Ornament and Crime, Part 2
No, I mean like "crime" crime.
I have no grand conclusion about ornament. Just the opposite, I want to confuse it, to complicate it. A quick look around at current klezmer instruction reveals youtube videos, books, etc, where ornaments are now laid out as menu items for players to pluck out and use one by one. E-Z peezy lemon squeezy, right?
Slobin once warned us that "diving into the discourse around ornament brings one to submerged layers of aesthetic about the nature of melody that are surprisingly deep" but we never seem to get there and no one appears to care anymore anyway. When we use ornaments as a sign for "Here's Jewish music," we lose the ability to hear ornaments as a battleground.
We saw in the last post that the old-timers thought not over-ornamenting was very important, which lead us to ask, "Who was over-ornamenting?" The answer to that exposed a rift in the klezmer world, a world that is often depicted as a homogenous single culture that can be packaged and taught. Central to this rift was the issue of ornament, although exactly how all this was connected was fuzzy.
For clues, we can look around. The rift around ornament was also going on, not only in other musical traditions around the world at the same time, but also in society at large. In fact, ornament, in the early twentieth century was undergoing nothing less than a complete meltdown after a century of crisis.
This meltdown was captured nowhere better than in Alfred Loos' Ornament and Crime.
The essay itself borders on the absurd. Is he serious? His contention is pretty clear from the title: that ornament is primitive, childlike, erotic, a sign of weakness, blah blah, you can guess the rest. The result of all this debasement is even worse: murder, rape, crime. The cure? "The evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornament from objects of daily use." I'm tempted to go into Loos' essay more, because, oh boy is it rich, but that would take us off the path.
Loos' exhaustion with ornament was not an isolated psychosis. He belongs to an intellectual tradition that goes back, in the short term, to 19th century debates about the role of ornament in urban, industrial life and one that, in the long term, goes back to racist fantasies about the decadence of the "east" and the superiority of the Greeks. [See this book for a thorough treatment of this “cosmophobia”].
But what was the problem Loos and others were facing in the early twentieth century? Why all the passion around such a trivial topic?
It's complicated, but, long story short- we forgot how to ornament. Industrialism gives us wonderful machines and things like cheap t-shirts, but when it comes to ornament, it just seems to miss something. Combined with colonialism, the modern industrial world brought us into contact with a dizzying array of ornaments, and the self-consciousness this produced made the intuitive act of ornamenting impossible. These ornaments didn't just give us decoration, they gave us our very identities. We talk like this, they wear funny hats like that. Seeing other cultures solutions to these problems just reminds us of the arbitrariness of our own, and we don’t like it!
Foreign and historic styles were open to them as never before, but there was no style in which they worked instinctively, because it was theirs. They knew this perfectly well, and it made them miserable. Trilling Ornament (page 124)
They tried to figure out various ways ornament could work in the modern age, but nothing stuck. It was all reduced to mere decoration, or incompatible with industrialization. It became just a reminder of their emptiness. Art became Artifice became Artificial. Finally Loos, and others said, “Fuggit, let's just throw it all out.”
Musically we find the same thing. As the music of various cultures became sucked into nation-states and played on factory made instruments, ornaments had to go.
"When I arrived in Sofia, my playing was piled high with ornaments." After playing with the orchestra he came to feel that the gaida's ornaments did not blend well with the other instruments and so cut back on his ornamentation in order to fit into the new orchestral sound. Rice p 192
Timothy Rice is quoting a traditional Bulgarian musician who is making the transition from a rural, decentralized and agricultural music ("traditional") to an urban, industrial and state-centered setting. Or consider this example from North America of Francis Densmore recording Native Americans, retold by Curt Sachs:
She told her singers that they ‘must sing in a steady tone and not introduce the yells and other sounds that are customary to Indian singers. The recording,’ she said, “is not intended to be realistic, but to preserve the actual melody.” The sentence is a challenge. What is an “actual melody?"
We hear this over and over in modern and especially state-controlled reproductions of pre-modern musical traditions. Music was reduced to what could be written down, melody became king, and ornaments were reduced to mere accidents that could be safely discarded. The same thing could be found in every aspect of life, as people learned to temper their ethnic habits to operate in a modern multicultural setting. (this was often worked out invisibly in the form of accordion jokes, banjo jokes, houses “smelling like soup” etc. Someone should compile these.)
Lord there's more to this story, but I'm trying to keep these posts readable. For now, let's just say, industrialism and state centralization made ornament impossible. But at the same time, the meaning, the soul, the "heart" (In Statman's words) that the ornament carried was the very thing industrialism and the state craved more than anything.
These contradictions would play themselves out in fascinating ways all over culture (blue jeans, Elvis, car designs, etc) maybe it is even the story of modern culture. To take one musical example, in contemporary bluegrass, jazz and several other musical traditions, innovation takes place solely in the realm of melody. What do we get? Lots and lots of "notes." These days, players assault sedentary audiences with a barrage of melodic virtuosity in an attempt to distract from their desperation that something is missing. Such virtuosity used to be commonly derided as decadence, but is now the only imaginable goal of music. What else is there? What else could it be?
As I said in the beginning, I don’t have an answer to these contradictions. But the mixed messages of ornament point to another way. Ornament is often seen as a spice “added to” melody, making it richer (a “value-added product”). In this model, melody is the primal element of music and the other stuff, like ornament and phrasing etc are extras to be added on top. But we can also flip this around. If we invert it, it looks more like a fermentation process. Fermentation is a process where raw ingredients are intentionally and slowly decayed. The bacteria that are slowly eating these raw ingredients are actually beginning the process of digestion for us, mediating the raw ingredients into something that is more familiar to our bodies. This decay paradoxically makes the food more nutritious and easier to digest. In this model, things like ornament, phrasing, timbre are the bacteria that precedes the raw ingredient of melody (Rice also points out that Bulgarian kids learn ornaments before melodies and in first language acquisition, there is a stage of babbling in rhythm with phonemes that precedes actual words. I’m not pretending to be an expert on this, or even fluent with the science, which is why my discussion of this ends here.)
This slight change in metaphor points to a very different understanding of ornament. Are we adding or subtracting? Are we rising up like a ornament-less skyscraper, or are we descending into the compost-y underworld of deviance? Spirit or soul? And does this change of perspective make it easier for us to remember how to ornament?