The Music of Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“Perhaps there never has been a philosopher who was, to this degree

at least, as much a musician as I am…”

(From a letter to conductor Hermann Levi – 1887)

“Without music, Life would be a mistake.”

(From Twilight of the Idols)[i]

Introduction

Written shortly before the mental breakdown that would last the rest of his life, Nietzsche attempted to explain all of his major writings in his autobiographical work Ecce Homo.[ii] Concerning the book he thought most highly of, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, what he has to say is particularly interesting given its unusual character: philosophical in content, but unlike any other philosophical text.[iii]  Rather than a work of logic and argumentation, its three-part narrative focuses on the historical character Zarathustra, founder of the Zoroastrian religion, followed by a fourth chapter made up of a series of epigrams. Describing when and where it was “the basic conception of this work” was first formulated, the idea of eternal recurrence (“this highest formula of affirmation that can possibly be attained”), what he says is especially interesting.

If I reckon back a few months from this day [that the idea of eternal recurrence first occurred to him], I find as an omen a sudden and profoundly decisive change in my taste, especially in music. Perhaps the whole of Zarathustra may be reckoned as music [italics mine];—certainly a rebirth of the art of hearing was among its preconditions.

What an understanding of Zarathustra as music would actually mean is therefore a question well worth asking even though an answer is hardly obvious. Its difficulty being not a sufficient reason to not make such an attempt, however (especially when faced with such a direct injunction as given here by Nietzsche), this essay will try to make sense of this possibility.

Nietzsche and Music

Nietzsche’s relation to music is most well known through his complex relationship with Richard Wagner. At first friendly, and in the case of the dedicatory preface to his The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music arguably crossing over into worshipful, their friendship soured around 1876 with the completion of the “Maestro’s” (as he desired to be called) specially built opera house at Bayreuth. Nietzsche’s increasing disenchantment with Wagner led to him public breaking off their friendship.[iv] Although the story of his relationship to Wagner is well known to readers of Nietzsche, his love of and familiarity with music is not appreciated to the same degree. Even less well known are his numerous compositions—mostly from the 1860’—that while showing a lack of formal musical training, reveal a deeply musical sensibility not unfamiliar with the harmonic language of the late-19^th century.[v]

            What of Zarathustra in particular, this work that Nietzsche declares, “a Goethe, a Shakespeare, would be unable to breathe even for a moment in this tremendous passion and height, that Dante is, compared with Zarathustra, merely a believer and not one who first creates truth” (EH)? What does music, or an understanding of it as music, have to do with its philosophical content?

Zarathustra as Symphnoy

One possible to think about Zarathustra as music would be to look at its structure. What is perhaps most obvious in this regard is the book’s division into four parts, thus possibly mirroring the (for the most part) standardized four part form of that most exalted of musical forms: the symphony.[vi] By the early years of the 19^th century, for many the symphony was not simply another musical form alongside all others. Instead, it was the musical form that best reflected the society and culture of which it was a product.[vii] Given Nietzsche’s love and passion for music, he undoubtedly would have to some degree shared such sentiments.

The expression of Nietzsche’s understanding of the need for the willing of eternal return—that everything that has and will occur returns again eternally—as the way of overcoming the “spirit of gravity” (nihilism) that he thinks has so infected the contemporary world, Zarathustra could perhaps be understood as a “symphony” along these lines in its attempt to express what is for him the truth of not just “a city, a state, or [even] the whole of humanity,” but of all life: will to power, which, in its positive formulation, is revealed to lead inevitably to the willing of eternal return. “To redeem those who lived in the past and to recreate all ‘it was’ into a ‘thus I willed it’—that alone should I call redemption” (II, 20). Lampert echoes this view writing that

The conclusion implied, but not named, in Zarathustra’s formulation of the problem of redemption is that the will to power that wills the past, and hence wills what is higher than all reconciliation, wills eternal return. The final naming of “will to power” is the first intimation of eternal return, not because the latter supersedes the former, but because eternal return arises out of will to power as its consequence. The will to power as redeemer overcomes and replaces the will to power as revenge when it wills the eternal return of beings as they are…As the agent of redemption, the will to power learns the most affirmative willing of itself and all that is and has been, an “unbounded Yes to everything that was and is.”[viii]

The likening of Zarathustra to a symphony is supported by the similarity that can be drawn between it and the implicit, and sometimes explicit, “messages” of three of the most foremost exemplars of the form that Nietzsche, again, would have been well aware of: Beethoven’s Third, Fifth and Ninth symphonies. The Third’s relation can be gleaned from the very title given to it by Beethoven as the Eroica (“Heroic”) symphony,[ix] a characterization Nietzsche surely intends for Zarathustra as he who first wills “beyond good and evil.” But in its being the first working out of Beethoven’s formulation of a new “symphonic ideal” that is in many ways similar to what is expressed throughout the course of Zarathustra. The substance of this new ideal, exemplified by all these works of Beethoven, is that “they all contrive to create the impression of a psychological journey or growth process. In the course of this, something seems to arrive or triumph or transcend.”[x] Specifically, this is brought about in the Third by the

similarity in the opening themes of the two outer movements [which] is scarcely coincidental and contributes to a broader sense of a dramatic psychological trajectory in which the finale does not merely succeed the previous movements but effectively represents a culmination of all that has gone before. Critics have necessarily resorted to metaphor in describing this emotional trajectory, and although these metaphors have varied widely in their level of detail they have almost invariably been associated with the idea of struggle followed by death and culminating in rebirth or rejuvenation.[xi]

The narrative of the book itself recounts a similar “psychological trajectory” in leading up to Zarathustra’s willing of eternal return in the final chapter of Part III, “The Seven Seals (or: The Yes and Amen Song), where he is finally able to declare “For I love you, O eternity!“—and the fourth part’s possible interpretation as the recapitulation and reworking of the themes and ideas introduced in the first three parts into a climactic whole.

            This overcoming of death is metaphorically enacted in Beethoven’s Third symphony where after the overall triumphant mood of the First movement, the Second is literally a funeral march—entitled Marcia funebre (Adagio assai)—for the fallen hero. This might be seen to parallel the role of Part II in the overall narrative, as it begins with Zarathustra returning to his mountain home having left his disciples in the hope that they would “seek themselves” and thereby live out his teachings in preparing the way for the overman, but after “months and years” in solitude he is startled by a dream in which he realizes that his

teaching is in danger; weeds pose as wheat. My enemies have grown powerful and have distorted my teaching till those dearest to me must be ashamed of the gifts I gave them. I have lost my friends; the hour has come to seek my lost ones (II, 1).

He has “died” to those he came to bring the teaching of Life (that of the overman who would create new values) to as they have made of him a “god” who has not been overcome, but has instead been idolized as declarer of the “Truth.” In a curious, and no doubt deliberately ironic, reversal of the Gospels account of Christ’s death, resurrection and subsequent appearance to his disciples as the confirmation of his divine nature, Zarathustra must go “live again” among his disciples in order to disabuse them of their error in seeing him as a new god.

That “The Tomb Song” is the literal central chapter of Part II (the eleventh of twenty-two) seems to validate this reading. Lamenting the death of all he had valued most highly, that through its “strangulation” by his enemies has brought about his own metaphorical death, Zarathustra curses those who “have taken from [him] the irretrievable” by “murder[ing] the visions and dearest wonders of [his] youth” (II,11). These are, presumably, his idealistic hopes and aspirations expressed in his declarations in the Prologue concerning his love of man (I,2) and need for “hands outstretched to receive” his overflowing honeyed wisdom now revealed as vain and foolish (I,1). In fact, his first mention of that honey since his initial address to the sun before he “began to go under” (I, 1) occurs here, but in terms of his cursing those who “galled my best honey and the industry of my best bees” (II, 11). Whereas he had initially hoped to bring to all men the teaching of the Overman, his experience with the people in the first town he comes to after his coming down off the mountain—laughing and jeering at what he has to say—reveals to him the folly of addressing the masses.

Zarathustra realizes instead that he must be much more selective by seeking out those who are ready to hear his teaching; “living companions I need, who follow me because they want to follow themselves.” However, the immediately following qualifier reveals the contradiction in his own position: “wherever I want” (I, 9). The rest of Part I recounts his finding those who would indeed follow him wherever he wants, but his realization at the beginning of Part II that, having continued to follow in his now absent footsteps, they have remained as but disciples and not the “fellow creators” he intends them to be fills him with despair. Part II as a whole is therefore concerned with the overcoming of this despair, a goal he does not manage to attain until his willing of eternal return at the end of Part III. Until then he must face the consequences of the misunderstanding of his teachings.

