Failure to Communicate

Failure to Communicate

By Colin Holter
It’s remarkable that you can revisit a piece years after first encountering it and understand it so much better than you did before
but not because you know more about music than you did then.

Written By

Colin Holter

If you go to enough performances of contemporary chamber and solo music, you’ll eventually see someone play Vinko Globokar’s ?Corporel. It’s been years since I first saw a performance of ?Corporel, but I had the pleasure to witness it again tonight in the context of an excellent solo recital given by Scotty Horey, the Twin Cities’ hungriest young percussionist. (If you don’t know the piece, go check it out on YouTube. I’ll still be here when you get back.) Whenever ?Corporel is brought up, I think back to a criticism one of my teachers leveled at it some time ago: ?Corporel “never really develops a language”; its menagerie of primitivistic gestures seems, condemningly, to lack an overarching syntax.

Even if this complaint were accurate, it would be irrelevant to ?Corporel, which is in some sense a “musicalizing” of symbolic communicative and demonstrative behaviors. And it’s especially strange that “language” is at the crux of the accusation, because the piece is indeed about the failure of language, the unacceptability of existing concepts of language as thought-models (q.v. the percussionist’s declaration that “I recently read the following remark: ‘Human history is a long sequence of synonyms for the same word. It is our duty to disprove this.'”) Of course the piece isn’t just about the failure of language; more broadly, it’s about the failure of society one short generation after the even more spectacular failure of Aufklärung was made undeniable.

The first time I saw ?Corporel, of course, I understood none of that. I figured it was a piece of woolly, naïve, zany, insufficiently theorized, vaguely leftist theatre in the early-’70s rural-public-university vein. How wrong I was. It was written in 1985, for one thing; for another, its tone is in fact wholly un-zany: The bizarre caperings and muggings of the performer are, in the logic of the piece, the actions available to a debased political subject. This makes perfect sense to me now but couldn’t have been further from my mind in 2002 or whenever it was.

It’s remarkable that you can revisit a piece years after first encountering it and understand it so much better than you did before but not because you know more about music than you did then. That’s as strong an argument as any for aspiring to well-roundedness: It’s all well and good to study music, but all the score analysis in the world will leave you high and dry when it comes to a piece like ?Corporel.