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DJ the Techno-shamanism

During four years of researching the way in which adolescents use technology to alter their literacy practices, a vital factor in this process was always out of reach. In particular, I did not have access to the actual forces of transformation that were operant. You could say that in the restricted spaces of schools in the UK, or in the relation of stories about what might have happened with respect to technology and literacy; the empirical evidence that I discovered was hollow or boring (Richardson, 2000). This hollowness, rather than being dismissed through rich qualitative data or through a critical approach (Foley, 2002) to examine the power factors that may have been inhibiting this research, became an overriding and dominant theme of my qualitative analysis. This paper is a direct response to the contiguous sensation of hollowness that I felt as an educational researcher. I let go of the descriptive mode of naturalistic analysis due to the way in which I continually doubted the interview, observation and questionnaire data as unsubstantial. I did not seek a solely personal and reflective narrative style, as I felt that the investigation of technological literacy was bigger than such story-telling could accommodate. I do not consider these problems to be methodological defects in qualitative analysis (Hook, 1997) that may be ‘put right’ in terms of a shift in research tools or design (Court, 2004).

Rather, this paper seeks to present a new way of looking at augmented technological change that underpins the transformations in literacy that I was noting in the youth, and also deals with my personal experiences as an educational researcher living in the Midlands of the UK during the 1990s. During the day I researched young people using the technology to change their literacy. At night, and at weekends, I became increasingly involved with free-party organization that connected the augmentation of technology that I was studying in the schools to a social and celebratory practice. As such, this paper is a result of a four year intensive longitudinal study of public and private thought processes and practices, and provides a sign-post for qualitative analysis in education (Freebody, 2003) and a legitimate alternative for social science.

Remarks on a transformative notion of qualitative change

This paper explores a theory of education that juxtaposes personal qualitative development with the emergence of transformative possibilities through the use of technology to augment literacy. I came to the conclusion that the change of agency involved in technological literacy may be expressed in terms which Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1988) have called, “blocks of becoming” (p. 239). Such blocks of becoming are unstable complex crossing points; they act in a variety of manners to be explored here through techno-shamanism. This position avoids linear appropriation of technological change as a model of learning (Semali, 2002). The figure of the techno-shaman and the qualitative position of techno-shamanism stand in a dual movement to introduce us to the dark areas beyond rationality (Christians, 2000) and to release us from identification with the individual in a post-modern, computerized educational environment where transformation may readily become identified with efficiency (Arnold and Ryan, 2003).

The introduction of the techno-shaman also produces a type of delirium that is irresistible to contemporary society. Exploration of this delirium is an escape route from current notions of psychic disease, and it opens up the possibility of entering into the immanence that rave music presents. The question of immanence is directly tied to that of the machine by Deleuze and Guattari (1984) by inventing the notion of “desiring-machines” (p. 8). According to this conjunction, immanence does not produce necessary conditions for the evolution of the system under analysis, but acts as a plane on which the full complexity of the phenomena may co-exist. On this plane, machines do not evolve mechanically given the calculation of the starting parameters to set goals, but symbiotically make hybrid and complex behaviours to consciously heightened rhapsodies during the rave. The multiple transformations of the ‘blocks of becoming’ make tracks towards the becoming-[x], about which Deleuze and Guattari (1988) have spoken. Techno-shamanism in the educational system may cause localized disruption through the imaginative use of the history of demonology, that we find for example in Shelley (1994) & Stoker (1992). It could also be stated that techno-shamanic transformation implements what is forbidden; in other words, its practice scrambles the coding apparatuses of mainstream sedentary society. This process may be understood as the transmission of taboo or “the power of infection” about which Freud (1991, p. 75) has written, and may be accelerated, intensified and dispersed in the electronic media environment. In nomadic societies, the splitting of the shamanic ritual has not yet occurred: the transformative figure of the shaman is not one of worship, but encapsulates intensive variations of personal and public fear in a vibratory spiralling movement. Therefore, the idea of transformation that is applicable to techno-shamanism is one of generating power and energy that may be used by the qualitative analyst to comprehend simultaneous internal and external changes in areas of contemporary society - for example, the raves. These may be hidden to traditional forms of social science (Thomas, 2000).

The transmission of taboo is one of the ways in which this paper works. In this communicative arena, the sacred and the profane are interwoven. The qualitative analyst, who is learning about rave music, raving and simultaneously analysing data about technological literacy augmentation, may be positioned as an educational experiment designed to experience the techno-shamanic transformations and represent them rationally. It is in this sense that the analyst exploring this area needs to practise techno-shamanism. This is not in order to write the script for a horror film, but to take us within the intensive variations of fear that define the thought patterns of techno-shamanism and are discernible as extensive forms of puissance in the masses (Maffesoli, 1996) where computer technology now operates in education and work. In a parallel manner to the cyberpunks who hack into prevailing capitalist codes and systems and in so doing augment their collective zeitgeist; the qualitative analysis of techno-shamanism in education may be positioned to cut across technological determinism - i.e. the use of technology to determine the state of progress or evolution of a society - in order to open up a way of thinking about techno-literacy that feeds back into society at large. This is a complex loop, and one in which the descriptive parameters should be flexible enough to cover the behaviour of the analytical social scientist (Holly, Arhar & Kasten, 2005) and the delirium of the rave. Information is not the primary goal of this research, as it is subsumed by the transmission of vibrations that are contained in taboo, intensity and the fluctuations of dancing with an electronic cohort whose aim is joy.

Becoming techno-shaman

At the apex of the relationship between qualitative analysis and technological literacy is the techno-shaman. The techno-shaman is a shaman who uses technology to augment similar processes to the shaman in nomadic society. The anthropological studies that have been carried out to understand the shaman reveal the predominance of shamanism in nomadic, hunter/gatherer societies. Shaman are importantly associated with everything to do with movement, with rituals of flight, with the control of fire and with the journey from life to death. The period of initiation for the novice shaman is a time of mental instability where they experience strange dreams, or they are taken by violent fits, or they have to leave the tribe to be alone in the wilderness in order to ‘come to terms’ with the powers which are beginning to possess them. Mirea Eliade (1974) has described this process in his anthropological work, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. The learning of the shaman confers knowledge from the dead, which includes rituals about movement, the use of drugs and the signs and symbols of their craft. The cobeno shaman of Mexico, “introduces rock crystals into the novice’s head; these eat out his brain and his eyes, then take the place of those organs and become his strength,” (Métraux, 1944, p. 216). The shamans as such have to die before they are endowed with magical substance that allows them to move freely in the spirit world, and thence they are able to communicate with the spirits in the fulfilment of the shamanic following. This death is rehearsed by the enactment of powers which defy death; for example, masters and neophytes walking barefoot on fire without seeming to burn themselves, or the exchanging of eyes, ears and tongues between novices and shaman, or the piercing with hot rods in the chest and the stomach. The central motifs of dismemberment, gashing or opening the abdomen remain constant in shamanism.

During the initiation of the medicine man in Malekula, the novice is asked to lie on a bed of leaves, while the Bwili or medicine man cuts off his arms and legs. The victim is required to receive this dismemberment with laughter, and if he does so, the Bwili cuts off his head, after which the novice is still required to show no sign of discomfort. The Bwili puts back the “body parts and the rite of passage is thereafter negotiated,” (Eliade, 1974, p. 56). According to the Kiwai Papuans, the initiate has his bones replaced by an óboro (spirit of a dead person); after which the power to summon the dead is achieved, and the shamanic powers are bestowed. Among the Dyak of Borneo, the brains of the neophyte are taken out and washed in order to clear the mind so that it may receive the mysteries of evil spirits. Gold dust is sprinkled into the eyes so that they may see the wanderings of souls, barbed hooks are planted in the tips of their fingers in order that they are able to seize the soul and hold it fast, the heart is pierced with an arrow so that it receives the suffering of the sick. The impetus for the learning process of the shaman is the necessary connection between the savage rearrangement of the flesh, and the augmentation of psychical powers. If we take these points and use them for the techno-shamanism of this paper, the rearrangement that is necessary for the novice qualitative analyst is that his or her deeply held knowledge beliefs are “profoundly shaken” (Hatch, 2002, p. 47). The subsequent loss of certainty that this process entails must be recast and transformed as the analyst reconstructs their knowledge in an expanded learning context that comprehends technological augmentation and shamanic healing.

The subject of techno-shamanic qualitative analysis

The litany of horrors confronting our prospective techno-shaman take many of their energies from the residues of festal ecstasy that have been played out in human society in terms of sacrifice, cannibalism, and the enactment of predator and prey relationships through ritual. Such activities have been described by Georges Bataille (1992) in his Theory of Religion as the domain of the sacred and the threshold between the human and non-human. The purpose of the sacrifice according to Bataille (1992) is to destroy the ‘thing’, so that the community may enter into the world of immanence and be absorbed by the richness of sensuality associated with blood rites. Sacrifice also contests the primacy of utility in the group, as the useless wasting of human life demonstrates that production and power are not wedded in an unbreakable union, but may be wrenched apart through the glorious and consumptive act of sacrificial death. In a later text, Bataille (1991) charted the rise of the military and industrial orders, which placed a blockade around the domain of the sacred, and constructed a world in which productive forces became primal and programmed to expand in order to meet ever increasing material needs. In effect, a schism was introduced, which took autonomous industrial and military society away from the violent intimacy of the sacred order even though Christianity has attempted to plug this schism through the rituals of the sacrament.