In the chapter “The Soothsayer” (II, 19), Zarathustra faces this misunderstanding head on when he “denies” (shakes his head) at “the disciple whom he loved most” in yet another reversal of the Gospel stories. According to widespread Christian tradition, John, the most beloved disciple of Jesus, was the revelator and authored both the Gospel of John and the book of Revelations.[xii] Although Biblical scholars now find this possibility unlikely, Nietzsche may well have believed it or at least assumed its truth in writing Zarathustra.[xiii] This disciple has just attempted to interpret (reveal) Zarathustra’s dream resulting from his hearing the Soothsayer’s nihilistic declarations: “All is empty, all is the same, all has been!” Zarathustra realizes that to grant his approbation would be to perpetuate their status as his disciples, a role he has become ever more unsure of throughout Part II. This attitude of caution and skepticism continues into the next chapter “On Redemption” (II, 20) where he is surrounded by “cripples and beggars” whose healing is to be proof not only to the cripples and beggars themselves as to the truth of his “doctrine,” and therefore to a Christ-like divine status for Zarathustra, but to “the people” as well whose judgment is revealed to depend upon the belief of the lowest among them. 

It is Zarathustra’s realization of the inevitable inadequacy of not only the people to the task that must be undertaken—the overcoming of the spirit of revenge/gravity—for whom this was made evident long before, but of his disciples as well. Content as they are on the “blessed isles,” they have forgotten the truth of the will to power and in so doing brought about his own “death.” To realize his own resurrection he therefore must climb out of the underworld where he had formerly placed his hopes on the coming of the Overman. He can no longer rely on anyone else to say what he knows must be said but instead must find within himself the necessary will to do so.

This journey is recounted in chapter two of Book III, “On the Vision and the Riddle.” Zarathustra tells how he

ascended defiantly through stones, malicious, lonely, not cheered by herb or shrub—a mountain path crunched under the defiance of my foot. Striding silently over the mocking clatter of pebbles, crushing the rock that made it slip, my foot forced its way upward. Upward—defying the spirit that drew it downward toward the abyss, the spirit of gravity, my devil and archenemy. Upward—though he sat on me, half dwarf, half mole, lame, making lame, dripping lead into my ear, leaden thoughts into my brain (III, 2).

As he strives to rise above his “death” of despair, the spirit of gravity weighs him down, taunting him with its Schopenhauerian pessimism: “You threw yourself up so high; but every stone that is thrown must fall. Sentenced to yourself and to your own stoning—O Zarathustra, far indeed have you thrown the stone, but it will fall back on yourself” (III,2). Such despair of life is the living death that Nietzsche sees as the consequence facing European civilization after two thousand years of living Plato’s “noble” lie (exemplified by Christianity) of the good in-itself. Socrates’ argument before those who condemned him to death that “there is good hope that death is a blessing”[xiv] has degenerated to the point of Schopenhauer’s argument that “life is a dream.” Suicide should therefore by no means be objected to “when the moment of greatest horror compels us to break it off.”[xv] Against this despair, Nietzsche advocates a “courage which attacks: which slays even death itself, and thus brings about his own “resurrection,” for it says, ‘Was that life? Well then! Once more!” (III, 2).

Though he is able to banish the spirit of gravity with the thought of its own eternal recurrence, Zarathustra is still unable to bring himself to will it until the end of Part III as he who has finally overcome his “great disgust with man” (III, 13). Returning to the analogy of Zarathustra as a symphony, Part III’s involving new developments as Zarathustra has overcome his state of “death” in Part II, but is, as of yet, not able to reconcile the consequences of what he has realized so far, could be seen to mirror the usual third movement of a symphony’s use of an explicit dance form in a triple meter time signature (such as 3/4, 3/8, 6/8) that contrasts with the usual duple meters (such as 2/2, 2/4, 4/4) of the other movements. This indeed seems to find itself reflected in the penultimate chapter of Part III that is, in fact, named “The Other Dancing Song” and narrates Zarathustra’s overcoming of his inability to will eternal return through his dance of love with all the manifestations of life itself.

To complete this symphonic analogy, however, we must find a way to understand Part IV in terms of what has been said so far. This might be considered difficult given that the book seems to find its effectual end with Zarathustra’s absolute affirmation and love of life realized through the willing of eternal return at the end of Part III, and the apocalyptic breaking of the seven seals that, like those in the Book of Revelations, herald the beginning of a new heaven and a new earth.

There is a great deal of evidence to show that Nietzsche himself considered the fourth part to be an addendum to the rest of the book; not necessary to the comprehension of the whole that is parts I-III, but rather an elaboration or interlude of sorts to the rest.[xvi] He in fact had only forty copes printed for the purpose of giving them away, but only to “those who had proved themselves worthy of it.”[xvii]

This therefore might be where the reading of Zarathustra as a “symphony” falls apart. A symphony, at least of the Romantic kind with which Nietzsche was undoubtedly most familiar, without its final movement can in no way be considered complete. For it is  in the final movement in which the summation of all the elements introduced up till that point are optimally synthesized into an emphatic and categorical whole.[xviii] So while this symphonic analogy has proved enlightening, it is limited in its application and needs to be supplemented with other ways of understanding this book as music.

For this purpose it is important to remind oneself of Nietzsche’s conflicted relationship with the philosophy of Schopenhauer. Nietzsche was impressed by Schopenhauer’s forthright atheism, but, as has been already discussed, saw his pessimism towards life as exemplifying the extreme suicidal decadence—the nihilism—that Platonism had degenerated into by the nineteenth-century. Schopenhauer’s view of music, however, found an always-sympathetic ear in the very musical Nietzsche.

Music is distinguished from the other arts by the fact that it is not a copy of the phenomenon, or, more accurately, the adequate objectification of the will, but is the direct copy of the will itself, and therefore exhibits itself as the metaphysical to everything physical in the world, and as the thing-in-itself to every phenomenon. We might, therefore, just as well call the world embodied music as embodied will; and this is the reason why music makes every picture, and indeed every scene of real life and of the world, at once appear with higher significance, certainly all the more as the melody is analogous to the inner spirit of the given phenomenon.[xix] 

Recalling Nietzsche’s statement concerning Thus Spoke Zarathustra in Ecce Homo that the idea of eternal recurrence (return) is the fundamental conception of the work and that, as has been shown, this “highest principle of affirmation” arises out of the will to power—being for Nietzsche the metaphysical basis of all life—a Schopenhauerian understanding of music as directly expressing this “truth” (quotation marks here given Nietzsche’s extreme suspicion of all supposed truths) would seemingly help to explain his positing the possibility of the whole text being “reckoned as music.”

            To make sense of this idea one must necessarily involve Nietzsche’s first major work, the already mentioned The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, as it most obviously bears Schopenhauer’s influence, though, as Nietzsche himself says in his “Attempt at a Self-Criticism” written concerning it in 1886 fourteen years after it was published, more “by means of Schopenhauerian and Kantian formulas strange and new valuations which were basically at odds with Kant's and Schopenhauer's spirit and taste” (6). For above all it is a book that point to and celebrates (one must understand the positive connotation of his use of the word “tragic”) the role of music in the remarkable artistic flowering that occurred in Greece during the 5^th and 6^th centuries BC that Nietzsche argues was killed by the rationalism of Socrates. He characterizes music as the Dionysian art par excellence in its capacity for enchantment and inducement of ecstasy through its penetration beyond the rational ego. He contrasts this with the Apollonian arts of poetry and sculpture that are so defined by their rational order.

Apollo is the deity of light personifying order, measure, number and the subjugation of undisciplined instinct. He is the ruler of the inner world of phantasy and dream. Dionysus, on the other hand, is the complete opposite, exhibiting liberation, drunkenness, unbridled license, intoxication and orgiastic celebration. In The Birth of Tragedy Dionysus stands for the emotional element in art - the Dionysian art par excellence being music, whereas Apollo for the form creating force representing the representational arts and especially sculpture. In other words, the rational versus the irrational, form versus content.[xx]  

Nietzsche argues that it was the general balance of these two artistic impulses, but with the Dionysian always somewhat dominant, that made pre-Socratic Greece as great as it was.

