(2921 words)

American Magic and Dread

From the Crying Aesthetic to Zooropa

Tracing Revolution from Schoenberg to U2

by ADM

There is no melody, only notes, a myriad of tiny jolts.… It is a small happiness of

Nausea.

— Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

It started when Bono walked into the studio one day with those fly shades…It was

like a whole moving into a more ironic point of view.

—The Edge, U2

The big players: Schoenberg, Cage, Coltrane, Sex Pistols, U2.

The big ideas: Commodification, Authorship, Intensity, Revolution.

To an early twentieth-century composer, nausea is praise. A retch proved the

power of the music; it declared the ability of the composer to overcome a century’s

worth of stale rewrites and flaccid additions to the musical canon. The music of

Arthur Schoenberg, for example, forced his audience to confront the anxiety of the

time, even in a discipline that traditionally had been a stronghold of beauty and

order. By dispensing with established musical structures and replacing them with

an impenetrable assortment of dissonance, atonality, and finally twelve-tone theory,

Schoenberg uprooted classical music, and made his audience ill. A potent glory lies

in such an accomplishment, but only briefly, because after a time, the composer

exhausts his audience. Listeners wander off, perhaps looking to be moved in other

ways.

Schoenberg lost his lay audience because of his obsessive attention to composing.

Designs too intricate to hear sacrifice popularity for intellect, clarity for self-

satisfaction. After Schoenberg, music moved toward an avant-garde that could

reach the masses without destroying the integrity of the composer. Had

Schoenberg written symphonies aimed at appealing to his audience’s aesthetic

sensibilities, his feeling of artistic significance may have been ruined. The music

discipline for nearly a century seems to have been yearning for a synthesis of

innovation, beauty, and intellect that would have a broad, appeal to the untrained

ear. This movement drove the careers of many major figures in twentieth-century

music in Classical, Jazz, Punk, and Rock, but is perhaps best exemplified in the

works of Schoenberg, John Cage, John Coltrane, the Sex Pistols, and, today, U2.

Each of these artists, in attempts to reach the best form of music (for both

themselves and their audience) had to balance many elements, artistically and

personally. They each found ways of coping with the necessary commodification of

their music, their authorship of a given piece, the intensity and predictably of their

lives and work, the deconstruction of previous rules of music, and the construction

of new ones. Over the last hundred years or so, the ways in which artists have

addressed these concerns has changed significantly, but their actions seem to be

moving away from the obsessive composer alienating his audience, toward the

ironic band parodying and commodifying themselves to critical applause. In tracing

music from Schoenberg to U2, we will see shifts and cycles from severity to

laughter, from the modern to the postmodern, from nausea to elation.

This is a piece which never fails to move and impress

me,

but always leaves me feeling a little bit sick.

—Leonard Bernstein, on Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire

(1912)

Schoenberg, in his prime (c. 1900-1915), did not have to worry about selling

records. Young and brilliant, he spent his hours wondering at the reinvention of

music. His approach could afford to be purely intellectual, if only because the

people he needed to impress were those who could understand what he was doing,

and who would (at least temporarily) put questions of euphony aside. The

mathematical relationships of one note to another, the exploration of the twelve

tones, the use of dissonance concerned Schoenberg more than the broad appeal of

his music. His is a deep music, one which pushes beyond the ear, and into the

higher functions of the mind. One might argue that Schoenberg brought the

modern preoccupation with science into his compositions, discovering the

underlying truth of music through a scientific method.

In the process of discovering the truth, Schoenberg descended so deeply into his

music, he alienated his audience. Possibly, he had no desire to hold onto an

audience beyond academics and composers, but his impact on music may have

been greater had his compositions been able to appeal to the listener’s sense of

beauty and harmony. Instead, obsessed with authorship, Schoenberg wrote music

that lingers in the collections of the few who understand what he did to music.1

Perhaps angered with the state of his contemporary musicians, and tired of the

same old thing, Schoenberg dispensed with the old rules to bring a level of intensity

and unpredictability to music. Other artists of the period were engrossed in ideas

of banality and regularity. The greatest novel of the period, James Joyce’s Ulysses,

chronicles an average man’s average day in Dublin, ironically alluding to Homer’s

Odyssey, a epic of heroes and beasts. T.S. Eliot yearned for regeneration of a

cultural wasteland, in which people spoke flatly of a cultural tradition they knew

nothing about. Schoenberg’s work reacts against the sullenness of culture,

challenging audiences to question long-held tenets about the nature of music.