Bataille (1992) has given us a convincing account of the loss of the sacred world of primitive society and the energies that concern techno-shamanism. However, it is also true that the power of sacrifice was one of a sedentary people, for example, the Aztecs employed it on a grand scale to establish a priest class via a massive hierarchy of blood in order to impose fear into the masses; and one could argue that we now see this behaviour represented through the channels of the media (Baudrillard, 1983). Whether this was an employment of the sacred realm of immanence or merely an economy of terror as Christian Duverger (1979) has argued is debatable. Elsewhere in a series of essays Bataille (2001) made it clear that the Aztecs provided his model for the articulation of a theory of religion, which went along the lines of his notion of expenditure or useless waste. Thus, even though the idea of expenditure is useful to help reconcile the sacred world of myth with the necessity for blood, it does not help us to understand the techniques of knowledge abandonment necessary for techno-shamanism. This is because the fundamentally Hegelian, historical subject of Bataille that desires by negation of the ‘I’ with the not -‘I’, and conquers by destruction of the not -‘I’, is more cogently positioned as a comment on the political climate of post-war Europe than a useful description of the subject of techno-shamanism that has to negotiate distributed networks of post-modern knowledge in qualitative analysis (Schirato & Webb, 2002). The discovery of that which is uniquely sacred to humans seems to be less vital today in understanding global subjects that are learning through digital technology and partying at raves. The techno-shamanic analyst is a subject that is not uniquely exploring or overcoming historical forces to find an authentic rendering of the person, but acts as a suitable qualitative position to describe complex transformations (Lankshear & Knobel, 1997).

Animal forms and techno-shamanic transformation

The transformative power of the techno-shamanic subject is directly located in episodes that have been described by anthropology and folklore, and relate to the way in which shaman change into animals. The shaman takes possession, or is possessed by the animal form in order to shed his or her human skin and to travel in the dimension of the spirits. Eliade (1974) speaks of the secret language of the animal-spirits, in which the shaman become fluent, and use to establish an existence “in illo tempore” (p. 74) where the separation between humans and the animal world has not yet occurred. The Buryat shaman describe a process called khubilgan, which may be translated as ‘metamorphosis’; the spirit-animal serves as a double or alter ego, which enables the shaman to take on its form and to pass through the dimension of animals. The animal form of the Tungus shaman is a snake, whose motions imitate those of the whirlwind during the communication with the dead. The Chukchee shaman turn themselves into wolves; the Lapps become bear, reindeer and fish. The Semang hala can change into a tiger, as can the Sakai halak and the bomor of Kelantan. During the initiation of the Carib shamans of Dutch Guiana, the neophytes are taught how to turn themselves into bats and jaguars, which is part of a long period of ritual, dancing and intoxication with tobacco. Witchcraft in England also has the idea of being able to turn into animals firmly rooted in its folklore (Burrell, 1997). In 1673, Anne Armstrong gave elaborate accounts of witches who are able to turn themselves into animals. They may appear as hares or cats, at Allansford they danced in the likeness of bees. Anne Baites, it is related, turned herself into a cat, a hare and a bee. Hole (1945) describes how Dorothy Green of Edmondbyers and Mary Hunter of Birkenside bewitched a mare by turning themselves into swallows and flying around it forty times.

Becoming-animal defines a plane of consistency or immanence that allows for the multiplicities of transformative change to emerge. We do not have to restrict the formula to becoming-[only]-animals, but in the context of techno-shamanism in education, the becoming-[x] may be ‘blocked’ or streamed into a definite tendency towards the limit fringe between animals and humans. To this extent, the techno-shaman is a figure of the ‘borderline’. Iain Hamilton Grant (1997) has described the changing into an animal in the form of a zoopoliteia whereby the techno-shaman may use the borderlines to intensify the possibilities of change on the thresholds. Grant (1997) explains the demonology of the ‘New Earth’, which is where the notion of the shaman is taken away from an anthropological study of hunter/gatherer society and used as a metaphor for the politics of biology which influences thinking about the rendering of the human. According to Grant (1997) the present scientific priesthood entails a form of morality that arrests the transformations of the techno-shaman by defining them as schizophrenic, anti-social and nonsensical. I do not wish to position this paper against any bodies of opinion, but I do want to clarify the use of techno-shamanism as a practice that connects qualitative analysis and techno-literacy augmentation whilst not reproducing the dominant codes of organising power (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1979) through education.

Further techno-shamanic considerations

One aspect of techno-shamanic music ideology is that everything is music. For this reason electronic artists explore the experimental creation of music from all kinds of unusual sources. Computers are used to generate; DNA music by assigning musical sequences to the base-pairs, galactic music by transforming celestial radiation into sound, bio-music by translating the electrical pulses of the peripheral nervous system into sound, and hyper-music created by hyper-instruments which are basically acoustic but whose sound qualities are shifted by the motion of the performer and the instrument. Ravers feel, almost animistically, that there is music in everything, and that the key to releasing it is by using the right technology (Plant, 2001). Part of raving is “getting in touch with your groove” - like in the New Age, the idea is that each person has a fundamental musical self, a harmony that is rooted in their being that they need to get in touch with.

The goal of techno-shamanism according to the ravers is “phase locking” - this is to get the group of people assembled at the rave into a synchronized, synergetic, collective mental space or vibe (Hutson, 1999). The rave is constructed to be a self-similar, unbroken, self-organizing factual; thus no divisions are permitted, and likewise no egos, leaders or partners. Ravers and techno-shaman are fascinated by chaos theory, and they believe that when the right number of people are all in one place, dancing to the right groove, a new emergent order around spontaneous strange-attractors can appear, and people shall evolve into mutants that will lead the human race into the chaotic, turbulent world of the 21st century (Rushkoff, 1994).

Techno-shamanism is conceived to deconstruct dualities, especially collapsing the past and the future into a singular modern primitive. The oppositions between technology and spirituality, the primal body and the higher mind, and neo-tribalism and global humanism; are supposed to implode at the rave, resulting in techno-shamanism where the DJ serves as the initiator of the people in a participation mystique when they may tune into the vibe of Gaia. Techno-shamanic music is an accelerated music, and ravers believe history is accelerating. Unlike Christian millenialists, many ravers follow Terrence McKenna’s (1966) dictum that we are approaching a singularity in time in the year 2012, and that after this point time will fold into hyperspace. We are all being dragged into this “strange attractor at the end of time”, that is creating newer and more powerfully emergent forms of cultural novelty, such as the raves and the interconnections that raves can produce in society through electronic mediation.

Providing the visual accompaniment at many raves are computer-generated fractal images and 3D rendered animation. But raves have also featured laser light, coloured-wheel lighting, holography, liquid oil projection screens, video projection, strobes, robotic characters, or other high-tech displays. Very common is the use of the Video Toaster to combine images from kitsch TV and movies, Japanese ‘anime’ cartoons, MTV music videos, advertising, and science fiction into a rapid-fire display which switches images at a rate close to the 135 bpm of the music. Techno-shamanism is a multimedia, multi-sensual experience, and thus there will be attempts to stimulate the sense of smell and touch of the ravers with incense and scented oils, dry ice and fans. Ravers feel that this ‘sensory overload’ serves a purpose - to overwhelm the senses.

Who am I?

I started this project as a qualitative analyst of children’s literacy practices. In particular, I was looking at the end point of the education system in the UK, the ‘sixth form’ – 16-18 year olds, or the ‘youth’. By this time, students had perhaps been in the system for 13 years, and their educational mores had been well established. As I sat in the classroom, and watched them use computers for various assignments or to surf around on the internet, I was struck by the way in which the group were intimately constructed. They had been together in restricted spaces for many years: What chance did I have, an older university trained researcher, of discovering anything new or exciting about the way in which they were learning language by using technology?

I suspected from the start that the project I was embarking upon had a lot to do with identity. I eagerly devoured books on the subject, and became lost in the intricate discussions and arguments about how we become the people that we are. I was especially intrigued by what I termed as the ‘Nietzschean heritage’ in social thought, encapsulating the work of Georges Bataille, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Michel Foucault and feminism. They spoke about desire, bodies and power; the factors that I felt actually motivated us to become the people that we are. I began to move away from the scientific evaluation and description of the processes that I was scrutinising, and looked for a more personal, emotional, affective approach to understanding techno-literacy.

It was clear that I had to somehow get involved in the actual practices that my subjects were doing in and out of the classroom to have any chance of understanding them. I conducted interviews, gave out questionnaires, held focus groups and on-line forums as my supervisor suggested, yet to find out what my cohort were getting up to I had to lose my identity as a mainstream researcher and find a way into their world outside of school.

My chance to do this came by accident. I had been seeing an undergraduate philosophy student. She was very interested in living a bohemian lifestyle, and assiduously sought out contacts in the local creative community that could be summarised by the phrase ‘the underground’. She told me about a party in a stately home. Apparently, the owner was an eccentric aristocrat, whose estate was so large that he didn’t mind people having gatherings on his property. I arranged to go to what she confidently declared would be a ‘real rave’ with a teacher that I had met during fieldwork collection in a secondary school. He was a dedicated and hard working teacher of the creative arts who also enjoyed going out and exploring whatever nightlife there was on offer.

We drove to the event in his newly acquired car that seemed to splutter and spurt at every bend in the road. I had been told that raves were conducted in remote places, and this was no exception. Eventually, I noticed that the agricultural countryside was transformed into the rolling landscape of an aristocratic estate. We drove past the shadows of a lake and straight lines of cypress and elm. The turning to the party was an unmarked brick gate on a small road, almost impossible to find in the middle of the night.