            Writing in the aforementioned “Attempt at a Self-Criticism,” Nietzsche is highly critical of the book,[xxi] but does not dismiss it completely arguing that its essential task, “to look at science in the perspective of the artist, but at art in that of life...” [His italics] (2), is still worthwhile and that the questions it asks are still deserving of answers.[xxii] For the purpose of this essay, however, what is most interesting about this retrospective critique of his youthful book is its ending. After critiquing his own present critique of the book as unsuitably romantic through the adoption of a second person voice, Nietzsche counters by using “the language of that Dionysian monster who bears the name of Zarathustra,” thus revealing a relation between his earliest book that he has so far for the most part disparaged and the book of his that he thought most highly of, by quoting five passages from the last three sections of the chapter “On the Higher Man” from the, at that point, still secret fourth part of Zarathustra.

Lift up your hearts, my brothers, high, higher! And do not forget your legs either! Lift up your legs too, you good dancers; and better yet, stand on your heads!

This crown of him who laughs, this rose-wreath crown: I myself have put on this crown, I myself have pronounced my laughter holy. Nobody else have I found strong enough for this today.

Zarathustra, the dancer, Zarathustra, the light one who beckons with his wings, preparing for a flight, beckoning to all birds, ready and heady, blissfully lightheaded;

Zarathustra, the soothsayer; Zarathustra, the sooth-laugher; not impatient; not unconditional; one who loves leaps and side-leaps: I myself have put on this crown!

This crown of the laugher, this rose-wreath crown: to you, my brothers, I throw this crown. Laughter I have pronounced holy: you higher men, learn—to laugh!

That they do not appear in the same order in the text may be seen as significant,[xxiii] though it seems more likely to simply reflect Nietzsche’s poetic license to re-order what has otherwise appeared in a different context in order to make of the five a more sensible whole for his present purpose. But introduced as they are by his explicit characterization of Zarathustra as a “Dionysian monster,” the passages cannot help but evoke an understanding of Zarathustra in terms of the spirit of Dionysus, and music as the Dionysian art, as first presented in The Birth of Tragedy.

             The Dionysus of Thus Spoke Zarathustra is not the same as the one that appears in the earlier work, however. No longer contrasted with his Apollonian antipode (a dualism for which Nietzsche castigated himself as unnecessarily Hegelian), this Dionysus is the Overman, “the meaning of the earth” (1, 3), that Zarathustra, when he first came down off his mountain in Part I, tries to teach first to the people in general and then to those whom he wished to be his companions, but instead remained only his disciples. Nietzsche’s explicit reference to Zarathustra as Dionysus in his “Attempt at a Self-Criticism,” as well as in Ecce Homo, therefore reveals the overall trajectory of the work as the gradual realization by Zarathustra (Nietzsche?) that he cannot teach the overman—as even those who are seemingly ready to hear the message (his disciples) are liable to not truly understand it—but must instead become the overman himself.

            This is revealed most clearly in “The Stillest Hour,” the final chapter of Part II (that to some degree parallels Christ’s night spent suffering in the Garden of Gethsemane before his capture, trial and crucifixion by the Romans), where confronted by the realization of eternal return Zarathustra cannot bring himself to say it; “Alas, I would like to, but how can I? Let me off from this! It is beyond my strength!” (II, 22). He knows that the willing of eternal return is the only way to overcome the “spirit of revenge,” which he has only recently told his disciples is “the will’s ill will against time and its ‘it was,’” by “recreat[ing] all ‘it was’ into a ‘thus I willed it’—that alone should I call redemption” (II,20). But the task seems too great for him: “I await the worthier one; I am not worthy even of being broken by it” (II, 22). He is but the teacher of the overman not the overman himself. Despite his protestations, however, he cannot pretend to have not heard the call that has been made to him. He therefore must leave the comfort of those he now calls his friends in order to begin his “loneliest walk,” the climbing of the “ultimate peak,” to thereby overcome his own spirit of revenge that prevents him from loving life unconditionally (III, 1).

            Zarathustra’s realization of himself as the personification of the Dionysian spirit who has overcome all pessimisms and feelings of revenge through the love of his highest hope—life itself—again points to book’s musical character. Nietzsche expresses this in Ecce Homo, that

Zarathustra is a dancer—; how he that has the hardest, most terrible insight into reality, that has thought the "most abysmal idea," nevertheless does not consider it an objection to existence, not even to its eternal recurrence,—but rather one reason more for being himself the eternal Yes to all things, "the tremendous, unbounded saying Yes and Amen" ... "Into all abysses I still carry the blessings of my saying Yes" ... But this is the concept of Dionysus once again.[xxiv]

Zarathustra as Dionysus is therefore Zarathustra as music understood as the “highest formula of affirmation [of life] that can possibly be attained.”

            Nietzsche’s seemingly hyperbolic comments concerning Thus Spoke Zarathustra—that “this work stands altogether apart … perhaps nothing has ever been done from an equal excess of strength”[xxv]—can thus be seen to be in fact somewhat justified for it is a narrative that is conceived and realized in terms of the absolute love of life in all of its manifestations: health and sickness, joy and sorrow, love and hatred and so on. To will such a thing for oneself would indeed demand a strength that few if any possess.

It must be wondered, however, what the result of such a willing would be. Though Nietzsche’s descent into madness has traditionally been explained as the result of his having contracted syphilis in the early 1870s (possibly during his time as an orderly during the Franco-Prussian War), recent investigations have shown the available evidence to be incompatible with such a diagnosis.[xxvi] Other diseases have been proposed as the likely cause, but one might wonder, given the example of what happened to Nietzsche, whether the strength needed to will such an absolute affirmation might in fact simply be beyond the capacities of the sane human mind.

Bibliography

Laurence, Lampert. Nietzsche’s Teaching: An Interpretation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Ecce Homo. Compiled from translations by Walter Kaufmann, R. J.

Hollingdale, and Anthony M. Ludovici; amended in part by The Nietzsche Channel. The Nietzsche Channel, http://www.geocities.com/ thenietzschechannel/bt.htm.

———. The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (the title of the first two editions);

The Birth of Tragedy Or: Hellenism and Pessimism (the title of the third edition published in 1886 that contained the “Attempt at a Self-Criticism”) Compiled from translations by Francis Golffing and Walter Kaufmann; text amended in part by The Nietzsche Channel. The Nietzsche Channel, http://www.geocities.com/ thenietzschechannel/bt.htm.

———. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Trans. Walter Kaufmann in The Portable Nietzsche.

New York: Viking Penguin Inc., 1954.

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[i] Also quoted in Tali Makell, “The Aesthetic Nietzsche: Philosophy from the Spirit of Music,” http://nietzschemusicproject.org/aesthpg1.html (accessed December 15, 2004).

[ii] “Ecce homo” is the phrase in the Vulgate translation of the New Testament that Pontius Pilate uses to present a bound, crowned-with-thorns Jesus Christ to an angry, watching crowd. The suggestion of similarities between Nietzsche and Christ are certainly intentional.

[iii] Perhaps as James Chester says, “Zarathustra is a dithyrambic tragedy, the first in more than two thousand years”; “Introduction to the Exegesis of Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” Public Appeal (http://www.publicappeal. org/node/view/121).

[iv] Addressing himself to Wagner, Nietzsche writes: “Let such ‘serious’ readers learn something from the fact that I am convinced that art represents the highest task and the truly metaphysical activity of this life, in the sense of that man to whom, as my sublime predecessor on this path, I wish to dedicate this essay.”

[v] His “Das Fragment an sich” is particularly notable in this regard. See http://nietzschemusicproject.org/ fragpg.html (accessed December 15, 2004) for a discussion and recording of this piece. The only other modern philosopher with a comparable knowledge of music and who also composed in his early years is Theodor W. Adorno who was himself influenced by Nietzsche. See Karin Bauer, Adorno’s Nietzschean Narratives: Critiques of Ideology, Readings of Wagner, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999.

[vi] Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, the “Pastoral,” and Berlioz’s Symphony Fantastique—which bears many indications of Berlioz conceiving it explicitly as an “anti-Pastoral”—in being two of the most famous examples that disregard this convention in their use of five movements.

[vii] “Performed by a large number of players on a diverse range of instruments and projected to a large gathering of listeners, the symphony came to be seen as the most monumental of all instrumental genres. The all-embracing tone of the symphony was understood to represent the emotions or ideas not merely of the individual composer but of an entire community, be it a city, a state, or the whole of humanity. As reflected in the writings of such critics as Paul Bekker, Arnold Schering and Theodor Adorno, this perspective continued into the 20th century, yet by the end of the century it was all but lost. It nevertheless constitutes one of the essential elements in perceptions of the symphony throughout the 19th century.” “Symphony,” Grove Music Online ed. L. Macy (Accessed [December 15, 2004]), http://www.grovemusic.com.login.ezproxy.library.ualberta.ca.

