creates a banal, endless nothingscape of Instagram faces, movie franchises, and generic pop songs on replay at Forever 21.
Martin Scorcese invokes the same woe in his “Il Maestro” essay for Harper's Magazine:
We can’t depend on the movie business, such as it is, to take care of cinema. In the movie business, which is now the mass visual entertainment business, the emphasis is always on the word “business,” and value is always determined by the amount of money to be made from any given property—in that sense, everything from Sunrise to La Strada to 2001 is now pretty much wrung dry and ready for the “Art Film” swim lane on a streaming platform.
One could criticize Scorcese for upholding the conservatism of maestro-venerating culture (and its elitism, racism, sexism, etc.). However, I've noticed that a weird byproduct of this cultural sentiment is a resistance to the fluidity of neoliberal capitalism: a desire to keep things in place, to make things last longer, to anchor them more deeply in our imagination. I don't agree that staying in place vs. moving forward should be a question of ideological position (i.e., are you a progressive or a conservative person?). Rather they reflect our anxieties and desires about ourselves; they change our relationships with each other, with objects, and with spaces. They are, like many other ways of seeing, frameworks for experiencing the world.
This week, I'm writing about the ways I have been stuck lately; not to offer you a happy ending of self-improvement solutions, but to encourage you to pay closer attention to sometimes wonderful, always strange stuff that emerges from dysfunctional, suspended action. Over the past few weeks, I've recording loops and listening for glitches, thinking about the persistent longing underlying John Clare's “green language.” In other words, I'm stuck on being stuck.
“It's true, I'm stuck on you”
When I was in elementary school, my evangelical Chinese parents didn't let me listen to any pop music, which meant any song that wasn't a piece of classical music or from the Hosanna! Music praise and worship series felt deliciously profane. I remember when Stacy Orrico's “Stuck” came out in 2002 and was playing in all the Limited Too stores. To my 8 year-old ears, it was catchy, Y2K girl cool, and the best part: it was secular. Finally! A song about crushing on someone other than Jesus (though maybe not these Jesuses).
I haven't listened to “Stuck” for more than 20 years, but it came to mind as I was thinking about what to write. Orrico sings in the chorus:
I hate you, but I love you
I can't stop thinkin' of you
It's true, I'm stuck on you
The word “stuck” can mean lots of things. “I'm stuck on you” means “I'm fixated on you” or more strongly, “I'm obsessed with you.” “I'm stuck” denotes suspended action or obstruction. “Stuck” is also the past tense of “stick,” which means to poke into something or to cling to something. Three dictionary definitions stuck out (“made noticeable, conspicuous”) because they underscore the word's negative connotation:
be unable to progress with a task or find the answer or solution to something.
remain in a static condition; fail to progress.
be or remain in a specified place or situation, typically one perceived as tedious or unpleasant.
No one wants to be stuck. In a capitalist world, self-help gurus, advertisers, and entrepreneurs insist we should flow, to break barriers, and to innovate solutions. I, for one, also tend to prefer a moving river to an alligator-infested swamp. Metaphors aside, the point is that stuckness is a quintessential “ugly feeling,” in the sense that it is not only “associated with situations in which action is blocked or suspended.” It is the state in which action is blocked or suspended that then engenders a whole host of negative feelings: frustration, irritability, envy, etc.
In Ugly Feelings, Sianne Ngai shows us how to be imaginative about negative affects, rather than fixating on turning them into a positive ones (the “look on the bright side” approach). Her method involves focusing on what perceived negative affects do: how female envy shapes feminist identities in criticism or how tonal ambiguity elicits discomfort and panic. Likewise, I'm interested in artistic responses to obstruction—not “10 of the best cures for writer's block” but the idiosyncratic, paradoxical creativity that emerge from creativity's worst nightmare: getting stuck.
L’Homme aux loup La femme aux loop
She made me do work on one ! single sound for 4 days / that was impressive
- Antye Greie, on working with Eliane Radigue
Eliane Radigue is one of the OG mamas of electronic music. Her 20th century work pioneered the ARP 2500 modular synthesizer (recorded onto tape), creating a corpus of sound: long, long drones changing incrementally over a long, long time. She, like the honey badger, doesn't care whether her music has commercial value. Its sheer length and (seeming) monotony might alienate some listeners, but for the ones who choose to stay, we are. locked. in.
Radigue's influence extends to decades of composers and musicians of multiple genres because her sound was so singular and, as composer Sarah Davachi writes, “Éliane's exclusive focus on the ARP 2500 was very inspiring.”
This summer, I finally finished Pink Noises, a collection of interviews with female electronic artists, which I had purchased last year when I was toying with the idea of electronic music on the harp. During my dissertation research, I had stumbled upon this article by Christoph Cox about the undeniable presence of women in the fields of experimental and electronic music. It sort of clicked as an answer to the disagreements about gender, aesthetics, and the harp: my observation has been that the quest to empower the harp (as an instrument/genre in classical music spaces) has been to masculinize it—to make people “take it seriously,” which was code for “make the repertoire less frothy” which was code for “less feminine.” Sure, in the 20th century, female harpists became empowered in the sense that they could work as professional musicians, e.g., they occupied positions in orchestras, or were visible in film/media, or were instrumental (pun intended) in commissioning major works in the repertoire. However, that empowerment was an economic numbers and social influence game in the industry; harpists still drift in the shadows of the great male composers, pedagogues, and soloists. Two notable exceptions are Zeena Parkins and Alice Coltrane—both of whom came to the harp later in life and wouldn't exactly situate themselves in the Western classical tradition.
Her stuff has bite. Vollenweider be damned.
