Destroy

Let’s say you are sick of a piece of music you have just heard. Dream, instead, of a kind of destruction that would lead harmony, melody, themes, to their ruin. Not elaborating them in the manner of Bach with King Frederick II’s theme (The Musical Offering). No – a battle needs to be fought. Sometimes a movement towards exhaustion is necessary – a theme must be run into the ground. Repeating it over and over again. Think of The Fall, or of Smog’s Rain on Lens. Something is being destroyed. The ‘substance’ of the work: an old form, a popular form. There is violence done to the ‘figure’ – to melody, rhyme and metre – without doing away with them entirely. This is not free improvisation. Destruction: lead the work to the point where it affirms its own materiality. When it affirms the matter from which it is born and reborn. Where it affirms its rhythmicality, its sonority, the nudity of music …

I have in mind the rhythmic composers – the early Stravinsky, Prokofiev…. Scriabin as the third piano concerto becomes pointillist – little dabs of music. Then Miles Davis’s polyrhythms. Then The Fall, with repetition, ceaseless repetition (Slags, Slates …) And sonority? I have written of this before. Yes, Berlioz is the composer of ‘pure’ sound. But he has not approached resonance. Resonance does not lie, as it were, at the end of his work.

Still this is too simple. What about irony, satire – Shostakovich’s terrible humour. So cold – it is hateful, even. And what does it hate? Itself. It hates what it is and yet it continues, laughing at itself, shaking with laughter through and through. Torn apart – nearly – by its own laughter. Then think of Bataille’s laughter which resounds through On Nietzsche, Guilty, Inner Experience … these books are lightning-struck.

Then there is the breaking apart of melancholy, loss. Eloge de l’amour. And isn’t Nostalghia a broken film – wonderful because of its monotony? Tarkovsky’s honesty saves everything he does from parable (except for one or two places … why does he stage the sacrifice in the Roman square as a dream? – it spoils the film, it’s horrible) And then the 15th String Quartet by Shostakovich: flakes of sound. Adagio follows adagio all the way to silence.

What I am trying to formulate: a typology of destruction. Of hatred in the arts. Of a destruction that occurs as the work. Not the serenity of Rothko, say, not the heroism of Newman. Not the purity of Pärt. – No it must be a work that devours what we receive as a work. I’m tired of abstract art, if I can put it that crudely. Tired of decoration and wallpaper. Where is the drama? Where is the intensity of affect? – This can be rapturous or lugubrious. An ecstasy that is joyful or solemn. It is intensity alone which sets it apart.