Vernacu
lar
1.
Moderni
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Literary modernism’s tendency to work within the methods of mythology and religion and mixing these with avant-garde literature was to create a new form of literary language. The music of its period had that aim, whether it was Charles Ives quoting a variety of older American vernacular culture or Bela Bartok using the folklore of his home country to express a new form of music. The aim of this playlist is to examine the musical idea of more abstract musical genres (ranging from post-rock, free-improvisation, and sections of progressive pop music) mining from pre-war blues, folk, and it’s spiritual successor from the 1960s known as “American primitivism”.
Vernacular Modernism starts off with the sullen hymns of John Fahey’s guitar, in which he’s finally completing the musical ambitions he drafted out from the earliest parts of his career in the context of the “American primitivist” movement. This time instead of playing for the hippies that he disdained, he was playing for a group of like minded artists who shared his growing tastes within the current underground scene that sprouted in Chicago during the 1990s. Part 1 ends with the kaleidoscopic Americana of the infamous beach boys track “Cabinessence”, a song whos lyrics was famously described as “fucking with the formula” by Mike Love. In between there’s a few staples similar to the “American primitivist” style such as Fahey's contemporary, Loren MazzaCane Connors, who, during the late 1970s, was also working on his own austere hybrid of pre-war blues and free improvisation. His art is the echo of bluesmen gone by, who conjured up these spirits alone in a room or within what became a “high brow” genre. Even though those improvisational and atonal rhythms are there, anyone at first glance could recognize that Loren was playing and wailing the blues like his musical forefathers before him.
Gastr Del Sol is the successor to the “American primitivist” movement with the track “ursus arctos wonderfilis” mixing the tense improvisation of O’Rourke and Grubbs while openly acknowledging their love of Fahey on this and many other tracks such as “Rebecca Sylvester”, utilizing a collage of American folk and experimental music. I chose “eight corners” as a foil, to show off the band’s debt to their more openly “avant-garde” approach, learned during their time with the famed composer, Tony Conrad on The Table of elements label. It is where David Grubbs, using a single piano—aided by a mixture of electronics and musique concrete—accompanied by O’Rourke,is able to help exemplify a debt that’s owed not only to the post-war composers such as John Cage and Tony Conrad, but, albeit unconsciously, to Charles Ives as well.
These two tracks help sum up what I mean by the “vernacular avant-garde”. On one side there is this hinting in such tracks like “ursus arctos wonderfilis” where the influence from Fahey is highly emphasized, using the principles of improvisation and blues in a coherent manner. “Eight corners” as a foil launches the band back to their art school roots within the realm of formal experimentation. The pre-war blues and folk music choices within the list are there to note some of the elements that musicians like Fahey were influenced by, but also how he used those elements as a way to reveal his own interpretation of folk music, an interpretation that informed many of his experimental successors.
Similar to Gastr Del Sol and Connors, there were some other choices I was more than happy to include in the vernacular avant-garde. Henry Flynt’s “informal hillbilly jive” proudly takes its cues from Appalachian folk music, using the sound of a fiddle being warped through tape manipulation to create this new interpretation of pre-war roots music, dually influenced by his association with the fluxus movement. The beach boys track at the end signals another part of the “vernacular avant-garde”, the section revolving around “progressive pop”, which through the combination of Van Dyke Park’s impressionistic lyrics about westward expansion and Brian Wilson’s maximalist compositions invites a new interpretation of American history through the lens of 1960s psychedelia.
