You could hardly accuse David Stubbs of being afraid of music. Since his student days as one of the principals of the esteemed Monitor fanzine, Stubbs has engaged with an impressive breadth of artists and genres from The Cocteau Twins to Eminem in an authorial style ranging from that of the workmanlike music journo biographer to his humorous Mr Agreeable persona (who is anything but). His latest book, however, eschews many of the trappings of music journalism for an approach which is as much concerned with art history as it is with music criticism per se. Fear of Music: Why People get Rothko but don’t get Stockhausen is very clearly a personal work for Stubbs, his attempt as an aficionado of avant-garde music to come to terms with its enduring unpopularity. The book’s premise, clearly stated in its subtitle, is that “modern” (i.e., 20th- and 21st-century) visual art enjoys a comparative wealth of patronage and popular engagement next to experimental music from the same period, despite the fact that both disciplines are motivated by similar (in some cases, identical) concerns. Although it never quite fully answers its foundational question, Fear of Music does provide the necessary background for interested readers to formulate their own answers while at the same time raising interesting questions about the relationship of the arts across disciplines.

In many ways, Fear of Music is best read as a companion or response to Alex Ross’s surprise bestselling overview of 20th century classical music, The Rest is Noise. Where Ross is disciplinary and historical, seeking to carefully elucidate the circumstances and rationale by which compositional music turned away from the heights of harmonic convergence and towards a variety of new organizational and even “non-organizational” aleatory systems over the course of the last century, Stubbs explores the relationship between the disciplines of non-representational art and experimental music, comparing their paths through the avant-garde over the past hundred years. Fear of Music thus gives us a highly selective and personal history of the avant-garde, with special attention to the moments of synchronicity between music and visual art, such as Wasilly Kandinsky and Arnold Schoenberg’s aborted correspondence, the Fluxus movement’s relationship to both popular and experimental music through figures like Yoko Ono and Tony Conrad, and rock group/”media terrorist” foundation the KLF’s assault on the 1990s British art scene. In doing so, Stubbs repeatedly contends that such musical figures are not taken seriously, or are somehow considered “crazy” in a way that their visual counterparts are not by a public with no interest in considering the well-founded rationale upon which their works are based.  

This problematic, while undoubtedly accurate at times, is not without, well, its own problems, as there are obviously other reasons aside from perceived insanity that might explain the general public’s aversion. Firstly, there is the issue of the qualitative difference between the media deployed in each discipline. Of primary importance, of course, is the temporality of their methods of reception: to appreciate a work of music it must be heard diachronically, that is to say in a linear fashion where one is a more-or-less captive audience for the duration of the piece. Visual art, however, can be experienced synchronically, with viewers free to spend hours in front of a piece in deep contemplation or, alternately, mere minutes or even seconds before (in a museum setting) flitting off to the next piece. Even granting the rather large distinction between quality appreciation time and a tourst-style museum blitz, the fact remains that a casual patron could easily experience the length and breadth of the Tate Modern’s offerings over the duration of a handful of symphonies. This is a problem, of course, that not only music but cinema and other diachronic media face.

Another qualitative difference between music and visual art is the physicality of their reception; in extreme circumstances, unpleasant “noise” can provoke a visceral, fight-or-flight response on a purely reflexive level. Depending on its volume, it may even be physically harmful. By contrast, while similar effects can be achieved in the visual medium they are much more difficult to produce. Indeed, where producible, they are generally only found in the relatively recent work of postmodern artists deploying strobe lights or headache-inducing neons. That is to say work which both stylistically and technologically follows the modernist avant-garde by several decades. Duchamp, Rothko and Pollock may have produced work that was puzzling to behold or disturbing to the psyche, but they were not generally capable of provoking the same physical reaction that being exposed to Kontakte (not to mention Merzbow) at the proper volume might.

This, in turn, raises another concern: for a writer with such a broad understanding of music, it is rather hard to pin down precisely what it is that constitutes “experimental music” for Stubbs. At one point early on he seems to exclude both tonal music and minimalist music from this definition, seemingly leaving us with a small cadre of artists breathing the rarefied air of post-serial composition (e.g., Boulez, Henry, Xenakis, and, yes, Stockhausen). Yet when considering Fear of Music‘s problematic under these narrow constraints, one might wonder precisely which quality it is that links Rothko and Stockhausen together in this argument. Is it their style? The effect they aim to produce on their audience? Their “difficulty”? The era in which they were both created? Some of these aspects line up, while others almost certainly do not.

