Silence to top the Charts?

“It’s worth a dime to get a few minutes of silence.” said Mike McCann to the Billboard magazine in 1959. He was distressed by the impossibility to hold a conversation over the sawing of hill-billy fiddles and the beat of rock’n'roll guitars blaring from the jukebox in the campus hang-out at the University of Detroit. So he decided to press four silent records on a label and placed them in the campus jukebox. Then, for a nickel, they were able to buy three minutes of peace and quiet. Technically, in fact, there was no silence coming from the jukebox speaker but the scratching and hissing from the needle on the record surface. Though this might be covered by the chatter in the student’s hang-out, there is a strong cagean appeal to the idea, even if unintended. John Cage already had the idea of a silent piece in 1947 when he mentioned that he wanted to compose a piece of uninterrupted silence of the lenght of a usual single and sell it to Muzak Co. According to Kyle Gann’s book “No such thing as silence” Cage supposedly read about the plans of placing a silent record in jukeboxes by a studend in a New York Post article in 1952 and the author wonders whether Cage wasn’t worried to be preempted by a commercial version of his visionary concept.

If John Cage would still be living, this autumn he could be worried of not only one, but even two commercial “versions” or “interpretations” of his concept hitting the top of the charts in the UK. The Royal British Legion is selling a “2 minute of silence” mp3 on the occasion of today’s Remembrance Day (11th Nov.) in order to commemorate the sacrifices of armed forces and civilians during times of wars. The aim is to reach the top of the charts with the silent single this Saturday, the day before the official ceremonies are held in Great Britain and other parts of the Commonwealth. In an accompanying video, war veterans along with sportsmen, artists like Thom Yorke and even prime minister James Cameron are shown looking quietly into the camera, as in this excerpts:

It seems to be a clever move to connect silence with death, since this connection, the equation of death and silence, has been made several times in literature, art and human rights campaigns. But there is some unrest, and this is because the idea to push a silent piece into the charts was first conceived by Dave Hilliard after last years successful attempt to upset the XFactor’s winner subscription to christmas’ top-selling single with a Facebook mob buying Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing in the Name” to the top of the charts. Encouraged by that, Hilliard started the Cage Against The Machine campaign, as he states, more or less as a joke but quickly gained traction after the Guardian and other papers wrote about it and gave the idea good chances to succeed later on at christmas. Now he is a little bit upset, as he writes in a blog post, that Liam Maguire sells the silent initiative of the Royal British Legion as his idea and probably diminishes the chances of Cage Against The Machine to score another defeat against a fabricated Cowell hit.

In the middle of this week, “2 minute silence” already entered the top 20, so even if the single won’t push Rihanna or Take That from the top of the charts, there are good chances that at the end of the year the UK might have had two silent pieces of 2 and 4:33 min., each at a top position in the charts, something John Cage would have never dreamed of. Should he be worried? In fact, there are two opposing re-contextualisations competing with each other, both using the charity aspect as a key argument. The Royal British Legion approach is serious and un-ironic to the bone: the silence of countless dead souls should scream at our ignorance and make us aware of how much we owe to the brave that risked their lives for our freedom. In case of the first and second World War, I’m absolutely with them, but with the second Irak war based on lies and false propositions, I rather would ask myself for what reasons these soldiers have been sent there in the first place. The Cage Against The Machine approach then is only ironic and has the charity aspect attached to it at a later stage to give it a somehow deeper meaning which it doesn’t have apart from the joke of having a “really” silent night with this track at christmas and another nice provocation in the direction of Simon Cowell. Or is the CATM campaign avoiding trouble with the John Cage Trust that might stage another bizarre copyright battle concerning the “rights” on the silent piece as against Mike Batt in 2002? But then, imagining the awkward comedy of a radio presenter to introduce a number-one hit single which is nothing less then 4 and a half minute of silence, is compelling. The BBC dealt with that situation in a funny way when they broadcasted an orchestral version of 4:33 at the Barbican Center live with the announcer giving a sportscaster-like explanation of what was going on at the silent performance. You can hear excerpts from this broadcast in this UbuWeb podcast about the sound of silence:

