A Big, Big Love
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Gigantism Muxtape (1:12:57)
1) Kronos Quartet - Marquee Moon
2) David Byrne - Glass Concrete and Stone
3)Tangoterje - Diamonds Dub
4) Mazzy Star - Fade Into You
5) Blur - This is a Low
6) Boris - Farewell
7) Glenn Branca - Lesson No. 1
8) LCD Soundsystem - Great Release
9) Scott Walker - Such A Small Love
10) Nina Nastasia - Ocean
11) Carla Bozulich - Medley: Time Of The Preacher, Blue Rock Montana, Red Headed Stranger
12) Dirty Three - Sue's Last Ride
(click on any song to start it streaming)
In my entry about John Luther Adams and hugeness from a while back, I didn't give a whole lot of musical examples of what I was talking about, so here's a muxtape that does the job fairly well. I'll talk about these a little bit later, but now I want to approach the subject using another example--a visual one.
This is a scene from Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away:
In this sequence, the main character, Sen, is traveling on a train from one end of the spirit realm to the other, from a city to the country. Her companions are three former villains that she has converted into friends: a spirit called No-Face who almost destroyed the bathhouse where she worked, a giant baby who tried to kill her (now transformed into a tiny but rotund cat), and the witch Yubaba's henchmen (transformed into a small bird, which carries the cat around). In terms of pacing, it's a significant break in the film. Previously, Sen has been going almost every minute, either working or collapsing from exhaustion, in a very urban environment populated by many people in a small space working frantically. Now, she simply sits, nearly wordless, for around two minutes, as we watch the train travel through the landscape. The lack of words signals pretty clearly that we're going to see an animator's showcase, and Miyazaki delivers with a perfect evocation of hugeness.
The subject has already come up in the film. Sen's clients at the bathhouse are larger-than-human scale, not only physically, but because they are incarnations of various natural phenomenons (rivers, turnips) that are much vaster than anything in our direct experience. The bathhouse, too, is so huge that we never get a clear picture of its layout; Sen seems to be constantly finding new rooms. And the plot itself is a kind of hugeness, with Sen pursuing not a single goal, but a series of goals suddenly thrust upon her, all under a rules system that she never really understands.
Two of these aspects are represented in the train sequence. The train travels on top of a body of water whose edges we never see, and the distance covered is so large that night falls over the course of the trip. But what's really interesting here is that she passes through a kind of city of ghosts, or maybe even an echo of a real city, as small signs of a recognizable reality are visible just at the edge of the tracks, even though beyond is only more water. Neon signs fly by the train's windows, disconnected from any building but still very real; as on a real train journey, we might wonder what's going on in the areas we're not disembarking. Shadow people wait at a train crossing, and a real house sits on a small island. This sense of whole stories being missed, unusual for a work of fiction, is most explicitly brought up when the train pulls away from a platform. Shadow people get off the train, and stream into an exit, but a shadow girl watches the train leave, seeming somehow dismayed. Was she waiting for someone on the train? Who is she? For that matter, what is she? Is she a spirit, a real person, or what?
I wrote on the old blog about foggy music and cities:
Many have commented about the great feeling you get in a city of being alone in a crowd, but it's also true that even when you're alone, there's this almost physical knowledge of all the people just out of view, the people in the buildings you're walking between, even if there's no one on the street, and this is a lovely feeling. This is the effect fog emulates; it takes a crowd and divides it into cells that know how many other cells there are in close proximity, but have no sightlines into them.
This is the feeling being evoked here. Traveling through suburban and rural areas you feel, rightly or wrongly, that you have a pretty good idea going on with the people you pass. But cities are so dense and so heterogeneous that, even when you're alone, you can look up at offices and apartment buildings and get a sense that there must be a thousand things going on there that you can't even guess at--stories being told, lives being lived, activities taking place that you've never even heard of. This density of unknowingness is a kind of hugeness to me, because it is essentially unknowable: too many people, not enough time. The crowd becomes a mystery, as perplexing in its individuation as bugs or stars.
The tendency when talking about art these days is to talk about its social significance, its expression of issues of identity or power relations or cultural conflicts. This happens everywhere, whether in the academy or among critics or just people talking. Is a movie too violent? Is an album fake? Does a TV show present negative portrayals of women? Does media attention to celebrities send the wrong message? That's fine, but it causes us to overlook perhaps the oldest purpose of art: to give some expression to our experience of the unknowable. Music, especially instrumental music, is perfect for this, because it is almost never literal. It's always abstract, and when it "means" something, it's because it's expressed a particular feeling or idea without actually saying anything about that particular feeling or idea. This is a pretty incredible thing. How does that happen? Why does that happen? Why do some things do it better than others?
