Author: Charles Céleste Hutchins

Supercolliding since 2003

Liberationist Agendas and Notation

Graphic notation, the story goes, is meant to be liberating. But for whom?
Not all graphic notation is actually open. Some of it, like the pieces written for David Tudor by Cage and others, were not open at all. Tudor used a ruler to take very precise measurements and worked out a performance score from the score that he received. These scores were graphic, but also very highly specified. When discussing notation in 1976, David Berhman wrote, ‘Learning a new piece can be like learning a new game or a new grammar, and first rehearsals are often taken up by discussions about the rules – about “how” to play rather than “how well” (which must be put off until later).’ (p 74). Indeed, this mining for exactness and rules meant that players needed specificity to approach a new piece. In the same book, but in a different article about the performer’s perspective, Leonard Stein wrote, ‘Little wonder, then, that when first faced with a new score of great apparent ambiguity the performer’s reactions to the music may be seriously inhibited, and he may be discouraged from playing it at all.’ (p 41)
In the era of serialism, every aspect of the piece (from notes, to dynamics, to timbres to articulations) would be carefully mapped out according to rules. Although he’s framed in opposition to this movement, Cage did also often map everything out, but used ‘chance operations’ to do so. That is, he cast the I-Ching, which is all a roundabout way of saying he used different algorithms to write very precisely closed music.
When everything is specified, the performer is at risk of falling into very rote renditions of things. He or she may play very mechanically, as if they are on a grid, or just repeating practices they learned in school, trying to get everything right. Musicality is at risk from hyper-specification. Therefore, according to Berhman, when Morton Feldman’s Projection scores have little high boxes in them, specifying a range of possible pitches, but not precise notes, this is meant to nudge the performer into greater engagement with the piece and the genre. ‘As a part of his interpretation, the player must ask himself what sort of pitches are appropriate – in effect, what sort of music he is playing.’ (p 79) The performer is liberated from their rote practice and forced to engage. But this liberation is not the performer’s liberation – it is the composers. The composer, broken free from the shackles of European Art Music and Serialism can use any method they want to get something very exact from a performer. Cage draws squiggles and Tudor takes very fine measurements of them. Performers: meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Meanwhile, European Art Music was also weighing down in people in Europe. But obviously, the political valences of this were completely different. Cage, tired of Americans being compared negatively to dead white European males joked that the US needed ‘music with less sauerkraut in it’. (Problematic!!) But Europeans who wanted more freedom had much less to prove. Nobody thought British people were somehow culturally incapable of writing large scale symphonic works worth listening to. They had Elgar! Which is not to say they didn’t also long for freedom, but they did so with much less nationalism.
American experimentalist composers had a project of proving their worth as composers. They rejected the strict, imported methods that came form Europe, but reacting to that by relinquishing control would be risky. Firstly, there is the danger of association with Jazz. White supremacy may have pushed some white composers away from engaging any of the openness suggested by jazz practice. Improvisation would be a step too far. And, indeed, composers trying to prove their worth as masters of their art may assume that retaining control would make a stronger case for their own work.
Those not embarking on nationalist projects, who have much less to prove, did turn out to be more open. Cornelius Cardew played in the AMM, a small group that improvised, influenced by jazz, but tryied to play outside of jazz’s generic boundaries. Cagean composers shunned improv, but Cardew embraced it and developed his own squiggly notation. Unlike Feldman, he did not seek exactness or a greater freedom to realise the composer’s vision more precisely. Cardew wrote, ‘A square musician (like myself) might use Treatise as a path to the ocean of spontaneity.’ (1971 p i) What Cardew gives, Feldman takes away. (Of course, when generalising about entire cultures, exceptions abound. Earle Brown argued for performer freedom.)
There is a tendency in musical writing, especially in the popular press, to see graphic notations as a high point of music’s historic embrace of left-wing libertarianism. While certainly Cage did come to embrace anarchism (and his writings on that deserve a fresh look), it would be an error to see most American notational experimentation of the period up to the 70’s as embracing any kind of class-conscious liberation. Sure it was liberationist for composers, but performers had to look abroad if they wanted freedom for themselves.

Works Cited

Behrman, David. ‘What Indertiminate Notation Determines’ (1976) Perspectives on Notation and Performance ed Benjamin Bortez and Edward T Cone. New York: W. W. Norton & Company Inc. [ book]
Cardew, Cornelius. “Treatise Handbook” (1971) London: Edition Peters. [Book]
Stein, Leonard. ‘The Performer’s Point of View’ (1976) Perspectives on Notation and Performance ed Benjamin Bortez and Edward T Cone. New York: W. W. Norton & Company Inc. [ book]

A note about notes

Musical notation, as you may have learned in school, is a lot like a mathematical function. That is, one of those math equations that you can graph. For every x, there is exactly one y. Which means that the graph is a line that may meander up or down, but it will never loop back on itself, nor split in two, nor do anything more interesting other than getting more and more to the right as x goes up

Similarly, unless there is a repeat sign, you read notes strictly left to right. There is no symbol for linked 8th notes (aka: quavers) that play in any order aside from left to right.