- Chicago Reader review of Zeena Parkins, 1991
Cox cites Pauline Oliveros (another OG electronic music mama) rationalizing that “the marginalization of both women and experimental music makes for a natural affinity between the two,” adding that “for Oliveros and her generation, electronics opened up a new and uncharted world.” Having “all the noises of the world in all their messy heterogeneity laid out on a single plane” meant women were free to create their own language, their own sonic utopias. I think it's noteworthy that Radigue studied with the two Pierres (Henry and Schaeffer) but felt free to do her own thing: “I was never concerned with making music like theirs. I had no desire to do that, anyway.”
While I could write a whole piece on electronic music and feminism and the harp, let's return to Antye Greie's quote about Radigue:
“She made me do work on one ! single sound for 4 days.”
As a classical musician by training, I'm familiar with repetition. Repetitive practice is essential to technique work (muscle memory, physical strength training) and memorization (retention and retrieval). So, why was I so delighted by the idea of working on one sound for 4 days, when I've probably done something similar in my normal practice?
The difference, I think, lies in intention. In classical music training, repetition is highly functional. I practice stuff over and over again because I'm trying to find a solution—to get out of the loop. I'm trying not to be stuck, so I practice until I fix the problem. While Greie doesn't detail why Radigue didn't want her to let go of this sound, I think I might understand Radigue's intent after doing some of my own sound work this summer. Being stuck in a working loop isn't actually about deficiency; it's a way to pause time and to listen extremely closely to extremely tiny differences.
Practice hackers (you know, the “practice smarter, not harder!” types—I'm one of them, too!) like to quote Einstein to demonstrate that good results come from changing bad habits. Sure, it's a useful, pithy quote and true to some degree, but on a deeper level, it carries the philosophical presupposition that humans exist in and act on an inert environment (and perhaps humans, too, are deterministically fixed). I enjoy petting my cat the same way repeatedly. On some days, she will continue to sit in my lap; on other days, she will hiss at me. The explanation is simple: the outcome of my same behavior is dependent on a highly unpredictable variable (my cat's mood).
Or, we're just both insane because we keep expecting the other to behave differently.
What Einstein's quote doesn't consider is that human actions, even ones that seem the same, are riddled with flaws and variances because we are riddled with flaws and variances—that's the beauty of being an organism. So, the ubiquity of human error, the imperfection of being a live thing, means we can find ourselves in a loop and achieve a different outcome at the end of each rotation. In theory, one could get stuck and still inhabit a richly textured world; that is, if one pays close enough attention.
Over the past few weeks, I've finally had time to poke around my electroacoustic harp, and with Patrick's help, I've been experimenting with sound design. Starting something new is always intimidating because of the learning curve (for me, writing original material, for both of us, working with our respective instruments—harp and digital synth—and new software), but we committed to spending 2 hours, 6 days per week, to just trying stuff. In the process, I've discovered I am partial to:
Long drones
Noisy effects (crackles, booms, buzzes)
Counterpoint, especially when they're buried in loops
Palimpsestic compositional process: We seem to work best when we write/record in layers, then deleting or re-recording earlier layers. It's probably very common in ambient electronic music production, and I appreciate that it's like playing Exquisite Corpse (which we very much enjoy) but with sound and the ability to edit.
At the start of the summer, the idea of spending 4 days on a single sound wouldn't have occurred to me. If anything, it seemed absurd, especially to something like me who has built a performing career on a highly efficient, pragmatic approach to music creation. While I won't be asking my students to spend multiple days on one note anytime soon, there is something to be said about getting stuck on an idea or repeating the same action in one's practice—just to learn how to feel, hear, and see it anew each time.
extract of a VERY rough draft of something we made, currently just titled “riblet” 🐷
Coda: is John Clare brat?
The title for this week's post comes from the poem “Meet Me in the Green Glen” by English poet John Clare. I discovered Clare while reading Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City this summer; while 19th-century English poetry isn't typically my thing, Williams frames Clare as a writer of the “green language,” a Romantic-era literary movement characterized by “prolonged, rapt, exceptional description: an intricate working of particularity” and “an intense devotion to watching and describing nature.” However, because Williams’s book is a historical materialist reading of rural and urban sentiments in English literature, he describes young Clare's reach for the green language as “not only the literary change but directly, in his person and his history, the inwardness of the social transformation.” Here, Williams refers to dramatic shifts in rural land economics during Clare's time, and the imagined feelings and real occurrences of dispossession that came with new capitalist developments of “the old country”—what Williams calls Clare's “rural elegy.”
what is then achieved, against this experience of pain, is a way of feeling which is also a way of writing … It is to survive at all, as a thinking and feeling man, that he needs the green language of the new Nature.
(Williams, 202, italics mine)
I like the idea of using artistic language itself to intervene on narratives and descriptions of the world, to respond directly to “the affirmative culture of a market society, where art is tolerated as essentially unthreatening” (jacket summary, Ugly Feelings). Like the green language, the loop might be a kind of sonic language that is all at once political, affective, and aesthetic; it is my response to the too-quick, too-empty things that dispossess us. To repeat a sound is to create a place—perhaps a green glen—to which we can return, again and again.
live long & prosper,
✨ Noël Éternel 🎅🏼 🎄
This week's Corner of Wondrous and Powerful
Listening: The Canadian citizenship test study guide—I'm taking it this week! 🤞🏼
Reading: This November Mag interview by Sianne Ngai, author of Ugly Feelings, which is probably the most simultaneously playful, challenging, and enjoyable book of cultural theory I've read in a while.
Watching: Atashinchi, a sitcom anime that I can't stop watching because Mrs. Tachibana is THE archetypal Asian mom. For example, “Mother Doesn't Believe in Cookbooks.” IYKYK.
Concert fees don't get talked about enough in professional development classes, so I hope to address this in a future post.