In 1959, McCann believed that ”stereophonic silence will be twice as silent”, as Life magazine reported about his further plans to press stereo “silent platters”. Maybe two charts-topping silent pieces within 2 months provoke a deeper silence as well. Sometimes I think that John Cages 4:33 deserves more silence. It is probably one of the most discussed and talked-about musical or non-musical pieces ever. It is boring to hear again and again how sound artists use Cage’s silent piece as a reference point and as the only justification for a piece of work. 4:33 is 58 years old now, don’t we have some other fresh ideas we can build upon? Maybe making John Cage’s 4:33 a number-one hit is exactly what it needs to stop this endless academic discourse about the piece: many number-one hits leave a sobering effect after the audience has been polluted with a certain song. These hits suddenly fall into oblivion, as if everybody wants to forget former excesses. This silence might be something that does 4:33 better justice than the endless chatter about it.

Update on 15th Nov.: ”2 minute silence” made it to number 20 of the british download charts this week (15th Nov.). James Masterton writes in his chart watch blog: “If we are being honest it reduces the buying of what is supposed to be music to little more than a personal gesture, nobody has bought this “single” based on what it sounds like in preference to others after all, and whilst it is hard to criticise something whose sole aim was to raise money for a good cause you do have to wonder just what the point was really. Was buying this really any better than putting money in a collection tin? I’m not completely sure.” At least it still leaves the possibility for the Cage Against The Machine campaign to score a silent number one hit…

Another update: here is the video with the orchestral version of Cage’s 4:33, as it was mentioned in the Ubuweb podcast…

On Trees and Sounds

The english translation of my essay “On Trees and Sounds” is now available for download on my homepage. I wrote the text for the July/August 2010 issue of the German magazine “Neue Zeitschrift for Musik”. It takes the old question: “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”, credited to George Berkeley, as a starting point to reflect on various ways to define the term sound. Here are the first two paragraphs:

“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” This koan-like question is often quoted in texts on sound and perception, and the answer given is often a counterintuitive no. The argument is as follows: a sound is something created in our brains when our ears perceive the vibration of molecules. Consequently, a sound is nothing but a mental representation in our nervous system, while the sound waves outside our ears are simply part of a larger physical continuum of vibrations. A sound is a product of our sensory apparatus: without ears to hear, no sound.

A similar case can be made in terms of acoustic communication: the production of a sound runs through the classic stages from sound source via medium to recipient. The movement or vibration of a sound source generates sound waves in a surrounding medium such as air, water or solid objects. The sound waves spread concentrically and reach the recipient, who then translates these fluctuations in pressure and density into electrical pulses and perceives them as sounds. If any one of these stages is missing, then there can be no sound. In the absence of a recipient, as in the abovementioned forest, though it is possible to speak in physical terms of a transfer of energy from the falling tree to the surrounding medium, acoustic communication in the sense of an exchange of information does not take place: without a recipient, no transfer of information, and thus no sound.

To read or download the full text please head to my homepage. The text was translated by Nicholas Grindell.

Point of Listening

In an article for Eurozine, Les Back reflects on the importance of listening and takes writer Primo Levi, radioman Studs Terkel and literary traveller Flemming Røgilds as examples for their accurate attentiveness. He concludes that ”the value of listening is to keep a bridge open in the present between the past and the future. The listener – as the society’s ear – establishes an ethical link to those who are not heard or who are ignored.” Attentive listening is here descriped as a requisite for an utopia of a better society. Some already speak of an “acoustic turn” since our culture is supposedly changing as it moves from the dominance of the sense of seeing towards the sense of hearing. This can be seen as if the pendulum swings back into direction of the ear since many philosophers are convinced that in the middle ages the sense of hearing was valued much higher than the sense of seeing. Religion priotized the ear as the organ to hear the voice of god. Luther said, the ear would be the crucial organ of a Christian.