The intensity of his work grows because of its unpredictability. Because only the

most knowledgeable composers can predict the direction of a given piece, his work

to everyone else as a chaotic assemblage of notes. The jarring notes of

“Moonfleck,” a portion of his Pierrot Lunaire , are innovative, to be sure, but as

Bernstein suggests, they also inspire nausea. To Schoenberg, however, this

reaction is not necessarily negative. If he intended to overcome his audience’s

sense of unchanging drudgery, nausea is an appropriate response: we can

appreciate the genius of the music without enjoying its sound.

If someone kicked me—not my music, but me—then I might

complain. But if they kicked my music…then who am I to

complain?

—John Cage

After Schoenberg faded, certain members of the musical avant-garde seemed to

realize the danger of obsessing over composition, of losing the ability to laugh at

1Perhaps Schoenberg’s disciples were more concerned with commercial success than the masters. One of his apprentices, Anton Webern, wrote many extremely short pieces, each just long enough to fill one side (three minutes) of a 78-rpm record.

oneself. Composers moved toward methods of including their audiences in the

production of the works, a major step that took away the hierarchy involved in one

person defining high art for an audience of millions. Where Schoenberg tossed

many of music’s rules, and replaced them with complex formulas, the new avant-

garde departed almost altogether from composition. In extreme cases, such as

some of the work of John Cage, the composer contributes only the idea for the

piece, not the specific notes or elements. Cage’s most famous work, 4'33", involved

a pianist sitting in silence for 4 minutes and 33 seconds, the only sound being the

audience’s. “Compositions” such as these de-emphasized the role of the artist while

more directly involving the audience, albeit reluctantly, in the production process.

Such a reliance on the audience removed the music from the composer’s identity,

thereby dissipating the kind of bonds Schoenberg felt toward his music. Where in

Schoenberg, the music alienates the audience, in Cage the audience is wrapped up

in it, and the composer is alienated. Works such as 4'33" once again reject

traditional standards of music, even the recent ones Schoenberg established, but

fail to posit a new standard.

The lack of a standard in Cage’s eventually unnerved audiences who perhaps

already were uncomfortable at being used as living instruments in his work. Cage’s

music, by the nature of it, could not be constant — it changed with each

performance — but neither could it be aurally pleasing, mostly because the

unpredictability factor rose too high. Since so little endured from one night to the

next, an audience could not trace or admire whatever beauty there may have been

in his work. Many compositions not only were unpredictable, but mostly random.

Based on the sounds of men tuning radios, broken pianos, and the nervous coughs

of audience members, Cage’s work evaded all efforts to transpose a logic on top of

it. “This logic was not put there by me, but was the result of chance operations.

The thought that it is logical grows up in you.… I think…that when we use our

perception of logic we minimize the actual nature of the thing we are experiencing,”

explained Cage.

The absence of logic made it nearly impossible to commodify Cage’s work, a side

effect Cage no doubt anticipated. But by this time in the century, commodification

served as the primary means of establishing something in culture. If it couldn’t be

advertised, mass produced, and purchased, its effects could be only ephemeral.

Cage’s music existed only in the presence of an audience. As with Schoenberg, the

novelty —perhaps the genius — of Cage’s work lost its audience, which grew

estranged with each further attempt to embrace it. With neither the composer nor

the listeners identifying with the music, it died.

Sometimes, I wish I could walk up to my music as if for

the first time, as if I had never heard it before. Being so

inescapably a part of it, I’ll never know what the

listener gets, what the listener feels, and that’s too bad.

