Manifesto 1908

On A Conceit: 'The Future Of Music'

'Rafael keep him Wednesday,
Sachiel feed him Thursday,
Hamiel provide him Friday,
Cassiel increase him Saturday.'
—William Butler Yeats
The Unicorn From The Stars (1908)

I. The

The definite article. Providing that music indeed has a future (a possibility no longer to be taken as granted), it may only be considered as having one single future; there are many potential futures of music, but they are merely that: potentials. In the end, as in the involuntary evolutionary struggle of genetic life itself, only one road can be taken, and only one future will eventually survive to become past. If music is to survive, it must adapt, and it must diverge from the path of self-flattery and complacency down which it finds itself, an ever-diminishing loop, degrading into so much static and silence. The music of 1908 does not provide a safe haven for the disadventurous, nor a pleasant background tune for those who want merely to shut off the thoughts that burrow at the back of the mind if we are not given the ample opportunities of distraction that the music of the present serves merely to provide. It is not a vaudeville vamp designed to distract from the changing of the scenery while the fifth act struggles to fit into its costume; it does not advertise perfumes and pomades, condoms or comforters. Whereas the music which imagines for itself a place in A future will eventually serve only for the tasteless, sentimental rubbishings of the aged and infirm, the music of 1908—THE music of the future—will cause disquiet even then, and spurn on even further digressions and divigations, instigate rioting and disatisfaction with the homeland, with the spouse and with the cushy stipendary job. The future of music is the music of strikes, of calumny, of creation after destruction. It is the falling down which is essential to the building up. It is as unnatural as the clenching of a fist, and as unnecessary as the imagination. One does not ask for such things to be given.

II. Future

Both Zappa and Schönberg saw that if music continues to draw incestuously upon its past to provide for its future, the only result can ever be feedback which diminuendos into nothingness, as the circles of nostalgic tripe close in upon themselves with frequency approaching infinity-null. The feedback loop must not close, but open; must amplify; must diverge rather than converge. The antithesis of the future is the past; therefore, the past is what must be totally disregarded in order to make perfect the FUTURE of an idea. What utter nonsense it is to imagine that music is somehow limited: something of which all the parts already exists, and which remains merely to be 'perfected' or otherwise winnowed dispassionately into some lifeless monument to the epitome of the craft! Well, if this is the case, then why even bother to create so-called 'new' forms of music? SURELY, the tools must have been used to cast the great mold millenia ago, in the age of Leonin and Perotin, by Roxy Music or Josef Matthias Hauer! Just as such a claim would be rubbish, so is the theory inherent in its preponderance, and purported implicitly as truth by so-called 'musicians' of all walks of life. Only 1908 allows for the destruction of the idols of the past, as well as those of the present so weakened by their indebtedness to outmoded forms as to be crippled beyond any hope of resuscitation; in such cases, euthanasia is only too kind an end to the suffering such creatures ought to be subjected to in whatever afterlife they soever belief awaits them. Here, the loop is broken—yet maintained; expanded, yet built sequentially; audible, yet ever-unattainable. It is the mountain which overlooks the history of music and knows that it is all dust before its intractable eye; yet mountains, too, are subject to the eroding forces of nature. But as eons matter to a mountain, it is memory which allows 1908 to escape even the degradation of eons, and survive as the solid life-force of creative virtue into ages as yet unthinkable. Or even undreamable.

III. Of

1908 is not a future FOR music; it is nothing something which latches on weakly and tries its best to adapt to the climate of its time, its place, its culture, its limits and its weaknesses, its doubts and its compromises. Rather, it is a future OF music: it is the unnatural betterment OF music and OF its components. Where the comdemnable feedback loop of which we have already spoken simply allows for a continuation, rather than construction, rather than contemplation, rather than explosion and expansion, 1908 maintains procreation; it is both parent and child, seed and spawn, music and master, listener and leader. Its audience is inherant in the sounds which are its production, and which so become its despised progenitor, the father-figure to be brutally dismembered if the race is not the strangle upon the bones of the fatted calves raised with the ill-gotten assets of complacency. 'Come', says the music which is not music, 'sit with your father and listen to the old stories, the ones you have heard many times, and which you will come to tell your children some day, and which your children will tell their children, and which their children...'. 1908 kills the corpulescent father, as it jams its fingers into its eardrums to startle the shrill sound even of the dying scream from its memory, to sear upon its brain only the images of revolt against 'kindly' tyranny and 'friendly' culture. And it shall soon have need to turn upon itself, over and over, again and again, in its neverending effort to reject its autopredecessors and strive for those sounds which cannot die if they are not first unkindly born, and weened and raised to their strength, and cut down in their prime, as all things which are truly great are—as they MUST BE!

IV. Music

Music is dead. 1908 is music. Only in this can music live: by becoming 1908. By making 1908 THE FUTURE OF MUSIC. There is no other hope. Music is a living force, not a dodo stuffed for entertainment, for viewing in the museum exhibitionary. For use as illustration in the child's textbook, for pleasant reminiscence in the boat out upon the summer lake. Music—1908's music—shall come beyond the tawdry distinctions of 'pleasant' and 'unpleasant'; shall overcome the whorish come-ons to be preferred or despised, picked or thrown away. Music can only survive if it is to be totally inescapable. 1908 is inescapable. 1908 cannot be withdrawn from and left to slop in the gutter, like all other pretenses to music that comprise the present can. 1908 cannot be placed aside once listened to, and forgotten; it cannot be phased out, tuned out, or ignored. What 1908 creates of music is a lifeessence, a pulsing, throbbing internal spasm which, once experienced, can never again be lived without. The thought of life becomes meaningless in imagining the period before it, or the thought of an absence after it. Droves of the greatest geniuses commit lemming suicide in the fear of a time when 1908 could not be heard: how foolish they are to imagine such impossible treacheries of the spirit! They WOULD be better off dead! To make music into the blood of not just humanity, but of the universe; to make its music the stuff of the imperceivable quantum dimensions, of the vibrating strings at the heart of our inelegant and tattered universe: nothing less shall be acceptable for 1908. It is already in the back of your thoughts; it has been with you since before the time before you were born; it shall be there waiting after you after the time after you die. If you haven't heard it coming yet, it is only because you are briefly distracted into imagining you haven't. You shall recognise it when it is here: for it has always been here. The themes are those which happen as you happen; which exist as the fundaments of existence: of your existence, which, in fact, is only some small facet of its existence—of the hyperexistance of 1908. You needn't bother waiting; you are already too late. And it is early. Which is to say: you are just on time.

Fin Definite
—1908