Finally, there is the issue of the relationship between art forms and the era in which they are produced, and it is here that experimental compositional music can really stake a unique claim, for the curious thing about the mid-20th century compositional avant-garde is that they find themselves always already anachronistic. Theodor Adorno, writing about Schoenberg in his Philosophy of Modern Music, argued that the public feared and shunned the composer’s music not because it was strange, but because it offered uncomfortably familiar parallels with modernity: “The deepest currents present in this music proceed, however, from exactly those sociological and anthropological conditions peculiar to that public. The dissonances which horrify them testify to their own conditions.” Some fifty years later, it is precisely the opposite that obtains; we are by now not only inured to the reorganization of daily life around new, more-efficient-yet-dehumanizing systems but so far down the road of structural systematization that it seems as if we have come out the other end into a world where anything is possible, yet nothing is absolute. In a word, postmodernity. Under such circumstances it is not the “forward thinking” aspects of the serial and post-serial composers that seem foreign to us, but rather their tenuous links to the past, their deployment of orchestral instrumentation, the ways they cling to the remnants of standard musical notation even as they try to reinvent it. All of which is simply another way of saying that it is next to impossible to comprehend the historical significance of post-serial music today without reference to not only Schoenberg and Mahler, but something like acid house. Stubbs is aware of this of course, quoting Stockhausen’s hilarious response to a packet of records sent to him by The Wire in which he comes across as utterly befuddled by contemporary electronic production, but this is the bind that the composer and his contemporaries find themselves in vis-à-vis an audience: their time is perpetually out of joint.

Naturally, these concerns are all acknowledged to a greater or lesser extent in the text and the book’s commitment to both a historical and contemporary perspective on the avant-garde means that it eventually ranges far away from “difficult” composers and out into the wide world of non-academic experimental music from Sun Ra and Faust to Captain Beefheart and My Bloody Valentine. If the book’s title is somewhat misleading in that it does not really answer its initial question – and what true fan of a genre so dedicated to raising questions could really profess to offer a definitive explanation? – it makes up for it by offering instead a very human (and humorous) perspective on an often po-faced genre, backing it up with a wealth of historical context and highlighting a number of important inequities between the visual and aural art worlds. Who could deny, for example, that experimental music and sound art could benefit greatly from just a fraction of the popular attention and institutional patronage that the visual and literary arts receive instead of being left, as it so often is, entirely to the vagaries of the marketplace? In this sense, Fear of Music may be the first step in overcoming this societal anxiety, at least for readers interested enough to pursue the issues it raises.

Utopia, of course, is a highly problematic concept, starting with the word itself which, as academics love to point out, is cobbled together from the Greek words for “not” and “place”, the knowing title of Sir Thomas More’s fictional description of an ideal society. The full implications of this wordplay, utopia as no place, might be said to only be fully realized in this past century, which reformulated More’s statement negatively in Theodor Adorno’s oft-quoted pronouncement that “to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.” As a riposte, Adorno’s statement is particularly apt in light of architectural historian Robert Jan van Pelt’s description of Himmler’s plans for Auschwitz as not only the death camp for which it is now infamous, but “the jewel in his crown of the German East“, an unrealized National Socialist/IG Farben “racial utopia“, to be built with forced labor from the camp. As Michael Rothberg argues, these two “visions” of Auschwitz are not opposing but interrelated. It is this tension between utopia and dystopia, between idealistic aspiration towards an unrealizable goal and despondent realization that there is no goal left to aspire to, is the territory that Utopia in Four Movements attempts to navigate.

As its title suggests, there are four parts to Utopia. The first covers not only More’s neologism and its politically-charged conceptual deployment in the 20th century, but offers a roundabout examination of the same themes in its treatment of the “universal language”, Esperanto. Invented in the late 19th century by a Jewish Polish ophthalmologist in hopes of transcending nationalistic divisions by overcoming language barriers, the most widely spoken planned language becomes here an apolitical analogue for 20th-century revolutionary movements. The language retains a loyal following to this day, but not nearly as large as at its early-20th-century peak, before the xenophobia of World War II and the mutual suspicion of the Cold War chipped away at the optimism that necessarily undergirds its practice. Contemporary practitioners of the language, caught here at the annual World Congress of Esperanto, come across largely as sanguine but inconsequential, excited by the global reach of the language, but realistic about Esperanto’s niche status; a far cry from its utopian conception. Two scenes in particular tease out the hamartia of linguistic utopia: In the first, a Brazilian man plays a song, singing in Esperanto; the song is beautiful, but the words speak of sorrow and suffering. In the second scene, which closes out the segment, Green makes the connection explicit, noting that the brutal ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia occurred between ethnic groups who had little in the way of linguistic barriers.