The repeated notion of a polarity between the ear and the eye was called an “audiovisual litany” by Jonathan Sterne in his book “The Audible Past“: following this differenciation, hearing is immersive while vision is distancing, hearing is emotional while vision remains rational, hearing tends towards subjectivity while vision tends towards objectivity and so forth. He critizes the theological undertones of this audiovisual polarity. And indeed, listening is a commodity that can be facilitated in many ways. This year, David Miliband declared New Labours death and announced in the New Statesman: “New Labour isn’t new any more. What I’m interested in is next Labour. And the route to next Labour is to be listening.” But apparently listening is also a crucial ability for the salesman. When I was googling the term “point of listening” earlier this year as an acoustic equivalent concept of the films point of view, I came across this passage in ”The Point of Listening is Not What You Hear, but the Listening Itself“ by Charles H. Green:

“The main reason for listening to customers is to allow the customer to be heard. Really heard. As in, actually being paid attention to by another human being. This kind of listening is listening for the sake of listening. Listening to understand, period—no strings attached, no links back to your product, no refined problem statements. Because that’s what people in relationships, at their best, really do. (…) Relationships are the context for successful selling. Relationships are based on trust; they predispose us to engage in qualitatively different kinds of sales conversations. And listening—unrestricted, unbounded, listening for its own sake—is the way we develop such relationships. And therein lies the paradox. The most powerful way to sell depends on unlinking listening from selling—and instead, just listening. Listening not as a step in a sales process, and not as a search for answers to questions. Listening not as a means to an end, but as an end in itself. The point of listening is not what you hear, but the act of listening itself.”

Silent listening, my blogs title, is also spotted as a new trend in communication:

“Silent Listening is an essential business skill. It’s especially important in sales. It shows people that you are fully engaged and care about what is being said and who is delivering the message. It helps us to remember people’s names and intricate details. With Silent Listening, you are also showing compassion and congeniality (Emotional Intelligence). It helps to build strong relationships.”

This is exactly the marketing lingo I hear echoing when you speak to an extremely friendly salesperson on the phone, as I did recently to order my first smart phone. The whole conversation was embellished with cordial remarks and late birthday wishes, only the problem with my contract couldn’t be solved and he promised to call back later which he never did. The feeling that this guy wore a mask of trained friendliness and attentiveness was not leaving me, this big smile painted on his face just to hide the pressure from steep sales figures imposed on him to achieve. But this attitude is not restricted to the sales area, as this quote from “The Listening Point“ by Lloyd Steffen proves:

“The ability to listen depends not in the first place on any particular skill or technique, but on a fundamental respect for one’s partner in conversation. Listening is thus a moral act. (…) We are in need of a theology of listening, for a willingness to listen ultimately expresses an attitude of love.”

That the act of listening is becoming something like a religious mantra is also true for the area of sound art and contemporary music since John Cage introduced listening for the sake of listening. I have the feeling that many artists like to use the listening dogma only as an excuse for self-indulgent and hastly produced music or conceptually idle sound art. To refer to listening as a cultural technique that we have to learn, as many do when talking about reduced listening or any other form of hightened perception of music or sounds, often comes with patronizing undertones and feels like an echo of high culture elitism. Today listening is a four-letter word, an empty shell for politicians, priests, salesmen and self-help gurus. The point of listening should be one that fluctuates between times of higher alertness and times of in-attentiveness. I sometimes don’t want to listen, I want my attentiveness to rest and take a break. When I go to a concert or listen to a piece of music, I want my attentiveness to be rewarded with something more than only the experience of listening. Recently I was in a concert with partly unbearably loud passages literally hurting in my ears and wondered about the tolerance showcased by most of the hipster audience. Is it that this attentive and zen-like openness of avant-garde listeners is the new theology of listening, are they caught in the moral act of unrestricted, unbounded engagement? Or is it that if I am tolerable to any kind of sound and music, of whatever loudness, my tolerance reflects nothing else than sheer indifference?

Tom McCarthy, Writing, Technology and the Dead

In last weeks Guardian, Tom MacCarthy promotes his upcoming novel “C” with a fascinating reflection on writing, technology and melancholia. By quoting literary critic Laurence Rickels, he elucidates the idea that each technological device thought of as a prosthesis in Freudian terms embodies an absence or loss: “every point of contact between a body and its media extension marks the site of some secret burial”. McCarthy traces this notion back to Alexander Bell who lost a brother in his adolescence: “As a result of this, he made a pact with his remaining brother: if a second one of them should die, the survivor would try to invent a device capable of receiving transmissions from beyond the grave – if such transmissions turned out to exist. Then the second brother did die; and Alexander, of course, invented the telephone.” That the dead can be detectable in airwaves via wireless devices is still widespread today, as can be observed in the 3 CD-set “Okkulte Stimmen – Mediale Musik” with recordings of “unseen intelligences” 1905-2007. McCarthy takes James Joyce’s novel “Finnegans Wake” as a literary example of “a long radio-séance, with the hero tuning into voices of the dead via a radio set at his bedside, or, perhaps, inside his head.” As Joyce scholar Jane Lewty suggests, the “hero” might even be the radio set itself. McCarthy concludes, that the literary work can be comprehended “as a set of transmissions, filtered through subjects whom technology and the live word have ruptured, broken open, made receptive. I know which side I’m on: the more books I write, the more convinced I become that what we encounter in a novel is not selves, but networks; that what we hear in poems is (to use the language of communications technology) not signal but noise. The German poet Rilke had a word for it: Geräusch, the crackle of the universe, angels dancing in the static.”