To my surprise, as we ventured up the tiny winding unpaved path, we came across a large field full of cars. As my friend carefully parked, I wound down my window and caught the first aural blast of dance music. Even at this distance, I was captivated and moved by the sound; it gripped my whole body in a way that rock music never could. It was as if a deep tribal memory had been shaken out of me. My friend and I walked towards the sound in silence and anticipation of what we might find.

The party had been organized at the side of what looked in the gloom like a series of out-houses. They were arranged in a square with shadowy retreats and a section that had been cordoned off with a large tie-dyed sheet. I lifted the sheet and found groups of people sitting around and dancing. We made our way through the individuals and sat down against a barn wall in order to survey the situation. The people were an incredible, eclectic mixture of ages and backgrounds. It was impossible to say definitely that there was one type of person that attended the rave. My friend and I looked at each other and smiled in non-verbal agreement that we had definitely found a ‘place-to-be’.

Several extremely agreeable hours passed before the main event took place. We had bumped into a few friends and acquaintances, including my bohemian girlfriend, who was incredibly excited and could not sit down or stay still for more than a moment. She told us that the main DJs were now coming on and that it was going to be fantastic. Someone rolled back the large sheet, and the sound system that had been filling the covered alcove where most of the people had gathered, was connected to the square between the buildings.

The music went off, and people came out of their hiding places in the array of shadows. They all stood and looked towards the DJ table and the sound system that was arranged on either side in two sombre black towers. At this point, the music began in earnest. It was louder, more minimal and driven. The crowd was immediately sparked into motion. My friend and I felt ourselves swept along by the pulsating and insistent noise. We danced for what seemed like hours without feeling tired or self-conscious; and at several points we were joined by fellow dancers who we may or may not have known, yet were fused with them and shared an intimate, real, emotional connection. As dawn came up over the English countryside, and the pumping techno set came to a close, we found ourselves close to the DJ table and the source of the communal trance. I noticed with astonishment that the DJ was one of my student subjects who had been taking part in the techno-literacy research.

On the way back in my friend’s car, I wondered about what I had witnessed and how it would affect my research. I wanted to immediately pore over the interview transcripts and questionnaire data for some sign that would connect the reality of the educational inquiry to the talent of the adolescent for moving large numbers of people that I had experienced at the rave.

However, I could find no such connection. If we may call this subject X, he was non-committal in the questionnaire about technological language; he had expressed an interest in virtual reality, yet had suggested no positive applications. I had interviewed him in a group and he had not responded or participated. I had been advised by the school authorities that he was a failing student with low levels of literacy. By this they meant that he had failed a linguistic test at 15 that had measured his spelling and grammatical ability. Yet I had witnessed the same student at the centre of a rave orchestrating a crowd. This contradiction sat in the middle of my research. I was convinced that the disparity in evaluation of the subject X was due to testing regimes. The standard literacy assessment principles were designed to generate individual linguistic profiles. These are essentially hollow vessels, not containing any information about the substance of identity: i.e. what a person is like, or how they express themselves. X, in the context of the rave was a sublime and competent generator of atmosphere and meaning. In the environment of the examination hall or the classroom, he was limited, hesitant and withdrawn.

I had to find a way of expressing this difference that did not diminish either activity. Through extensive research on the internet I found out about techno-shamanism. It immediately stuck me as a means to discussing a linkage between the changes that I had experienced at the rave and the ways in which we may express ourselves through technology.

At the rave, the DJ is the techno-shaman, initiating the group into a ritual of collective celebration through dance. He or she, through skilful choice of track, subtle mixing and a powerful sound system may create a unified and coherent group environment that expresses the values and affective growth of collective power. Technologies such as the internet also have the potential to augment multiple identities, though these processes of change are not as clear or unified or personally affective as those that are exhibited in the rave. On the contrary, in the context of a school, the usages of the internet that the students demonstrate such as research for assignments or the following of personal desires tend to individualise and reflect the surveillance and control procedures that are in place.

As I made my way through the doctoral studies programme, and organized the literature review, methodology and results sections into a coherent whole; I found myself shuttling between rented accommodation. One October evening, I followed the directions of an advertisement to a farmhouse in a small village. As I drove up the gravel drive I noticed beautiful rhododendron bushes and a small lake in the grounds. I parked in a regular enclave of out-buildings not dissimilar from the house where the rave had taken place. As I entered through a back door and into the kitchen, I quickly recognized the décor and organization of the English aristocracy. The owner of the farm was the second son of an old Norman family, who owned the surrounding area, including a housing estate, half a dozen working farms and several small but pristine villages. The young aristocrat explained that his father had given him the farm in order to establish an art gallery. He showed me the gallery building that was a converted barn, painted white with a new wooden floor, a silver-plated bar and internal toilet. The deal was that I rented a bedroom and looked after the place. The owner was usually away in his recently acquired townhouse in London, though would come back for an occasional weekend. This was an ideal place for me to finish my doctoral write up, and I felt like the lord of the manor as I walked around the property during the next few days.

I had finished the fieldwork for my thesis, and therefore contact with X through the school had finished. However, I had met him several times at raves in various locations in the Midlands of the UK. He was a top draw, and worked with another DJ who had been at the same school, Y. They were surviving financially by using a combination of welfare and illicit means such as selling marijuana. The two subjects had a following in the local underground network. Arrangements for their parties were made at a pub by handing out small pieces of paper with a phone number. When you called the number, an answering machine gave you instructions to go to the party. Close to the location one would usually come across other people trying to find the place that had been described on the phone, so it was fun, and working together would probably sort out any misunderstandings.

On one instance, I travelled to the site with my school teacher friend and several others. He had bought a VW caravanette, which made the journey even more enjoyable as the communal atmosphere inside the van was strengthened by the excitement of driving into the unknown. On this occasion, we were headed to an orchard in Worcestershire.

After a couple of hours of travel we eventually met up with a small convoy of vehicles that took us to our location. The set up for this party was impressive; there was a stage and dance-floor replete with neon and daglo decorations. There was a drinks truck and people sat and chatted next to fires hidden between the trees around the dance-floor. Everyone that I met was relaxed and amiable. My techno-literacy subjects X & Y played barnstorming sets that completely filled up the dance area, and as dawn broke, we were just about ready to make our way home in the early morning.

This had definitely been a techno-shamanic event. The natural surroundings, great music and friendly folk had inspired a tremendous feeling of community and healing. I danced with people from extraordinarily different backgrounds and ages. I remember an enormously muscular farm worker, who had gyrated vigorously for much of the night with his top off and in skin-tight jeans. As I went out of the dance-floor and into the bright morning, I felt simultaneously at ease with the natural world and part of a community. I looked up at the hills that surrounded the site and noticed lines of figures coming down in formation.

People started to run in all directions, women screamed and children looked around helplessly to try and understand what was going on. It was a police swoop. Gatherings of this sort are illegal in the UK, and the police have the power to impound the sound system and to arrest anyone who they think is part of the organizational structure of the rave. I saw my first officer of the State running towards what had been a peaceful gathering. Now the scene looked like war. The police had shiny knee-length boots, riot helmets, shields, batons and dogs. They struck anyone in their path as they made for the sound system. They formed a line and marched in formation towards it, walking on those who got in their way. I was an Education PhD candidate, and my friend was a teacher employed by a State school; so we decided not to get involved in the conflict. I do not consider my writing to be political, but I do not think that you have to be a radical activist to appreciate the over reaction and harshness of the police action. The police had targeted the rave with military precision, even though the group constituted of an unarmed civilian gathering. I wondered about the validity of my own research as we drove away from the scene.

Literacy is one of the most over researched subjects in the field of Education. Researchers may struggle to find anything original in this area that often reports directly to government. It is clearly a political zone of research. The study of children’s reading and writing abilities is basically a control mechanism. The State looks to intervene in people’s lives and gain information about the make-up of their subjectivity for its own information banks. Yet I had witnessed the nature of this intervention myself. It was regulatory, imposing and oppressive. I asked myself the question: Does my research serve the purposes of the State to become more powerful?

Furthermore, what is the other side of this equation? Can educational research really help individuals develop their subjectivity, and improve their literacy outcomes? I decided as I wrote up my thesis, that the answer to this question lay somewhere in the subjective practices of my subjects X and Y. They were engaged in activity that lay outside of State control, and yet constituted a clear augmentation of social purposes. We must assume that literacy is a social practice, as much recent research has convincingly proved. Yet the social practice of techno-shamanism is rooted in deeply affective landscapes of the imagination and motivation, where the individual is overrun with desire and positively contributes to the practice as well as being fully absorbed by it.

My engagement with X and Y increased by a qualitatively measurable amount as I become more fully involved with the rave scene. My rental status a lodger was put in jeopardy as my landlord decided that he was going to put the whole property up for rent, and live permanently in London. He had been visiting less and less, and his estate agent saw an opportunity to make some more money by converting several of the out-houses into luxury apartments. This work was going to take at least eight months, and I decided, in a calamitous few days that I would take on the whole property for twelve months whilst the conversion work proceeded. I would have the house and the art gallery, yet it would be extremely expensive for a PhD research student, working part-time as a teacher and lecturing first year psychology students in the philosophy of education for three hours a week.

The solution to my dilemma came in a chance meeting with X and Y. I had been with my bohemian girlfriend, when X had come to sell us some weed. In the midst of the conversation, I had mentioned to him that I was to embark on renting out the farmhouse and an art gallery, and needed to look for reliable sub tenants with whom I could share the rent. X was immediately captivated by the idea, and said that he would find some others to move in including Y and another DJ that he knew who was moving to the Midlands from Scotland, that I shall call Z. Welfare would pay three quarters of the rent, and we could share the house and the facilities of the immaculate property. I remember assuring the owner that his farm would be inhabited by serious educational types that I had met through the university.