[viii] Laurence Lampert, Nietzsche’s Teaching: An Interpretation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986) 147; quotation from Leo Strauss, “Note on the Plan of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil,” in Leo Strauss, Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983) 189.

[ix] The title was originally intended to be the “Bonaparte Symphony” in dedication to the reforms introduced by Napoleon as First Consul of France in parts of Europe conquered by the post-revolutionary republican army that he led, but upon hearing that he had crowned himself emperor in 1804 (instead of having the then Pope Pius VII, who was at the coronation and had carried the crown to him, do the deed, thus symbolically representing his non-subservience to papal authority) Beethoven apocryphally tore up the title page, in rage at Napoleon having become simply another tyrant.

[x] “Beethoven; the symphonic ideal,” Grove Music Online.

[xi] “Symphony; Beethoven,” Grove Music Online.

[xii] D. A. Carson, Douglas J. Moo, An Introduction to the New Testament, 2^nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2005), 700-02.

[xiii] See, for example, ibid, 702-707; and R.H. Charles, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Revelation of St. John, Vol. 1 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1920), xxix-xxxvii.

[xiv] Apology, 41

[xv] Arthur Schopenhauer, “On Suicide,” http://comp.uark.edu/~mpianal/schopenhauer.htm (Accessed December 15, 2004).

[xvi] “When it appeared in public, it bore the title ‘Fourth and Final Part.’ This is a title Nietzsche gave it, and it is in fact final in that it is the last part he wrote. But judged by its content, its being entitled ‘final’ is not as nearly as appropriate as another title Nietzsche gave it. ‘The Temptation of Zarathustra: an Interlude,’ a title that he called ‘more exact,’ ‘ more descriptive,’ ‘its proper title in view of what already transpired and what follows’ (letters to Fuchs, 29 July 1888, ‘An Entr’acte’; to Brandes, 8 January 1888, ‘Ein Zwischenspiel’)”; Lampert, 288. 

[xvii] From an introduction to Thus Spoke Zarathustra written by his sister, Elizabeth Forster-Nietzsche (Nietzsche Archives, Weimar, 1905), http://www.underthesun.cc/Classics/Nietzsche/Zarathustra/ Zarathustra1.html (accessed December 17, 2004). She goes on to state that only seven copies were in fact given away. Concerning Nietzsche’s attitude towards it, Lampert quotes from his last known reference to it, part of a letter to Köselitz on December 9, 1888: “Dear friend, I want to have all the copies of Zarathustra four back, in order to secure this unpublished work against all the accidents of life and death….If after a few decades of world historical crises—wars!—I publish it, then that will be the proper time” (287-8). A realization that this was written less than a month before his first (incontrovertible) signs of madness might help us to understand Nietzsche’s seeming urgency, but what it is about Part IV in particular that demands such special treatment is a fascinating question for any reader of Zarathustra.

[xviii] Beethoven’s Fifth symphony expresses this tendency perhaps better any other “as a work of unusual historical importance, particularly as regards the question of cyclical coherence. With its overt manipulation of a single motive across multiple movements, its blurring of boundaries between the two final movements, and the extended return to an earlier movement (the third) within the course of its finale, the Fifth brings to the surface strategies of cyclical coherence that had long been present but rarely made so obvious. The Fifth is also significant for the emotional weight of its finale, which reintroduces and resolves issues and ideas left open in earlier movements. Beethoven thereby placed unprecedented weight on a symphonic finale in a manner that was immediately palpable.” “Symphony; Beethoven,” New Grove Online.

[xix] Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, quoted in Harlow Gale, “Schopenhauer’s Metaphysics of Music” (http://users.belgacom.net/wagnerlibrary/articles/ney48218.htm, accessed December 16, 2004). This valuation of music above all other arts should be understood in the context of coming after Immanuel Kant’s judgment that “if … one estimates the value of the beautiful arts in terms of the culture that they provide for the mind and takes as one’s standard the enlargement of the faculties that must join together in the power of judgment for the sake of cognition, then to that extant music occupies the lowest place among the beautiful arts … because it merely plays with sensations. The Critique of the Power of Judgment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 206.

[xx] Spiros Doikas, “Metaphysics of Art - Nietzsche's and Schopenhauer's Theories of Art,” http://www.translatum.gr/etexts/moart.htm (accessed December 16, 2004).

[xxi] “To say it once more: today I find it an impossible book: I consider it badly written, ponderous, embarrassing, image-mad and image-confused, sentimental, in places saccharine to the point of effeminacy, uneven in tempo, without the will to logical cleanliness, very convinced and therefore disdainful of proof, mistrustful even of the propriety of proof, a book for initiates, ‘music’ for those dedicated to music, those who are closely related to begin with on the basis of common and rare aesthetic experiences, ‘music’ meant as a sign of recognition for close relatives in arbitus [in the arts]—an arrogant and rhapsodic book that ought to exclude right from the beginning the profanum vulgus [profane crowd] of ‘the educated’ even more than ‘the mass’ or ‘folk’” (3).

[xxii] Two of these being ““what is Dionysian?” and “What, seen in the perspective [Optik] of life, is the significance of morality?”

[xxiii] The first being from the first paragraph of the nineteenth section of the chapter, the middle three making up, in the same order, section eighteen, while the last makes up the final two sentences from section twenty, the last of the chapter.

[xxiv] Ecce Homo, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” 6.

[xxv] Ibid, 6.

[xxvi] See Leonard Sax, M.D., Ph.D., "What Was the Cause of Nietzsche's Dementia?" by Journal of Medical Biography, Royal Medical Society, London, February 2003, 11: 47-54.

At the Edge of the Avant-Garde: On the Montreal Free Improvisation Scene

‘Yes, we’re free to do anything and, as well, free to be ignored’

         Malcolm Goldstein[i]

Introduction

            In his article ‘Tracing Out an Anglo-Bohemia: Musicmaking and Myth in Montreal,’ Geoff Stahl (2001) explores the ways in which Montreal functions within Canadian (as well, though to an obviously lesser degree, international) cultural discourse. And how this position, and its concomitant structures, have allowed for the creation of, as well as helped maintain and develop, an English-speaking artistic community that understands itself according to a bohemian, counter-cultural identity. Defined by a municipal history of politic—stretching back most notably to 1849 when a mob burned down the Parliamentary buildings in what was then the capital of an 8-year old united province of Canada (Foster 1951)—cultural hybridity, artistic experimentation, moral decadence and economic decline, this identity, Stahl argues, has found expression in (among other things) an Anglophone music scene whose participants conceive of it, and themselves, as ‘independent.’ That is, as individuals in opposition to corporate control—with Toronto functioning metonymically as the city to where the money has fled but that lacks Montreal’s cultural vitality.[ii] Although inevitably informed by its location within a majority French-speaking province, Stahl quite rightly points to the influence of the French-English cultural and language divide as of profound importance to the constitution of this Anglo-bohemian musical identity given the deep-rooted distinctions that exist between most Montreal Anglophone and Francophone musicians, their respective audiences and, in many cases, performance spaces.

            However, among partisans of at least one Montreal musical scene what is most commonly referred to as ‘free improvisation’ or, in Québécois French, musique actuelle, this linguistic, cultural divide is much less significant. Made up of both Anglophones and Francophones, as well as some Allophones (a term seemingly unique to Quebec referring to those whose first language is neither English or French), this scene’s identity is significantly informed by a self-consciousness of its cultural diversity in opposition to the greater uniformity of other Montreal music scenes. An appreciation for such cultural diversity, combined with considerations of this scene’s relative vitality and strength, motivates this paper. From interviews with a number of those involved in the scene, attendance at numerous performances associated with it and close analysis of documentary evidence (in print as well as audio and video recordings of related events), I hope to explain how the extremely non-commercial, and largely improvised kind of music that is associated with the label musique actuelle, and its common English equivalent “free improvisation,” as well as the identities with which it is associated, took root, survived and, arguably, continue to thrive as a distinct, and internationally renowned music scene.

Part I: Setting the Scene

            As sociologist Patricia Lamarre points out, ‘Montreal is an unusual city in the North American context and is significantly different from other cosmopolitan centers in Canada, such as Toronto and Vancouver…[It] is the only major metropolitan center in Canada to function predominantly in a language other than English; this on a continent where English dominates massively’ (2007: 111). So even though, according to the 2006 Canadian census, only 13.45% of the population of metropolitan Montreal now claims English as their mother tongue (Statistics Canada 2006),^[iii] the importance of its historical presence, in conjunction with its dominance throughout the rest of Canada and the United States, gives it a far greater importance within the city than its present numbers might otherwise indicate.

