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Different

A spectre is haunting music, the spectre of ‘fusion’. It has no body – no melodies, no harmonies, no instrumental colours it can call its own – but its ghostly presence is everywhere, seeping under and over every musical category. In film music, ‘world music’, jazz, pop, even in classical music, you hear its unmistakable tones. Unmistakable because, though fusion music is nothing in itself, it turns all the things it devours into its own wraithlike substance – fusion is as much vampire as ghost. First comes the electronically produced drone, portending vast but unspecifiable horizons. The sense of ‘cosmic’ distances is reinforced by the arrival of a long wailing melody, evoking a faraway country of which we know little – Mongolia, say, or West Africa, though at a pinch Irish pipes will do. Then comes a beat, followed by a parade of more exotic flavours. These then combine and whip themselves into a kind of languorous frenzy, then fade out, leaving the cosmic drone behind.

The musical, emotional and intellectual vacuity of much fusion music is patent. To explain its success, and the willingness of critics to read profundity into this musical mirage, you have to look outside the music, to ideology. The imperative in the arts these days is to ‘break down barriers’, to mix and mingle everything so as to annul and flatten all those wicked ‘élitist’ distinctions between art-forms and genres. And what better means to ‘break down barriers’ than fusion, which can flit through stylistic walls. This chimes in nicely with another ideological imperative, spelled out in a recent gig by Nitin Sawnhey which combined Indian devotional singing, flamenco guitar and what-have-you. Projected on a screen across the back wall was the following message: ‘Beyond politics, beyond nationality, beyond religion, beyond skin’. And in case we hadn’t got the message (fusion music has a tendency towards humourless reiteration that smacks of the demagogue), we saw at one point an image of the globe projected behind a singer evoking some ‘timeless’ chant.

All is one, and one is All. Is this a noble sentiment, or a soporific? Is music really a ‘universal language’, as the south Indian violinist Subramaniam tells us in his album Global fusion? Surely music is as much to do with the expression of rootedness in a certain place, and the assertion of belonging to a community? The fact that fusion musicians have such an insatiable appetite for music with just those qualities shows that, at some dim level, they’re aware of that uncomfortable truth but their ideology leads them to deny it. What this leads to in practice is a kind of systematic hypocrisy. They make use of the ‘evocative’ qualities of, say, north Indian devotional singing, but strip it of its real meaning by removing the devotional context, and surrounding the chant in a protective barrier of acoustic mist. As for the audience, how many of them will understand the words of the chant, if they can hear them? (Which is doubtful: one of the ways fusion musicians neutralise the disruptive force of the things they steal is by blurring the words.) Nothing must be allowed to disturb the mood of cosmic serenity, so all routes to the music’s meaning must be blocked. Fusion music may break down some barriers, but it creates others of its own.

This is not a plea for a return to purity. All musical cultures are mixed, and always have been. The idea of a ‘pure’ musical language may be conceivable in theory, but it has never existed in practice (except perhaps for post-war ‘total serialism’, and look what became of that). But there is all the difference in the world between a genuine marriage between different musics – as in the adoption in Renaissance Europe of the Arab lute – and the kind of shot-gun weddings we see nowadays. The lute must at first have been regarded with scorn as the barbarous instrument of the barbarous infidel Other. And when fascination got the better of scorn, and the lute moved into European music, it was thoroughly naturalised. Nobody would guess an Arab provenance for the lute just by hearing it.

Respect for the other is predicated on awareness of difference, an awareness that brings precisely that emotional ambiguity – scorn and grudging respect, fascination and repulsion – on which real fusion depends. Debussy must have felt something of that when he saw a Javanese gamelan orchestra. He admitted that the clanging overtones and subtle polyrhythmic made European scales seem barbarous. But though he didn’t say so, there must have been something in the gamelan which struck him as barbarous in turn. Which is why, when he came to write ‘Pagodas’, he translated that perception of something unutterably alien into something completely personal, and thoroughly Western. Black musicians in pre-First World War New Orleans must have felt ambiguous, to say the least, about the white music that surrounded them – military bands and opera. But they were fascinated too, and couldn’t resist ‘naturalising’ those symbols of white dominance. Blended with the early blues, they became New Orleans jazz. John Cage was fascinated by Indian music, but he didn’t pillage it for its evocative qualities. He abstracted a formal principle from it, and created something that has no trace of India left in the sound.

Compare this with today’s fusion musics, where there’s no clash of opposing values, no emotional ambiguity, just a warm bath of evocative flavors. There are exceptions of course. The very crudity of Asian Dub Foundation’s mix of Dance beats and Indian turns of phrase bespeaks a genuine felt experience. The two layers refuse to blend, revealing perhaps more than the musicians intended of their experience as second and third generation immigrants. But on the whole, fusion music is all about soothing away uncomfortable thoughts, blurring distinctions, ‘breaking down barriers’. It is the musical equivalent of buying a Shaker-style bed and draping it with bed-linen decorated with Chinese characters. In its refusal of real human attachment, and its restless search for new flavours, it is the perfect expression of consumerism.

Ivan Hewett is writing a book entitled New century music.