needless to say, a draft:

i’ll never forget the summer i spent in paris during the month when neauveau boujalais has just been bottled and distributed to every possible bar in that great city. i forget the year, but it must have been circa 2000, when the new wine coincided with a great, city wide Fete de Music, festival of music, which promoted the possibility that any musician, any at all, would be heard. so as parisians and foreigners like myself, walked though the city, and believe me, parisians came out in great numbers specifically to hear the ‘amateurs’, they might encounter a young child playing his violin on his door stoop, or a waitress suddenly cease her expected duties and break into song, or an octogenerian playing guitar on a bench in luxemburg gardens. that moment made me pay great attention, years later to poor street musicians in latin america. and in lima, peru. i came across a blind duo, a blind violinist and a blind singer, outside the great baroque Basilica Cathedral of Lima, singing the most sublime versions of argentinian tango music and song. the blind singer, an ‘older’ woman, had a voice as beautiful as any ever recorded, as only the argentinian tango voice so full of lament, can be. ever since my experiences in paris and lima, i’ve thought that every city, big or small, should institute a similar festival. of course, because it was paris where culture and art remains absolutely central to civic life, the Fete de Music was funded by the city, and included free concerts by world renowned musicians in public places all around the city. it was an amazing weekend that i’ll never forget. the inclusion of everyone in the 2 day event, brought the city’s communities together like nothing else could. and i thought, wow! now, this is a model for community and cultural participation, full of possibility and hope and beauty, and that great elusive goal, liberty.

we might even speak of the profound sound of ‘amateur’, non-label, non-industrial scale, music that happens outside the recording industry’s control. in fact, we must. and this is no big surprise, is it?

and the same goes for all of the arts. no? if you think otherwise, then maybe you are not listening to the lyrics.

……………

i’m thinking of Noise: the political economy of music…

realizing that attali’s book may have been less about the economics of musical control, than about what has been lost, musically, to how we hear music and sound. to how we hear… what ever it is that we hear.

so it’s not about the political economy of sound, music, noise – all ‘objects’ in that view.

but far more about the loss of hearing/listening, of perception, and therefore, of the body… of the ‘subjective’ ability to hear/listen.

back to attali then: hearing/listening has been determined by, controlled by, music’s industrialization. so our ears have been industrialized.

the consequence of which is that the so called, ‘amateur’ musician/composer simply is made inaudible. we can’t here or listen to them.

so, the problem of muscial diversity is a subset of the globalization of the industrial deafening of human audition…

and that proposition, if true, must be critically put to work against the regimes of the audio, and by association, to audiovisuality and the industrial power that controls it.

IF that’s true, then, the only political recourse is to seek out ways to fend off, since defeat is not possible now, the industrial dominance of audition…

so, then, there is only one approach to that – to raise ‘amatuer’ music/sound/noise to a level by which it can displace industrial audition…

and of course, this is a form of analysis that equaly applies to visuality…

to the industrialization of visuality.

and yes, i’ve reverted, in the so called, digital age, to what’s considered and obsolete terminology, to an analog metaphor… industrialization.

and therein lies one of the problems of the dominance of the digital…

the digital is merely a means by which the continuation of industrialization can be suppressed…

no?

if will require david goldberg to take this line of thought from here.

http://metrohawaii.com/davidgoldberg/resume.html