However, this was far from the truth. The farm was soon filled up by the three DJs and their entourage, which included several single mums, a couple from South Africa on the run for drug smuggling, a French model with nowhere to live and assorted wanderers who usually turned up after a rave and stayed for several days to calm down. This was an extraordinary turnaround from the enforced seclusion that the doctoral study required. My life was now full of social action. I was released for the solitude of researching, writing and organizing a thesis, where notions of community may be a distraction and you can only share the worry and fear of academic failure with other research students and your supervisor. I felt joy in the company of the youthful musicians and their colourful group. I wondered at the contrast between my now exciting home-life and the sterile dryness of the academy.

There was also the matter of the art gallery. In addition to being a great exhibition space, it was a near perfect party venue. Thankfully, it was not illegal in the UK to have parties on your property, but you must have a licence to serve alcohol or charge an entrance fee. We decided to go ahead and arranged a party for the following month. I commissioned a local artist to do an ice sculpture of a pistol that we hung over the bar so that drinks would emerge from the barrel frozen. We erected a tarpaulin over the yard in between the out-houses in case of rain, and we decorated the space with lights and tables and chairs.

As the night began we could tell that the party would be a success as crowds of people started to arrive. We kicked off with heavy house music and progressively changed it into techno with X playing the last set as dawn came up. The gallery and courtyard were completely packed out with party revellers. It seemed to become obligatory for men to take their tops off, and I can remember the gallery was absolutely full of half-naked men at one point. I had also been impressed by the freedom and fun that the women wanted to have at our party. They were several large groups of them who were especially boisterous, and terrorised anyone in their path as they made tracks inside the gallery, courtyard and farmhouse. One might ask: Did you feel that this event could have got out of control?

And indeed I was asked this question by a university undergraduate who was amazed to see 500 half-naked men dancing vigorously to powerful techno music. Yet as I watched these strangers expressing themselves to the limits of their physicality in my house, I felt no fear whatsoever. On the contrary, I had an overwhelming sensation of care and companionship with these men. They were all engaged in a peaceful and unifying activity that diminished social divisions.

The farmhouse was located close to a country church, and the next morning, I saw several of the congregation frown in disapproval at the sight of some of the mixed bag of party-goers who were still leaving well into the next day. The contrast could not have been more powerful. They were dressed up in their ‘Sunday best’ and the party-goers were by this stage rather bedraggled and unkempt. The congregation were going to sit and listen to a sermon, sing several hymns and gossip in the cemetery before going home for lunch. The party-goers had been celebrating together since the previous evening in various forms and levels of organisation.

I made a connection in my mind with educational research. It can be invested with a morality that may misunderstand and not investigate the very phenomena that it seeks to explain. For example, teenage desire and the often confusing search for identity that this entails is not a straightforward story. In fact, I would go so far as to state that many of the more extreme behaviours that we may find enacted by the ‘youth’ are directly related to restrictive moral codes that have been imposed by Christianity. As such, investigation into educational ‘failure’ in the youth needs to start with the ways in which desire has been trapped and homogenised by Christian society in history, and certain behaviours such as drug taking, sexual promiscuity and profound celebration have become taboo.

These thoughts also focused my interest and research into techno-shamanism. If we disavow educational research of Christian morality and as an information mechanism for the augmentation of the secular State, what are the grounds for our ‘values education’? I am not proposing that we should all become techno-Pagans and actively propound this perspective through education; but that multifarious religious options are opened up through new technology such as the internet and dance music, and that the desire of the youth is discovering these options through celebration. Techno-shamanism is to an extent a neat category within which to bracket these behaviours, and the youth will break out of it as they continue to experiment with lifestyle options. Yet it is one that may give us a clue as to the qualitative subjective changes that are happening in contemporary society that are connected to techno-literacy.

Conclusion

I am now ensconced in the sedentary life of an academic at the University of Tasmania, Australia, and yet I believe that the evidence and ideas contained in this writing are still acting on my behaviour. Techno-shamanism is a positive and life-affirming practice. It is also a guide to the many contradictions and tensions that present themselves when one is describing complex transformations of the self, and in this process one might be experiencing complex changes (Land, 1995). This salient point is directly relevant to the social sciences as techno-shamanism defies qualitative analysis just as it is competently categorised. It simultaneously works on the behavioural aspects of the imaginary and the pragmatics of everyday life.

I am not practising techno-shamanism now in the same way as I was during those heady days of free party organization. Yet I cannot deny the space that was hollowed out in my personality during this period, and the positive energy that delving into this space enables. This energy defines my sense of what John D. Brewer has termed as ‘ethnographic realism’ (Brewer 2000), or the description of the local under extreme pressure from the forces of globalization.

UNRULY MEDIA: YOUTUBE, MUSIC VIDEO, AND THE NEW DIGITAL CINEMA

{1} Carol Vernallis’ Unruly Media expands significantly on her earlier groundbreaking work in Experiencing Music Video (2004), providing a set of tools for understanding how sound and visuals work together in new kinds of media.  Vernallis considers an ambitious range of media – from film, to music video, to YouTube clips – and expertly models an analytic style that captures the feeling of experiencing contemporary audio-visual media. The book is structured in three sections: the first examines digital cinema; the second, YouTube; and the third, music video.

{2} Part One of Unruly Media focuses on what Vernallis calls “new digital” or “post-classical” cinema: films of the 2000s that use digital production techniques and that, Vernallis argues, are strongly influenced by the audiovisual style of music video. These films use narrative approaches that differ from the classic Hollywood style. Their narratives are often elusive and sometimes hard to understand, and sound sometimes seems to animate characters and drive the action. 

{3} The first two chapters of this section survey a wide range of films. In “The New Cut-Up Cinema,” Vernallis shows how films such as The Bourne Ultimatum, Day Watch, Bringing Out the Dead, and The Life Aquatic have an intense audiovisual aesthetic that borrows lighting, color, gesture, and other techniques from music video, creating fluid narrative forms that are structured by sound. The chapter that follows, “The Audiovisual Turn and Post-Classical Cinema,” is an ambitious and expansive study in which Vernallis analyzes ten fragments from different films, and demonstrates how the strategies of post-classical directors create highly intense and aesthetically stylized moments and structures that wed sound and image. Vernallis outlines the different functions of music video-like audiovisual sequences that occur in the larger context of films, including SLC Punk, Summer of Sam, 500 Days of Summer,and Tarantino’s Death Proof and Kill Bill. In other examples, Vernallis examines fragments in which music creates or suggests structure: in Run Lola Run, a looping soundtrack structures a looping narrative; in Transformers, sound, gesture, and color combine to create smooth lines out of otherwise jerky robotic movements. Finally, Vernallis explores audiovisual style now possible through post-production tweaking that shapes narrative frame, and creates color, texture, and sonic and visual lines.

{4} Of all the chapters in the book, this one best demonstrates Vernallis’ method and style; and it models a kind of analysis that mirrors contemporary experiences of media.  As Vernallis points out, her choice to deal in fragments of film reflects how many viewers experience these compelling audiovisual moments: not necessarily as part of the entirety of a filmic work, but as a favorite clip, cut out of the film and posted and shared on YouTube or another platform, to be re-watched and re-mixed. Her description of these fragments is effusive and evocative, capturing the kind of sensory overload that they create. As a reader, the experience is akin to watching these clips with the assistance of an expert guide, someone accutely sensitive to sonic and visual detail and how they create meaning.  On the descriptive level, Vernallis’ writing performs the ebb and flow of digital cinema. And while the media she discusses is often characterized by elusive narratives, Vernallis provides clear throughlines and structures in her chapters that make them a pleasure to read.   

{5} The remaining chapters in this first section are each narrower in focus. In one, Vernallis critiques film theorists’ dismissal of music video’s stylistic influence on film, and in another explores the marriage of musical and visual elements in Bollywood film.  Finally, in chapters on Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge and Michel Gondry’sEternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the films function as case studies for demonstrating how their directors create audiovisual-oriented forms, and use sound to suggest multiple, often contradictory, narrative arcs, themes, and perspectives. Vernallis convincingly argues that the challenging narratives of films like Eternal Sunshine, which offer multiple perspectives and uncertain conclusions, are a more truthful representation of life and relationships than the clear-cut narratives of many films.

{6} Vernallis’ second section explores the audiovisual aesthetic of YouTube clips and expands the definition of music video. In Unruly Media, a music video might be a commercially produced video that accompanies a pop song, like Psy’s “Gangam Style,” or it might be an amateur video like “Chocolate Rain,” or a surreal musical animation like “Badger Badger.” She expands the category even further, arguing that amateur video clips like “Haha Baby,” are music videos because they operationalize sound in ways that are musical. For instance, the laughter in “Haha Baby,” a home movie of a baby laughing in response to an adult, becomes a repetitive, songlike chorus, one that has invited musical remixes.

{7} In an ambitious chapter entitled “YouTube Aesthetics,” Vernallis offers a detailed taxonomy of the aesthetic effects that make clips work well on YouTube, addressing audio and visual elements of YouTube videos and common narratives and themes. According to Vernallis, the brevity of most YouTube clips results in a loose relationship to causal relations – we don’t necessarily know how or why something in a YouTube clip comes to be.  In addition to outlining aesthetic features of YouTube clips, this chapter shows how YouTube offers new modes of audience engagement with media, and modes of engaging with other people through media: sharing clips, she argues, becomes a means of articulating kinship and relationships; consumers can become producers of content; and the bottomless, borderless archive of YouTube clips lets viewers drift through them, consuming them like a flaneur.  YouTube is also, Vernallis argues, a space of reanimation that defies death and time: it’s a platform that enables decades-old clips to go viral, a space where users can share new videos created out of old ones. 