And, indeed, letters of words plot a similar route. But when drawing musical lines, like the UPIC system, people sometimes want to double back. This impulse is also evident, at least occasionally, in non-musicians.

Wallenda by Penalva at the Irish Museum of Modern Art is a study in naive notation developed by a visual artist. This is an example of a closed and particular form of graphic notation, invented to communicate a monophonic line extracted from the orchestral score of Rite of Spring. Its meaning is specific and fixed.

The artist has divided the movements into sections, each of which has a single page of notation. The third movement is 153 pages. The notation is sometimes mnemonic and sometimes drawn lines. It appears to be read right to left, top to bottom. many of the images resemble piano roll notation as used by some MIDI programs. Some of the lines curve up and down, presumably tracing a melodic line. This has a strong implication of a left to right directionality. However many panels, starting with 69 in the first movement as the first such example, have loops in them.

Loop pages include 69, 94 in the first set. 16, 74, 107, 110, 111, 113 in the second set and 23, 57, 92, 93, 117, 119 in the third.

While I can only speculate as to the meanings of these gestures, some of the very tight loops do seem as if they may be intended to suggest vibrato. Some of the larger loops appear more mysterious, given their violation of the directionality implied.

Page 44 in set 2 does not loop but does have a gesture that is not a function in a mathematical sense. Instead, it goes down and then backwards. It’s meaning is intriguingly mysterious.

I would guess that the reason that people tend to want loops (despite making up a system that does not support them), has a lot to do with gestalt psychology. The relationship between it and musical notation is very beautifully illustrated, in this analysis of Cardew.

Alas, no pictures are allowed in the museum, so this post is without illustrations of Penalva’s score, but I did do some possibly ambiguous notation of my own in myPaint. In what order would you play those notes?

Racists do not Speak for Us

White liberalism has problems. First it was Bill Mahler on his Islamophobia rant, now it’s a column in the Independent. They claim to speak for liberal values, which are often broadly reducible to atheism and LGBT people. I want to address this.
For too long, the atheist and LGBT communities have tolerated our self-appointed leaders seeking advantage in Islamophobia. Maybe Richard Dawkins and Peter Tatchell really think there is some threat of Sharia Law being imposed in the UK. However, this seems unlikely. Muslims make up a tiny minority in Europe in general and within the UK. Even if a majority of Muslims were in favour of abandoning a thousand years of common law, (which is already a dubious assertion), they don’t have the political backing or the numbers to make this happen. The idea that this is some kind of threat is absurd. Dawkins and Tatchell are being deliberately disingenuous. These men are (presumably) smart enough to know better.
Meanwhile, Christianity, the majority religion, is often threatening to both atheists and LGBT people. One need look no further to our closest allies, the US, to see a country where Christian parents can bully their trans children to death, like the case of Leelah Alcorn. And where Christianity is such an official part of that ‘secular’ state, that they hold a National Day of Prayer. Indeed, former president George HW Bush gave an interview where he called for atheists to be stripped of their citizenship. American Christian extremists are part of an international network, which does have links in the UK and have done some serious harm abroad. These religious extremists have travelled to Uganda, specifically to persecute LGBT people there.
And nobody spills endless ink on a national stage about the Christian threat. Because Christians are dominant and have power. Which is exactly why they actually are a threat, and also why nobody wants to have to deal with the fallout. Because obviously not all Christians are extremists, only a small minority – something that is also true for other religions, although that fact tends to be conveniently forgotten. When one lives in a dominant Christian milieu, it’s immediately very obvious that there are some positive aspects to the structures created by Christian organisations and that many Christians are peaceful and harmless and privately horrified by the misogynistic and homophobic activities undertaken under the banner of Christianity. Yet, somehow, white liberals are systematically unable to perceive that this kind of ideological diversity might exist in Islam. Why is that?
LGBT people and, to a much lesser extent, atheists in the UK are ‘subaltern’. In many ways still, we do not have direct access to power and are not granted platforms to advocate for ourselves unless we enter into a bargain with the powerful. We can have nice shiny platforms to advocate for ourselves only if we couple that with advocating against other unpopular groups. At least, according to Spikvak in Can the Subaltern Speak. Surely now, though, atheists and LGBT people are much more empowered than we used to be? And Grace Dent, the Independent columnist, does not appear to be part of the LGBT community, so we’re not even getting access to a major media platform, we’re just being used as a stick to beat people with. Our role as subaltern has shifted from being consistently outsider to some sort of militarised symbol of tolerance. ‘Look at how well we treat LGBT people’ says the west (please pay no attention to the discrimination behind the curtain). We’re better than our military enemies because we’re less awful. And thus our militarism becomes pink-washed. We invaded Kuwait many years ago to defend premature infants thrown out of incubators by the Iraq army (one of the most telling and canny lies ever told in the US congress). Now we fight ISIS to save the gays. Militaries that only recently decided to admit LGB people are now supposed to be our saviours.
There are multiple problems with this model, aside from the obvious moral ones. If we turn LGBT people into symbols of western values and western tolerance, then those who we would bomb are incentivised do the same. Putin shows he’s different from the bullying US though the state’s aggressive homophobia. Western militaristic pink washing puts the lives of LGBT people in other countries at risk. LGBT people in the west, as a whole, don’t have a lot to gain from this strategy (although individual self-appointed leaders may find it personally very rewarding), but our community overseas has really a lot to lose.
Furthermore, and very importantly, this narrative erases the entire existence of Muslim LGBT people, especially those who are organising for their own rights. The binary opposition of white liberal vs homophobic Muslim is an invention of the western press, serving the pinkwashed military. This is the ideological heir of Blair’s war in Iraq. The binary opposition of white racist vs LGBT Muslim almost never arises in the media, despite this being a real issue with a real, non-imaginary risk of violence for people in the UK. Hate crimes maim and kill people in the UK. ISIS doesn’t. One of these things is a real risk for people here. The other isn’t. Some fascist groups in East London have specifically appealed to the imaginary dichotomy between LGBT people and Muslims as a basis for their organising. The kind of rhetoric used in today’s Independent is not without consequences.
For too long, white liberals, atheists and LGBT people have only quietly grumbled at the Islamophobia of the more famous members of our ranks. ‘Sure Peter Tatchell might be an idiot about his warnings on Shaira Law in the UK, but look at all the good he’s done,’ we said. However, we cannot let people advocating for our rights throw others under the bus for our supposed benefit. In addition to being immoral, it’s also dangerous for us as a community. One need only look at Tatchell’s recently split with trans people to see how a willingness to sacrifice some unpopular people can easily grow to include ourselves.
We need to take stronger action – to link our remaining struggles for inclusion to the struggles of others. We must complain loudly when Islamophobes are invited to speak on our behalf. We must cease financially supporting organisations, like the Peter Tatchell Foundation, that make Islamophobia part of their platform. We must condemn Islamophobia where it happens and not let our white liberal ‘allies’ use as as tools to further racist agendas. This must stop now.

