Andy Kozar: Ein Horn

Source and Origin

Ty Bouque, University of Chicago

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There is much talk nowadays about what technology has wrought upon the social. There is fear—I share it— that what Baudrillard in The Ecstasy of Communication called “private telematics,” that distinctly twenty-first century isolation of the individual into self-sovereign digital universes of atomized autonomy, has irreparably damaged our capacity to be-in-relation to each other. Technology, once the promise of utopian connectivity, seems to have only made us less of an us: One as World, and not the other way around.

And so one has to ask, defend even: why use technology to surrogate the commune in a music intended for overwhelming communality? Why—excepting the monstrous logistics of securing 36 trumpet players who can articulate together in something like successful coordination—replace the treacherous, glorious relationality of ensemble music’s multiple humanity with the perfect homogeneity of the isolation-boothed individual, recording with and towards no one but himself? Is archival documentation—the overdue preservation of pieces like the Birtwistle or Kagel, unrecorded since their premieres—justification enough? Is this digital optimization, this virtual reality which modern multi-channel tracking permits, a merely satisfactory replacement for the grain de la trompette, as it were? Or is it precisely what does not happen on this album—what the studio singularity evacuates from the mix—that is, paradoxically, its expressive revelation?

I want to contend—and hope you do the same as you listen—that the trumpet ensemble, in its strange and freighted history, redirects questions of sociality in awkward and unexpected trajectories, trajectories which are doubly exposed by the manner of (non)assembly undertaken here. Kagel himself, in the program notes to his Fanfanfaren, suggests that “it is only now that [the trumpet fanfare] has lost its original function”—its chivalric battlefield heraldings long since drowned by drones and tanks—“that we can devote ourselves to the genre in a carefree manner.” I want to make the case against Kagel’s interpretation of his own work: it is precisely because the trumpet ensemble so viscerally retains its inheritance, because it cannot flee enough its fons et origo, its source and origin, that its instantiation here in virtual format can be received as anything more than mere lack. But, contra Kagel again, that receiving is hardly carefree: on the contrary, it involves an active and frustrating sequence of disrecognition, in which the entrained tendencies of assignation in the hearing of trumpet ensembles, the kinds of utterance we are habituated to ascribe to it, fail to cohere or arrive because this music both is and is not congregational. Precisely by divesting the ensemble’s latent potential for perlocutionary force, Ein Horn unconceals how the music itself interfaces with—recasts, upends, refutes, indulges, simulates, critiques, evacuates—its own insuperable origins in that fundamental cruelty around which Freud saw sociality as always anxiously constructed: homo homini lupus, man is wolf to man.

If we can devise a loose taxonomy of Western origins, the trumpet ensemble might be tracked back to two fundamental impulses, both of which are knitted up in utterances of force that themselves return to the same Biblical beginnings. The first, as Kagel rightly suggests, is trumpet as war herald, always magnified in quantity. The mass, coordinated blaring of annunciato, of violence’s impending approach, suggest that the trumpet ensemble is first a medium of limited but direct communication: signal and alarm, it is the trigger of battle’s initiation, the ego sum of war itself. That communication will take up new guises in the royal proclamation—dat-da-da-daa, “The King is Here”—but even there it retains destruction’s imminence (or, perhaps, eminence): coordinated trumpets always invoke the threatening presence of sovereign, if contested, force.

The ensemble’s second source, meanwhile (though hardly divorced from regency), is in the galleries of seventeenth-century Venetian churches, where peals of antiphons evoke the final coming of the Lord. (Notice kingship and its total sovereignty always bound up when the trumpet plays.) Their instantiation in Venice was a kind of simulated practice, an aestheticized test run of preparedness for the final Day of Judgment: here is how you will know the Lord has come. But if the monstrous inversion of this formula in the final moments of Ari Aster’s Hereditary, the brass pealing à la Mahler’s Eighth for a demon’s arrival on Earth, attests to anything, it is that spiritual eschatology is never devoid of violence: the dawn of the new world, simulated or otherwise, is always the excruciating end of this one. The massed trumpet heralds both.