Don't worry, I'm not going to get all fucking spiritual here. But if God is shorthand for "we don't know, but it's pretty impressive," then it's no accident that so many religions use music as part of their worship. Music can express that sentiment better than anything. And that's why musical expressions of hugeness are so affecting, I think. When a hundred-plus piece orchestra plays together, it's a model of that mammoth complexity that we look at with awe--urban populations and the vast variety of insects and the distance to the moon. And it's not a possibility being much explored these days, either in music or in the writing about it. This is not to say that it's never done, of course. In terms of writing, Said the Gramophone has been doing it for five years now, and doing it really well. Sean, Dan, and Jordan write about music not (just) in terms of how it sounds but in terms of how it makes them feel and what images it evokes. But as Sean and I have discussed on many occasions, the STG aesthetic is slightly different than what I'm talking about. I may be misreading him, but his interests seem more in small beauty, the wonder of the everyday. I like that. But that's not what we're talking about here.
To get at that, let me return to the train scene. The thing I haven't talked about are the two small things, the bird and the cat. They are, to use the Japanese term that I think would be appropriate here, kawaii--cute and innocent. They're funny, with their jumping and sleeping. But don't let the humor fool you. Without smallness, hugeness is meaningless. We need something to place it against as a comparison. Hugeness on its own seems fake, like an airbrushed drawing of mountains on the side of a van. Even hugeness accompanied by an expression of awe doesn't help us grasp it. But put against something cute, something innocent, something that accepts the unknown for what it is because there is so much else unknown in a kawaii life--then we, as viewers and listeners, feel like we have some sort of control over that hugeness, some understanding of the mystery. If a single composer can understand that feeling enough to write it down, if a conductor or performer can grasp it enough to draw it out in sound, then maybe we, too, can handle it. We turn to music not for a depiction of the unknown, because we can experience that any time we like. We turn to music for an ordering of the unknown, an abstract explanation of vastness beyond our comprehension. The low end rumbles and one hundred people slowly build up a roar, controlled precisely by a person with a small stick. On a giant screen, one hundred people have worked for months to create a sequence that takes our breath away. That order rubs off and stays with us. And it's not just limited to that. Let me leave you with one more self-quote:
The OC is important as social history because of its compact evocation of the decade it helped soundtrack, but important as art in the same way opera is: ridiculous in its scope and occasionally breathtaking in its beauty.
1) Kronos Quartet - Marquee Moon
2) David Byrne - Glass Concrete and Stone
3)Tangoterje - Diamonds Dub
4) Mazzy Star - Fade Into You
5) Blur - This is a Low
6) Boris - Farewell
7) Glenn Branca - Lesson No. 1
8) LCD Soundsystem - Great Release
9) Scott Walker - Such A Small Love
10) Nina Nastasia - Ocean
11) Carla Bozulich - Medley: Time Of The Preacher, Blue Rock Montana, Red Headed Stranger
12) Dirty Three - Sue's Last Ride
(click on any song to start it streaming)
In my entry about John Luther Adams and hugeness from a while back, I didn't give a whole lot of musical examples of what I was talking about, so here's a muxtape that does the job fairly well. I'll talk about these a little bit later, but now I want to approach the subject using another example--a visual one.
This is a scene from Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away:
In this sequence, the main character, Sen, is traveling on a train from one end of the spirit realm to the other, from a city to the country. Her companions are three former villains that she has converted into friends: a spirit called No-Face who almost destroyed the bathhouse where she worked, a giant baby who tried to kill her (now transformed into a tiny but rotund cat), and the witch Yubaba's henchmen (transformed into a small bird, which carries the cat around). In terms of pacing, it's a significant break in the film. Previously, Sen has been going almost every minute, either working or collapsing from exhaustion, in a very urban environment populated by many people in a small space working frantically. Now, she simply sits, nearly wordless, for around two minutes, as we watch the train travel through the landscape. The lack of words signals pretty clearly that we're going to see an animator's showcase, and Miyazaki delivers with a perfect evocation of hugeness.
The subject has already come up in the film. Sen's clients at the bathhouse are larger-than-human scale, not only physically, but because they are incarnations of various natural phenomenons (rivers, turnips) that are much vaster than anything in our direct experience. The bathhouse, too, is so huge that we never get a clear picture of its layout; Sen seems to be constantly finding new rooms. And the plot itself is a kind of hugeness, with Sen pursuing not a single goal, but a series of goals suddenly thrust upon her, all under a rules system that she never really understands.
