Collage: Don't Listen To Friends / Jazz evangelism / Musique concrète in Anthony Burgess' The Wanting Seed

 

RTomens, 2021

'Do not listen to friends' seems like strange advice but it was given for one star sign in a horoscope from an old newspapers I have (can't recall which since it's now jumbled up in the pile). It felt right to stick it over the figure I'd cut out. Then I printed a background of mouths onto a page from the paper on which I'd slapped some acrylic paint. 

I always try to listen to friends and thankfully few of them offer advice. Why would they? My life and how I live it is perfect - ha-ha. My accumulated years have taught me that friends rarely listen to advice anyway. I'm probably the same. 

In the 80s, I would 'advise' everyone I knew to listen to Jazz. Yes, I was evangelical about it. Well, you know what it's like when you discover something that changes your listening life; you want to tell everyone. No doubt they thought me a 'Jazz bore'. But after New Wave and nothing much on the contemporary horizon some of us looked back and found a buried chest of musical treasures in Jazz. One friend did listen. He set about buying Jazz with such enthusiasm that by the end of the decade his collection dwarfed mine. When he moved to London before me he was also in the enviable position of being able to attend Jazz nights on Mondays at The Wag Club in Soho. I could only go if I could get somewhere to stay overnight. Luckily, that was quite regularly. 

Whilst we looked back for our musical future, sci-fi writers must look forward and imagine how things will be; even musical things sometimes. Reading The Wanting Seed by Anthony Burgess yesterday, I was amused to find this:

Wisely, Burgess doesn't specify the year in which the novel is set, but it's proof, once again, that no matter the year of creation (in this case, 1962) future predictions in literature or film so often reflect the time they were made in. Musique concrète would have been known to a few people in '62. A few people seriously into the avant-garde, that is. Or people like Burgess who, I suspect, would have come across it through a love of Classical music, connecting with contemporary composition, therefore in the orbit of Musique concrète. By his description in the novel, we can assume he wasn't a fan. Note also the replacement of the jukebox with the 'musicator'(!). Just as funny as the description is the idea that a barman could 'let loose' to musique concrète. I can't imagine how anyone would dance to it!

TTFN