Tom McCarthy is not only a writer but also an artist who occasionally sets up art projects connected to his ‘semi-fictitious organisation’ called the International Necronautical Society. In this video he talks about a broadcasting project for a Swedish art gallery:

More information about him can be achieved over his webpage “surplus matter“. Also worth reading is Zadie Smith’s comparison of the two novels “Netherland” by Joseph O’Neill and Tom McCarthy’s “Remainder” which is a stunning meditation on reality in a postmodern life that is a good read along with the much-hyped “inception” movie about dreamstates becoming reality.

The Wire, Dominik Graf and the Berlin School

I recently came across Peter Jukes complaint from last year about UK television drama’s creative decline  ”Why Britain can’t do The Wire” and it reads like a template for the current situation in German TV. He blames the centralisation of power and a small clique of people at the public service broadcasters picking their favourite creative staff leading to a stale and mediocre output with a too narrow spectrum of tastes and approaches in drama programmes. Though many aspects of the TV industry in the US are not comparable with the situation in Britain and Germany – after all, HBO, the producer of “The Wire”, is a paid subscription niche broadcaster and has therefore more freedom to invest in cutting edge drama instead of catering for majority interests – it still remains a puzzle why the BBC and the German public service broadcasters produce so little quality in terms of genre and style in the high end range compared to their huge budgets from public funding (though I have to say that I always envied British TV for idiosyncratic programmes like “Skins” or “The Mighty Boosh”).

Now if German TV ever came close to the degree of sophistication achieved in a show like “The Wire”, Dominik Graf’s mini-series “Im Angesicht des Verbrechens”,  premiered at this years Berlinale and broadcasted this spring on German TV, will be the only competitor. The series is obsessed with detail, full of exuberant story lines that revolve around the Russian mafia, German police officers of Jewish ancestry and the human trafficking of sex workers. The 10 episodes come as a highly addictive experience – one can feel that the production of the series already brought the staff to the limits. The production company was bankrupted because of sky-rocketing costs and endless overtime caused unrest in the team. But the endresult marks some kind of turning point in German TV history with the pondering question of: will we ever have something of such quality and intensity again or will we regress after this last effort because it proved to be too expensive and too exhaustive?

The director Dominik Graf might be completely unknown to the english-speaking world since he predominantly works for German TV after some of his earlier brilliant genre feature films failed to find an audience and left him with no place in the German cinematic industry. Now he is responsible for some of the most artistically challenging and still intelligble TV productions of the last 10 or 15 years. Thanks to the magazine “sense of cinema” a first very long interview translated in English is now available with Dominik Graf. One of the key points in this interview is his year long interchange with and criticism of the so-called Berlin School of cinema which is also portraid in the same issue of the magazine in form of a written collage. Two of the Berlin School most important proponents are Christoph Hochhäusler (read this interview in the same magazine or visit his blog “parallel film” written in German) and Christian Petzold (read yet another interview by Marco Abel, this time in the magazine “cineaste“) with whom Graf had a very long email exchange about their different aesthetic approaches.