Two of these aspects are represented in the train sequence. The train travels on top of a body of water whose edges we never see, and the distance covered is so large that night falls over the course of the trip. But what's really interesting here is that she passes through a kind of city of ghosts, or maybe even an echo of a real city, as small signs of a recognizable reality are visible just at the edge of the tracks, even though beyond is only more water. Neon signs fly by the train's windows, disconnected from any building but still very real; as on a real train journey, we might wonder what's going on in the areas we're not disembarking. Shadow people wait at a train crossing, and a real house sits on a small island. This sense of whole stories being missed, unusual for a work of fiction, is most explicitly brought up when the train pulls away from a platform. Shadow people get off the train, and stream into an exit, but a shadow girl watches the train leave, seeming somehow dismayed. Was she waiting for someone on the train? Who is she? For that matter, what is she? Is she a spirit, a real person, or what?
I wrote on the old blog about foggy music and cities:
Many have commented about the great feeling you get in a city of being alone in a crowd, but it's also true that even when you're alone, there's this almost physical knowledge of all the people just out of view, the people in the buildings you're walking between, even if there's no one on the street, and this is a lovely feeling. This is the effect fog emulates; it takes a crowd and divides it into cells that know how many other cells there are in close proximity, but have no sightlines into them.
This is the feeling being evoked here. Traveling through suburban and rural areas you feel, rightly or wrongly, that you have a pretty good idea going on with the people you pass. But cities are so dense and so heterogeneous that, even when you're alone, you can look up at offices and apartment buildings and get a sense that there must be a thousand things going on there that you can't even guess at--stories being told, lives being lived, activities taking place that you've never even heard of. This density of unknowingness is a kind of hugeness to me, because it is essentially unknowable: too many people, not enough time. The crowd becomes a mystery, as perplexing in its individuation as bugs or stars.
The tendency when talking about art these days is to talk about its social significance, its expression of issues of identity or power relations or cultural conflicts. This happens everywhere, whether in the academy or among critics or just people talking. Is a movie too violent? Is an album fake? Does a TV show present negative portrayals of women? Does media attention to celebrities send the wrong message? That's fine, but it causes us to overlook perhaps the oldest purpose of art: to give some expression to our experience of the unknowable. Music, especially instrumental music, is perfect for this, because it is almost never literal. It's always abstract, and when it "means" something, it's because it's expressed a particular feeling or idea without actually saying anything about that particular feeling or idea. This is a pretty incredible thing. How does that happen? Why does that happen? Why do some things do it better than others?
Don't worry, I'm not going to get all fucking spiritual here. But if God is shorthand for "we don't know, but it's pretty impressive," then it's no accident that so many religions use music as part of their worship. Music can express that sentiment better than anything. And that's why musical expressions of hugeness are so affecting, I think. When a hundred-plus piece orchestra plays together, it's a model of that mammoth complexity that we look at with awe--urban populations and the vast variety of insects and the distance to the moon. And it's not a possibility being much explored these days, either in music or in the writing about it. This is not to say that it's never done, of course. In terms of writing, Said the Gramophone has been doing it for five years now, and doing it really well. Sean, Dan, and Jordan write about music not (just) in terms of how it sounds but in terms of how it makes them feel and what images it evokes. But as Sean and I have discussed on many occasions, the STG aesthetic is slightly different than what I'm talking about. I may be misreading him, but his interests seem more in small beauty, the wonder of the everyday. I like that. But that's not what we're talking about here.
To get at that, let me return to the train scene. The thing I haven't talked about are the two small things, the bird and the cat. They are, to use the Japanese term that I think would be appropriate here, kawaii--cute and innocent. They're funny, with their jumping and sleeping. But don't let the humor fool you. Without smallness, hugeness is meaningless. We need something to place it against as a comparison. Hugeness on its own seems fake, like an airbrushed drawing of mountains on the side of a van. Even hugeness accompanied by an expression of awe doesn't help us grasp it. But put against something cute, something innocent, something that accepts the unknown for what it is because there is so much else unknown in a kawaii life--then we, as viewers and listeners, feel like we have some sort of control over that hugeness, some understanding of the mystery. If a single composer can understand that feeling enough to write it down, if a conductor or performer can grasp it enough to draw it out in sound, then maybe we, too, can handle it. We turn to music not for a depiction of the unknown, because we can experience that any time we like. We turn to music for an ordering of the unknown, an abstract explanation of vastness beyond our comprehension. The low end rumbles and one hundred people slowly build up a roar, controlled precisely by a person with a small stick. On a giant screen, one hundred people have worked for months to create a sequence that takes our breath away. That order rubs off and stays with us. And it's not just limited to that. Let me leave you with one more self-quote:
The OC is important as social history because of its compact evocation of the decade it helped soundtrack, but important as art in the same way opera is: ridiculous in its scope and occasionally breathtaking in its beauty.
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