‘Challenge, dichotomy, aggression, opposition’: Tony Conrad
Thursday, November 8th, 2007
How to briefly introduce Tony Conrad? You could easily do it yourself by googling his name and come across a string of breathtaking references and countercultural links. You would find out that Tony Conrad is a composer who actually disposes the composer. Ever since the early sixties, he has been on the threshold of the avant-garde, continuously stretching the political and social implications of his radical art. I meet Tony Conrad, the composer, filmmaker, video artist, media activist, writer, and educator, in the context of Washington DC’s best kept secret, Sonic Circuits, a festival of experimental music where he was performing, aggressively but adventurously, with his recent musical companion Violent Raid.
I’ve been fascinated by your view of music as an experiential environment that you create for people to participate in. How do you see that exactly?
Tony Conrad: “I see that in a variety of ways. For example, music has a unique relationship to space, unlike many other forms of cultural expression. It is unrelenting and pitiless in the way that it surrounds people in the space and pokes into their bodies, occupies and causes their bodies to react. It’s a horrifyingly intimate kind of thing. That’s one kind of a relationship, and then another one of course is the political consequence of that. Music can be adopted and used in a veiled way to implement the designs of those who are in authority.”
Isn’t music something abstract? Where does the political element come in?
Conrad: “That’s a very complicated thing, because it happens on different levels and these levels don’t seem to be integrated. It happens in capitalism also. There are people who go to the store and buy things and they think that that is capitalism. Then there are other people who are actually investing money in elaborate corporate systems and they think that’s capitalism. These two levels don’t connect except through money, and this turns out to be very effective. With music, it’s a similar thing. There is the person who is listening to a song, the words, the beat, the music, the nostalgia, and all of the personal reactions it brings forth. This seems completely unrelated to the theoretical conditions in which larger structures sometimes seemingly automatically fulfill those needs. In the European tradition, there is a sense that concerts, music being played by orchestras while the audience is just listening, were always there and that this is almost a fact of nature. We begin to see more clearly now, as this institution is being threatened, that it was a temporary thing that only lasted for a few hundred years. If we look very carefully at it, we can see that there are reasons why this institution was brought into existence and that these reasons have to do with the way the society was organized into powerful states.”