These twin announcements—in Girard’s words, the violence and the sacred—route the trumpet ensemble all the way back to the Book of Revelations, where it is by seven trumpets that the end of the human world and the arrival of the everlasting kingdom is induced. In Chapter 11, verse 15, the seventh and last trumpet enters as a deafening multitude of voices from the heavens, proclaiming: “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ.” What remains of humanity is destroyed. From the first assembly, the trumpet ensemble thus always contains both mass death and religious ecstasy in its articulation: its summons of visceral, primal horror cannot be extricated from its glorious relief of salvation.

The history of the modern trumpet ensemble is, then, a history of litigation with these twin impulses. Whatever a composer chooses to do with such an instrumental composite, it is always done in relation to this fundamental truth: that humans together will always spill towards violence. The trumpet is the symbolic utterance of that primal fact, and any activation of it today must always contend with that encrustation. In their inevitable failure to forget the sacred destruction to which the trumpet ensemble is always destined, these many ways of writing around it testify to something like strategies of divestment: how to keep the trumpet ensemble from proclaiming the very thing we expect it always to proclaim?

Perfecting these works as music—that is to say, with the excess of attention lavished on articulation, on elegance, on accuracy, and on tone that is so characteristic of his trumpet playing—and erecting them in the vacuum of virtuality, Kozar has managed to expose by distance the expressive machinery which keeps the modern trumpet ensemble in permanent flight from its own implicit violence. The homogeneity permitted here effaces the ensemble of its embodied tendentious aggression, leaving exposed and undeployed the musical tactics for circumventing that association: we can see how the music negotiates its semiotic escape from eschatology—without having to witness the escape itself. By precisely not giving in to—let us say it—the marshaled masculinity that is the implicit destination of the trumpet ensemble’s gathered bodies, by erasing any assembly at all from its utterance, Kozar has drawn this music to the furthest limit of expressivity. It is only here, from such a vantage of remove, that expressive revelation of Ein Horn comes finally into view: by evacuating congregation from this music, the album exposes the fragile contingencies by which music prepares and rehearses alternative modalities of congregating, of being-in-relation to others, modalities that are both demilitarized and generative.

This album is thus not a digital sociality masquerading as embodied presence (that impoverished sense of togetherness which virtual meeting platforms always promise and then fail to surrogate). It is instead (and in keeping with Kozar’s long-standing educational commitments) an exercise, a kind of pedagogy for recognizing the many ways music thinks about alternative forms of relationality. That it is uniquely enabled by technology should hardly raise concerns, for at all moments it points back towards the world of bodies where those strategies of divestment may again be reintroduced as praxis towards a more ethical being-together.

Postscript

Included on this record is the first commercial recording of Harrison Birtwistle’s Placid Mobile. That piece, though quintessential Birtwistle in its extreme negotiation between line and density, encodes a formative early encounter with music-as-architecture which Ryan Streber’s studio mixing here nobly recreates. For a few brief years in the early 1960s, Harrison Birtwistle taught music to the primary school girls of the Cranborne Chase School in Wiltshire. Teaching was all fine—mostly he used their many school plays as a low-stakes environment to hone his emerging sensibility for writing theater music—but the summers were especially fruitful times. In 1964 and ’65, Cranborne’s New Wardour Castle played host to the Wardour Castle Summer School, a kind of New Music intensive that burned bright and hot and short. Among the performance offerings were evening recitals of antiphonal Venetian brass music, mounted by Birtwistle and Peter Maxwell Davies in the greenstone ruins of the Old Wardour Castle, itself a derelict monument to godliness and war: the Old Castle had its back wall blasted Eut during the English Civil War of 1642 in an attempt to rid it of occupying Parliamentarians, and no one bothered to rebuild it. Though written much later in 1998, Placid Mobile retains echoes of that initial exposure, massed trumpets crying the dark, empty corners of some war-begotten space.

– Ty Bouque