If, in the end, a common tongue can just as easily amplify our antagonisms as erase them, what hope can there be for explicitly political utopian movements? Utopia‘s middle two movements explore the visions and limitations of modern political ideologies, starting with state communism in “The Revolution”, which surveys the left-wing movement’s legacy from the perspective of one of the few remaining countries with any realistic claim on it, Cuba. Much of the Cuban footage centers on Nehanda Abiodun, an African-American radical living in exile in Havana, wanted back home in connection with the robberies she and her comrades undertook to fund their revolutionary organization. Neither a Cuban citizen nor able to return home, Abiodun is, in a sense, permanently in limbo. She has made a life for herself in Havana, becoming a sort of matriarch to the burgeoning Cuban hip-hop scene, yet she makes clear in the film that hip-hop is more something she understands as a powerful, popular youth movement for encouraging social awareness than it is something she can identify with musically. The footage of her with headphones on, singing along eyes closed to a tape of ’70s Philadelphia soul is perhaps the most touching of the film: The revolutionary, trapped in amber.

In this sense, Abiodun is presented here as a microcosm of Cuba, a country whose “permanent revolution” also seems, at least to outside eyes, trapped in the past. We see, for example, the billboards that dot the roadside, advertising not commodities but the benefits of socialist government. One, in particular, claims that of the hundreds of millions of children in the world who will go to sleep homeless tonight, none of them will be Cuban. As Green notes, this is impressive, and probably true, but with the country’s limited access to the internet (most citizens can neither afford, nor are allowed to own computers) and the outside world, its outdated infrastructure and its authoritarian government, is this all we can hope for?

If capitalism is the offered alternative, then the third segment of Utopia, “The World’s Largest Shopping Mall”, suggests that the outlook is grim. As the title suggests, South China Mall, located in Guangdong province, is unbelievably vast but also unbelievably empty. Built in the heart of Chinese manufacturing territory and only accessible by car, the mall’s aspirations are completely out of sync with its populace, and its failure is at once tragic and comic. In the post-Cold War era, with even supposedly communist countries like China embracing many aspects of global capitalism, Green suggests that the mall is nothing less than our historical moment’s equivalent of utopia, and it is here, at long last, that the word’s Greek roots take their revenge, as the South China Mall might as well not exist for its customers. When we finally discover a pair of visitors, exactly the young, trendy couple that the mall intends to attract, we find out that they are not shopping, but instead mainly like to visit in order to be alone. Instead of shoppers, then, we get to see banners selling the idealized, Chinese version of the consumerist good life juxtaposed with shopkeepers doing their homework and falling asleep out of sheer boredom or, most absurdly of all, mall employees paid to dress up like Teletubbies and animal mascots, dancing and jigging around the empty corridors, ready to entertain customers who will never arrive.

The fantasy of the mall (a wall banner slogan reads “I Enjoy my Mall Life”) is also juxtaposed with the reality of Guangdong’s manufacturing economy and its Special Economic Zones, which are of course the two opposing facets of globalization: deeply interrelated, yet kept as separate as possible. This separation is not only divisive but untenable; factories cannot continue to build products for which there is no market indefinitely, and the sweatshop conditions of factory employment conspire to deprive the area of a middle class capable of filling the South China Mall with the upwardly mobile customers it so desperately needs. As the global recession continues apace, one can only imagine what straits the mall, its 2009 rebranding as the “New” South China Mall carrying more than a whiff of desperation about it, finds itself in today.

As goes the mall, so does the world, particularly in the age of globalization. While it seems likely right now that capitalism in its cyclical nature will once again somehow bounce back, the current economic crisis serves as a timely reminder that, as a political-economic system and in spite of post-Cold War rhetoric, it is far from utopian. Utopia‘s fourth movement, “Requiem for the 20th Century”, then, surveys this landscape from both the unrealized utopias of the past and the delayed millenarianism of our present moment; in so doing, it runs up against the same problematic that has troubled progressive intellectuals since at least the failed global student movements of 1968, if not Thomas More: How do you aim for (or even define) progress, when the goal itself is obviously unattainable? Green’s response is somber, realistic, and not to be spoiled here, as the film (actually a Keynote presentation accompanied by live narration from Green and others) really ought to be seen. Instead, perhaps now is the time to return to Adorno’s oft-misinterpreted statement; as Rothberg also points out, Adorno returned to and qualified this statement a number of times, writing for example in an essay, “Commitment”, “that literature must resist this verdict, in other words, be such that its mere existence after Auschwitz is not a surrender to cynicism.”

In a sense then, Adorno’s statment is not a moratorium, but a challenge to the entirety of the humanistic enterprise in the face of unbelievable odds. In intellectual terms, the 20th century is notorious, both in Adorno’s work and more generally, as being the graveyard of the Enlightenment, the death spasm of the rational argument on the altar of all-too-human foibles like greed, power and tribal identification. Yet standing here, now, knowing this, we can no more give up hope than we can abandon reason, and this is the challenge which is put to not only poetry but all art, politics, and, ultimately, history itself. Or, in the words of Samuel Beckett, “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Whether utopia may be a goal or an unending journey, however, Green’s Utopia is undoubtedly one step in the right direction.