Provocation: ‘The Criticality of Contemporary Musical Modernisms’
Earlier this month, along with Christine Dysers and Seth Brodsky, I ran a session at the AMS-SMT joint conference on the topic of ‘Contemporary Musical Modernisms’. Kicking off the session, we heard a series of 3 minute provocations about musical modernism and the contemporary. These were all very different in style and content.
Here’s mine:
‘The Criticality of Contemporary Musical Modernisms’
Criticality has long been taken to be a feature of musical modernism. In short, modernism enables use to think about, to feel, and to be in the world differently. Today I want to ask: how do we approach some coordinates of this criticality within our contemporary condition, and what does this mean for a study group that wishes to navigate these coordinates practically?
Musical modernism is ‘an artistic response to the social changes wrought by modernity,’ writes Björn Heile and Charles Wilson. This definition is broad, but is helpful too. Twentieth-century modernisms responded to societal registers that have been refigured once again in recent years: developing technologies, which now include post-digital environments; epistemologies that now extend through data sciences and brokerage; transformed temporalities of the everyday and the historical; and, in politics, frighteningly reemerged forms of authoritarianism.
How do we look beyond the proliterating labels of various new modernisms – metamodernism, altermodernism, and so forth – to better understand music’s relation to these shared societal dynamics and problematics, to what Fredric Jameson called a “cultural condition”, a cultural condition not – as it was for him – of “late capitalism”, but of whatever it is that we are living under now?
And, if the commodity-form was formally emblematic of cultural production in the early twentieth-century, the form to which musical and artistic modernism responded critically, what is the form of cultural production that modernism responds to today? We need to understand a modernism not just of commodity objects but of “the stream”; an ‘artistic response to the social changes wrought’ by Youtube and Tiktok, and of the smartphone as post-digital device.
And what about the future? The future was important for the modernists. But, as Franco Berardi, Peter Osborne, Mark Fisher, and others have argued, “the contemporary” professes a diminished capacity for us collectively imagine society’s future.
Does turning to modernism again express a displaced desire: a desire to reassert the importance of “the future”, the notion of a musical and social project that has a future, within our own time-without-future?
I have emphasised musical modernism’s criticality. I note here that our age has been called post-critical by some; the hermeneutics of suspicion have been weaponised by conspiracy theorists and paranoid talking heads. Despite this, I think that, given our current omnicrisis, appreciating music’s criticality – at least some kind of criticality – is needed more urgently than ever before.
Yet, if we are to learn anything from a post-critical mindset, we could ask: How do we enact new collaborations and alliances, partnerships of knowledge-making and sharing, not only through provocations and good intentions, but through material organisation, through building structures and spaces and modes of speaking and sounding and listening?
What work is done? What is its rhythm; when and how is this work done and who does it?