A boot stamping into a human face forever.

So I logged into twitter and saw this:

Allow me to provide more context than anyone wants about the latest trans vs terf twitter storm.
The weekend, the Observer published a letter, where terfs complained that universities no longer invite them to speak. One section of it complained that Julie Bindel is no longer given a university platform to advocate for conversion therapy for trans people. She is forced to constrain her remarks to national newspapers, instead of taking her case directly to trans young people.
If the phrase, ‘conversion therapy’ seems familiar, that’s because it came up in Leelah Alcorn‘s suicide. Conversion therapy doesn’t turn trans people cis any more than it could make a person gay or straight or left-handed or blonde. It wouldn’t have any effect at all, if it weren’t devastating for people. Leelah specifically cited it in her suicide note. Terfs such as Bindel think it should be absolutely the only option for trans people. Alas, given her national platform, she has advocated this as public policy and nearly scuppered the law that gives legal recognition to trans people in the UK. This is not a harmless disagreement or just an ideological row. Terfs have been much more effective at causing material harm to large numbers of trans people than right wing Christians have been. Normally, this is framed as a long running any annoying internet argument between trans women and some feminists, but in fact, it was because of successful organising by terfs that, until recently, all trans people in the US had to pay out of pocket for trans-related medical care. They got it removed from medicaid, which had the knock-on effect of also dropping it from private insurance. Bindel has campaigned for this to also be the case in the UK. In response, the NUS has a policy of not inviting her to speak at student unions (so-called ‘no-platforming’). She describes this as a McCarthy-esque limitation of freedom of speech – to not be given a university platform to advocate for something that would surely mean the deaths of many trans people. (Bindel says she doesn’t want trans people to die, but not all Terfs agree.)
So the letter in the Observer says it’s undemocratic not to give a platform for a relatively privileged group of people to call for harm of less privileged people. Peter Tachell, an often heroic campaigner for LGBT-rights, is a free speech fundamentalist and signed the letter. Possibly he was not entirely aware of the context. Or maybe he is – I seem to him recall him defending hate speech that was directed at him personally. Nonetheless, I think it’s a stretch to say that demanding an apology from a political candidate who questions whether or not trans people should have the right to access public toilets (Rupert Reed) is an attack on his free speech. Indeed, normally free speech involves a lot of back and forth and often this includes asking politicians to apologise. (Which he did and the Green party has reaffirmed that their platform is welcoming to trans people, so I would tend to see this as having had a positive outcome.) Indeed, I think the entire letter is disingenuous and I’m disappointed to see Tatchell signed it.
As I said in an earlier blog post, I tweeted at him about it, as did loads of other people. For the record, I’m sorry for being part of such a huge mass of people and for the snarky tone that I took. I’ve been the topic of a much smaller twitter pile-on and did not enjoy it. Some of the posts directed at him were much more hostile than mine. The included image above contains a tweet which reads: ‘I’d like to tweet about your murder you fucking parasite’
While this stops short of an actual death threat, it does cross a line. I’m not going to condemn or excuse the person who sent it (nor is it my intent to condescend to them like the concerned person who photographed the tweet). I will say that a lot of trans people are vulnerable. Many come from homes that do not support us. If we run into financial difficulty, poorly-thought-out ‘protections’ of our privacy can make it extremely difficult to access benefits. Many trans people experience tremendous amounts of transphobia from the family, their community and their work environment. A very large percentage of trans women lose their jobs on coming out and many of them face systemic discrimination which makes it difficult to get a new job. I’m sharing this not to assign any angry a tweeter a mantle of victimhood, just to note that some trans people are very badly stressed by circumstances that are not their fault and are due to them being trans. Many are not, but most trans people have dealt with very serious transphobia for at least part of their lives.
Meanwhile, Peter Tachell, for whom I have quite a lot of respect, has managed to make a career as a campaigner. He has a foundation. He can work full time at addressing injustices, including ones that don’t effect him personally. He has taken on trans rights recently because he thinks its the right thing to do. I see this as noble and note that his LGB campaigning has caused him quite a lot of personal hardship and even physical injury. However, his support for trans rights is somewhat undermined by his signing of this letter. He has a strong identity as a champion of trans rights and some of the funds that he collects to support his work are from trans people and allies who want to help him work on this cause. If he is getting identity and funds based on work for other people, but then suddenly sides with those who want us to die, you can see where the term ‘parasite’ might come from. And indeed, how a stressed person in a vulnerable community could easily get angry enough to tweet that.