            Indeed, it would be difficult to overstate the importance of Montreal’s bilingualism to its cultural constitution. Within Montreal, the question as to the use of French or English colours (or, depending on one’s perspective, haunts) nearly all interactions with strangers on account of the initial uncertainty as to which language the other prefers to, or can, speak.^[iv] It is also a source of perpetual discord among some Anglophones and Francophones who feel aggrieved by the perceived intolerance or closed-mindedness of members of the other community. These perceptions are aggravated by the past 40 or so year history of divisive events: the FLQ/October Crisis (1969-1970), the 1980 and 1995 referendums on the separation of Quebec from Canada, the 1982 patriation of the Canadian constitution without the agreement of then Quebec premier René Lévesque, and the late 1980s to early 1990s Canada-wide debates over the Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords. And it is this long history of language and cultural hybridity that distinguishes Montreal most profoundly from newer Canadian multicultural metropolises such as Toronto and Vancouver. Though both of these latter cities have been profoundly changed by the influx of non-English speaking immigrants to Canada that have made them their home over the last 50 or so years (Troper 2000), they retain a cultural unilingualism that is wholly foreign to Montreal’s core linguistic and cultural diversity, a mixture that has been of integral importance to the development and support of its free-improvisation music scene.

            John Heward, who has lived in Montreal most of his life and now plays drums in a variety of free improvisation ensembles, traces the vitality of this music in Montreal to the city’s vibrant nightlife in the 1940s and ‘50s, through the politically turbulent and artistically experimental 1960s, the birth of musique actuelle in the 1970s and early 80s among sovereignist-leaning Francophones, and a long period of relatively underground genre-blending experimentation and exploration in the 1990s that culminated in the opening of the Casa del Popolo, a now iconic Montreal venue specializing in experimental music, in 2000.^[v] Heward also points to the few months spent by Sun Ra and his Arkestra in Montreal from the fall of 1960 to early 1961 as, if not directly influential on later Montreal musicians, at least an early, auspicious sign of the city’s openness to free improvisation (Szwed 1997: 179-81).

            As one of the founders of musique actuelle and its associated record label Ambiance Magnétique,^[vi] flautist, saxophonist and composer Jean Derome has had a profound effect on the evolution of improvisationally-based music in Montreal.^[vii] In an interview he pointed to the first Festival Internationale de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville in 1983 as the origin of musique actualle on account of the organizers need for a label for the type of music they wished to present.^[viii]

Musique actuelle is a name that we gave to a community of musicians. To me it doesn’t mean much in itself...I was content not to use a name at all because when you don’t have a name it’s nice as one isn’t trapped by institutions. But it was the foundation of the Festival de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville that announced the name publicly as it hadn’t had much of a use before that...For me it describes a point of encounter between all the avant-garde: modern jazz, free improvisation, what some call ‘art rock’—rock that is non-commercial and artistic—and also contemporary music. It’s a fertile and interesting meeting point for people with common interests.^[ix]

Vitally important to its correct understanding in English is the translation of ‘actuelle’ not as ‘actual’ (for what would ‘actual music’ even mean? Some variety opposed to non-actual music?), but instead as ‘new’ or ‘current.’^[x] Other names I have heard from those involved in the Montreal scene to describe this kind of music are ‘new’ and ‘creative’ although these are problematic in their implicit characterization of other music as not-new and non-creative. As Derome points out, however, applying some name is seemingly unavoidable given the need to promote and market music even—or perhaps especially—of a highly experimental kind.

            For Derome, one of the most remarkable characteristics of the contemporary Montreal free improvisation scene is how musically and culturally diversified it is in comparison to the resolutely francophone, politically left-leaning, sovereignist (i.e. desiring for Quebec to separate from Canada) group of musicians (e.g. René Lucier, Pierre Cartier, Robert Lepage, Joane Hétu) with whom he primarily performed from the 1970s through 1990s. ‘Many musicians who have moved here from elsewhere have told me that it was because of the group of us musicians around Ambiance Magnétique that they came here. I appreciate that.’ Although he continues to play in groups made up primarily of other Francophones, he has found himself performing more and more with non-Francophones in recent years. He, along with all the other musicians I interviewed, stressed the importance of such cultural cross-fertilization of musicians and performance spaces as of integral importance to their own understandings of the Montreal free improvisation scene.

Part II: Meanings of freedom

            Before going any further a discussion of the qualifier of “free” in “free improvisation” is necessary. For ‘freedom’ is a concept loaded with ideological significance within the hegemony of an internationally dominant liberal, capitalist regime that extolls the worth of individual freedom above nearly all else.^[xi] Through its invocation of freedom, the label ‘free improvisation’ acts as a mechanism of interpellation—calling into existence the subjective identities and positions that fulfill the demands of the relevant Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs), whose function it is to foster a sense of individual distinction and self-motivated creative expression as a controlled, and ultimately neutered, outlet to anti-authoritarian impulses. So conceived, such expressions of purported individuality serve to affirm and help propagate the consumerism that is of integral importance to the functioning of the very capitalist system that is, in most cases, the very target of the expression’s purported rebellion and/or resistance (Frank 1998; Heath and Potter 2004). On this account, ‘free improvisation’ describes not a radically free musical practice (and its attendant social engagements) in perpetual challenge to the established order (artistic or political), but rather a musical community that has been effectively marginalized precisely because of its participants’ self-understanding as autonomous, free individuals unencumbered by the cultural-ideological conditioning that produces those who make more conventional, commercially-minded music.

The workings of this musical label’s invocation of freedom thus bear no small relation to Michel Foucault’s ‘repressive hypothesis.’ Against the view that understands sex as the object of growing repression beginning in the 17^th century, culminating in 19^th century Victorian prudery and then finally liberated (at least partially) in the latter half of the 20^th century with the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s, Foucault argues, rather, that sex has been transformed into a discursive regime of power that has been integral to the production of the modern subject as a constantly self-interrogating self (1990: 23-24). ‘For us, it is in the confession that truth and sex are joined, through the obligatory and exhaustive expression of an individual secret. But this time it is truth that serves as the medium for sex and its manifestations’ (1990: 61). Through the positioning of sex as something personal and secretive, but simultaneously of increasing importance to the well-being of society and at the center of a constantly proliferating discourse of self-examination and confession, power comes to be invested in, and realized through, both the minutiae of individual bodily responses and the broader complexes of the society in which they exist (1990: 146).

            Crucially for Foucault is why this narrative of sexual repression has been so compelling for so many despite, he points out, there having been a ‘veritable discursive explosion’ over the last three centuries pertaining to sex (1990: 17). His answer is that conceiving of sex in terms of repression works to the advantage of those who speak of it since they are thus granted the status of deliberate transgressors and truth tellers and thereby accrue the corresponding benefits of such a romanticized and ostensibly anti-normative yet liberatory position.

What sustains our eagerness to speak in terms of repression is doubtless this opportunity to speak out against the powers that be, to utter truths and promise bliss, to link together enlightenment, liberation, and manifold pleasures; to pronounce a discourse that combines the fervor of knowledge, the determination to change the laws, and the longing for the garden of earthly delights’ (1990: 6-7).

By speaking about or, in the case of music, playing that which is supposedly taboo, individuals position themselves as courageous truth-tellers defying society’s irrational and unjust proscriptions; artists on the edge of the avant-garde forging ahead for new truths in opposition to society’s inherent conservatism.

            Indeed, Foucault asks whether ‘the critical discourse that addresses itself to repression...is not in fact part of the same historical network as the thing it denounces (and doubtless misrepresents) by calling it ‘repression’?’ (1990: 10). That is, rather than sexual repression (whether real or imaginary) and its various critiques existing in opposition to each other—the latter true, the former false—Foucault suggests that they are part of the same ‘discursive fact’ produced by relations of power; that they are, in fact, mutually dependent. Although likely conceived as a break from what has come before and motivated by altruistic, liberatory desires, Foucault argues that the critique of purported sexual repression actually shows many continuities with far older processes as but a ‘more devious and discreet form of power’ (1990: 11). This is because, Charles Taylor points out, the critique is not conceived of as resulting from the workings of power, but instead ‘as science, or fulfillment, even “liberation”’, which ostensibly stand outside of power and are thus capable of escaping from its strictures (1985: 152). But since such seemingly independent points of resistance are themselves the products of power, they function as its perfect disguise precisely on account of their status as seemingly self-evident truths. Therefore, according to Foucault, a complete escape from power is impossible; at best, one can realize small-scale, localized resistances to it in order, merely, to upset a present regime of ‘truth’ in favor of its substitution for another that is, however, in no way morally superior to what came before. They are simply different.