{8} As a scholar of pre-YouTube audiovisual media—specifically, 1960s pop music and television—I found this last argument particularly compelling. One of the major modes of contact that I have with the artists that I study has been through YouTube: through clips of televised performances uploaded by fans. While YouTube is a fantastic resource for finding this otherwise hard-to-access footage, it’s an archive full of gaps, one where the sources of media aren’t well documented. The borderlessness of this archive does, however, have benefits: clips take on new life and meaning. A scene from a music variety show like Hullabaloo or Shindig becomes a standalone music video, taking on different meaning, as I share it with colleagues and students. I can add it to a playlist with videos from other periods, and see connections between their audiovisual aesthetics that might otherwise go unnoticed. Vernallis offers a tantalizing hint at the way YouTube resurrects music and media, suggesting productive avenues for future theorizing.

{9} In a later chapter, Vernallis revisits the aesthetic elements introduced in “YouTube Aesthetics” and discusses how they, and a few others, operate in the video for Beyoncé’s “Video Phone.” “Video Phone,” Vernallis argues, shows how YouTube has changed music video. Without the rules imposed by television networks, she argues, videos have become weirder, edgier, less constrained, while the growing consumption of music videos on YouTube and on mobile devices has introduced new challenges and possibilities for video directors that have resulted in stylistic changes. While Vernallis’ arguments about the changes to music video that YouTube enables are well founded, more context about how the history of how YouTube operates would have made them more convincing. In 2006, Google acquired YouTube, triggering a shift from primarily user-generated content to more professionally-generated content, and resulting in an increased emphasis on generating revenue.¹ This shift raises questions about the extent to which it shaped the aesthetic of music videos on YouTube: are there new, implicit rules and restrictions in place? Or is there something about the way YouTube generates revenue that incentivizes edginess?

{10} Among the strongest and most compelling chapters in Unruly Media is “Audiovisual Change,” which examines the work that YouTube videos did during the 2008 presidential election. Vernallis’ most valuable contribution here is her illuminating discussion of how the use of visual gestures and sounds that narrate feeling creates empathetic relationships between viewers and performers. In a detailed analysis of the Obama campaign video, “Yes We Can,” Vernallis deftly shows how the sonic and visual gestures of the individuals in the video anticipate and address viewers’ emotions, a strategy used by the Obama campaign to create an affective connection between voters and the presidential candidate. My one reservation is that Vernallis’ analysis of how a video like “Yes We Can” engendered cross-cultural and cross-racial empathy sometimes seemed idealistic, and overly optimistic, given the material divisions that contribute to social inequality and racism in the United States. In addition, the audiovisual strategies that she positions as tools for working for positive social change could just as easily be deployed in propaganda of a less benevolent sort. These reservations aside, the chapter makes a crucial and important contribution to understanding how audiovisual media shape and respond to audiences’ emotional states.

{11} In the third section of Unruly Media, Vernallis tackles music video, picking up on where her groundbreaking Experiencing Music Video left off, and offering a theory of music video aesthetics for our current digital moment. The first chapter of this section tracks the shifts in music video style and approach from the 1980s to the present, not by providing a straightforward chronology of music video’s evolution, but by showing how different videos from the 1980s and the 2000s have approached different technological problems or have adopted different thematic and narrative approaches. She shows how video directors have adapted to different technological tools in ways that have shaped the degree of immediacy that videos are capable of, and argues that though today’s directors may have the ability to more finely control their videos, this may, in fact, make them seem less immediate and exciting.

{12} In the two chapters that follow, Vernallis meditates on the question of a music video canon (or lack thereof) and on the potential and challenges of applying an author-based approach to music video studies. The first of these chapters focuses on the videos of directors Dave Meyers and Francis Lawrence, and argues that each director’s approach creates very different modes of hearing songs; that the images they use adopt particular attitudes towards a song. Similar to Vernallis’ work inExperiencing Music Video, a director’s techniques are instrumental in enabling particular understandings of a song. The chapter that follows discusses the work of video directors represented in DVD collections released by Palm Pictures, and argues that the works and commentary included therein reveal that the directors think of and experience their video as art. Vernallis frames this collection as a first step towards establishing a sharable body of music video work—necessary given that, unlike film or books, music videos are rarely distributed in consumer formats. While Vernallis’ discussion of these directors’ videos provides a valuable analysis of how videos function as artworks that fundamentally shape how we hear and understand songs, I was not always convinced that the question of canonicity was vital. Vernallis does discuss the politics of canons, and their relationship to social inequality: canons often exclude work by women, and by people of color, as evidenced by the Palm DVD set, which includes no women directors; but more analysis of how a music video canon might subvert this paradigm would have strengthened the argument here. In addition, a canon- or author-focused approach risks sidelining how collaborative music videos are: they’re born of relationships between directors, musicians, and other creative staff. Vernallis is sensitive to this and alludes to this issue. In so doing, she opens up a space for future work, perhaps more ethnographic in nature, that looks at the collaborative relationships and power relationships that, in addition to the director’s vision, ultimately shape music videos. 

{13} As the first study that views digital cinema, music video, and online media as genres deeply entwined with one another, Unruly Media opens up the possibilities for new research. Vernallis deftly captures the aesthetic qualities of digital media at this particular moment. The book spends some time historicizing this aesthetic but dwells largely in the present. Far from being a shortcoming, since this is a book about the contemporary culture, Vernallis creates a space to begin asking questions about how we got to this aesthetic moment. The book also provides a baseline that will prove crucial for understanding how media evolves in years to come as platforms and tastes change and adapt. 

{14} In an afterward, Vernallis suggests that music videos, YouTube clips, and digital cinema provide us with tools for navigating our working lives, our relationships to other people, and our relationships to media. In a similar vein, Vernallis’ book provides valuable tools and strategies that for making sense of digital media.  These tools are useful not only to scholars, but to anyone who has been moved by the sound and visuals of a film or music video, but has struggled to articulate how those effects move them.

Music, Politics, and Violence

{1} Recent ethnomusicology publications offer compelling case studies about the intersections between music and conflict. Noteworthy examples include Music, Politics and War: Views from Croatia (1998) by Svanibor Pettan; Singing Our Way to Victory: French Cultural Politics and Music During the Great War (2001) by Regina M. Sweeney and Sound Targets: American Soldiers and Music in the Iraq War(2009) by Jonathan Pieslak. The in-depth focus of these books on one particular case study alludes to the challenge of creating a more generalized theory about music and conflict, two context-based and relativistic concepts that resist generalization across chronological and geographical boundaries. One admirable effort to overcome this obstacle is evidenced in the landmark publication Music and Conflict(2010) a series of essays by ethnomusicologists edited by Morgan O’Connell and Salwa El-Shawan Castelo-Branco. By drawing together a diverse set of studies on music and conflict, the editors offer one possible theoretical framework with general applicability for examining music and conflict.

{2} Music, Politics, and Violence (2012), a series of essays compiled by Susan Fast and Kip Pegley, is another important work for the advancement of general ethnomusicology theory about music and conflict. Its focused attention on a cross-cultural examination of music and violence within a political context is long overdue. Interestingly, in the introduction to the book, the editors position the volume as simultaneously a part of, but separate from, the growing tradition of music and conflict studies. “[Our] choice of the term violence in this volume, over the more commonly used conflict, is a deliberate departure from existing literature” (2). It is curious that the editors offer little explanation as to how the study of music and violence strays from the tradition of conflict studies.

{3} Perhaps the most important contribution of the book to ethnomusicology is its positioning of music securely within the broader theoretical discussion about violence and the nation state. In the extensive introduction as well as in the short essays that introduce each chapter, Fast and Pegley engage numerous important theoretical studies about violence including Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” (1921), Frantz Fanon’s Concerning Violence” (1963) and Hannah Arendt’s On Violence(1970). The editors propose that nation states are inherently violent as they “cut or divide up the world – through borders, passports, citizenship papers, counting and managing its populations through the science of the state itself (statistics)” (3). They conclude that since music is fundamentally intertwined in the nation state, it is riddled with violence and conflict.

{4} A central theoretical springboard for the book is Slavoj Žižek’s important theoretical examination of violence, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (2009). The fundamental premise of this book is that subjective violence with a clearly identifiable source is actually the result of systemic violence inherent in less obvious economic and political systems. Žižek urges his readers to explore these hidden systemic causes of violence as a means of understanding the corruption of basic organizational structures such as contemporary versions of democracy. In Music, Politics, and Violence,Fast and Pegley engage thoroughly with this notion of systemic violence though they maintain a more neutral political stance: they examine music as “a particularly rich medium for perpetuating symbolic violence, which, in turn, often becomes part of a much larger systemic oppression” (27). Fast and Pegley do disagree with Žižek’s approach to music and violence. They are particularly keen on undoing his assumption that music maintains an inherent transcendent quality somehow expressing ideas and emotions where words fail, and that it thus somehow lies outside of the realm of everyday social context: “We cannot use music to keep our reflections on violence at some respectful distance. Indeed, we must uncover precisely how music does its cultural work, which is what the essays in this volume seek to do” (12). Music, Politics, and Violenceemphasizes the social construction of musical meaning, clearly explaining why this is fundamental to understanding the connections between music and violence in a political context.