But who is this person who is so concerned about the orignal tweeter that they chose to photograph the tweet? Indeed, before we get to that: posting images to things like twitter is not only a huge waste of bandwidth, but is a major accessibility problem for people who rely on screen readers, such as blind people. If you’re going to use a screen cap, please provide a transcript. If that’s too long for twitter, you’re on the wrong platform!
The photographer, Beatrix Campbell is, of course, the person who wrote the letter in the Observer, complaining that universities don’t like to issue paid speaking invitations to those who actively wish harm to some of their less empowered students. She also is, unsurprisingly, a terf, who has previously written about Julie Bindel being no-platformed. How does she describe her ideological foes who don’t want their student fees to go towards people who would deny them medical treatment? ‘Transgender people who used to live as men and now live as women’, she wrote, also in the Guardian. (For people claiming to be silenced, they do seem to get rather a lot of space in influential national newspapers.) It should be very clear that this formulation is calling trans women’s womanhood into question. She complains in the column that she doesn’t like being called a transphobe. I think there might be an easy solution for that, which is to stop using formulations like that one. Indeed, this formulation would deeply problematic if applied to trans women in their 30’s, 40’s and so on. But as most undergraduates do tend to be young, it’s especially disingenuous. Somebody who has come out in their teens or early 20’s to start living as a woman probably has not actually lived ‘as a man’ in any meaningful sense or for any length of time. Which is neither here nor there, as you don’t need to have lived as any gender to be against giving paid speaking engagements to somebody who wants to deny you needed medical care!
So Ms Campbell, who wants to gently remind everyone that trans people are not always and forever their own gender, is very deeply concerned about the well-being of this angry tweeter. Not so concerned that she wouldn’t try to keep her out of ‘women only spaces’, like public toilets, or to reach out to her directly, but I’m sure her concern is entirely sincere. She’s also very concerned for her new bestie, Peter Tatchell, who was the target of this wish for death. Peter was touched enough by all this concern that he re-tweeted it.
Meanwhile, Tatchell is fairly angry about all the abuse he’s getting and is posting inadvisably to Twitter about all the very hard work he’s done for trans people (which is true, he has done) and how under appreciated he feels (this is the less advisable part) and why can’t we be nicer to our allies even when they collaborate with people who are out to harm us?
And… that’s it.
This is twitter. Twitter is hurt, angry people lashing out. People with OBEs and national newspaper columns whining about being silenced. People who should know better crying they aren’t beloved enough and should be allowed to speak over those for whom they’re meant to be working for and how their free speech is violated when they can’t.
Everyone is angry. Everyone is hurt. Everyone feels like they’re right. Everyone feels like their feelings are the most important thing going on here. Everybody is lashing out. And this is today on twitter. And yesterday on twitter. And tomorrow on twitter. And every day on twitter. I just can’t take it any more. I’m done.
What twitter is good for: if a corporation does something stupid and embarrassing, you can force them to apologise and stop doing the thing that was probably not making them any money anyway.
What twitter is good for: multiplying anger and hurt feelings until they risk turning into a black hole of awful.
What twitter is shit at: changing anyone’s mind about anything, getting corporations to stop doing things that are unethical but profitable, getting people to behave better, being a thing I want to spend any more time with.
I’ll be on Diaspora, where we can have longer posts, longer comments, visible threads and hopefully a lot more light and a lot less heat.
And I’ll be at my local. Talking to people I know, to their face, taking a walk when I feel really angry and trying to avoid being murderously angry or petulant as fuck.

The Problem with Twitter

These last few days, I’ve run into Twitter storms twice. Once was reported on in a New York Times article, How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life. This was a followup on what happened to the woman who tweeted a crass AIDS joke about Africa. I remember the tweet when it happened and the sense of outrage at her apparent racism. What was she thinking?