            Although not a perfect comparison, given its lack of immediate association with pleasure to the same degree as sex, the notion of freedom invoked within the Montreal free improvisation community has more than a little in common with the understanding of sex described by Foucault’s ‘repressive hypothesis.’ Here also there is a narrative of repression, of doing that which is forbidden—or at least not approved by any institution of any broader political, commercial or cultural significance—and thereby ‘speaking’ (or, in this case, perhaps rather ‘playing’ or ‘performing’) truth to power.[xii]  And there is undoubtedly some validity to the preceding Foucaultian analysis of free improvisation, for it would be naïve to posit its complete exceptionality from the devious workings of power laid out so provocatively by Foucault.

However, such an understanding of freedom in terms of Foucault’s theoretical position is not without problems. Particularly difficult to accept is his complete devaluing of subjective agency and concomitant separation of power from that of some notion of truth, and of freedom from its repressive effects.  Not all external impositions are usefully thought of, or even coherently conceived, as the consequence of power and repression.[xiii] And without a conception of freedom and truth as external to power, as not merely ideological masks to hide its all-encompassing functioning, power becomes so ubiquitous as to lose any meaning. One can only speak of power with any degree of efficacy in terms of some countervailing force (e.g. truth, freedom) that opposes it.[xiv]   

And it is preciely the history of the genre of free improvisation that renders the appropriateness of such Nietzschean-like value neutrality highly questionable (Merquior 1985; Nietzsche 2003). This is because one of the primary antecedents of this form of ‘free improvisation’ is the so-called “free jazz” movement that began in the late 1950s (with, perhaps most prominently, Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman), and then proliferated through the 1960s primarily among African-American musicians as a musical expression of (among other things) the-then burgeoning civil rights movement.^[xv] ‘Freedom’ in this context was often times overtly political, an expression of defiance and demand for liberation from a centuries old tyranny that, especially in the southern United States, routinely used the full weight of (to again reference Althusser) the Repressive State Apparatuses (RSAs; i.e. the police and unofficially the Ku Klux Klan) to enforce its dictates.^[xvi] To adopt Foucault’s position wholesale would be to undermine any moral basis for such demands for liberation and thus to leave one with no ethical basis to critique what is in favor of what could be.

            So though the label ‘free jazz’ is still sometimes invoked by some contemporary musicians, especially in those forms of improvisation that George Lewis has referred to as Afrological, ‘jazz’ is now often replaced by ‘improvisation’ due to the considerable pedigree and contemporary influence of improvisationally-based music from a European art-music, or what Lewis calls a Eurological, background. For though these, in Lewis’ words, ‘historically emergent rather than ethnically essential,’ varieties of improvisation were in the past sometimes quite antagonistic towards each other (especially the Eurological critiquing the Afrological), in Montreal at least they now seem to have comparable influence on the overall contemporary free improvisation music scene (1996, 93). But this convergence should not distract from an awareness of the history of very unequal relations between these two improvisatory traditions. As Lewis points out, the rise in awareness among Europeans and white Americans of the heritage of musical improvisation among African-Americans brought about the former’s attempt, ‘to come to grips with some of the implications of musical improvisation. This confrontation, however, took place amid an ongoing narrative of dismissal, on the part of many of these composers, of the tenets of African-American improvisatory forms.’ The partisans of the real-time music making that began to be incorporated into the Western art music tradition post-WWII, led most notably by John Cage, therefore

almost invariably theorized as emanating almost exclusively from a generally venerated stream of European cultural, social, and intellectual history—the ‘Western tradition.’ In such texts, an attempted erasure or denial of the impact of African-American forms on the real-time work of European and Euro-American composers is commonly asserted (Lewis 1996: 92).

Using John Cage and Charlie Parker as respective paragons of the Eurological and Afrological, Lewis argues for a fundamental distinction between these two improvisatory traditions. For whereas Cage, through the use of aleatoric (i.e. chance) procedures, hoped to break out of what he considered the staid, subjective-derived musical patterns of the past in order to create music that was truly new, Parker, and many other jazz musicians of the bebop era and after (especially African-American ones), saw their improvisational practice as expressly about the ‘assertion of self-determination’ in opposition to the legalized discrimination of Jim Crow injustice and the broader history of political and economic injustice (Lewis 1996: 95). The former attempts to kill the ego; the latter, in stark contrast, to affirm its irreducible value.

            For Frank Kofsky, such assertions of the self in opposition to oppression were precisely what was at work in the practice of free jazz musicians of the 1960s, whose music, he believed, represented a revolution in music aimed explicitly at overthrowing the racism, capitalism and imperialism that, was endemic in white America. It was a musical counterpart to Malcolm X’s revolutionary exhortations. The ‘avant-garde movement in jazz is a musical representation of the ghetto’s vote of “no confidence” in Western civilization and the American dream – that Negro avant-garde intransigents, in other words, are saying through their horns… “Up your ass, feeble-minded ofays!’’’ (1970: 131). On Kofsky’s account, not only does free jazz have little to do with Western art music (even its most avant-garde varieties), but it is resolutely antagonistic towards it and its ‘art for art’s sake’ principle that is, in fact, but a post-facto rationalization of its own political impotence or acquiescence to the status quo.

            Kofsky’s Marxist-inspired musical radicalism, however, seems curiously out of place in the context of Montreal’s free improvisation scene.[xvii] Lori Freedman, for example, one of the most prominent, and internationally renowned members of the free improvisation community in Montreal, studied classical clarinet performance at the University of Toronto and considers herself much more at home within that tradition than that of jazz though she performs regularly with musicians with a strong modern jazz background.^[xviii] And Malcolm Goldstein, another of the scene’s most prominent members, studied violin and composition at Colombia University, knew John Cage and has been one of the most consistent interpreters of his work since the 1960s, although he is also strongly influenced by Ornette Coleman’s work.^[xix] There are also many musicians with a primarily jazz background (e.g. Jason Sharp, Sam Shalabi) and others whose primary experience is with rock or punk music. A number of those I interviewed informed me that one of the most valuable distinguishing characteristics of the Montreal free improvisation scene is its constitution by, and accommodation of, an unusually wide range of musical backgrounds and styles. Saxophonist Matana Roberts (a resident of New York City who often performs in Montreal) expressed her experience of the Montreal free improvisation scene to me very much in these terms.

            What I...like about my Montreal shows is the cross-section of people I can get in an   audience. I don’t  like playing my music for purely jazz/improv fans. In fact, I hate that. I find

them to be a...bit set in what music is supposed to be and I’d rather play my music for broad

audiences. Montreal makes me happy in that I can get a crazy cross-section of folks in one

room...Montreal is interesting in that it seems improvisers here are coming more out of a gypsy

tradition of dealing with sound. And there’s also a very punk rock DIY vibe to it that makes it

very inspiring for me at times because I feel in contrast to NYC musicians, Montreal improvisers

tend to invest more of themselves into the art form. The Montreal improviser challenges the constrictions of space, time and musical construction in ways that I think at times can make the listener uncomfortable, but again I think points to a very homegrown language of dealing with sound.^[xx]

As a label of identity, ‘free improvisation’ seems to transcend the various different genres and scenes that Roberts refers, to provide a common identifier, and therefore ideological ground, for a marginalized musical scene that lacks the luxury of acute distinctions due to its lack of economic capital. Because there is so little financial gain to be realized from performing music of a free-improvisation variety, those wishing to perform it cannot afford to define themselves in evermore specific ways as happened beginning in the late 1960s with the proliferation of rock hybrids (folk-rock, hard-rock, psychedelic-rock, progressive-rock, punk-rock, etc.) and since the 1980s with an even more rapid proliferation of genre distinctions in electronic music.^[xxi] As Pierre Bourdieu’s points out in his theorization of the field of cultural production (1993: 29-73), this relative absence of sub-genre distinctions cannot be separated from strategies aimed at the attainment, retention and growth of symbolic and cultural capital: the fame, notoriety and other benefits that come from the denial of commercial pressures or the desire for popular acclaim. In this ‘economic world reversed’ the diversity of the musicians’ backgrounds bears a homologous relation to the diversity that ostensibly marks its difference from other, more stylistically unified, musical scenes.

