Bunraku pop

[imomus]

Osaka has the world's last active Bunraku theatre. Bunraku is puppetry as a fine art, a vocation. It's not theatre on the cheap, or theatre for childen, but a kind of purified, refined expression of all that's most theatrical about theatre, a demonstration of how art is better when all the manipulation and simulation are visible rather than hidden behind the scenes. Bunraku is very Japanese in the way it mixes spontaneity with skill and custom -- kikkoshibari, the art of bondage, Japanese calligraphy, or the way Nature is both respected and ostentatiously controlled here, all show the same balance between the splashy and the tight, the chaotic and the controlled, the spontaneous and the trained.

Bunraku puppetry controls the expression of emotion with a typology of what Brecht called 'quotable gestures' (the kind you're supposed to recognize and applaud in Japanese theatres by calling out the actor's name in the middle of the performance, 'marking' the gesture with your cry and shattering the illusion of fourth-wall realism or the tendency to identify). You could even see the puppets themselves as 'air quotes', quotation made visible, human sensibility given its most poignant expression in non-human, but completely physical, form. Whereas the question of what an actor may or may not feel about his role has always cluttered western acting (becoming the central question in the Method and Stanislavskian schools), here it's completely absent. The puppet, free of any feeling itself, becomes an empty repository for the feeling of others. The paradoxes are fascinating to watch; now you focus on the puppet, now the three men in black running around with it, ventriloquists of the body, 'mumbling' and miming the physical gestures of the vacant creature they're controlling and giving a compelling yet stylised impression of life. As in Mishima's 'Confessions of a Mask', 'sincerity' and 'spontaneity' and 'the natural' are only visible in bunraku when articulated by their opposites.

You can see some splendid RealPlayer video clips of the Osaka Bunraku Theatre here, courtesy of UNESCO. The fact that the music in the first clip sounds, incredibly, rather like Captain Beefheart underlines the fact that, to me (and I feel the same way about Harry Partch) there's no reason to think that this couldn't be the sound of pop music being made right now, or in the near future. The music is dramatic, it has a good ratio of figure to ground, sound to silence, it's decisive and constantly interesting, balancing voice against music in a way pop music also does, telling stories the way a pop song can. Why shouldn't there be Bunraku-pop? A pop of artifice, emotion, and quotable gestures? And why shouldn't there be pop music in other scales, slithery, Partchian, Grecian scales? Aren't bold and beautiful gestures like these exactly what pop music needs to break out of its vicious circles and sloppy, crappy habits?

We have the traditions, we have the tools. Now all we need is the audience. That shouldn't be a problem. Rows and rows of human beings are easy to make*. Easier than bunraku puppets, anyway.


* See me after class if you need more details.

Comments

*Details needed, please.

[(Anonymous)]

"Aren't bold and beautiful gestures like these exactly what pop music needs to break out of its vicious circles and sloppy, crappy habits?"

I think pop music needs a complex new delivery format--one in which users supply chemical and biometric data (through awesome little super-expensive earbud headphones) to an automated real-time music calibration system. Each song template module (to replace entirely pre-recorded, mixed and mastered songs) would contain various parameters defining potential alterations in tone/harmonics/tempo/structure/repetition/duration/mood/thematic intensity/vocal qualities/etc/etc/etc. These would be adjusted in real-time (from either pre-recorded or generalized sets of options)... And all of this would be done automatically by the listener's current mental state/pulse/birthday/fullness of bladder/whatever! My thinking is that the only way to really capture a pop music audience is by HOLDING THEM ACCOUNTABLE for the music itself. If they're not paying attention and their brainwaves don't jump at a particularly relevant moment of lyrical content, take away their low-end bass response! Force them to stop dancing and bring the vocals to the forefront of the mix. All of these things could be easily integrated into a simple but flexible programming language.

Such a system would finally embrace the idea that creators of contemporary pop music are dealing with endless options, and songwriters are bound to have 11 versions of a song sitting in Logic Audio 12.0, awaiting some "finalized" arbitrary choice about which is the final and best mix. Why not reward the true listeners with the best selections of aural qualities and feed muzak to those who don't care? All this endless interactivity could be created through a smart system that allows musicians to define "optimal" qualities or "unobtrusive" ones or "exciting" ones or "calming" ones or whatever in hell they decide. Musicians could write music with well-defined core elements and leave all the potential sounds and intricacies of the music up to the listener's unconscious reponses.

Of course I'm just dreaming. It would surely turn out similar to the promise (in their inception stage) that all DVDs would offer multiple camera angles so that movies would become interactive experiences. No one wants to shoot a movie 8 times on different cameras, and who wants to record a song 8 times, or bother integrating all these sound modules that come and go as you begin to perspire or your heart rate halves? Well, maybe Momus does. Ha. There's a challenge for you. Integrate that into a forthcoming album. I'm sure you could cull the appropriate resourceful people from this journal to arrange for some lo-tech interactive Momus creations on CD-ROM. 20,000 Vodka... Something. It wouldn't really be holding the listener accountable for the music, but it might sell as a keen novelty item.

By the way, are you ready to retire in the sterile air of some cardboard island collecting the quiet sounds of life in a jar?

===Adrian===

Re: *Details needed, please.

[me-vs-gutenberg.livejournal.com]

Why not reward the true listeners with the best selections of aural qualities and feed muzak to those who don't care?
Protestant musical software?