I don’t remember if I tweeted about it at the time, but I probably did. And today, I tweeted annoyance at Peter Tatchell. Along with 2000 people. To be fair, Tatchell is often a bit annoying. He’s also extremely consistent and has campaigned tirelessly for years. I don’t agree with all of his positions, but he applies them absolutely evenly, treating homophobes exactly the same no matter where they’re from or what the cost to himself personally. He may be wrong some of the time, but he’ also extremely principled.

Sarah Brown and Natacha Kennedy do a good job explaining what the issue is, but let’s leave that aside and talk about twitter. That I happen to agree with the points raised by the 2000 tweeters (or rather, me and 1999 others) is almost beside the point. I entirely disagree with GamerGate and while many or most of those guys just want to intimidate and harass, at least some of them just want to talk about what they find annoying or personally oppressive.

For whatever reason, Twitter seems to lend itself to outrage. There are several possible reasons. The Twitter company has been extremely poor at dealing with trolls, which may have encouraged a certain institutional culture, but I think that’s not it, as the Twitter pile-on effect seems to be non-ideological. I suspect there are two major reasons. One is the brevity required and the other is the extremely poor threading.

Yesterday was my birthday and I have not actually deleted my facebook account. So I logged in to look at an event and found around a hundred messages posted to my timeline. I thought I could take advantage of people cruising by to better advertise the event, but this didn’t work at all. Because people didn’t actually look at my profile. They saw a notification, a chance to leave a very short message and they did so. Along with everyone I’ve ever met. That kind of UI decision distances people from the milieu in which they are operating. They never saw the other messages, including my own post inviting them to a concert. Similarly, I had no idea that I had joined thousands of other people when I was snarky about ‘freeze peach’ at Tatchell. What’s more, the brevity of the medium forced me to distil my snark down from a much longer thought about how he is really consistent about free speech, even if I think sometimes misguided, and how given the context in which he began his activism, this view might make more sense.

Whether or not twitter is actually more prone to pile-ons is something that seems deserving of more research. Could this happen with tumblr, or does the (terrible, but still less bad) threading help put things within a context? Does the longer format help? I’ve seen trolls on Diaspora, especially repugnant MRAs lurking on the feminism tag, so it may be that pile-ons are cross-platform and not a side effect of brevity. However, Diaspora MRAs are certainly aware of their attempts to shout down all feminist discourse and are not stumbling blindly into it the way I think many twitter users seem to do so.

Accounts like @YesYoureRacist exist to point out that casual racism is still very prevalent online. With more than 59000 followers, though, it’s clear that when I make a reply to a racist tweet he’s highlighted, I’m hardly alone. Indeed, I sometimes get ‘likes’ on my replies even weeks later. And these likes bring up a performative aspect mentioned in the times article. I might not realise exactly how many people are tweeting along side me, but I am definitely tweeting publicly. Each of which might reach a few more people, in widening concentric circles of outrage. Each of which is devoid of knowledge of other circles, making it seem like each of us is one of only a few voices crying out in the wilderness, to the acclaim of few, but still to acclaim.

The times article also talks of this direct, public reach of people seeming democratising. But instead it easily becomes mob-like, for a strange sort of mob that may be largely unaware of each other. It is a neoliberal simulacrum of democracy, in which we all think we have something special and unique to say back to whatever has provoked reaction. It’s as if each of us is at the centre of our own little protests. But in fact, we are an avalanche of (often interchangeable) opinion falling upon another unfortunate individual. Worse than not actually being democratic in any meaningful sense, it feels like a way to be heard. It seems like action has been taken, when in fact, one poor sap has been made an example of. It takes each of us less than a minute each to say something snarky, outraged or mean to whatever has come up that day, and then we can move on. If this is a company or a brand and the problem is not complex, this really can be effective at solving the issue. If some shop has stocked a racist children’s toy, for example, the outpouring of thousands of angry tweets will quickly cause an apology. But most of us are not companies.

I probably say at least a dozen idiotic things per day. And since I was raised in a deeply prejudiced culture, some of those things are occasionally fairly awful. In the old days, I was sometimes met with stony silence, realised my error, apologised and tried not to do it again. Call-outs made me a better person. But these days, I’m more socially isolated, tend to spend most days working alone and post my random thoughts to Twitter. I have not yet caused a storm of outrage, although I have said dumb things to some activists who very nicely took the time to point out that I should stop – something they did not have to do and which I appreciate. Their followers did not chime in. One day, though, maybe I’ll try to be funny in too little space, or say something sarcastic that gets stripped of context. Nobody is right all the time, and when it’s my turn to be wrong, how many people will speak up? How many will see it? I once played in a concert in front of other music students and every single person in the audience separately and quietly pointed out my one wrong note.

I don’t want to be the kind of person who blindly joins a mob. I don’t want to cause people to lose their jobs. I’m not even sure I want to always be so brief with expressing my thoughts. I used to complain about political soundbites on the news and now my own words, as if I’m trying to be some kind of celebrity, are often similarly abbreviated. Finally, the near-constant outrage, even when I’m entirely in agreement, is really tiring. How many of us really have anything to say that’s meaningful in that format? We might all have aspirations of being Jenny Holzer, but even she provokes in a way that can’t be responded to so briefly.

