[following Schmidt's lecture]
Audience: To ask a simple question, what happens to the words in a song, in an age of global media sounds?
Schmidt: But it's never the words standing alone, they're always being experienced against the larger musical context.
Audience: Didn't you say that with the Cage piece he was trying to make something that didn't need translation? That's also happening in visual culture, people are doing things on the internet that need to be understood all over the world, so we have to speak in images instead of words.
Schmidt: The speaking in the John Cage piece was like music, it was the sound of the voice.
Audience: Any vocals would be in the context of sound impressions anyway, so in the context of world music, for those who don't speak the language it would just be more noise, more sound.
Schmidt: In this phenomenon of global music it is important to show how you can use the differences between musical cultures. Using it only in an eclectic way, such as this Australian group Yothu Yindi, who manage somehow to use musical forms from their own culture in an eclectic way, is rather limiting, I think.
Audience: I just have a problem with the word 'music'. Any sound seems to be accepted as long as it eventually is turned into music. We started with the theremin interpreting Tchaikovsky. Then the everyday sound came in, then Boulez, then we couldn't differentiate anymore between what is electronic and what is acoustic, what is original and what is a reproduction, and now you say that the words Cage is reading are also music. I don't see it as music, I'm getting a little disturbed by the word 'music', especially when we look way ahead. In the future, what role will sound have if everything is at our disposal and everything will be music?
Schmidt: It depends, there are different meanings. The Greeks had a totally different understanding of music. Now we try to use music under the idea of media sounds, in which it depends on how you use something. How Cage used his speaking was a musical way. It's very difficult to have a very straight theory with very defined terms to describe these phenomena we are confronted with, so we always try to look for a new vocabulary. Often we use these categories like metaphors, like analog and digital, terms from the visual. For example, when DJ Spooky spoke of 'glitch' music, he didn't use it in an eclectic way, it was used to create a new context. I think that's the difference between mixes of DJ Spooky and the music of shopping malls.
Audience: I'm interested in the way you used 'exoticism', being the tourist's version of another culture. It's not a 'good' term, it's just a kitschy term?
Schimdt: For me Yothu Yindi is an example of kitschy exoticism, in contrast to someone like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. There is no synthesis.
Audience: We can call it tokenism also, like when you represent a group of people by having each member being a different race.
Audience: With a global music scene there is ripe opportunity for cross-pollination but at the same time in order for mass appeal an accidental aesthetic imperialism which emerges, in which culturally specific and rhythmically unique musical idioms are all transformed to have the same disco beat behind them.
Schmidt: After four or five years now, it changed. They have now MTV Brazil, MTV India, which include more and more sounds which could be called 'authentic'.
Audience: Going back to the point about being disturbed by the word 'music', usually I would say 'No no, it's all music', but there are some moments when I get very frustrated, especially when I have to give a class on rock aesthetics, everyone is speaking in terms that are only appropriate for classical music. How shameful it is that we have one word for sound art - 'music'. Yet we draw very sharp distinctions between film and video, and we have different aesthetic criteria for each. Virtual arts have their own names. What we've been listening to is different sound art using very different materials, using very different practices, yet it's all being stuck in the same place and we feel compelled to talk about it this way without ever going deeper into what is going on, without asking ourselves how we should speak about it.
Schmidt: It's always more difficult to speak of musical phenomena than to describe visual or textual phenomena. We need not only to describe what happens in media sounds, but also to develop criteria for value. For example, I tried to develop the difference between exoticism and synthesis.
Audience: Regarding exoticism, I think one of the problems of world music is that it allows us to become virtual tourists, where we can actually experience other cultures with no complexity whatsoever. Without the complexity of language, having to interact with people, see them, smell them, eat their food, it's a virtual interaction. On the concept of sound versus music, the term music bothers me as well. Looking at it from a physiological and psychological viewpoint, we can't block out sound, it's tyrannical.
Schmidt: Contact such as smelling or tasting another culture is a process of synthesis. Exoticism is always at a certain distance, using something without connection or combination.
Audience: But I think it's pretty difficult to differentiate between the two. What is appropriate use of another musical source? We were talking about Moby's blues music samples. I can understand having a relationship that goes beyond 'This sounds novel to me, I'm going to use it without knowing anything about it'. In case of the Australian group using their own instruments, it's particularly difficult.
Audience: Isn't part of that really having to do with context? For Moby he just used it because it sounded good. Something like world music has this political sort of motivation, or intentionality, to mix things together, to cross cultural boundaries.
Audience: So you have to consider the motive of the artist?
Audience: Chantal Akerman said that in taking pictures of people, when you respect that subject you take from that subject in a certain way, which is different from taking it in a voyeuristic and manipulative way. I think intentionality matters.
Audience: Maybe the whole groups of people who feel they are in contact with other cultures through world music is more important than artistic intentionality.