{5} The nine essays that comprise Music, Politics, and Violence examine the dialogic relationship between music and violence in diverse chronological and geographical contexts. While such a book might have been held together solely by virtue of its basic subject matter, the editors skillfully bring together the numerous case studies with an extensive introductory chapter and carefully integrated theoretical prefaces to each essay. The clear organization of the introductory chapter and of the entire book around three critical theoretical trajectories makes clear to the reader the larger framework of the text. These three theoretical trajectories examine the dialogic relationship between violence and the nation state: Slavoj Žižek’s discussion of subjective, objective and systemic violences and their surrounding discourses of action and inaction; notions of belonging and/or “otherness” within nation-states, ideas incorporated by numerous scholars of violence including Jacques Derrida, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler and Gayatri Spivak; and examinations of public and private memorials as tools of justification for committing violence against the dead as discussed by Judith Butler and Sharon Rosenberg.

{6} The book is divided into three parts. Part I, titled “Objective and Subjective Violences,” examines the violent use of music during wartime. Particular attention is paid to the emotional and physical harm caused by music and to the role of music in defining categories of difference and ‘Otherness.’ The four chapters in Part I cover a broad range of conflicts including World War I, World War II, the Vietnam War, the Yugoslav Wars and the invasion of Iraq. In Chapter One, “‘A Healing Draft for a Sick People’: War in the Pages of the Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik, 1914–1918,” Nicholas Attfield examines one of the best known and longest running German-language music journals Neue Zeitschrift für Musik.The focus of the chapter is how political ideology played a surprisingly major role in guiding the journal contents and how the journal reflected subsequently the nation’s war effort. In Chapter Two, “The Afterlife of Neda Ukraden: Negotiating Space and Memory through Popular Music after the Fall of Yugoslavia, 1990–2008,” Catherine Baker discusses the case of Yugoslavian singer Neda Ukraden to demonstrate how musical biographies “become subject to recontextualization and reworking in conditions of ethno-political conflict” (60). Baker examines the erasure of multiple identities in what she characterizes as a violent process to create meaningful identities for newly-formed nation states. In Chapter Three, “Between the Lines: ‘Lili Marlene,’ Sexuality, and the Desert War,” Christina Baade examines the way in which the song “Lili Marlene” was enjoyed across enemy lines during World War II. Also, the author focuses upon three key wartime performers of the song, Lale Andersen, Anne Shelton and Marlene Dietrich, examining how they negotiated the ambivalent sexuality and sentiment of the song in live performance for soldiers and for other audiences. James Deaville traces the history and development of music integrated into televised American news broadcasts of war in Chapter Four, titled “The Changing Sounds of War: Television News Music and Armed Conflicts from Vietnam to Iraq.” He emphasizes a profound transformation in the sound and function of this music during the years between the Vietnam War and the Persian Gulf War, complicating the ways in which “music served as a primary agent for the transformation of the American living room into the site for war’s ‘virtual reality’” (106).  

{7} Part II, “Violence and Reconciliation,” is divided into three chapters that examine the diverse roles of music in processes of reconciliation during and after violent conflict. In Chapter Five, “Revivals and New Arrivals: Protest Song in the Al-Aqsa Intifada,” David A. McDonald writes about Palestinian expressive culture since the escalation of the al-Aqsa intifada in 2002. With special attention to various types of protest song, McDonald engages ethnographic analysis of individual performances and events to discover how Palestinian ideational strategies are embodied and performed from within various politico-nationalist frames.  In Chapter Six, “Pax Mevlana: Mevlevi Sufi Music and the Reconciliation of Islam and the West,” Victor A. Vicente explores the role of Sufi poetry, music and ritual in countering the “increasing ‘rift’ between the Muslim world and the West” (150). With a particular focus on the music of followers of Mevlana Rumi, Vicente examines moments of musical reconciliation as well as moments of increased tensions found in state-sponsoredsema whirling shows, private zikr ceremonies, and popular music performances that incorporate Sufi themes and sounds. Chapter Seven, “Choreographing (against) Coup Culture: Reconciliation and Cross-Cultural Performance in the Fiji Islands,” explores the symbolic power of hybrid music performance in the Fiji Islands. Through an examination of two contrasting performances, one government sponsored and the other “grassroots” that incorporate the music of Indigenous Fijians and Indo-Fijians, ethnomusicologist Kevin C. Miller investigates music and dance as a critical site for nation making in the midst of ethnic tension and multiculturalist discourse on a local and national level.

{8} Part III, “Musical Memorializations of Violent Pasts,” investigates the ways in which music and musicians provide narratives of remembrance for violent histories. In Chapter Eight, “Complementary Discourses of Truth and Memory: The Peruvian Truth Commission and the Canción Social Ayacuchana,” Jonathan Ritter examines how recent violence against the state involving the Shining Path guerillas is woven into local and national historical narratives. Ritter presents a fascinating comparison between the official commemorative work of the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission and that of canción social ayacuchana musicians. While both served to commemorate violent histories through similar discourse, their divergences in content and style raise interesting questions about the nature and value of local and national narratives of remembrance in the public sphere. The final chapter in the book is “National Identity After National Socialism: German Receptions of the Holocaust Cantata, Jüdische Chronik (1960/1961)” by Amy Lynn Wlodarski. This chapter engages with broader questions of German memorializing of the holocaust and of how in the aftermath of the war, cultural memory was shared between the citizens of the Federal Republic of Germany and of the German Democratic Republic. Using the Holocaust Cantata Jüdische Chronik (1960/1961) as a case study, Wlodarski adeptly demonstrates how one composition can present divergent paths of remembrance and serve ulterior motives: Wlodarski posits that the cultural prominence of the Cantata in the German Democratic Republic was due less to sentiments of guilt or reconciliation and more to its use by the state as a pawn in Cold War politics.  

{9} Ethnomusicologist J. Martin Doughtry provides a thoughtful and inspiring Afterword to the book titled “From Voice to Violence and Back Again.” In this essay, Doughtry skillfully ties the nine essays of the book together through a philosophical engagement with the voice and with violence in which he challenges conventional understandings of their intersections: “[I]t is clear that we need a definition of violence that does not put it in opposition to voice, or to music” (257). Doughtry proposes that violence is not merely an activity engaged when the voice is no longer effective; it is an activity that incorporates the voice as systemically and subjectively as Fast and Pegley propose that violence and politics incorporate music.

{10} Music, Politics, and Violence makes a convincing case for the need for conflict studies framed specifically around music and violence and presents a tenable theoretical framework for doing so with cross-cultural applicability. Incorporating the work of a number of renowned scholars who examine theoretical implications of various social constructs including violence, national identity, and public and private space, editors Susan Fast and Kip Pegley successfully and organically integrate music into larger theoretical discussions about violence and the nation state. As such, they offer a fully integrated theoretical framework for examining music and violence from a cross-cultural perspective and emphasize the importance of considering the role of music in moments of systemic, subjective or objective violence. In the words of the editors, “music is never neutral, and we cannot turn a blind eye to how it is used for violent purposes in the realm of the political” (27).

HOW GILLES APAP'S NEW CADENZA ILLUMINATES MOZART

{1} According to a recent article by Alex Ross in the New Yorker, the once defunct art of classical improvisation is in revival mode; his emphasis was not the expected ornamentation-savvy Baroque specialists but the more surprising field of cadenza-updates in the performance of Classical and Romantic works, a field led by Robert Levin (Mozart Piano Concertos), Will Crutchfield (Donizetti arias), and Joshua Bell (Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto).¹ Here Ross could also have included original Mozart violin cadenzas by Leonidas Kavakos and Rachel Barton Pine.² Curiously excluded from the immediate context of this revival is Gilles Apap’s Mozart, which Ross describes in parentheses as “full-on cadenza craziness.”³ He places it in a separate category along with Schnittke’s cadenza for Beethoven’s Violin Concerto. What Apap’s and Schnittke’s cadenzas share that the others do not is explicit intertextual referencing: Schnittke quotes snippets of Violin Concertos by Brahms, Bartok, Berg, and Shostakovich, thereby stepping out of the bounds of Beethoven’s musical language, while Apap quotes Mendelssohn and ventures several steps further, out of the bounds of classical music altogether and into other musical styles.

{2} Apap’s eight-minute cadenza near the end of the last movement of Mozart’s Violin Concerto in G Major, K. 216, can be viewed on YouTube.⁴ He begins with a virtuoso prelude of diminished-seventh arpeggios running up and down the instrument over three octaves punctuated by dramatic pauses (0:09). He then whistles one of Mozart’s themes while accompanying himself on the violin (0:40). Next comes another theme in the style of an Old-Time fiddler (1:44) and a Gypsy Swing fiddler (2:13). In quick succession, Mozart’s music is transformed into a Scottish reel (2:44), a Gypsy dance (4:41), and a Classical Indian improvisation (5:27). Overall Apap fulfills the basic definition and purpose of the traditional cadenza, which is to “throw new light on the themes occurring in the piece… [to] extend the range of what has already been said, give [one’s] own personal view of it.”⁵

{3} Mozart himself left no cadenzas for his violin concertos; he expected performers to provide their own. This was true even in the case of his piano concertos, for which he did write cadenzas.⁶ Indeed, in Mozart’s time “it was expected of virtuosos that they should establish a personal performance manner or method of embellishing as a kind of trademark distinguishing them from their rivals.”⁷ In this respect, Apap has carried out Mozart’s wishes fully. What makes this cadenza controversial is the question of style: in Eva and Paul Badura-Skoda’s words, “inappropriate (unstylish) cadenzas often suggest a tumour in an organism that is otherwise perfect and healthy.”⁸

{4} The question of whether cadenzas should be in the style of the concerto vs. or in the style of the soloist (or the soloist’s era) has been contentious since the Romantic era. Beethoven composed a cadenza in his own style for Mozart’s Piano Concerto in D Minor, K. 466; Edwin Fischer took off into “late-Romantic chromatic fantasies of a post-Wagnerian sort” in the 1930s.⁹ The “standard” violin cadenzas of Joseph Joachim and Fritz Kreisler were written in a Romantic idiom. Apap’s cadenza thus comes in a long line of departures from Mozartian language in favor of the language and individual skills of certain performers—the question is, how far is too far?

