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Music and Categories (IV):
Toward a Theory of Interstitial Types
By Warren Senders
There are different types of interstitiality, and there are different levels of typing which we can apply. Most of the people you'll meet on this website are writers; some are visual artists; some are musicians. The in–between–ness of their work is a function of their dissatisfaction with labels inside a given artistic medium; "we're writing fiction, but we're not happy with the terms the marketplace uses to define our particular genres." Most of have a hard time imagining an artistic medium midway between, say, prose fiction and music. Or do we? Isn't poetry the art of crafting words with deep attention to the way they sound?
But I digress. The different forms of interstitiality are beautifully manifest in the universe of music, and I want to give a few examples.
"Syncretism" is the word given to the phenomena that exist at the boundaries of different cultures. Places where multiple influences from multiple places had a chance to meet. Historically these have been seaports and trade cities, places like New Orleans, Odessa, Kingston, Liverpool, and Johannesburg. People who grow up in this atmosphere shift easily between the cultures of their parents, their neighbors, and their trading partners. They come to adulthood conversant in widely varied ways of description and expression, and the boundaries assumed by a monocultural life seem infinitely more permeable.
Jazz is a perfect example of a musical form that emerged from syncretic interactions between cultures, weaving strands of tradition from Europe, Latin America, and Africa into a tapestry of unanticipated and original power and beauty. Because the form combined so many elements, it had to evolve its own standards of quality; it could not be judged by the same criteria as any of its ingredients. Jazz listeners had to evolve as the music did...and once they did, the form began to transcend its own interstitiality, dividing into subgenres and stylistic categories within which a newer, more finely grained interstitiality became possible. Instead of a music which occupied a confusing middle ground between European harmony and African rhythmic conception (a gross oversimplification, but what the hell), it became a music in which tenor saxophonists were expected to choose between the dominant influences of Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young. One or the other; which side are you on? Other jazz musicians had similar choices: you could be a bopper, a swingster, a "moldy fig." As the music grew in complexity, more possibilities emerged, categories between categories which grew into recognized styles and approaches thanks to the genius and charisma of particular artists...and which then spawned interstitialites of their own in all directions.
Note that this is a sort of broad interstitiality, a general idiomatic transformation emerging from the collision and interpenetration of cultures. As such, its music, poetry, art, dance, and other expressions are not necessarily conscious of themselves as existing between genres. An individual artist inside a genre may seek a position of interstitiality: "I imagine a musical form that combines the rigor of the string quartet with the rhythmic vitality of African drumming," and then spend years developing a new form that answers to these specifications — but when an entire culture is interstitial to begin with (as was irrefutably the case with African–Americans in New Orleans at the turn of the 20th century), its music is simply an expression and manifestation of that inter–cultural position. While the musicians who made jazz evolve and grow were surely aware of their own influences and of the ways in which they combined conceptions from different places and times (witness Jelly Roll Morton at the Library of Congress demonstrating the various influences on his piano playing, discussing each in turn and showing how they were combined in his original approach), they were for the most part too busy making their music and their livelihoods to articulate their positions at a cultural/historical nexus.
Contrast the "syncretic interstitiality" with that of the individual who (through quirkiness, cussedness or a commanding artistic vision) imagines a new and different path and stubbornly follows it. Harry Partch is a good example. Robert Rutman and John Zorn are two others. Often they are rejected by their peers and colleagues, described as eccentrics, lunatics, or, occasionally, geniuses. These folks have their own melanges of influence — some from childhoods more bizarre than we can imagine (Partch's parents were former Christian missionaries who kept their New Mexico house full of Chinese artifacts — and he had a teenage job playing piano for the local silent movie house, within earshot of Native American tribal singing and drumming), others consciously sought out (as a teenager rejected by my peers, I began looking for the most obscure and bizarre music I could find, and embarked on a self–training program of listening to things that sounded weird...over and over until they sounded normal). This is a deliberate interstitiality, an artistic position from which all contributing influences can be spotted and articulated.
