Musikon
Upon typing the term “musikon” Google comes back with well over 400,000 hits. None of which is what I am speaking about.
Here I have defined the Musikon as a generic musical entity (what’s that?), a conceptual character with different evolutions, akin to the beautiful Japanese Pokémon. There is so much to the Musikon. What I’ve said before is somewhat abstract, somewhat bookish, and the first thing about the Musikon is, it makes things personal. So I invite you, reader, to tiptoe with me and to softly approach this wild creature to look into its eye. Perhaps it will look back.
(!!!Achtung! Be careful opening any music links on this Substack: they may or may not contain a potentially dangerous Musikon!!!)
Once upon a time there was a parasitic fast food Musikon
For someone who loves thinking and writing about, playing and engaging with music, I don’t like to listen to it very much. Hell, as Momus put it so well, is DEFINITELY other people’s music. Worse still, hell sometimes is the music you happen to be most attracted to. . ..
Until about 10 years ago I have never doubted I am someone who unconditionally loves music. Me and music – we are OK. The only slightly weird thing is, I have never been able to listen to music casually: to read and have music on the background? Impossible. But perhaps this is not so weird. I remember being impressed by the observations of David Byrne about the intrusiveness of music and how he finds it difficult not to actively engage with it in restaurants or bars, so he tunes it out and treats it as an “annoying sonic layer”. This story’s beginning taps into a similar idiosyncrasy. My dynamics with music started changing around the time my children began forming their own music taste and listening to music at home. To their credit, most of *their music was better than one might think. My daughter was fond of 70s pop- and funk, enjoyed Japanese anime film music and French chansons; my son was into Black Eyed Peas and Twenty One Pilots – what’s not to love? As soon as someone put some music into the house I would hear myself saying things, like: “Can you, please, lower the volume?”, “You can listen this in your room, you know?!”, and, “Please stop this, I CAN’T THINK!” The music I had not chosen would mess up my head muddling my clear consciousness space, telling me what to think or do, how to be. As if an uninvited stranger is yelling in my home, barking up order-words. . .. Julian Jaynes describes the nature of listening so well:
Consider what it is to listen and understand someone speaking to us. In a sense we have to become the other person; or rather, we let him become part of us for a brief second. We suspend our own identities, after which we come back to ourselves and accept or reject what he has said. But that brief second of dawdling identity is the nature of understanding language; and if that language is a command, the identification of understanding becomes the obedience. To hear is actually a kind of obedience.
Jaynes, The Bicameral Mind…, 1976
I cannot stand (being aware of) such aggressive commands. Music, be nice! Speak when invited, OK?
Then, things get weirder. The unfolding scenario is always the same: I notice some piece of music, usually a pop-song (on this more bellow), I listen and listen, play it on the piano, find all its available covers, sing karaoke… and then I am not able to sleep, for the bloody piece keeps playing in my head, on and on through the endless night. Two, three nights in a row. It is some kind of bizarre fascination, a quasi-sexual carnal obsession with the musical object, one I am unable to overcome or obtain a release from until it is fully digested, internalized, made mine, until I have breathed in every tiny nuance, each inflection.
At first this helpless falling for music was occasional, more like a special case: I would still be suspicious I am falling in my musical rabbit hole but I would continue to play the music… until it is too late and I find myself imprisoned by it. With the years, my wiggle room has gotten narrower and at present I have to immediately recognize an ensuing music attack and take measures to avert it. This is not always successful, mind you, I still get floored, but on these occasions I know I am the adict to blame, for I have let my guard down and have willingly hit the repeat button again and again, played and sung in a most disgusting self-negating fashion. Unable to resist. Too weak. Or something.
Now that I know my affliction I’ve started noticing different facets of the music beast that typically gets hold of me. Generally, it is a short pop-song: a quick sugar rush I know to avoid in fast foods, the short satisfaction of crunchy-creamy-cookie-candy-cupcake. Of course, there are also literature (ahem) pieces that work towards the same effect, as well as movies, art, people, all social media – but that’s another story. I am talking about the music kind of fast foods cancerous memes.
All my parasitic music animals of pray are:
- 2 to 3 minutes short,
- tonal,
- most are ~ pop songs and those that are not have translucent texture with a clear melody/accompaniment relationship, predictable harmony that hides one or two surprises, modulations to elevate matters, with just a few instruments. Yes, Mozart too, occasionally;
- with a sentimental character, although not always: the attack also comes from undisputedly beautiful, sober pieces with highbrow genetics, deceptive simplicity and perfect Greek noses;
- the more complex the (tonal, harmonic, orchestral, formal etc.) structure – the less chance there is for me to lust over it. I am a difficult pray for, say, a symphony or tonally-ambivalent pieces;
- the pieces are most often from the European-American tradition; a notable exception is that powerhouse of a woman, Tanya Tagaq, but it is not her musics as such, but her whole performance that leaves me sick and aching;
- N.B.: I have never been attacked during live performance! The musical beasts come out of audios and music videos, and occasionally from sheet music;
- Also N.B., usually, these peculiar entities are armed with lyrics and often have a video component, which augment their powers of impact…
Musikon
Many have written of the umbilical cord that extends from language to thinking: expanding musical vocabulary results in expanding our ability to think about music. This issue is prescient for the musicologist, whose job is to use words in order to express what lies beyond them. The “linguocentric predicament”, Charles Seeger called it in The Musicological Juncture. The creation of the concept of the Musikon (in my PhD thesis) came out of a certain need: the need to better grasp something alive, furry, alluring and shifty in music, something that, I felt, needed naming. Dressing up murky intuitions into the muscle and bone of language is fun. Also, it has the ability to simplify obtuse phenomena, to bring them to the light of consciousness and to render them understandable. Music is one such wide-ranging, obtuse phenomenon, an umbrella term with an only implied unity covering a variety of discreet matters, events, sensations, desires …
One of these desires is the desire of music to be(come) and to be known. This is the Musikon. Above I have tried to describe only a few of its characteristics – its exquisite beauty, luring danger, its visceral, drastic agency and tremendous power of possession. Of course, not all Musikons are sugary, vicious and parasitic – nothing could be further from the truth! The Musikon has a plethora of aspects and forms, capacities and circumstance, features and angles, incarnations and personae, conditions and intentions, moods and hairdos. Like you do. I know, I am anthropomorphizing, but so what? Are we so sure that all great books, art and music fictitious characters resemble us? Could it be the other way around – that we evolve resembling them? Who is to say what is alive and what is not? What is more alive, more meaningfully alive, longer lived? Do we write music or does music write our unconsious into existence?
We will soon zoom into these questions in a post about ideas, language, plants and fishes… and amoebas! Is it alive, what is a life??
Until then,
Mira
In some ways, I tell myself that concepts are such living things, that they are things with four paws that move, really. It's like a color, like a sound. Concepts are so living that they are not unrelated to something that would, however, appear the furthest from the concept, notably the scream.
In some ways, the philosopher is not someone who sings, but someone who screams.(Deleuze, On Leibniz, 1986)