One main difference between Graf and the Berlin School directors is that Graf stresses the role the screen writer plays for him. The script and the plot are the most important parts in his film making while the Berlin School directors often speak about the image, the sheer moment of watching, being the crucial aspect of their work, often embodied by the work of cinematographer Reinhold Vorschneider who shot many of the Berlin School films. It is a dichotomy that was expressed by Christoph Hochhäusler in the email exchange with Petzold and Graf as “experience versus story telling”: the Berlin School clearly favours experience over story telling, in Hochhäuslers words, the story often contaminates the image, uses it and hierarchizes it. Therefore in many films of the Berlin School dialogue is more something like a noise, what is said is not of uttermost importance. Or as the collage article in “sense of cinema” summarizes these ideas: “If one were to formulate the topmost commandment of the Berlin School, it would consist of a proscription of manipulation – of reality and of the observer. From this, everything else follows: a commitment to observation, a prohibition of intervention (which could also mean intervening against false interventions), a concept of representation which wishes to cure actors of acting, the camera of autonomy, montage of becoming authoritarian and narration of lapsing into topoi and clichés. Almost throughout, extra-diegetic music as a means of underscoring images is regarded as illegitimate: original sound. It is the world that should appear: original world. Reality is fetish, its fair representation is “beauty”.

Dominik Grafs answer to this argument would be, as expressed in the interview with “sense of cinema”: “The point is: I first have to invent reality anew for my scenes so that the film, the cinema, will once again be able to resemble a possible reality somewhat more! This is part of my debate with the Berlin School directors.” He also “accuses” the Berlin School directors of some kind of mannerism or formalism: “In my experience—whether this is in music, literature, film, or wherever—if artists foreground their desire to be an artist to such a degree that they feel like they must mark each and every decision with their own will to art, then the result always ends up being less creative. In my view, an active embrace of ‘artistic genius’ has always foreclosed more than it has opened up.” Grafs way of dealing with such questions is to stick to certain genres in which he can work as some kind of guerilla film maker underneath the radar of the main stream “while nevertheless remaining unyielding and resisting any political correctness.” Here lies the reason why Graf is nearly unknown to the international film scene while Petzold and Hochhäusler next to Angela Schanelec and other filmmakers slowly receive some recognition among cineasts. One can even track back the aesthetics of the Berlin School in “The Wire” of which the first three seasons have been photographed by German cinematographer Uta Briesewitz, who started studying film at the DFFB in 1990, just the same film school Petzold, Schanelec and most of the other directors of the Berlin School came from.

The series “Im Angesicht des Verbrechens” is – for the time being – available to watch via you tube:

Vuvuzelas and the Politics of Noise

The vuvuzela is the signation sound of the 2010 FIFA World Cup (as it was already at the 2009 Confed Cup and the Africa Cup 2010). For many this blowing horn is a major annoyance. There are strong arguments against it: it can cause serious damage to ears of bystanders, it drowns the acoustic dynamics of the stadion atmosphere in a constant drone of a dissonant cluster, football players have trouble communicating on the pitch and the live commentary of the sports reporters is hard to understand. There is already a free plug-in out to filter the TV’s audio signal to get rid of the vuvuzela frequencies. But demands of critics to ban the vuvuzela from the stadions have been denied by FIFA president Sepp Blatter: “I have always said that Africa has a different rhythm, a different sound. I don’t see banning the music traditions of fans in their own country. Would you want to see a ban on the fan traditions in your country?” (according to Wikipedia)

More left-wing commentators followed this line of thinking and suspected behind the vuvuzela-criticism an eurocentric and bourgeois resentment, because the sound comes, sociologically speaking, from the lower classes, from the under-privileged. It appears to be politically correct to talk in favour of the vuvuzela. But is this really true? First, a very similar plastic horn or trumpet has been used in Mexican football stadions since the 70s. Only in 2001 the South-African company Masincedane Sport started mass-producing the vuvuzela and claimed it is of African origin, which is highly disputable. Nevertheless supporters of the South-African campaign for organizing the World Cup used the vuvuzela and finally helped them getting the bid. The vuvuzela was something like a unique selling proposition for the campaign. This leads to another aspect of the problem: noise is always tied to power, writes Garret Keizer writes in his book, “The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want: A Book About Noise”. Those who make the biggest noise are usually the ones with power, literally and metaphorically. Keizers writes (mainly from an american perspective):

