The Composer Who Hated Music: Walter Marchetti's “As in a Diary”
Rusty's Thoughts
“Slow, very slow; with a slowness that banishes every sensation of movement; like the infinite, enveloping slowness of gigantic waves; to the point of taking the look of a waveless, nearly immobile sea of shit” – Walter Marchetti
Walter Marchetti (1931-2015): a composer who hated music, who saw its osteoporosified structures betray sound's possibilities.
A world-travelling Italian, Marchetti is best known for co-founding with Juan Hidalgo the Spain-based ZAJ Group, an experimental collective that operated throughout the 1960s & 1970s. The group—loose in both membership & aims—initially was musically focused, trying to extend American composer John Cage's aims in breaking down traditional Western boundaries between music, noise, sounds, & silence. With the addition of the writer José Luis Castillejo, however, ZAJ moved to a more interdisciplinary focus. I hesitate to say “arts” focus because ZAJ practitioners are the spiritual cousins of Fluxus & other anti-art impulses. As with Fluxus' “happenings,” ZAJ focused much of its creative energy on surreal, humorous, self-reflexive performance pieces that tried to shatter the divide between life & art. A good example is Tomás Marco's “Das Augenlicht (homage to anton webern)” translated in ZAJ Sampler:
Close your right eye Open your right eye
Close your left eye Open your left eye
Close both eyes Open both eyes
I don't know if Marco ever performed this piece or if it even needed to be performed. As an idea, it works: the ridiculously simple action both pokes fun at artistic pretensions & re-inserts us into our bodies, paying attention to the most simple, taken-for-granted actions. These are also the central impulses in Marchetti's aesthetics.
“Music always refers to itself and to nothing else, and this tautology satisfies everybody, even musicians.” To Marchetti, music is a narcissistic monster. It prevents us from being fully embodied in the present. It offers only a mirror for musicians in love with their creations, in love with their El Dorado-ified pasts.
We detect once again the philosophical presence of John Cage & Fluxus, especially in the notion that art commandeers our attention, diverting it from life's rich multiplicity. As Marchetti writes in “Veils of Maya”: “Music appropriates the time of others, and the ear hears nothing but its own enslavement.” These echoes make sense: Marchetti knew Cage personally & participated in performances such 1978's Il Treno di John Cage. However, we must be careful to not see his work simply as an extension of Cagean concerns.
Cuz Marchetti is punk as fuck too. Disgust & negation are the engines of his mind. Considering his acidic humor, his penchant for scatology, & his insistence that this world cannot be redeemed, Cage's brand of hopeful anarchism doesn't come to mind. No, I see Marchetti's compadres in later Noisicians such as the Haters with their ritualistic entropy-embraces.
“Sounds, in my music, are the very last thing: non-essential and empty.”
Wait, what? A composer who says that sounds are non-essential to their music? Surely, Marchetti is having a bit of fun at our expense here. Yet I'm convinced that he's also quite serious.
To return to Cage, or as Marchetti wrote, “my cage”: Cage worries that we no longer listen to sounds, but rather only the relationships between them. Marchetti is obsessed by this too: “We spend our lives listening—re-listening—to what we have always already listened to, and more than anything else at listening what others tell us to listen to.” But while Cage wants us to open our ears to the sounds that surround us, Marchetti playfully advocates for a particular kind of deafness.
Marchetti repeatedly paints himself as the “deaf” composer in his writings. My favorite instance: “When I was young, I wasn't shrewd enough to close my ears in time.” Marchetti's variety of deafness is volunteering to no longer listen, a choice to isolate one's ears.
But he's not suggesting that we live in a soundless world. Instead, he's advocating for a detachment from sounds: “My ears betray no emotion in the presence of sounds; they seem content simply to be present.” Involvement with sounds means we'll inevitably inject meaning into them, separating them from their ambiguous, complex immediacy. José Luis Castillejo, Marchetti's ZAJ compadre, argues that Marchetti deliberately impoverished his aesthetics so as to maintain a non-interventionst stance towards sounds. As Castillejo writes, “Because only in the immediate experience of sound can music be realized as free as a music that does not sound like something to somebody.” Marchetti is working towards a world where sounds are allowed to be themselves.
How to describe this music? Here are some attempts:
Nei Mari Del Sud. Musica in Secca: Pianos drowning in Nyquil. Dried salamis of notes hanging in a goopher-dusted sunset.
