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THE MUSICAL DEPICTION OF A DISTORTED PLACE, SPACE AND TIME: AN INTERPRETATION OF JOHN ZORN'S INTERZONE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 March 2021

Maurice Windleburn
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Abstract

This article interprets John Zorn's composition Interzone (2010) by comparing it to the eponymous place that is found throughout William S. Burroughs’ early novels. This is done through linking some of the ‘sound blocks’ that make up Zorn's composition to selected passages from Burroughs’ books as well as to specific events from the lives of Interzone's two dedicatees: Burroughs, and his associate, the writer and painter Brion Gysin. Zorn's disjointed, chaotic arrangement of sound blocks, and by extension their extra-musical associations, is then shown to emulate the dream-like structure of the phantasmatic place that is Interzone, which Burroughs created for his novels with the aid of Gysin's ‘cut-up’ method. Through these extra-musical connotations, it is demonstrated that Zorn's composition imitates Interzone's distortion of place; of internal and external space; and, most importantly, of time.

Type
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Information
Tempo , Volume 75 , Issue 296 , April 2021 , pp. 34 - 45
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 Burroughs, William S., Naked Lunch: The Restored Text (London: Fourth Estate, 2009), pp. 89–90Google Scholar.

2 My interpretation of Interzone is hermeneutic – according to Lawrence Kramer's rather broad use of the term – as I look through Kramer's first type of hermeneutic window, what he calls ‘textual inclusions’, to interpret Zorn's work. See Kramer, Lawrence, Music as Cultural Practice, 1800–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 9–10Google Scholar.

3 The musicians who realise Interzone with Zorn (who plays alto saxophone on the album) are Kenny Wollensen (percussion), John Medeski (keyboards), Trevor Dunn (basses), Ikue Mori (electronics), Cyro Baptista (percussion), and Marc Ribot (guitars, banjo, sinter, and cümbüs).

4 For explanations of Zorn's file card compositional process see John Zorn, liner notes to Godard/Spillane, Tzadik, TZ7324, CD, 1999; McCutchan, Ann, The Muse That Sings: Composers Speak About the Creative Process (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 310–20Google Scholar; Gagne, Cole, Soundpieces 2: Interviews with American Composers (London: Scarecrow Press, 1993), pp. 519–28Google Scholar; Strickland, Edward, American Composers: Dialogues on Contemporary Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 127–32Google Scholar.

5 Kathryn Hume, ‘William S. