Interview with Jon Hassell for Leonardo Music Journal #25, Politics of Sound Art

Jon Hassell in the January 1969 Issue #5 of SOURCE: MUSIC OF THE AVANT GARDE Magazine

In July 1969 SOURCE: Music of the Avant Garde magazine asked twenty innovative composers the same single question: "Have you, or has anyone, ever used your music for social or political ends?"  

For the 2015 Politics of Sound Art issue of Leonardo Music Journal, I got to ask the same question of twenty composers working today 

One of those composers is seminal composer/trumpeter and progenitor of Fourth World music Jon Hassell. I first contacted Mr. Hassell in 2014 to express my glee at having been able to "perform" his MAP2, which I happened upon in the January 1969 of SOURCE. I am grateful to him for seeing fit to continue our correspondence!

I have been featuring individual responses from composers included in the LMJ article here on the blog until May 2016, when the entire series of interviews will be made freely available on the Politics of Sound Art page.

JON HASSELL

Have you, or has anyone ever used your music for political or social ends?

I'm for full-on pleasure in listening with no excuses necessary – "Les Baxter and Beyond". I'm lightyears away from any idea of "political" with regard to music. But that's my personal credo. This canonization of the chorus-verse form (and all the other conventions that come with it) is unstoppable. It's a colossal loop. (See Simon Reynolds - Retromania - Pop Culture's Addiction to its Own Past). What would Guy Debord have to say about iTunes and Spotify?

And here's the secret – Music is Invisible. It exists only as an interior experience in an individual. Who can say what this or that person is experiencing? We inevitably try to get close with word descriptions but that is essentially a language experience about a musical experience. In discussing a painting, one can actually touch an area and say, "This is quite Picasso-like" – it's visible – there's a common database for visual culture.

But the Entertainment Industrial Complex knows how to spot an opportunity to supply the "missing" visuals and descriptions to keep those clicks and dollars pouring in. "Political"?  What is NOT political in the megamarket?

PS: To underline the fact that there is an area called "Music as Art" – I've proposed the idea of a SEMINAR around the question, "What is the musical equivalent of a Gaudi?" This question asks those with a visual sensibility refined enough to appreciate the surreal, storybook aspect of Gaudi's architecture to also think about what in their musical universe is conceivably equivalent? All of us, including those of visual literacy and refinement, have grown up with a corporate-supplied background track to our adolescent years that loops forever in movies and online. Without a real effort at broadening the experience of music, they (we) have no idea of what a Gaudi could sound like in the imagination. (Charles Ives? Ravel? Gamelan?) Again, highlighting the gap between visual and musical imagination and sophistication.