Part III: Freedom in tension

            Many of those I interviewed expressed the importance within the scene of individual expression and the need to be true to one’s self; the absolute priority of this self conceived of as prior to any social engagement was therefore unsurprisingly rarely questioned.^[xxii] Guitarist and composer Sam Shalabi, however, while extolling the openness and genuine acceptance of new ideas and forms of expression by musicians and audience members in Montreal (especially compared to other urban centers in North America) expressed his frustration with the very idea of a free improvisation scene.

            As Ornette Coleman said, style is the death of creativity…The fallacy that say experimental

music, improvised music is really that, is improvised or experimental all the time is nonsense...You go see a group of improvisers it’s not like it’s ground zero improvisation. You’re taking stuff from the history of improvised music, the licks you’ve been practicing that week, or whatever; it’s all in there. And so, the notion that it isn’t a style, that it doesn’t have a tendency to become stylized as much as a rockabilly band or a Pink Floyd tribute band. To me there’s not a lot of difference between the bulk of improvised music and that. More and more it’s about maintaining the tradition without really questioning what you’re doing in your own time and place and how you can make that interesting.^[xxiii]

Though one of the more well-known musicians within the Montreal free improvisation scene and highly appreciative of the freedom it allows in comparison to that of any other he knows about throughout North America, Shalabi, of all my interviewees, most pointedly expressed this kind of opposition to the seemingly inevitable codification of musical style.

            Howard Becker, in this regard, argues that artistic conventions, rather than expressing a lack of creative ability, are in fact productive of it, while also necessary for audience member’s capacity to engage with art works (2008: 30). This echoes Foucault’s argument that power, rather than purely repressive, is in fact productive of identities, language, bodily states and so forth. This is most obviously the case, as Becker also argues, in facilitating communication and ‘efficient coordination’ between artists engaged in collective action and those who support them in their endeavors (2008: 30). Without these, lacking any assumptions as to what should occur, the likely result of opening such a vastness of possible actions is extreme paralysis for performers in having no standardized structures to depend upon. One might even wonder, given the inevitable internalization within the body of the repetitive practices involved in learning to play an instrument, whether such a total freedom is in fact possible—at least without the aid of methods of intense personal defamiliarization, for example that which, many have argued, result from the use of psychedelic drugs (Nicotra 2008; Banco 2008). But even this seems unlikely since, as Foucault notes, ‘disciplinary coercion establishes in the body the constricting link between an increased aptitude and an increased domination’ (1984: 182).[xxiv]

            There is, then, a seemingly irremediable tension inherent to the Montreal free improvisation scene and of the wider genre that it is an example of. Although it extols the untrammeled, entirely self-directed freedom of musical expression, to differentiate it from other musical genres its participants for the most part limit themselves to musical characteristics (resolute atonality, lack of any clear metrical pulse, foregrounding of ‘extended’ instrumental techniques and so forth) that clearly mark it as distinct from music ostensibly compromised by commercial, and therefore heteronomous, considerations. On one hand, a number of my informants expressed the positive nature of the limited financial rewards for the music they played in that it facilitated a sense of community and lack of competition among Montreal free improvisation musicians and a concomitant freedom for genuine artistic experimentation. Sam Shalabi, for example, told me:

I think if you’re doing experimental music, and there isn’t a sense that you’re actually experimenting or in opposition to something at all levels...socially, politically, aesthetically...then there’s something weird about it. So if you’re able to get a giant grant to stage a show of really experimental, bizarre music...and ten people show up and you don’t care because you’ve already gotten your money then I think that affects what you do...It creates a closed environment where the people who do the art are doing it, it creates a loop, it influences what you do...an environment where there’s a lot of backslapping, where people aren’t really critical of what you’re doing because they’re in on it as well. They’re getting money to do the same thing, you’re getting money, they come to see your show and everybody’s getting money and as long as it stays in this closed environment then everything’s fine...You know the quality suffers because of that...If you’re doing ‘experimental art’ or music and you’re funded for everything you do, it’s not experimental anymore, it’s sanctioned by the most un-experimental institution in the world: the state.^[xxv]

At the same, however, the lack of institutional support for the free improvisation scene from local universities, conservatories, media and prominent well-funded festivals such as the Montreal International Festival du Jazz was a commonly expressed lament, which many saw as politically reactionary and artistically stifling in preventing musicians from dedicating themselves whole-heartily to the creation of what they argued was important, new, creative music (Smith 2001).^[xxvi] For example, none of the daily newspapers in Montreal (The Gazette, La Presse, Le Journal de Montréal, Le Devoir) regularly report on free improvisation performances, nor even, for the most part, do the ‘alternative’ arts & entertainment weeklies The Montreal Mirror, The Hour and Le Voir.[xxvii] According to several of my informants, the publicly funded Canadian Broadcast Corporation’s Radio 2 station was in the past quite supportive of free improvisation in providing various opportunities for it to be played on the air, thus giving them a much welcomed source of income from performance royalties.^[xxviii] But beginning in 2007 the format of Radio 2 changed to emphasize more popular and commercially successful music (often of an ‘adult-contemporary’ variety) and is now almost completely devoid of anything resembling free improvisation.^[xxix] And the fact that the administration of the McGill University Faculty of Music cancelled the contemporary improvisation ensemble taught by Lori Freedman for 2009-2010 because of budget cutbacks, despite its relatively meager cost of $60 a week,^[xxx] while doing little to promote it during its seven years in existence (it was never included in the university calendar or online course listings and was advertised purely through word of mouth and posters put up by Freedman and course participants) was, for a number of my informants, highly indicative of a disturbing lack of acceptance for a form of musical expression for which there is significant interest within Montreal and, moreover, among McGill University music students.

            This lack of institutional support was amply demonstrated in late January of 2004 when Steve Lacy, arguably the most influential soprano saxophonist of the last 50 years, was invited by the McGill University-based Project on Improvisation (PI), led by Associate Professor of Philosophy Eric Lewis, to Montreal to give a lecture on improvisation and his life-long practice of, and participation with, it, as well as to lead a group of musicians through two open rehearsals and a subsequent performance. It was a notable event for a number of reasons. First, unbeknownst to all but a few at the time, Lacy was quite sick with inoperable cancer (he died less than six month later in June of 2004). Second, it brought together a number of the key figures of the Montreal free improvisation community together to play with him—John Heward, Lori Freedman, Rainer Wiens, Jean Derome and Nicolas Calloia—along with two individuals from outside of Montreal, Joe Giardullo and Gordon Allen. Third, it exposed the profound rift that exists between many of those in the traditional jazz establishment—represented most famously by trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and writer Stanley Crouch (Elworth 1995; Hersch 2001)—for whom jazz’s technical evolution effectively ended in 1959, and those who have continued in the modal and free jazz styles that played such a vital role in the development of jazz throughout the 1960s and ‘70s.

For although Lacy’s jazz pedigree was of the highest degree—having played with Thelonius Monk, Sonny Rollins, Cecil Taylor, Duke Ellington and having crucially influenced John Coltrane’s use of the soprano saxophone—the jazz area of the McGill University Faculty of Music was extremely reluctant to make a space available for the accompanying lecture and rehearsals. A room was ultimately provided but, to their surprise, it was too small to fit everyone who wanted to attend, including many of their own students.^[xxxi] The performance itself was held off campus and, from all accounts, was an enormous success with a large, appreciative audience.^[xxxii] For trumpeter Gordon Allen, then a resident of Toronto, the event made such an impression on him that he subsequently moved to Montreal largely on account of his experience playing with Lacy and thereby becoming aware of the existence of such an appreciative and understanding audience for improvisationally-based music in Montreal. He has since become one of the scene’s most important performers and organizers helping to run a performance venue dedicated to its music, L’Envers (though now closed), and a weekly series at a café, Le Cagibi, both in Montreal’s Mile-End district.^[xxxiii] I think that my discussion of this event therefore marks an appropriate ending point for this paper in that it exemplifies the promises and difficulties, the tensions and agreements that constitute the identity of this unique music scene.

Conclusion

            In this paper I have drawn together a wide variety of disparate perspectives in order to suggest appropriate ways to understand what constitutes the Montreal free improvisation music scene as well as explains its relative vitality. Although freedom, self-expression, the desire to succeed as a professional musician and to build a strong community are all important qualities to those participants with whom I engaged, the question as to how to reconcile their divergent tendencies remained at the forefront of a great deal of their considerations. Situated on the outer-edges of the art world, the musicians who make up this scene both resent their exclusion from many of the financially-lucrative and culturally-legitimizing institutions that surround them in Montreal while simultaneously celebrating their liberation from the demands and prohibitions that such institutions inevitably require for their support and legitimization.