{5} In this article I argue, based on a detailed analysis of Apap’s controversial cadenza, that there is an order to the madness—a kind of musical-lingual logic that, while stretched to extreme lengths by Apap, is unique in overlapping with a distinctive and well-known aspect of Mozart’s own musical language, namely, its mixture of styles. In abstracted form, his compositional voice, resulting from mixing multiple voices and styles, corresponds to what Bakhtin called heteroglossia, an idea he developed in response to the “polyphonic” novels of Dostoevsky and others. Literally meaning “different languages,” heteroglossia encompasses dialects and jargons indicative of age, class, and other social markers that carry ideological undertones. My point, briefly put, is that Mozart’s compositional heteroglossia is mirrored by Apap’s performative heteroglossia. Apap does this in an eccentric and transgressive manner, in a way that seduces or provokes, though which one is a matter of debate.

APAP’S CADENZA

{6} Apap’s polystylistic reinterpretation of Mozart comprises a series of variations on selected themes drawing on a variety of Western and non-Western violin playing techniques. He explained them to Sir Yehudi Menuhin, who hailed him as “the violinist of the twenty-first century” and immediately organized concerts that he planned to conduct himself (tragically he died shortly before the project was to begin, in March 1999).¹⁰ In an interview taped shortly afterwards, Apap recalled meeting with Menuhin.¹¹ “I told him I could transform the theme in various styles,” he says, and demonstrates how changing even a single note can entirely alter the character of Mozart’s “Andante” theme (in this case, a C-sharp instead of C-natural in m. 253):

Example 1a.

Example 1b.

{7} The d2 at the beginning of Example 1a, part of a G-minor triad, becomes scale degree 3 of a B flat chord in the second full bar, with the trilled C as part of the modulation; in Apap’s version, the augmented second C-sharp to B flat inflects the harmony with “otherness,” variously coded as “Eastern,” “Arabic,” “Oriental,” “Jewish,” etc. (This particular transformation illustrating Apap’s process does not appear in the cadenza.)

{8} Apap then goes through each of the variations of his cadenza explaining the different techniques he uses. In one variation he whistles the theme while self-accompanying with syncopated plucked chords and interjected rhetorical slaps on the fingerboard. This refers to the bardic origins of the “Serenade” (the example gives the whistled line on the top staff and the pizzicato accompaniment on the bottom staff):

Example 2.

{9} Later in the same variation Apap accompanies himself using a bowing technique known as “chopping,” simulating the off-beat chordal strumming of rock guitarists, popular among electric violinists such as Mark Wood and Tracy Silverman (not shown). Next Apap renders the theme in the style of a Highland fiddler by lifting the fingers of the left hand to make the notes squeak “like a bagpipe […] something they don’t teach at the Paris conservatoire!” (2:44, Example 3a).

Example 3a.

 

{10} Here the original cut-common time signature is changed to 12/8 and the rests are eliminated to create a continuous quaver-beat motion. (Example 3b is notated in E minor as per the recording, rather than the G minor of the YouTube performance—Apap appears to have changed his mind about the best key for this variation.)

{11} Apap then takes the “Allegretto” theme (bars 265ff, shown in Example 3b) and subjects it to a “Gypsy Swing” treatment, imitating the flowing improvisational style of Stephane Grappelli (Menuhin’s erstwhile collaborator) and evoking the smoky Hot Clubs of 1920s Paris (2:13).

Example 3b.

 

Example 4.

{12} Next Apap transforms the “Andante” theme into a breakneck Friska, performedmoto perpetuo and bedecked with trills on almost every other note, while the orchestra provides a rhythmic accompaniment in the manner of a Hungarian Gypsy band (4:41).

Example 5.

{13} In the final variation, on the “Andante” theme, Apap imitates the style of a Classical Indian improvisation through the use of long glissandi and extremely wide vibrato. This particularly fascinated Menuhin, who was very fond of Indian music and especially the playing of Ravi Shankar (5:27).

Example 6.

{14} The cadenza concludes with the finale’s main theme in the minor developed through a brief modulation (7:00) and juxtaposed with “a bit of Mendelssohn”—a quotation from the last movement of his Violin Concerto (7:15).  What Apap does not mention in his interview is that the cadenza also includes a bluegrass variation in the manner of a fiddler such as Mark O’Connor (1:44)…

Example 7.

… and (spoiler alert!) a blues song, introduced by way of a wailing solo in the style of Jimi Hendrix (3:32):

Example 8.

He sings throatily while accompanying himself on the violin (3:48):

I woke up this morning
Could not play my fiddle no more
I woke up this morning
Could not play in the key of G major (one sharp, that is)
I tried and tried
Whoaaaaa!

{15} Neither does Apap mention how he gets from one variation to the next—by means of improvised (or improvisatory) connective passages in which he whistles and plays simultaneously, a feat that is not nearly as easy as it looks.  He whistles, he sings, he “chops”; he plays in the idioms of nineteenth-century virtuoso violin music, rock music, the blues, bluegrass, Scottish folk music, jazz, Gypsy music, and Indian music—all in quick succession. The virtuosity of Apap’s cadenza lies in its wide-ranging stylistic and technical versatility; it highlights his many different skills and simultaneously highlights certain commonalities of technique across traditions, e.g. the use of the open strings as drones in Mozart and in bluegrass music.¹²

MOZART’S “STYLE OF STYLES” & BAKHTIN’S HETEROGLOSSIA

{16} The fact that Mozart’s voice as a composer was characterized by stylistic heterogeneity is too well known to require more than a brief summary here. As many scholars have pointed out, this voice undoubtedly stemmed from his early exposure to numerous musical styles, traveling widely throughout Europe as a child prodigy. As a young man he proudly claimed to his father, “as you know, I can more or less adopt or imitate any kind and any style of composition.”¹³ He “absorbed various influences, learned the full range of current styles in the same way that he mastered the main foreign languages,” as Maynard Solomon has observed, and synthesized them into a multifaceted compositional voice.¹⁴ Wye Jamison Allanbrook has noted that “in general, nothing is ever wholly “new” in Mozart’s repertory, but is instead a brilliant combination of existing compositional materials.”¹⁵ Leonard Ratner has remarked on Mozart’s rare ability “to incorporate and synthesize elements from the various styles of eighteenth-century music,” making him “the greatest master at mixing and coordinating topics, often in the shortest space and with startling contrast.”¹⁶

{17} Let us turn directly to an examination of Mozart’s “style of styles” in the Violin Concertos. As the following examples (Examples 9-12) illustrate, the Concerto in G, K. 216 brings together an assortment of “types” and “styles” drawn from the lexicon of eighteenth-century musical language:¹⁷

Example 9: Pastorale (a style). K. 216/I mm. 38-41.       

Example 10: Hunt Music (a style, here exemplified by “horn fifths”). K. 216/I mm. 76-77.

Example 11: Passepied (a dance type). K. 216/III mm. 1-8.

Example 12: March-musette (a style/topic/dance combination). K. 216/III mm. 265-68.

{18} In addition to these characteristic “topics,” the Concerto includes cross-generic references such as operatic recitative—possibly alluding to the fact that the main theme was recycled from Il Re Pastore, K. 208, composed a few months prior to K. 216. (Example 13) Another inserted genre was the Serenade, complete with pizzicato accompaniment. (Example 14)

Example 13: Recitative (borrowed from opera). K. 216/I mm. 147-152.

 Example 14: Serenade (an inserted genre). K. 216/III mm. 252-56.

{19} Expanding the scope of exploration to include the Violin Concertos in D, K. 218, and A, K. 219 (the two most often performed of the five concertos; Examples 15-21), reveals yet more “topics” and discursive devices borrowed from eighteenth-century styles, including dance (Example 15) and opera such as arioso (substituting the violin for the voice; Example 20) and the speech of characters in dramatic “dialogue” (Example 21):

Example 15: Minuet (a dance type). K. 219/III mm. 1-4.

 Example 16: Military Music (a style, here exemplified by a trumpet fanfare). K. 218/I mm. 1-4.

 Example 17: Military Music-Brilliant Style. K. 219/I mm. 46-50.

Example 18: Turkish Music (a style). K. 219/III mm. 164-172. 

Example 19: Strict (or Learned) Style. K. 219/II mm. 85-86.

Example 20: Arioso (borrowed from opera). K. 219/I mm. 40-42.

Example 21: Dialogue (borrowed from opera). K. 219/III mm. 78-85.