I’m not quitting Twitter, but I’m re-evaluating it’s usefulness, especially as a political tool. Although a rather offensive twitter advert claimed that #Ferguson happened there, it really did not. Our engagement with online mediums from our living room is really not being on the street. And, again, this simulation of democracy is ultimately disempowering. Nor was Twitter really any kind of serious force in the Arab Spring. Twitter is ultimately just another for-profit social network, selling our relationships, thoughts and even outrage back to us for a profit.

What is Noise Music Anyway?

The question I am most frequently asked about my commissions is, ‘What is noise music?’ An excellent question!
Noise music is incredibly diverse, from the lush drones of Éliane Radigue, to the aggressive edge of Elizabeth Veldon, to the quiet whispers of Maggi Payne, to the subversive raucous of Cosey Fanni Tutti to the glitchy digitalism of Shelly Knotts. There is also, of course, a specific context and history of the genre, starting with Russolo’s Futurist manifesto, The Art of Noise, up through early industrial and bands like Throbbing Gristle and then Japanese noise from people like Merzbow. But even though this is important, let’s talk about what sonically unifies these many different sounds of noise music, rather than the cultural bit.

Different kinds of music have different elements that are their primary focus. For example, Bach chorales are largely about harmony. Christmas carols are about melody. And a lot of current pop music is primarily about rhythm. Noise music is about timbre. That means the quality, or texture, of the sound. There can, of course, be all of these other elements in noise music, but a noise composer is very often trying to create a collage of sounds that are interesting based on texture.

Unlike other musical elements, there isn’t really a specialist vocabulary for timbre. Sounds might be described as ‘rough’ or ‘smooth’ or ‘glitchy’. Practitioners talk about this roughly the same way as listeners do. While noise music isn’t exactly new – the Art of Noises was published in 1913 – it’s still very much an area being explored, not fully codified in the way that other musics might be.

In fact, you can make noise music yourself! Although noise has not historically been given much consideration, any new parent can tell you that babies love noise. Humans are attracted to this kind of music from their youngest moments. We all are born with an attraction to these kinds of sounds. So you can experiment yourself at noise making and try recording some sounds that you think are nice. Your might use the microphone on your phone, your camera or your laptop (or a regular mic if you have one). Try dragging your mic along different surfaces, to record the sound of the physical texture. How does your sofa sound vs a wall? How do different kinds of bricks sound? Or try putting your mic next to something that makes interesting quiet sounds.
Pause for a moment and listen to the place you are at. What do you hear? Maybe your laptop fan? A refrigerator? A kettle? A copy machine? Passing cars? If you put the mic very close to the source of these sounds, sometimes the recordings can reveal hidden depth. Maybe your office copy machine has a quiet rhythmic clicking as it copies.
Now that you have all these recordings, you can try to arrange them. Audacity is a free program that might be useful for this. Or maybe you want to listen to them as they are. Play your collages or recordings for a friend. Now you’re a noise composer!
If you have a bunch of recordings you like and want to commission me, I can use them as source material. Commissioned music makes a great gift for babies or for Valentines Day! Order yours today!

Public Key

Do you want the NSA (or Google, or your ISP) reading your email? Of course not! Do you want to simultaneously frustrate David Cameron? Hells, yes! Fortunately, you can encrypt your mail, using a tool that’s a wee faff to set up, but very easy once you get going! Mailvelope lets you encrypt or sign your email, even if you use a web interface. Those of you using hotmail or gmail, this is the encryption tool for you.
You’re going to have to click through to the howto page, as the route to the configuration menu is somewhat non-idiomatic for firefox. However, once you get going, encrypting is dead easy.
Once you get started, we’ll need to exchange public keys. What’s that, you ask? EFF answers all your questions about this. This kind of encryption is the kind that Edward Snowden swears by, so it really does work and EFF’s description is very readable.
UPDATE (7 Feb 2015): If you have trouble decrypting, make sure your version is up to date.
Ok, now that we’re clear on that, allow me to present to you my public key:

-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: Mailvelope 0.11.0
Comment: Email security by Mailvelope - https://www.mailvelope.com

xsBNBFTTfUYBCADMpMs1fXzNP337GR+XoN26HssszqX8QwjrYaA+YVed5VaS
yOyVUZ+4zJn+DGizOy8Ci1vH6CTw2qxX9QEgt0BtMVqwg4IDTSfbbndf0SEI
fuyg0byu9G1DX8sgP1dlF2XQi7s30cmNLqR/a35a03mU1hkdmo+ZkllaNzGa
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VjU6R2qhQCaPz8SnYMzUOQK4XmRgmv/CbC6PbNyy+xkAEQEAAcLAXwQYAQgA
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wfZZvJN0Za+t86xwlFP64KZwvy8rKG74yTD+jBdELIzm7LqjNoLa+2U1DNsN
4+o5NB4FrJAvQJT4Mrv/ff5mUQWDnGQys8ePdeZLOMvNXbvKWHLx4PEldYuf
qHe6HDk3O822u+CO9+gOnw2e6cj5+gTBuP44ufgoua8JJQcbxAb0MDkagBqC
VpdvIRjfYRjfKBFc
=JaW9
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