Birds of Paradise: In the COVID19-quarantine slowdown, songbirds have become more prominent in my neighborhood. Listening to “Birds of Paradise” places me in my backyard, weeding, listening to bird calls weave together. My pet guinea pigs are great fans too. When I play it, they grow still, listening intently with cocked heads. Marchetti transports us—human & guinea pigs—to a pre-music sound realm.
Bless me, Marchetti, for I have sinned, describing your music in this way. Every word I write is another tombstone, another record of a dead present, a gift that I have refused. Sorry, but I'm addicted to graves.
Marchetti's writings are also thrilling: they are aphoristically ponderous, cruelly ironic, & undeniably funny. They are seismographs of a mind ripping its own ego apart. While I don't agree with all of Marchetti's points, I find him to be inspiring because he's an artist questioning the validity of existing structures while avoiding the pitfalls of self-satisfaction. Below I've included one of my favorite Marchetti's writings, “As in a Diary.”
Marchetti's “As in a Diary”
Any place at all: any moment of the day; any phrase, spoken, written, or read; thoughts, dreams, desires, ideal or unknown events, summoned and dismissed in an instant, in accord with each individual's need for poetry .................. , ..................
Having nothing to do at the moment, nor at any other moment, nor at any other moment .................. , ..................
...and there are so many desires... Unimaginable abundance, splendid opportunities... .................. , ..................
Mere simultaneity sometimes takes the upper hand .................. , ..................
The listeners only play the role which we musicians allow them to play .................. , ..................
But this music could also be an experiment which has led to no results .................. , ..................
Sounds that repeat themselves with potent, disagreeable rhythms of majestic montony and uniformity. .................. , ..................
It's true that I compose, but really I'm always thinking about something else .................. , ..................
Bringing yourself to a halt at the threshold of music .................. , ..................
To make or not to make music? What finer formulation of a quandary in absolute existentialism? But what it mainly reveals—even more than it reveals the utter ambivalence of people who make music—is all the uncertainty in setting up sounds that aim to convince a listener. .................. , ..................
Every sound is equivalent to ever other sound .................. , ..................
It is in the errors that you find something interesting .................. , ..................
I stopped believing my own ears quite some time ago .................. , ..................
This continuum is so perfect, and the illusion so absolute, as to seem to be the very essence of music .................. , ..................
Do you think of the era of human life on earth as a long or short period for music? .................. , ..................
A reassuring vision of music would doubtless be preferable .................. , ..................
I decided quite some time ago to abandon this acoustic desert of always identical sounds, fixed once and for all and forever consigned to this pseudo-eternity known as music .................. , ..................
We spend out time and our lives listening—re-listening—to what we have always already listened to, and more than anything else at listening to what others tell us to listen to .................. , ..................
Music which invokes a forgotten El Dorado (which never existed, was never experienced, never conceived) .................. , ..................
Nothing is true, everything is permitted .................. , ..................
The notion of first this sound, then that other one, makes very little sense; before and after, this and that, is exactly the same thing in music. Pure movement, or moving .................. , ..................
Reality, in music, is the reality of reality .................. , ..................
This music tramps on and on and on without conviction .................. , ..................
The simple succession of sounds: each is as good as the other .................. , ..................
There has always been a kind of deafness in my way of approaching music .................. , ..................
What compels us to plunge towards the nearest spectable is perhaps the need to perform a symbolic act of self-exhibition, or a final gesture of unconditional surrender .................. , ..................
The movement ought to be vague, without tension: neither too slow nor troppo mosso; like a music with no horizon .................. , ..................
The area in which I move is once again deserted .................. , ..................
Set a 'C' on fire: that's the first thing to do .................. , ..................
The problem, perhaps, is now to get out of it all without soiling yourself too much .................. , ..................
That sinister band of men who perpetuate this state of affairs .................. , ..................
Before music dies, I'd like to harvest the final sound .................. , ..................
The survival of any and every sound always and only depends on the will of the composer .................. , ..................
I have not fallen victim to the sounds which are hammered into my head .................. , ..................
Musicians closed their ears to the world quite some time ago .................. , ..................
Slow, very slow; with a slowness that banishes every sensation of movement; like the inifite, enveloping slowness of gigantic waves; to the point of taking the look of a waveless, nearly immobile sea of shit; without movement, like music that dilates the present; music has straight and immobile as death, or like a yellowish, pestilential miasma that heaves on the surface of a cesspit, as though the present were indefinite; music no less menacing that the world that wraps around us; fleetingly luminous music, streakeed by manifold colours: bile yellow, blood red, rigor mortis blue, the orange of suffocated rage .................. , ..................