—John Coltrane

Cage’s deconstruction of music occurred along side the rise of a far more melodic

music of harmony and ecstasy: Jazz. From the beginning, Jazz was an interactive

music, designed to elicit strong reactions from the audience, so they would feel the

intensity of the musician. Jazz is a music of people fed up with hierarchies and

predetermined definitions of art. Spontaneous, rhythmic, and rebellious, Jazz

almost always has been on the avant-garde of the music scene. One of its most

talented practitioners, saxophonist and composer John Coltrane, helped

revolutionize Jazz with the “cool” and “hard bop” styles, both meticulously

composed but augmented with improvisation, and then moved into the deep fury of

Free Jazz, a complicated, chaotic form pioneered by Ornette Coleman. Having

reached the limits of jazz composition, Coltrane went beyond into previously

untested territories. He rejected the tight structure of earlier Jazz and drove

toward a transcendent music, unwritten and unrehearsed, that would propel him

and his audience out of elation, through hysteria, and into what he called “unity.”

Coltrane on his album Om screams through his saxophone almost without pause for

half an hour while a pianist, two drummers, another saxophonist, and a bass player

play manically around him. Occasionally, some people grunt “Om,” calling the

name of a deity, a symbol of unity. Elvin Jones strikes a cymbal. A sheep seems to

bleat, wind or horn cries out. These are the sounds of revolution. “This cry, the

characteristic resonant element of ‘free music,’ born in an exasperated tension,

announces the violent rupture with the established white order and translates the

advanc[e]…of a new black order,” writes critic John Beverley. Taken together, these

sounds cancel out concentration. Their intensity cancels everything outside the

music — the boring life, the smoky room, the nagging sense of failure all surrender

to the blur and frenzy of Om.

In some way, Om and music like it collapses the entirety of life into a moment.

Being drawn into a music such as this not only rejects old beliefs about the nature

and purpose of art, but inspires the doubting of issues outside the music. The

sounds go beyond eliciting particular emotions, and into promoting an altered state

of being. Somewhere, Coltrane becomes more an instrument than a composer.

Music passes through him into the audience without apparent direction or goal. No

critic can classify the reaction of a listener. “If you find yourself responding…with

any feeling — listen on,” Nat Hentoff wrote in the album’s liner notes.

Each of Coltrane’s notes vanish for him as soon as he play them. Although others

may record and remember them, the producer of the notes only knows the intense

magic of playing. Problematically, the audience seems able to get something from

the music Coltrane himself cannot: the ability to hear it objectively. Unable to know

or even separate himself from the music, Coltrane cannot objectify it. Where Cage

pushed his music away from him, Coltrane (alienated from his own music) yearns to

hold onto it, but realizes he can savor only the playing, and gives the music to his

audience. Only by playing can he know the intensity his audience feels. Cage once

described his own music as “a non-sentient being,” but with Coltrane, the music

gains its life through a kind of tacit contract with his audience, in which together

they generate an enormous energy. However, Coltrane seems to end up with the

lesser reward, because he works while his audience listens, and reacts to the music

as they please.

The energy generated in the performance could not be commodified. Instead,

people in effect commodified Coltrane himself by giving him money to play and

elicit some kind of response in them. Once they left the performance, their use for

him evaporated, and he was left with no one to play for him. Heroin was the only

agent capable of doing for him what he had done for his audience.

Coltrane’s unlikely successors in spirit were the Sex Pistols. A band born of a wily

manager’s greed, the Pistols began as a commodity. Packaged, labeled, and

marketed to a cynical youth, the Pistols were an ingenious way of capitalizing on a

bratty generation’s weak efforts to reject capitalism. In their early days, they were

among the avant-garde, and changed the direction of rock-and-roll, but remained

pathetically unaware of their status as consumable goods. Like Coltrane, the

Pistols moved their audiences to frenzy, but when the crowds went home, they

remained alone and used, blindly navigating their way through fame and wealth.