{20} These examples, while hardly exhaustive, encompass a wide range of types (Dances [in Examples 11 and 15], the March [12]), styles (Military, Hunt, Brilliant [Examples 16-17], Musette [12], Pastorale [9], Turkish [18], Strict/Learned [19]), and generic borrowings (Serenade [Example 14], opera [3, 20-21]), all of which were socially codified in the eighteenth-century musical lexicon. While a comprehensive examination of the subtle discursive differences between types, styles, and genres in the musical language of Mozart’s time is beyond the scope of this article, we can nonetheless note that each of these carried certain social, historical, or intertextual implications. For instance, the Minuet was a dance associated with a high social class in contrast to, say, the low-class Contredanse; the strict/learned style referred to imitative counterpoint as epitomized by J.S. Bach; “Turkish music” imitated the raucous sounds of Janissary music; Hunt and Military music referred to aristocratic and army pursuits respectively; “dialogue” using the high and low registers of the violin simulated an exchange between operatic characters, such as Don Giovanni and Zerlina. Each musical style thus carried some kind of social connotation tied to certain groups or human behaviors and it was Mozart’s facility at integrating these disparate elements into his music that was arguably his hallmark as a composer.

{21} Mozart’s heterogeneous musical style can be further illuminated by invoking Bakhtin’s concept of “heteroglossia” (from the Greek hetero (different) and glossameaning tongue or language—as in the word “glossary”). In his essay “Discourse in the Novel,” the Russian philosopher wrote:

The novel can be defined as a diversity of social speech types (sometimes even diversity of languages) and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized. The internal stratification of any single national language into social dialects, characteristic group behavior, professional jargons, generic languages, languages of generations and age groups, tendentious languages, languages of the authorities, of various circles and of passing fashions, languages that serve the specific sociopolitical purposes of the day, even of the hour… this internal stratification present in every language at any given moment of its historical existence is the indispensable prerequisite for the novel as a genre. The novel orchestrates all its themes, the totality of the world of objects and ideas depicted and expressed in it, by means of the social diversity of speech types and by the different individual voices that flourish under such conditions. Authorial speech, the speeches of narrators, inserted genres, the speech of characters are merely those fundamental compositional unities with whose help heteroglossia (raznorezie) can enter the novel.¹⁸

{22} Bakhtin considered the “stratification” or proliferation of language into many different languages to be a fundamental feature of novels, as exemplified by Turgenev, Pushkin, Tolstoy, and others. He gave the name heteroglossia (“raznorezie” in Russian) to the novelist’s mastery and manipulation of these languages, through which the entire world of the novel came to life. For example, Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons switched from voice to voice to give ironic characterizations, and mixed accents and dialects in the speech of characters to build an entire social sphere, while the use of direct and indirect speech and inserted genres (such as the introduction of poetry to Dostoevky’s The Possessed and Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister) enabled thoughts and emotions to be expressed with varying degrees of directness. In Bakhtin’s view, the defining feature of the novel as a literary genre was the agency of the author, who orchestrates his multitude of themes, speech types, and voices into a unified synthesis.

{23} Parallels can be drawn between linguistic and musical discourses by comparing selected social speech types and individual voices named by Bakhtin with the topics and genres identified earlier in Mozart’s Concertos (see Table 1).  As we can see, the elements of Mozart’s musical language correspond closely to Bakhtin’s categories.

TABLE 1.

Bakhtin’s Social Speech Types and Individual Voices	Mozart’s Topics and Genres
Characteristic Group Behavior	Dance Types (Passepied, Minuet) The March
Professional jargons	Strict (or Learned) Style
Generic Languages	Pastorale, Hunt Music, Military Music, Turkish Music
Inserted Genres	Serenade Opera (Recitative, Arioso)
Speech of Characters	Dialogue

{24} Furthermore, heteroglot discourse allowed the author to express his own socio-ideological position by manipulating various characters’ dialects, jargons, and individual voices. As Bakhtin explained,

Heteroglossia, once incorporated into the novel… is another’s speech in another’s language, serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way. Such speech constitutes a special type of double-voiced discourse. It serves two speakers at the same time and expresses simultaneously two different intentions: the direct intention of the character who is speaking, and the refracted intention of the author.¹⁹

In other words, heteroglossia revealed a novel’s discourse as unfolding on two levels: the language of the characters themselves and the ongoing conversation between a given character’s speech and authorial intent. This discursive interplay, which Bakhtin described as being “internally dialogized,” enabled the author indirectly to voice his opinions, to express humor, and ultimately to express a world-view or ideology. Pushkin’s Evgenij Onegin, for example, was not only “an encyclopedia of the styles and languages of the epoch” but a reflection of Russian life itself, thus revealing a certain socio-ideological consciousness on the author’s part.²⁰

BACK TO APAP’S CADENZA

{25} By now the parallels I am drawing between Mozart and Apap should be clear. Adapting Bakhtin’s terminology, we could say that Apap has created “speech types” for violin. We can note here, drawing on Karol Berger’s idea that the cadenza is the moment where “the performer steps out of a written role and speaks in his or her own voice,” that a double-voiced discourse emerges, as if Apap is in dialogue with Mozart. The presence of more than a single voice is most evident at the cadenza’s conclusion, as the final trill leads back into Mozart’s Rondo theme. Here Apap’s voice recedes in favor of Mozart’s. This dialogic moment is further highlighted by the fact that Apap plays “standard” cadenzas in the preceding two movements, saving his own for the last movement.

{26} Apap’s heteroglossia distinguishes him from the phenomenon of “cross-over” artists, i.e., musicians who leap from one genre into another. Among the first classically trained violinists to do this was Menuhin himself, who collaborated with Ravi Shankar and Stephane Grappelli in the 1960s and 70s.Since then, numerous leading classical violinists have forayed into non-classical repertoire, including Nigel Kennedy (jazz), Gidon Kremer (Tangos by Astor Piazzolla), Viktoria Mullova (covers of the Bee Gees and Alanis Morissette), Daniel Hope (Indian Classical music), Joshua Bell (bluegrass) and David Garrett (film music and pop song covers). “Crossing over” in the opposite direction, meanwhile, we find Stuff Smith jazzing up Bach’s Double Concerto, George Gao rendering the Queen of the Night aria on the erhu, and numerous pop musicians covering classical repertoire, such as Bond. Crossing over entails “speaking with an accent” on the violin that should not be confused with the multi-lingual musical discourse comprised by Apap’s “speech types.”²¹

{27} Apap’s contribution is unique in the history of performances of Mozart’s violin concertos. However, we should note here that he could not have intended his cadenza specifically as a commentary on Mozart’s concerto since he revels in polystylistic performance behaviors just as much when performing Bach and Ravel, bluegrass and reels (as we will see below). Leaving aside the question of authorial intention, Apap’s cadenza does draw attention to an aspect of Mozart’s music never before emphasized in any previous cadenza.

{28} Finally, the question of what Apap did intend with his cadenza can be addressed by looking into his background and sketching a brief portrait of his individuality and motivations. Like Mozart, Apap travelled widely, absorbing musical influences in his formative years. Born in Algeria in 1963, he began playing violin at the age of seven and attended Lyon Conservatory where he acquired what he calls “mind fungal disease.²² Rejecting the formalities of the institution, Apap embarked on his own study of folk music, improvisation, and jazz, making pilgrimages to Bulgaria, India, and Alaska. Having once served as concertmaster of the Santa Barbara Symphony Orchestra, he now performs as a soloist with orchestras throughout the world and with his two ensembles, the Transylvanian Mountain Boys and The Colors of Invention.

{29} In every configuration, Apap’s heteroglossia comes to the fore. His version of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons—arranged for violin, accordion, contrabass, and cymbalum—includes whistling in the opening of “Spring” and an Indian sitar imitation during the last movement of “Autumn”. His recording of Ravel’s Tombeau de Couperin with the same group transforms the original “Forlane” into a smoky jazz bar number. During a performance of Manuel de Falla’s Spanish Dance in New Haven, Connecticut, in 2005, with his band the Transylvanian Mountain Boys, for example, he included an unscripted blues break in the middle of the piece.

{30} Apap has said, “all music is created equal,” signaling a multi-cultural relativist position that equalizes musical traditions and implies that classical music ought not to be especially exalted.²³ His performances break the mold of the typical classical music concert by creating a casual atmosphere; he talks to his audiences, often making them laugh. “If only the president could play the fiddle, that would be beautiful,” he jokes, “If all the presidents at the summit meeting could play the fiddle, and whip them out to jam, that would be great.”²⁴ Yet inherent in his idealistic stance that the power of music, as symbolized by the violin, can unite people across linguistic, cultural, and political divides is a necessary jab at classical prestige.

{31} At one point in the above-mentioned 2005 concert, he quoted Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony with the mischief of a schoolboy. After playing the Sarabande from Bach’s Partita No. 1 in B minor and a fiddle tune in succession and without a pause, he turned to the audience and said: “First I played John Sebastian Bach, then I went into some Irish reels.” The deliberate mispronunciation of the composer’s first name can be taken as a metaphor for Apap’s attitude towards classical music. “Hey… where’s Mozart?” he hollers playfully on a bonus track at the end of the CD recording of the Mozart concerto, reveling in irreverence.²⁵

{32} Irreverence lies at the core of Apap’s musical persona—it fuels the heteroglossia on display in his cadenza, it informs his humorous stage manner, and it infuriates his critics.²⁶ It also echoes the mythology of Mozart the rebel, with his romanticized image of anti-authoritarianism towards his father and his patrons. Whether that is good or bad is not the point of this article; besides, readers can make up their own minds and stake a position, as millions have already—the cadenza clip has had nearly 1.5 million views on YouTube at the time of this writing. What this article has aimed to show, rather, is that whatever his means and intentions may have been, Apap has produced a cadenza that is “Mozartian” in unexpected ways.