The artist has the wonderful ability to look at himself in the mirror without ever throwing up .................. , ..................
Yes, it's true: shit is the blood of musicians .................. , ..................
The scenarions depicted by music show nothing but the passage of time .................. , ..................
Moving from one sound to another strikes me as already the most radical undertaking of all .................. , ..................
The melodic line is never static .................. , ..................
Sometimes irritated, sometimes in ecstasy, sometimes bored, sometimes absent-minded .................. , ..................
My activity limits itself to transmitting weak signals of identification .................. , ..................
The things that take place in a world of diversity are always flanked by a touch of surrealism .................. , ..................
A warm sound in a soft and changeable light that's veined with red, black, yellow and green .................. , ..................
Tension abates. The sounds spread out and grow ever more distant .................. , ..................
More blue is simply more blue than less blue .................. , ..................
Music! Lethal dust for the mind .................. , ..................
There's no place to go; every place seems by now to be the same place .................. , ..................
A positive utopia: an imaginary place of perennial vacationing .................. , ..................
So much music, music, music! .................. , ..................
No one talks and wherever you look you always see the same worried, intent expression: like the look on the faces of people who are listening to music .................. , ..................
Even in its most sublime and complex manifestations, music is a very simple thing: a constant return of formulas .................. , ..................
The past doesn't interest me .................. , ..................
The possibility of interpreting things depends on accepting this crazy proposition as normal .................. , ..................
Entering time in depth. Slowing down physiological time .................. , ..................
Music always refers to itself and to nothing else; and this tautology satisfies everybody, even musicians .................. , ..................
Time passes slowly, and confused .................. , ..................
Disabled sounds are the ones that present themselves in perfect physical conditions .................. , ..................
Lying in the sun is a marvellously antisocial activity, since it's an utterly passive and antiproductive occupation .................. , ..................
This music has no end, but likewise no beginning .................. , ..................
The only reality we owe is the one we owe to our dreams .................. , ..................
For me it's enough to sit in the sun, and to breathe .................. , ..................
Under favorable circumstances, and in the light of the sun .................. , ..................
Music that demands a reclining position: one simple stretches out in the sun .................. , ..................
I always find it difficult to locate sounds without the help of a map .................. , ..................
Slate-blue .................. , ..................
The intervals between one sound and another are like a continuously active (excited) field. Empty space comes alive .................. , ..................
Now that we are close to the end, music seems to quicken our steps .................. , ..................
A sound within a sound .................. , ..................
Music was quick to turn itself into a commonplace, in hopes of being bearable .................. , ..................
One doesn't get bored in the sun, one bathes in the source of time .................. , ..................
I have always found music to resemble the site of an archaeological excavation: an investigation into something which is no longer there .................. , ..................
It is not an attempt to preserve a world on which I long ago turned my back .................. , ..................
You wake up one morning and realize that it's probably too late to do it; you'll never do it again .................. , ..................
The sounds slip out of my hands .................. , ..................
Music does nothing but offer a reflection of pure, senseless rationality .................. , ..................
A certain image of music has collapsed for me; no longer belongs to me; and it's not my task to attempt to restore or perpetuate it .................. , ..................
The horror of music is that there are no longer any intervals .................. , ..................
Well below that threshold of perception where sounds begin the exhale an unbearable stench .................. , ..................
Dreaming a day-dream while asleep and dreaming that I dream a dreamt dream .................. , ..................
But why have all these people gathered here? .................. , ..................
By now the world is convered by a great, vibrant sheath .................. , ..................
In the liquid oblivion of a kiss .................. , ..................
A music free of all cognitive associations that derive from habit .................. , ..................
Sounds, in my music, are the very last thing: non-essential and empty .................. , ..................
My ears betray no emotion in the presence of sounds; they seem content simply to be present .................. , ..................
Not managing to accept the others for what they are .................. , ..................
A concert. An audience. The audience is listening to nothing at all .................. , ..................
Time is our very own breathing .................. , ..................
Everything else is to be discarded. I'm waiting for the first ray of sunlight .................. , ..................
All it contained is the effort to establish no domination over even the tiniest element .................. , ..................
The sun is hot, I'm waiting for the afternoon .................. , ..................
Music is like a battlefield where clearly there's no way of hiding the movement towards the void .................. , ..................