Despite their antics, the Pistols were perhaps the most predictable of all the

musicians mentioned here. Though they succeeded in challenging and rewriting

music, the Pistols failed to separate their music from themselves, and could not

cope with the intensity of their lives when their success finally outgrew their

abilities to manage it. They imploded in a haze of drugs and violence.

We’re a little more relaxed at this point in time about

being a big band, because we’ve turned it into a part of

the creative process.

—U2’s The Edge

Schoenberg wrote brilliant music, but no one could stand to listen. Cage opened

his arms to his audience, but then squeezed to tight. Coltrane gave his audience

too much, and himself not enough. Gluttony and lack of irony killed the Sex Pistols.

The band would have been perfect, but they couldn’t support their own size, and

couldn’t laugh at their largesse. A band so big needs awareness of its

shortcomings, its excesses, its abilities. They must find the balance between the

brilliant and the pleasing; they must receive from their audiences as much as they

give. To retain its artistic integrity, a band must change not only what came before

it, but change itself over the years, and change what will come after it.

U2 is synthesis. Since their beginning, they have changed rock-and-roll,

consistently won critical praise, played with astonishing intensity, and destroyed

themselves only to resurge stronger than before. While perfecting their music, they

watched the Sex Pistols, and then Punk, shoot skyward and fizzle. Within a few

years, U2’s work culminated in Joshua Tree, and they became the biggest band in

the world. When the Pistols reached the pinnacle of their popularity, they auto-

destructed. In the same position, U2 did the same, but only on an artistic level,

with Rattle & Hum, an explosion of blues that stunned music and seemed almost

entirely removed from anything they had done before. The subsequent release of

Achtung, Baby! introduced a wholly restructured band, with a new persona and

radically different music.

That album begins with the pounding of drums overloading the input channels on a

mixer. With these opening sounds, U2 indicates their newfound sense of irony.

They show awareness of their medium, and of the ways to subvert that medium.

The drums suggest the band is pretending to be too powerful for the medium, the

compact disc is not as sonically perfect as assumed, or they are playing with the

limits of popular acceptance. (They repeat this effect in the closing moments of

Zooropa, in which an alarm sounds, perhaps to warn of what the next album.) U2

seems to be saying, We can do these things because we are U2. While this would

seem at first blush to be a statement of conceit, it is instead one of fact. The band

can begin an album with garbage, and move into a display of brilliant talent.

The last three U2 albums (Rattle & Hum, Achtung Baby, and Zooropa) clearly

illustrate the band’s willingness to innovate. Perhaps they feel as Schoenberg did,

that music for too long had survived on rehashings of old forms, or more

specifically, that the band was in danger of surviving on rehashed material. This

drive toward innovation prevents them from becoming stale, but the band still toys

with the notion of themselves as only musical commodities. The lyrics to the title

track on Zooropa, for example, derive mostly from advertising slogans. By

ironically reappropriating the phrases into their music, the band affirms their

originality and their position as consumer goods.

U2’s recent tours have further emphasized the band’s ironic representation of

themselves. The unprecedented ZooTV tour blended the band’s music with the

satellite television images, on-stage cellular phone calls, and giant video screens.

Tens of thousands see the same image, hear the same words in the same place at

the same moment. Guitarist The Edge suggests the band was trying to create

“information central, whatever that is.” U2, in some sense, is the information

central of music. They have processed history, learned from their own and other

artists’ mistakes, considered cultural movements outside their discipline, and

handled their fame with a smiling irony.

Sources:

Jones and Wilson, An Incomplete Education, 1987.

John Beverley, The Ideology Of Postmodern Music And Left Politics, Critical

Quarterly, 1989.

Mondo 2000, interview with U2

Partial Discography:

Laurie Andersen, Big Science

Laurie Andersen, Strange Angels

John Coltrane, Blue Train

John Coltrane, Om

Lou Reed, Magic and Loss

Schoenberg, Pierrot Lunaire

U2, Achtung Baby!

U2,Rattle & Hum

U2, Zooropa

Tom Waits, Bone Machine