Audience: In speaking as the representative of a group, it's a catch-22 in terms of how to make use of your own cultural material.
Schirmacher: So you see Michael your talk needs another chapter. You present just a good case, you are in favor and supportive of global music which is done in the right way, but you kind of miss out the critical question. You should consider someone who is in-between cultures. Some of you here who speak another language like me know what it means to be between languages or between culture. You gain something but you lose a lot. You become illiterate in both languages. Your only hope is to find a language which is not defined as in-between but is a language of your own. This is very difficult in sound because sound isn't something you construct. You need your evidence, your life experience for it. The sounds you understand are the sounds of your childhood, the sounds of your mother's womb. Those are the sounds you're still related to. It sounds pretty different in India than in Hamburg, Germany. Here we generate sound with the material at hand. But what kind of original evidence, of subjective material do we still have after we are bent out of our culture, and left in-between?
Schmidt: The aspect of experience is very important. I think the question we should discuss now is 'What will be the music of the future?' Will we go in a direction of a musical illiteracy?
Schirmacher: I know that for DJ Spooky his key concept is collage. He claims, and this we should take seriously but also attack seriously, there is a language of collage. This is, I think, not settled yet. Think of somebody who would really use the English language in collage and tries to speak to you. You understand something, it's gone, something else, it's gone, it's not possible to do anything with this person but listen and admire, maybe treat it like an artwork, but in media, which is intended for communication, it's not a language you can really understand and act on. Maybe it's not necessary, but it's important to make this difference between music as an art form and sound as communication. Can a collage speak? A collage can inspire, it can give you associations, make you think, maybe, but does a collage itself think? Dada is the first example of collage, Dada certainly caused people to think, but it was not thinking itself. Only stupidos go and make a philosophy of Dada. The philosophy of Dada is very easy to explain - 'Ha Ha Ha!'.
Stone: All the things you're talking about are to a certain extent oppositional practices that are embedded in some prior political context, and it's in that dialectic that they acquire their voice, otherwise they don't mean anything. Collage without a context is meaningless. A collage of music drawn from a so-called urban black idiom which is presented in the context of whitebread FM radio means something. As that is placed in different contexts, it mean different things.
Schirmacher: So you have to be literate in order to be so illiterate in your music. But who is? It assumes that people are educated, that's not the truth.
Stone: Consider what you said about language and what Gloria Anseldua says. She points out that speaking multiple languages means differently depending on whether the language you're speaking is the dominant language or the slave language.
Schirmacher: But how many can you actually speak? My point is that you're lucky if you can speak your own tongue.
Stone: But speaking your own tongue and trying to speak another tongue in the context of power means something different than if you're speaking German as opposed to French or English, which all have more or less the same position'.
Schirmacher: Therefore it's a very important point to say that collage only works in a context, and this context is very often knowledge or experience-based.
Schmidt: This is what John Cage taught us, a collage itself is a context, within a larger social context.
Schirmacher: But what kind of context do we have? You raised Adorno's question about the impact on technology. Technology is now our major context. It's much stronger than all this cultural memory stuff. In technology it becomes just another smart technique to use the locals for the global economy. To earn this local currency worldwide.
Schmidt: Adorno frowns upon the use of technology only in a virtual sense, to create only effects without sense.
Schirmacher: The point is that technologies are not local, they are universalizing things, and against the contexts of the things. This collage stuff is an extreme violence for people raised in certain cultures. Then they are told that they are old-fashioned, and to 'Enjoy that DJ Spooky from New York uses you!' 'Thank you DJ!'
Audience: I agree with Wolfgang on the level of language, this is a huge debate I've been having in the multimedia program where I teach, because more and more the students that come in are illiterate in text. They are not able to read very well, because of the kinds of the education we have in the U.S. This doesn't mean that they're not smart. They're very smart in terms of multimedia and technology, it's a kind of new generational smartness. It's a way you can develop intellect very early on, through the understanding of very complex machines and how they work. We have this argument that these young people are creating very interesting, very complex media works. However, I am a language person and a text person from way back, and part of me thinks you just can't express very complex ideas without a kind of language. Until we have a text that we share it's very difficult to communicate very complex thoughts, because we just can't remember enough from one moment to the next. You have to be able to read it over and over again.
Schmidt: But there are things you can only really say in music.
Schirmacher: The point is that it works both ways. Only so far as you are willing to be tech-oriented as your students will they be open to meet you. We have to require that you are able to speak many languages. I know for some Americans this is the greatest threat! But I'm not just talking about linguistic language, but every kind, you must avoid finding yourself saying 'This is the only language I know, here I am at home and secure.' You have to encourage them. In your PhD dissertation you should be able to speak both languages, the language of your media and of philosophy to defend the ideas. That is something we should not give up. Your students can ask you if you're able to play Playstation, because otherwise you will not understand their language. Why should they talk to you?
Audience: I play Doom, I swear!
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