Conscious eccentrics, stubborn visionaries, madmen and madwomen — these people seem to flourish in syncretic cultures where there are a lot of influences to draw from, emerging in places where those influences come together in unexpected ways. When a society shows a high degree of diversity, it's a virtual certainty that somebody somewhere will start thinking of putting together cultural ingredients in ways that hadn't been imagined before — and a diverse culture implies a tolerance for "deviations from the norm," and a recognition that there are different norms to begin with, an understanding that may not be found in highly traditional societies. In homogeneous cultures, individual eccentricities may be relatively significant, but almost imperceptible to an outsider: the Hindustani vocalist Kumar Gandharva was (and still is) considered a shockingly radical innovator in the closed world of "khyal" singing, but a listener unfamiliar with Indian classical vocals would be unlikely to hear any real difference between his singing and that of any other highly ranked artist in the genre — whereas even a listener with minimal acquaintance with Western musical traditions would be able to tell that Robert Rutman's droning sheet–metal instruments are emphatically not part of the musical mainstream. In a unified culture, it takes very little to be out of the ordinary, and being a significant innovator can be dangerous; in a diverse and heterogeneous culture, you have to work harder to be an eccentric, but it's probably less likely to get you kicked out of the community.
These singletons stake their claims way out on the outskirts of an idiom, and with a modicum of luck, other listeners, readers, or viewers may take inspiration from a trip to the borders. Some of these may set up shop elsewhere, expressing homage to a particular visionary not through imitation, but by following their example in a willingness to risk all, or nearly all. Inspired lunatics like Partch and Rutman don't generate "styles" or "genres" so much as they offer liberating examples to other nascent lunatics, and they're not necessarily "interstitial" so much as they are, as it were, "extrastitial."
Yet another type of "interstitiality" is that which emerges as the expression of an economically marginalized people. Again emerging from the complex phenomena of cultural syncretism, "economic interstitiality" can trigger new styles of music or art as a function of what kinds of technology and materials are available to people with fewer resources. Trinidad's famous steel "pans" were crafted from leftover oil drums discarded by American military and commercial vessels...had the Trinidadians been wealthy enough to afford band instruments to begin with, an entire instrumental genre would never have emerged. An economically excluded population has its own very different expressive needs, and the song forms, poetry and art it evolves will not be that of the dominant culture, even if some of the ingredients are the same. Klezmer music is a splendid example — a powerfully creative recrafting of Western musical norms to meet the artistic demands of Europe's marginalized, ghettoized Jewish population.
Sometimes a population may not be economically disenfranchised, but may perceive itself as being excluded from the dominant mainstream in some other way. White American/European youth culture in the 1960s is a good example. The musical forms which emerged during this turbulent period expressed the alienation of a substantial part of the world's young people in music which incorporated elements of African–American blues and European ballads along with Indian ragas and practically anything else that was available. Interstitial? Sure, at least at the beginning...but this new compound idiom became a genre all to itself so quickly that interstitiality within it was possible almost immediately. Think of all those hyphenated forms that gathered life within themselves between 1966 and today. Blues–rock, folk–rock, art–rock, psychedelic–rock, raga–rock, Latin–rock, prog–rock, punk–rock, jazz–rock, country–rock...The mind reels.
The very act of establishing a form is to mark a point in expressive space around which one's work, and the work of others, may coalesce. And once a point is marked, the possibility is inherent: find another point, and mark out the territory in between. This is what we do, always. Any new piece of art, even those completely within an idiom, is somehow interstitial — because to be new, it has to be different from what precedes it. (Remember Borges' Pierre Menard, who rewrote Cervantes' Don Quixote from an entirely different and contemporary perspective, creating a work of literature which was word for word identical with the original, but in no respects an imitation? Here is a case in which two identical artifacts occupy different positions in the artistic universe: Cervantes providing one of the paradigmatic examples of the novel as we know it, and Menard, hypothetical in any case, giving an example of a radical contemporary innovation built upon entirely different premises.)
And once the art is made and is part of the multiverse of overlapping taxonomies? One of those categories can come swooping in from any point, and presto! Instant inclusion!
The nice thing about this is that it's possible to be interstitial in more ways than one, and that it's possible to, zen–light–bulbily, be both stitial and inter–stitial at the same time. If our position between categories is a function of the categories we use, then we can experience that most beautiful of superimpositional effects: the moire pattern. Put two window screens atop one another and watch rippling waves emerge when the grids interact. This is the greatest delight of an interstitial perspective, and it's what keeps me going in my own creative work.
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