KILLED in CARS

Franz Constant - Works for Accordion, Alto Saxophone, Piano & Symphonic Band (Rene Gailly, 1994)

Here’s a rare gem brought to you courtesy of docperkins:

In my ears Franz Constant commits to score ‘minor music’, in the same sense that a certain stream of post-structuralism calls Kafka’s a ‘minor literature’. According to Deleuze and Guattari, coiners of the term, “the first characteristic of a minor literature in any case is that in it language is affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialisation”. Constant’s language or, more precisely, grammar, stems from post-Webern atonalism. In Constant’s minor music that grammar is highly deterritorialised – as any blend of atonalism should be – into a bizarre blend of Bartók, regarding harmony structures, and Stravinsky, in the way it juggles with the themes.

Deleuze and Guatari describe the second characteristic of a ‘minor literature’ in terms of politics, which hereby I will replace by its encompassing element: power. In their words, “its cramped space forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately to [power]. The individual concern thus becomes all the more necessary, indispensable, magnified, because a whole other story is vibrating in it”. It is amazing how instantly the epistemic connections to Constant minor music become visible, say, audible.

Franz Constant’s aural space is more than cramped, claustrophobic. The feature is stressed by his choice of solo instruments: accordion and alto saxophone, both bearing all the karmic scars acquired respectively in tango and jazz ventures and, in Deleuze’s terminology, intrigues. Scars that Constant makes a point out of keeping glowing, displaying them in magnified fashion as if equipped with autonomous drives. The individualisation of solo instruments vibrates and tells stories stemming from musical traditions other than avant-classical, reaffirming the ‘minority’ of Constant’s grid of intelligibility. Thereby, stories are contents leaning against formal possibilities that here and there seem to be on the verge of confessing mortal sins, so individual are their trajectories and indivisible their sonic kernel (and, mind that, it is not Anzellotti who is playing the accordion, it is a certain Guerouet, who sounds like a possessed Aníbal Troilo).

A third characteristic described by Deleuze and Guatari, which is also amenable to be applied to Constant’s aesthetics, is minor literature’s ability to forge “the means for another consciousness and another sensibility”. The minor music strikes not only for combining two well known canonical references – Bartók and Stravinsky — against an innovative background, but it also strikes for the way through which it turns individual stories of instruments into collective tales. Along these lines, consciousness has nothing to do with self-imposed moralised and fetishised spaces for exhibiting aesthetical limitations, which became such a recurring attitude in the ambit of so-called improvised (atonal) music. Constant, in his blend of minor music refrains from trying to imitate life’s grandiosity, and tagging the mimicry as ‘human all too human’. The latter, a trend that pays tribute to objectivism, is discarded on behalf of a supposed transference of meaning, which is subjective by design and so flimsy a transaction that it has to impress when it works. And it works in minor music.

Franz’s minor music unfolds its lush plethora of aesthetical unexpectedness into the factual, given that the minor music you will find therein is also geopolitically deterritorialised: it blasts out of Belgium, where it was created by a virtually unknown composer. It is performed by a certain Band of the Belgian Guides where one of the main orchestral ‘divisions’ is aptly titled ‘The Cavalry Trumpeters’ (they play with warrior zest). The contrast between their martial denominations and outfits on the one hand, and on the other the complex works they perform is outlandish enough to make the unreachable post-modernity to sound plausible for a split second.