“Make a list of the people most likely to be affected by loud noises (though not all noise is loud), either because of their greater vulnerability to the effects of loud sound or because of their greater likelihood of being exposed to it, and you come up with a set of members whose only common features are their humanity and their lack of clout. Your list will include children (some of whom, according to the World Health Organization, “receive more noise at school than workers from an 8-hour work day at a factory”), the elderly (whose ability to discriminate spoken speech from background noise is generally less than that of younger contemporaries), the physically ill (cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy, for example, are often more sensitive to noise), racial minorities (blacks in the United States are twice as likely, and Hispanics 1.5 times as likely, as whites to live in homes with noise problems), neurological minorities (certain types of sound are especially oppressive to people with autism), the poor (more likely than their affluent fellow citizens to live next to train tracks, highways, airports), laborers (whose political weakness has recently been manifested in weakened occupational safety standards), prisoners (noise, like rape, being one of the unofficial punishments of incarceration), members of the Armed Forces (roughly one in four soldiers returning from Iraq has a service-related hearing loss) — or simply a human being of any description who happens to have less sound-emitting equipment than the person living next to her (who might for his part have car speakers literally able to kill fish) and no feasible way to move.”

The New York Times wrote that “Mr. Keizer thinks it is condescending cant to assume that the poor are fundamentally noisier than the rich. And among his most interesting ideas is his linking of noise with later antisocial behavior.” “You can judge a person’s clout — his or her social and political standing — by witnessing how much racket he or she must regularly endure. Those who lack silence in their lives tend to be the politically weak, whether the poor (investment bankers don’t live near runways) or laborers or soldiers or prisoners or children. In creating noise that others must live with, we display our contempt for those weaker than ourselves. Hear us roar; eat our exhaust.” From this premise, I doubt the vuvuzela can be seen as an instrument of the politically weak as it has been suggested by some commentators. Can anyone from the townships of South Africa afford a ticket for a WM match? Or are the football fans from Europe blowing the vuvuzelas representing a lower class despite the high price for travelling to Africa to watch some football matches? I doubt so. Uppermost, the vuvuzela represents nothing else as money making tool and a win-win situation for the manufacturer: According to Wikipedia, “demand for earplugs to protect from hearing loss during the World Cup outstripped supply, with many pharmacies running out of stock. Neil van Schalkwyk, manufacturer of the plastic vuvuzela, began selling earplugs to fans.” And maybe the political correct favouring of the vuvuzela here in the west shows nothing else than an underlying guilt-complex of a white elite and eventually even a twisted form of a reversed rascist resentiment.

David Sylvian’s Manafon interacts with Lars von Trier’s Antichrist

As I saw Lars von Trier’s Antichrist recently, I had to constantly think of David Sylvian‘s album Manafon and the artwork, that in some strange way interacts with von Trier’s latest movie. There are three animals in Antichrist, represented by star constellations and symbolizing grief, pain and despair: deer, fox and raven. The deer is the first animal the male character played by Willem Dafoe encounters when he retreats to a cabin named Eden hidden in a deep forest together with his wife who is traumatized by the death of their child she feels responsible for. The deer carries a dead fawn hanging from her rear and it is not the last time the deer appears in the film. In the crucial and shocking scene in which Charlotte Gainsbourg’s character mutilates her genitals, von Trier cuts back to the black-and-white shot of the beginning in which the young kid falls out of the window while the parents have sex. Only this time we can recognize a deer standing behind the child slipping out of the window in super slow-motion.

Antichrist is laden with enigmatic symbols impossible to decode in its entirety and it seems as Lars von Trier never intended to provide a “readable” film as he stated in a “thesis“: a film is not about what the director thinks about things. Instead, there is a stylized imagery of partly super-aesthetic, partly bluntly horrifying scenes with no greater logic in the narrative. In a similar way David Sylvian’s latest album Manafon weaves a web of image-inducing poetry wrapped in beautiful melodies that are surrounded by a deep and mysterious forest of strange instruments and free improvisations growing in unexpected but nevertheless concise manners, like the undergrowth the deer lurks in on the cover of Manafon. Nature appears to be an over-saturated painting, a surreal landscape of the inner imagination, a place of solitude and unexplored terrain, of hidden dangers and unknown disturbing facets of the human psyche. Willem Dafoe’s character, the psychologist, stands there in the forest, puzzled and without explanation, after encountering the deer with the dead fawn.