Review: Unchosen

Publishers will very frequently send review copies of their books to newspapers. Sometimes they review them. Sometimes they don’t. Often the books eventually end up being sold as used to staff members. Which is how my journalist wife brought home Julie Burchill’s memoir Unchosen
I’m only reviewing the first chapter. Apparently the last chapter is largely about a strange conflict between Burchill and my wife’s cousin’s rabbi, who officiated at a wedding I went to several months ago; but despite that tenuous personal connection, I’m not going to carry on. Indeed, rather than make an attempt to summarise what I’ve read so far, I will talk about another book.
This other book is imaginary (or, alas, is probably not imaginary, but I haven’t read one like it). Imagine a memoir where a white person goes on and on about how they love “the blacks”. There are pages and pages about how great black people are at sports and rhythmic music, including statistics about the races of past Olympic gold medallists and music award winners. The author of this imaginary book sharply denounces racists, who they implicitly define to be people who criticise the political and military behaviour of some African countries – including black people who complain.
Now replace ‘the Blacks’ with ‘the Jews’ and ‘some African countries’ with ‘Israel’ and switch around the stereotypes appropriately and you’ve pretty much got the gist. Burchill defines herself as a ‘pro-Semite’, which is to anti-Semitism what benevolent sexism is to sexism. It doesn’t take many pages to get this across, but somehow she manages to pad it out into a chapter. One might feel tempted to see this as a Stephen Colbair- like performance. Is there any self-awareness lurking underneath her fawning bigotry? By the end of the chapter, it seems clear there’s not.
To compare her to Ann Coulter would also be unfair to Ms Coulter. Coulter is cynical and espouses what Frankfurt calls ‘bullshit.’ I can’t know her mind, but I’m confident from context that she knows it’s bullshit. Burchill, on the other hand, seems to be as painfully sincere as its possible for a British person to be. (And if this is the result, I can see why sincerity is so taboo.)
It is not enough to call this book terrible. I need a word to use to describe the vegan coconut faux-nutella I bought the other day. The same word cannot possibly describe both. I would eat the whole jar of that stuff before read another chapter of the book – maybe another five jars. The word ‘terrible’ is far too forgiving. To apply it to this book would be to render it incapable of describing a host of banal things that are ill-conceived and best avoided. Or perhaps, this is the platonic form of the ill-considered and avoidable.
How did this book come to be? When I have a terrible creative idea, which does happen to everyone, usually I can rely on a good friend to gently steer me away from it. I can only conclude that Burchill either has no good friends or they’re as monumentally tacky and racist as she is. Unfortunately, its too easy to see why a publisher picked it up and why reviewers, including whoever filled this used review copy with pencil notes, wrote about it. There is, however, an implication that many people bought this book at full price and read it. People who were not paid to do so. People who may have even gotten through the whole thing. What I really want to know is: who are those people? How many of them are there? What on earth are they thinking?

This is not my music website

Welcome, LMJ readers. The URL that should have been listed by name is http://www.berkeleynoise.com/celesteh/. This is just my personal blog.
I just had two pieces in the audio companion for the latest Leonardo Music Journal, which is very exciting. You can find more about the latest issue here. Both pieces are also on my podcast, but the LMJ versions have been remastered by Tom Erbe and probably sound better.

Crucify Him

I recently read the suicide note of Leelah Alcorn and keep thinking about how far we haven’t come since I was a teen. This is my story. It comes with a trigger warning. Don’t read it if you knew me before I was 18 – none of us need that.