In pointing this out I by no means wish to suggest that those involved in this scene are in anyway strange or hypocritical in their partiality to contradictory impulses. Rather, the balance between these differing demands is a paradox common to self-described modern or avant-garde artists and an unavoidable one as long as they desire, as did nearly all the musicians I talked to, both the legitimation of what they do as art untainted by commercial demands and the success that enables them to support themselves professionally within a capitalist economic system.[xxxiv] Constituted to such a vital degree by the cultural and linguistic diversity of Montreal, however, this musical scene offers a unique window into the workings of musicians and spectators in a constant struggle of trying to achieve a balance between these divergent, paradoxical aspirations.

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[i] In discussion with the author, November 28, 2009.

[ii] Will Straw (1993: 169) points out that “Imagined or real distinctions between Toronto and Montreal have long served as the deep structure of a Canadian moral geography”.

^[iii] I determined this percentage by adding together those who declared English as their singular mother tongue (425,635) with those for whom it was one of two or more mother tongues (English and French: 26,855; English and non-official language: 15,225; English, French and non-official language: 4,950) to a total of 472,665. I then divided this by the number of single responses in Montreal (3,514,485) and then multiplied by 100.

^[iv] This has led to the ubiquitous yet controversial, often remarked upon and made fun of greeting in Montreal: ‘bonjour/hello!’

^[v] John Heward in discussion with the author, November 28, 2009.

^[vi] Information on the label can found at http://www.ambiancesmagnetiques.com/ (accessed Dec. 2, 2012).

^[vii] For the most detailed discussion of his musical career as well as a discography see the article on him in The Canadian Encyclopedia/The Encyclopedia of Music in Canada: http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/index.cfm?PgNm=TCE&Params=U1ARTU0000936  (accessed Dec. 2, 2012).

^[viii] Victoriaville is a small city approximately 170 km east of Montreal. For information on the festival see http://fimav.qc.ca/en/edition/home/ (accessed Sept. 13, 2014).

^[ix] Jean Derome in discussion with Hélène Laurin and the author, January 19, 2010. Translated from French also by the author.

^[x] The meaning is perhaps most evident in its relation to ‘actualité’—that is, current events or news.

^[xi] At least freedom of the ‘negative’ kind as discussed in Isaiah Berlin’s seminal essay ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ (2000).

[xii] “But there may be another reason that makes it so gratifying for us to define the relationship between sex and power in terms on repression: something that one might call the speaker’s benefit. If sex is repressed, that is, condemned to prohibition, nonexistence, and silence, then the mere fact that one is speaking about it has the appearance of a deliberate transgression. A person who holds forth in such language places himself to a certain extent outside the reach of power; he upsets established law; he somehow anticipates the coming freedom” (Foucault 1990: 6).

[xiii] “[S]omething is only an imposition on me against a background of desires, interests, purposes, that I have. It is only an imposition if it makes some dent in these, if it frustrates them, prevents them from fulfillment, or perhaps even from formulation. If some external situation or agency wreaks some change in me which in now way lies athwart some such desire/purpose/aspiration/ interest, then there is no call to speak of an exercise of power/domination. Take the phenomenon of imprinting. In human life, it also exists after a fashion. We generally come to like the foods which have assuaged our hunger, those we are fed as children in our culture. Is this an index of the ‘domination’ of our culture over us? The word would lose all useful profile, would have no more distinctiveness, if we let it roam this wide” (Taylor 1985: 174-75).

[xiv] “Mask, falsehood [i.e. what power does] makes no sense without a corresponding notion of truth. The truth here is subversive of power: it is on the side of the lifting of impositions…The Foucaultiam notion of power not only requires for its sense the correlative notions of truth and liberation, but even the standard link between them, which makes truth the condition of liberation” (Taylor 1985: 176-77). Indeed, it is hard to reconcile Foucault’s totalizing anti-subjectivism and neo-Nietzschean value-neutrality with his long concern for the reform of the conditions in which prisoners are held. See, for example, Foucault and Simon (1991), “Michel Foucault on Attica: An Interview.”

^[xv] Free Jazz being the title of Coleman’s 1960 album, as well as of its album-long track.

^[xvi] Max Roach’s album We Insist! – Freedom Now! Suite, also from 1960, is one of the most explicit examples of this kind of musical-political expression.

[xvii] And as Mark Gridley points out, even in the context of the 1960s, Kofsky’s attempt to explicitly connect the practices of free jazz musicians and radical politics is problematic given the explicit denials of a number of such musicians, such as Albert Ayler and Marion Brown, that their music was in any way political (2007: 144-46).

^[xviii] Lori Freedman in discussion with the author, November 30, 2009.

^[xix] Malcolm Goldstein in discussion with the author, November 21, 2009. ‘I had heard Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz LP recording around 1960 when it was first available. I was overwhelmed with what, to me at that time, seemed like chaos, but a glorious chaos fertile with the creative soul of music making…Later, in 1986, Ornette would compose violin music, ‘Trinity’, for me’ (Goldstein 2008: 10-11).

^[xx] Matana Roberts, e-mail message to author, December 3, 2009.

^[xxi] Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music, http://techno.org/electronic-music-guide/ (accessed Dec. 2, 2012) is a highly detailed, if somewhat irreverent, exploration of the history and identities of the plethora of genres and sub-genres of electronic music.

^[xxii] Arguably this viewpoint ultimately stems from Immanuel Kant’s subjectivist, bourgeois account of morality as necessarily constituted by autonomous, i.e. entirely self-legislating, universalizable actions (1998).

^[xxiii] Sam Shalabi in discussion with the author, November 30, 2009.

[xxiv] Anders Ericsson has shown (2002) that any sustained practice, such as for music or sports, leads to the ‘deliberate modification of bodily systems and individual cells’ in order to adapt to its goals.

^[xxv] Sam Shalabi in discussion with the author, November 30, 2009.

^[xxvi] As Julie Dawn Smith explains in her dissertation on women improvising musicians, the political economy of free improvisation—as with new, experimental music in general—is characterized by a pronounced lack of financial rewards or even much possibility of making a career playing it (2001: 14-18). As some of my informants pointed out, however, being excluded from any serious chance of reaping much of any substantial financial reward from their music, or even obtaining the symbolic capital that is the marker of avant-garde art’s attainment of cultural consecration, does have certain advantages in reducing feelings of competition between musicians and thereby bringing about greater cooperation. To paraphrase one of my sources: why worry about trying to outdo other musicians when the rewards are so meager? Intriguingly, the continuing exclusion of even the eldest and most respected of these avant-garde artists to attain the symbolic capital that comes from cultural consecration seems to problematize Bourdieu’s history of the field of cultural production that for him is defined primarily in terms of generations. For even those who I interviewed who have been involved in the production of free improvisational music for decades (Malcolm Goldstein and Jean Derome most notably) have been granted little in the way of symbolic capital within the cultural or educational institutions of Montreal.

[xxvii] The Mirror and Hour have since ceased publishing.

^[xxviii] Malcolm Goldstein and Jean Derome in discussion with the author, November 28, 2009 and January 26, 2010 respectively.

^[xxix] For details of announcements as to CBC Radio 2 changes see ‘CBC Radio to broaden Radio 2, add arts magazine,’ http://www.cbc.ca/news/arts/cbc-radio-to-broaden-radio-two-add-arts-magazine-1.668998  (accessed September 14, 2014) and ‘CBC Radio 2 to revamp daytime programming,’ http://www.cbc.ca/news/arts/cbc-radio-2-to-revamp-daytime-programming-1.720872 (accessed September 14, 2014).

^[xxx] Lori Freedman in discussion with the author, November 21, 2009.

^[xxxi] Professor Eric Lewis in discussion with the author, November 20, 2009.

^[xxxii] With the kind permission of Professor Lewis I was able to watch the video recording that was made of the lecture, rehearsals and performance. Due to on-going negotiations with the Lacy estate the video held in the Project on Improvisation archives is the only one in existence.

^[xxxiii] Gordon Allen in discussion with the author, November 30, 2009.

[xxxiv] I use “avant-garde” here because many musicians within the Montreal free improvisation scene commonly use it to describe what their artistic practice. However, following Peter Bürger (1984), I question its applicability in many cases because of the continued propagation of the modernist division between high and low art and celebration of artistic autonomy, which, Bürger argues, were precisely what the members of the historical avant-garde (futurism, dadaism, surrealism) saw themselves as resolutely opposing.