Both Antichrist and Manafon deal in their own particular ways with faith and the existence or non-existence of god. David Sylvian emptied his music more and more from a predictable rhythmic backbone and clear harmonic structures over the recent years (apart from his Nine Horses project) and therein reflected a spiritual crisis he was suffering from. He stated in a conversation with Marcus Boon: ”If we start with the track “Manafon” we’re looking at a description of a man, a man of faith, who struggles with that faith, who imposes an order on the external world in the hope of finding it internally. A man who embraces the morals and values of his faith and lives by them but who also struggles with the silence that burns inside his own heart and mind. God’s silence.” And then later: “I like the state of hopelessness. Hope really does tend to get in the way. It takes you out of the present towards an ideal. To live without hope but without a loss of love for life… that’s a great starting place it seems to me.” Here is a line from “Snow White in Appalachia”:

And there is no maker
just inexhaustible indifference
and there’s comfort in that
so you feel unafraid

And then in “Small little Gods” he sings:

I’ve placed the Gods
In a zip-lok bag
I’ve put them in a drawer
They’ve refused my prayers

And again, watching the “Small little Gods” video, the introducing black-and-white super-slowmotion scene of Antichrist comes into mind, the perfect contrast to the saturated greenish colour of nature, the pleasant enfolding warmth and heavyness of the woods the psychologist thinks will heal his wife but eventually turns into the unfolding of evil itself.

Now, the complete opposite trajectories with which both artists meet their own doubts and fears become evident. David Sylvian draws a lot of attraction from the enstrangement he imposes between singer and context, between the controlled part of his extraordinary singing and the indeterminacy of the instrumental web he spins around his voice. The improvisational freedom and indeterminacy has a direction, we can feel comfortable in this peculiar sound world and accept the strangeness. Lars von Trier’s world then is emptied of any sign of hope. The horror is unpredictable and irrational, nature is evil and chaos reigns. While Sylvians work still can be comforting, von Trier’s movie affects the strongest and most disturbing emotions in his audience. He revealed in a director’s confession, that he suffered a depression in 2007 and wrote the script as a kind of therapy after his crisis. His images stem from his dreams and possibly unbearable despair and were composed later “free of logic and dramatic thinking”. The subject of mysogyny seems to be a vehicle for him to unveil some of the darkest sides of the human soul. Heidi Laura, the official misogyny consultant for the film, supported this notion in saying that “the dark shadows of civilisation deserve to be seen and reflected on rather than ignored.” Both works, David Sylvian’s Manafon and Lars von Trier’s Antichrist, overlap by coincidence in a certain usage of the imagery of the forest and the deer as one of its main inhabitants, but though the images resemble each other, their symbolic meaning could not be of a bigger contrast.

Steven Mithen – The Singing Neanderthals

„The basic problem of studying the origins of language is, to understate matters, language leaves few fossils.“ – Edmund Blair Bolles.

In „The Singing Neanderthals“ Steven Mithen, professor of Archaeology at the University in Reading, summarizes his views of the co-evolution of music and language in the history of our species. Drawing evidence from many areas such as anthropology, psychology, neuroscience and musicology, he asserts that music is not only a byproduct of language with no evolutionary value in itself as stated by Steven Pinker for instance. More than that Mithen introduces a hypothetical proto-music/language that was holistic (not composed of segmented elements), manipulative (influencing emotional states and hence behavior of oneself and others), multimodal (using both sound and movement), musical (temporally controlled, rhythmic, and melodic), and mimetic (utilizing sound symbolism and gesture) – a musicking that he calls ‚Hmmmm’ as an abbreviation of the before-mentioned communication modes. These holistic utterances, each with its own meaning but lacking any meaningful sub-units (that is to say, words) were used to manipulate other individuals, as commands, threats, greetings and requests. They would have been as much music-like as language-like. According to this theory „modern language only evolved when holistic utterances were ‚segmented’ to produce words, which could then be composed together to create statements with novel meanings.“

Here is a brief summary of Mithen’s hypothesis in form of a collage of key citations taken from his book:

„Music and language are universal features of human society. They are hierachical, combinatorial systems which involve expressive phrasing and are reliant on rules that provide recursion and generate an infinite number of expressions from a finite set of elements. Both communication systems involve gesture and body movement. They provided the human mind to switch from a ‚domain-specific’ to a ‚cognitively fluid’ mentality that was only attributed to Homo sapiens alone. Cognitive fluidity refers to the combination of knowledge and ways of thinking from different mental modules, which enables the use of metaphor and producing creative imagination.“

