- Metal Machine Music: Metal Machine Music is an album by musician Lou Reed. Wikipedia says it’s "variously considered to be a joke, a grudging fulfillment of a contractual obligation, or an early example of noise music. The album features no songs or even recognizably structured compositions, eschewing melody and rhythm for an hour of modulated feedback and guitar effects". In the lines after this reference, Feld writes, “It’s good to think of music as having a function, praise, or lament, satire or warning.” I’d say it’s hard to tell what his opinion is of Metal Machine Music, but he does describe it as “an album that can drive roaches out of your apartment,” so it seems like he at least considers it very loud noise. The “satire” option in that particular line is probably connected to the idea that the album was a joke or an unhappy contractual obligation.
- Schoenberg’s emancipation of dissonance: This concept involves a lot of musical terminology that I don’t quite understand, but I feel that it’s important considering the epigraph on this poem (“Birds of prey have no song.” –James Richardson) and the penultimate line, “Expand your definition of song.” Wikipedia says, “The emancipation of the dissonance was a concept or goal put forth by composer Arnold Schoenberg and others […] It may be described as a metanarrative to justify atonality.” If there are any musically inclined people who want to look into it further, please do! I read a little of the article and it just didn’t click for me. Is it basically justifying sounds that don’t easily please the ear? Again, please chime in if you understand this better than I do.
- Ornette Coleman: A saxophonist, violinist, trumpeter, and composer who was involved in the creation and naming of “free jazz.”
- “Sister Ray:” “Sister Ray” is a seventeen-and-a-half minute song by the Velvet Underground from the album White Light/White Heat. Wikipedia cites Lou Reed (the same Lou Reed from Metal Machine Music) as saying of the lyrics: "'Sister Ray' was done as a joke—no, not as a joke—but it has eight characters in it and this guy gets killed and nobody does anything.” Sounds similar to the ideas about Metal Machine Music, the idea of making something loud and noisy and musical (your opinions of both may vary) as a joke or something that doesn't really go anywhere.
So what do all of these references mean within the context of the poem? I think the many references to music are obviously important, again considering the epigraph and the final lines of the poem. Feld references both an album and a musical concept that aren’t necessarily pleasing to the ear, as well as a musician from the free jazz movement (which I’m sure many people dislike and don’t consider “music”) and a really long song that seems to have originated as a joke. What’s he saying about the song of birds of prey, then? I know we listened to the sound of a goshawk in class the other day and it wasn’t exactly beautiful, but Feld tells us to “Expand your definition of song.”
At first, the references to freedom (Schoenberg's emancipation of dissonance, Coleman's "free jazz") made me think that the speaker was commenting on the captivity that raptors now live in and perhaps wishing that they could be free. However, upon further thinking about what Schoenberg and Ornette were doing I think the speaker is actually justifying their captivity, or at least trying to point out that their captivity is not necessarily a bad thing. Schoenberg's emancipation of dissonance was an expansion of possible harmonic sounds through a very complex system of rules dictating how to resolve these dissonances. Ornette Coleman's music is not as free as one might think. He was a straight ahead jazz player for a long time before he branched out and his music still contains most of those elements such as a strict adherence to time, and melody. He payed less attention to form and specific harmony and in that way was able to focus more on creating melodies. What im getting at is that both of those guys essentially found more "freedom" not by imposing different rules on themselves. Essentially learning to be free in captivity. Perhaps the speaker is implying a similar idea about the captivity of raptors.
ReplyDeleteJust for fun here is a link to a great Ornette Coleman song...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNbD1JIH344
The idea of learning to be free in captivity is a really good point I hadn't thought about! I think I heard once that you have to learn to learn the rules before you can play with them/start breaking them, and it seems like that's the case with Coleman, at least. I'm trying to figure out how this relates to the poem, though. Of course there's the setting of the poem, which seems to be the poet/speaker teaching a class, so I guess that would relate to learning the rules? The poem does include, "When a raptor has been injured so it no longer can survive in the wild we call that condition educational, which doesn't mean it's tame." I suppose, if we're going with the idea that you have to learn the rules of jazz before you can break them and play "free jazz," you could imagine the raptor in captivity as a musician playing jazz by the book--it doesn't necessarily mean he's "tame," or that he cannot play "free jazz."
ReplyDeleteDoes any of that make sense?