Music is there to be made 1
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Pepino Pascual also told me the other day, "music is there to be made", that is to say, not for the spectator or the show. The same thing that Alessi dell'Umbria affirms in his incredible study Tarantella! Possession et dépossession dans l'ex-royaume de Naples. In fact, another investigation into the birth of the notions of "spectator" and "concert hall" has found that they appear at the time of the consolidation of the modern state, in the 16th and 17th centuries. Moment of the elaboration of grammars, crystallisation of the metaphysics of the proprietary subject and the sovereign order. The opening time of the vast operation of external colonisation and internal domestication with the Counter-Reformation and the Reformation, against "the Indies around here", such as the former kingdom of Naples, the mountainous areas or the wise women in the north.
In the West, historically, the position of the musician has been ambivalent and marginal. "The Aristotelian idea that musical practice was unworthy of the free man because of the manual labour inevitably attached to it has not remained an isolated judgement. In the Middle Ages, around the year 1000, Guido of Arezzo invites us to think on the musician as a 'beast'" (Fubini, Estética de la música). Fubini reminds us that it was not until the late Renaissance that musicians were better considered, and never equated with "architects, painters, sculptors and, above all, the literati, whose social function had been exalted since the most remote antiquity". It was not until the 18th century that Mozart and Haydn rebelled against "the humiliating condition of being little more than servants of noble palaces". - It is true that later, with Schopenhauer or Novalis, music will be exalted as that which can "express the in itself of the world", or as "the limit point to which all the arts tend". Later on, musical technique and speculation have tended to converge, however, the collective experience of popular music has rarely been understood, nor its worldview opposed to the official world, and sometimes, saving it in "festivals" has been like freezing it in museums, while offering it to the tourism market to ruin it, for, as we know, the tourism industry ruins everything it touches. It is quite another thing to reinvent it, to investigate and fight for the meaning of playing that music.
Non-educated music has been regarded with distrust and contempt from the positions of order, and welcomed with enthusiasm by the plebs of all classes. Not only because of its power to alter moods and tempers. Since Plato and Aristotle, the Western tradition has received disdain for certain Dionysian music linked to drunkenness, trance, possession and the carnivalesque, and praise for more leisurely forms. Always distinguishing between the pleasure of listening that knows and the contempt for the performance that plays, which leads to the ambiguous distinction between an exalted but inaudible "worldly music", the music of the spheres, and a "human music", sonorous, a pale reflection of the former.
Although a closer reading of the sources leads Monica Ferrando to problematise this reception, in her major study Il regno errante. L'Arcadia come paradigma politico, she points to the system of scissions established by the Athenian Polis as a political model, as a model of earthly habitation - intellectual/manual, rich/poor, high/popular, political/impolitical, etc. - as a fundamental impulse for the stultifying and confusion of our civilisation. "The fatal hierarchical distinction between an aristocratic music and a humble and rough music probably dates from here [in the 7th century B.C.], from the separation of music from speech with the preference given by the epic poets to the rhythmic element of verse over the melodic, which was nevertheless an integral part of the gift of the epic Muse".
Tim Ingold, an anthropologist who also thinks with his cello, has also pointed to the separation between music and speech, which occurred in the West in antiquity and again after the Middle Ages, as a major event in the constitution of a civilisation whose dealings with the world lead to the spread of desert and the absence of vitality (Lines. A brief history).
Monica Ferrando takes the concept of nomos out of its link with the order of the Law, the order of appropriation and exclusion, the source of the system of law (Ius), to return it to a musical constellation: "as appears in Emmanuel Laroche's study, among the meanings that lead from nemo to nomos is also that of 'to inhabit', 'to enjoy a good' and 'to rule with measure'. When oikeo will impose itself on nemo, nomos in its broad and all-embracing sense, will gradually abandon the earth. [...] Having lost its power to signify once and for all the musical partition of the soul predisposed to reflect the partition of light on earth and to arrange the human world according to this model, nomos will be relegated to designate only and solely the ancient shadow of the Law. As such it will no longer be able to unleash that original irradiation virtually capable of holding together in a harmonious bond spheres as distant from each other and discordant in themselves as the human psyche, the inhabited lands and the means of subsistence. [...] This has been made possible not so much, as Schmitt would have it, by the triumph of oikos over nomos, by the former prevailing over the latter, but by the reduction of nomos to just one of its meanings, precisely that of law which legitimises the taking and possession and, what is more, identifies itself with it. Only by unduly reducing nomos to a legitimate nehmen/taking, was it naturalised to become a manipulable 'thing' of the world. And it is the status of appropriability, heir to the religious 'inappropriability', as Yan Thomas [...] and Giorgio Agamben have shown, that has reduced the world to things to be disposed of and created the conditions for the birth of law".
Law and its world, which the power of violence and the violence of power found and preserve, appear, from the very beginning, precisely in Aeschylus' Orestiad, as "nomos without nomos", as "song without song". The sacrifice of "the beautiful Iphigenia" ordered by her father, Agamemnon, as eager as his brother and his army for the wealth, power and glory that the Trojan War should give them; the murder of Agamemnon by his wife Clytemnestra, just after returning from the war; that of Clytemnestra by his son Orestes; the persecution of Orestes by the Erinias or the Furies "without a beautiful voice", who "seek the smell of blood"; and the false reconciliation that transforms the Erinias into Eumenides, neutralising the inward violence - which manifested itself as civil war and blood vengeance - in order to turn it outwards from the state, in war, giving a patina of civilisation to the maintenance of the same order of plunder, appropriation, exclusion, with the institution of a court of "justice". And finally, the prediction of Cassandra, slave, concubine, prophet condemned by the god not to be heard: "like a singing nightingale full of lamentations, in her sad heart moans life where misfortune flourishes". - It is difficult to give a more diaphanous entrance to our "juridical-political" civilisation, which tries to live under a split, inharmonious and unreconciled order, insofar as unreconciled, and therefore sustained through the violence of order and law, through institutional and technological prostheses, as if in some utopian or dystopian future, the scission between interiority and adventure, between precarious life and resplendent civilisation, between manual technique and intellectual knowledge, between poor and rich, or between music and speech will overcome itself, silencing all the pain of the world and our own pain.
"If nomos is song, it cannot be command" says Monica Ferrando, the lack of nomos is at the same time a lack of music and justice. Singing as persuasive nomos that keeps the soul, the earth and the means of life in accord, indicates that "there was no reason to separate theoretical wisdom from vocal and manual technique".