Mithen stresses the role bipedalism has played in the evolutionary development of the homo family:

„Both the multi-modal and the musical aspects of such utterances would have been greatly enhanced by the evolution of bipedalism. Bipedalism required the evolution of mental mechanisms to maintain the rhythmic coordination of muscle groups. As our ancestors evolved into bipedal humans so, too, would their inherent musical abilities evolve – they got rhythm. The new degrees of motor control, independence of torso and arms from legs, and internal and uncouscious time-keeping abilities, would all have dramatically enhanced the potential for gesture and body language in Homo ergaster, hugely expanding the existing potential for holistic communication. This would have added to vocalization an invaluable means of expressing and inducing emotions, and manipulate behaviour.“

„Bipedalism requires a relatively narrow pelvis and hence puts a severe constraint on the width of the birth canal. To be born at all through the narrow bipedal pelvis, infants effectively had to be born premature, leaving them almost entirely helpless for their first eighteen month of life. Thus creating selective pressures for the development of vocal and gestural mother-infant interactions, which would have been of a music-like nature.“

„Music-making had considerable survival value as a means of communicating emotions, intentions and information and therefore facilitated cooperation, that is: the sharing of information and resources, working as a team during a hunt, caring for each other’s well-being, advertising and consolidating pair-bonding. In all known societies music-making is frequently, if not always, a group activity.“

Then, Mithen speculates on the transition from a holistic communication system to a referential language:

„Alison Wray uses the term ‚segmentation’ to describe the process whereby humans began to break up holistic phrases into separate units, each of which had its own referential meaning and could then be recombined with units from other utterances to create an infinite array of new utterances. This is the emergence of compositionality, the feature that makes language so much more powerful than any other communication system.“

„Simon Kirby of Edinburgh University is one of several linguists who have begun to explore the evolution of language using computer simulation models. He was able to simulate how children acquire language simply by listening to their parents, siblings and other language-users. In his simulations he gave each speaking-agent a ‚random language’, which is in fact a holistic language, and as the simulation runs, learning-agents are exposed to a sample of speaking-agents and by this means acquire a language by their own. Because they will only ever have heard a sample of the utterances of any single speaking-agent, their language will be unlike that of any other individual. As the simulation proceeds, Kirby finds that some parts of the language systems become stabilized and are passed on faithfully from one generation to the next. A learning-agent mistakenly infers some form of non-random behaviour in a speaking-agent indicating a recurrent association between a symbol string and a meaning, and then uses this association to produce its own utterances, which are now genuinely non-random. Kirby refers to this process as ‚generalization’. Other learning-agents will acquire the same association between the symbol string and its meaning, so that it spreads throughout the population and, eventually, the whole language system will have been stabilized and will constitute a single, compositional language. With his work, Kirby challenges Noam Chomsky’s argument that children are born with an innate language abilities, something he called ‚universal grammar’. Instead Kirby’s simulations show that the process of learning itself can lead to the emmergence of grammatical structures.“

„The transition from a predominantly ‚Hmmmmm’ communication system to a compositional language most likely took tens of thousands of years. Some communities may have continued primarily with ‚Hmmmmm’ for much longer than others; some individuals who had become proficient language-users may have died before their knowledge was passed on, but finally compositional language emerged from ‚Hmmmmm’ and changed the nature of human thought and set our species on a path that led to global colonization and, ultimately, the end of the hunting and gathering way of life that had endured ever since the first species of Homo appeared more than 2 million years ago.“

 Well, from the latest spectacular fossil findings, Ardipithecus ramidus or short „Ardi“ being about 4.4 million years old, it is estimated that the homo lineage is much older than it was recently assumend. But Mithen admits that Archaeology is always coming up with new pieces of a broader puzzle and that human history has to be rewritten over and over again. But since fossils don’t say much about the language and music of our ancestors, much of the theorizing about the origin of language must remain highly speculative and that one of the few weak spots of Mithen’s endeavour: there is too much could-be and might-be in the text and some conclusions appear highly speculative. I also think there is a lack of ethnomusicological background that would have provided a broader, non-western perspective, but doubtlessly this book is a great starting point to dive into the different academic controversies about the evolution and origin of language and music.