Every year on Palm Sunday, the Catholic churches of my youth would do a small bit of drama, where they would semi-act out the scene where Pontius Pilot condemned Jesus to death. The priest played Jesus. Other readers played the other speaking parts. And the congregation played out the braying mob who called for Jesus’s blood. ‘Crucify him!’ we called out in unison. Or rather, chanted in a dull monotone. Repeating the same scene we did every year for the 18 years I was compelled to attend Catholic mass.
My parents were devout Catholics, and so was I by default for my childhood. Before I could read, they took me to a picket at a women’s health clinic, where I carried anti-abortion signs filled with the mysterious symbols of English writing. I went to Catholic school. I played trumpet at mass. I volunteered at my parish, putting together the paper inserts of church bulletins. Church was a place I could go and get some peace away from my family for a bit.
I don’t know if we had more or less dysfunction than other aspirational, middle class families. The popular thing to do in those days was take your misbehaving kids to therapy, so my mother took us. I went to three different shrinks until I was a teenager and I never trusted any of them. They were not there for me. They were there for my parents. Anything I said to them would be repeated on.
For my brother, they wanted to know why he didn’t like school. For me, they wanted to know why I was not conforming to gender roles.
I’ve repeated this story many times to shrinks since, to the point I don’t trust my own memory of it any more. They also weren’t looking to help me, but were working as gatekeepers. They ask about the parts where I didn’t fit in, but they don’t ask about the part that hurt. Here is the part that hurt: I didn’t know what I was – I only knew what I wasn’t. And what I wasn’t was normal. I told my parents at 14 that I liked girls. They were the first people I told. This was a huge mistake. My mother told other parents. Their kids told everyone at school. I was bullied – sometimes by my friends. (They got teased for spending time with me and shielded me from that, mostly, but also became frustrated with it. I had no official support at school, but neither did they. Why would a 14 year old know what to do when getting flack from all sides for even hanging around with somebody who seems so queer?)
It was Catholic school. Everyone was in the closet. The LGBT staff were afraid they would be fired if they came out. The only teacher who addressed LGBT issues at all was the religion teacher. He had us read about Sodom and Gemorrah, because he thought it was funny. When we didn’t understand the story, he claimed that it was God killing all the ‘faries’.
And thus my safe-haven of church evaporated. I’d read Ratzinger’s letter to American bishops about the pastoral care of homosexual persons. I was ‘intrinsically disordered’. I was unwelcome at church, bullied at school and bullied at home.
My mom hadn’t just outed me as school. Family dynamics had shifted considerably. I was no longer the perplexingly non-conformist child. I was the black sheep. My brother, finally freed from that role, relished his newly raised status. He and my mom would trade queerphobic quips and hate speech at the dining table. I felt unolved and unlovable. If I should somehow attract someone on the basis of unnatural lust, they were not welcome. I could never bring a partner home. There was no place for me in the world.
I pondered suicide. If God hated me, he would send me to hell, which would not be an improvement. Or else, he might not exist, in which case there was hope for a life without him. I knew that happy LGBT people existed and if I could make it, I could join them. I pondered running away from home, but decided to hold out until I turned 18.
My parents did love me; they were just really shit at communicating that. My mother’s friends told her to pack me away to conversion therapy. To throw me out of the house and leave me homeless. In the end, the advice she did follow – to bully me straight – was the kindest advice she received. She thought Jesus wanted her to make my life hell, so she did. But not enough to kill me or make me homeless or make my plunge into the minimum wage, insecure life of an emancipated minor.
I turned 18 and I went to university. I’d picked my uni based very largely on how LGBT- friendly it was. I went from being an outcast to being popular. I got into a relationship. But I didn’t know what it felt like for people close to me to be nice to me. The relationship was awful. And I used my social capital to bully other people.
When I was at university was when I first heard that transgender men existed. I was immediately interested. My my girlfriend, who I spent 9 years with overall, forbade transition. She was a lesbian, she said, so if I transitioned, she would leave. I was used to threats, conditional love and non-acceptance, so I agreed. As we bullied away most of my friends, who did I have aside from her?
My life became less and less tenable. And finally we broke up. She’d had enough, I’d had enough. It took a few years of questioning and of me desperately trying to force myself into boxes that didn’t work, before I finally did transition.
This isn’t an ‘it gets better narrative.’ My mother died and I inherited money. I used it to transition and then move to another continent. My life is ok now. It’s really good in fact, but this is not only because I stuck it out. It’s because I have privilege. I can’t make promises to trans kids that things will definitely get better for them. I desperately wish I could. I can say: the future you think you see is not the future you will have if you stick around for it. You will be surprised if you stick around. I really want you to stick around.
When I first moved away from home, at 18, my parents told me not to come back. But it was half-hearted – the kind of rows people have to make separations easier, but with the particular viciousness of our established dynamic. They paid my student feeds. They called me after a week to ask when I was going to visit. They met my girlfriend and came to see her as part of the family. All their threats vanished. Their disapproval slowly melted away. They forgave me. I forgave them. I stayed at my mother’s bedside when she had cancer. There was love there. Some clergy told them not to push me away and in the end, they went with the kinder version of their God. Their love gradually triumphed over their queerphobia.
Not every religious person has access to loving clergy. There are many in pastoral care who will happily sacrifice other people’s families to feed hatred. There are many who will turn their backs on their own families. They can’t face the truth of it, so they call their abuse ‘love’. It’s what Jesus wants.
And so, they stand in a mob, dully shouting ‘crucify him’, at their own children, just like we did at mass every Palm Sunday.
We like to think, when reading history, that we would have provided haven on the Underground Railroad, or joined the Resistance in Nazi-Occupied France or marched with MLK or somehow been on the side of the angels. When we read about privileged allies who helped Others at great personal risk, unless we’re part of the Other, we imagine ourselves as one of the allies. Of course we would have known that something so evil was wrong. But on Palm Sunday, the liturgy forces us to acknowledge the lie of this. ‘Crucify him!’ we say of the ultimate victim – the one we have defined as someone who never did wrong. The news might say ‘he was no angel’ about most innocent victims of state violence, but Jesus was better than an angel. Christians read every year about how the chief priests persuaded the crowds to say Jesus was guilty.
When clergy say Jesus demands violence, cruelty, abuse, neglect, ‘conversion therapy’, homlessness and death for LGBT people, they order parents not to love their children. They say Jesus does not love. They say Jesus is a monster who deserves no loyalty or respect. The world would be better off without such a hateful God. We’d all be better off if they would just crucify him.
Whose side are they on?