essay
at
the heart of the modernist music project lies mis-memory. in
bartok in webern in satie in cage, there is a playfully devious
re-negotiation of musical discourse and structure. often out
of the materials of classical and folk music, modernist composers
make something convincingly familiar yet disquietingly unrecognizable--
herein lies an uncanny valley of experience.
whence
the agon between canny and uncanny? i regard the source as mis-remembrance--
the failure of the faculties to recover thematics given sensations
specific to those thematics. mis-rememberance is first associated
with a particularly biting agony. second, it is associated with
fear, because through the audition, as familiarity lingers,
the discomfort of irresolution chokes the body. the psyche is
affected, and agency becomes that extrusion through a tubular
compulsion to solve this mis-remembrance.
leitmotif is a psycho-music robot composer which creates unholly
bassi continui out of half-submerged memories of once-familiar
tunes. iconic melodies are digested, de-familiarised, and re-assembled
into anxious and unsatisfying {de,ar}rangements. the experiencer
is thrown into a tumble of unnominated and unknowable moods
and sensations. agency, here, is futile resistance.