Afterwards:
I've been thinking more about the interplay of pre-war blues and experimental music in the same vein as the modernist writers used the mythological method to explain this cosmic feeling of alienation after world war one. It also helped that many musicians under the “American primitivist” label were hunting for old blues records throughout the south at the time and were trying to rediscover the same mystical feeling that Eliot did when discovering Jesse Westons From Ritual to Romance. The main goal out of all of this was to try and recreate and interpret these sounds of pre-war vernacular music, while encouraging this idea of “progressive music” at the same time. The phrase “American primitivism” personally comes off as somewhat condescending. They were anything but, these musicians were moving towards more complex song structures, but also playing around with this reinterpretation of lost past to create a new aesthetic future. John Fahey even dabbled in the idea of fusing the pre-war music he grew up on and studied intensively, before being crowned as this rediscovery by much of the underground music scene. Before he was the arch-revivalist he was the cutting edge, his experiments with tape music predate this period, starting from his album “Guitar Vol. 4: The Great San Bernardino Birthday Party and Other Excursions”. There was also Loren MazzaCane Connors using blues music to inform his improvisation pieces that started in the 70s. The goals I hope to achieve from the discussion of vernacular-modernism will always have three objectives.
1. THE DISTINCTIONS BETWEEN HIGH AND LOW CULTURE WILL BE BLURRED
2. CHUBBY PARKER AND DAVID GRUBBS HAVE MORE IN COMMON THAN PEOPLE THINK
3. THERE IS NO PRIMITIVE, ONLY ARTISTIC AND PERSONAL PROGRESSION
What I hope to get out of this piece is not only explain the idea of vernacular-modernism with just a playlist ,but explain how many of these musicians were labeled under labels such as “post-rock” or “free-improvisation” have a more honest root in their roots . Blur the “high” and “low” to create an alternative aesthetic path and not reinforce any form of division within those genres. To me what’s called “low” or “primitivist” is that there’s more room to treat these older depictions of music, culturally and mythologically, in the form of an open canvas. That desire of an alternative form of musical history aided by this Frazerian idea of using myth to solve the questions of modernity has always been an idea I’ve kept since the first time I discovered modernist literature. These days I have returned and gained a better clarification of these thoughts while reading William Gaddis’s The Recognitions. Henry Flynt also had that vision of synthesizing and creating an alternate interpretation of the ethnic vernacular music of the past with the avant-garde, stating in his article The Meaning of My Avant-Garde Hillbilly and Blues Music:
“Again, why do I specialize in ethnic music when I am competent in various options enabled by modernism, including my own''audact ``? (See the postscript.) Certainly I do not claim that all ethnic traditions in music are equally interesting, or that for a composition to belong to an interesting ethnic tradition will guarantee its interest. As a matter of fact, the music of Southern whites leaves a lot to be desired, and I have had to reconstruct it from the inside out to bring it to the level of the best ethnic music. (As Rose Lee Goldberg said, I took the fascism out of bluegrass.) The result is that my fellow “folk creatures,” who mostly want to hear traditional or mass-cultural clichés, find my music puzzling. But ethnic music has a unique significance in contemporary society. Again, let it be clear that I am not speaking about what the ignorant call “folk music,” but about Hindustani masters such as Ram Narayan, about Buddy Guy or Coltrane, even about African field recordings which were never ensconced in any canon. Simply, such music preserves heights of the spirit which cannot be rebuilt from the sterile plain of modernity. Commercial-mechanistic-impersonal civilization is progressively crushing people’s spirit. What emerged [in the late Sixties] is a culture devoted to fads and synthetic identities, a culture of smirking self-disgust and degradation. Mass culture is a facet of the horrible symbiosis which exists between the manipulators and the underlings.”
For now the only thing to do is to preserve the musical folklore of the lowlands before it’s too late. Teach the bluesman how to prepare his guitar, give an Appalachian jug band a tape recorder, talk to the crazy old guy in the basement with the 78’’ collection, preserve and respect the older traditions, but treat it all as an open musical canvas! You don't need the academy to dictate the backroads of Mississippi or a swamp in Louisiana. Make it new! To elucidate these “modern” feelings that went behind the creation of this playlist, I will leave you with this quote from William Gaddis’s late modernist classic, The Recognitions :
“—But . . . even Voltaire could see that some transcendent judgment is necessary, because nothing is self-sufficient, even art, and when art isn’t an expression of something higher, when it isn’t invested you might even say, it breaks up into fragments that don’t have any meaning and don’t have any . . .”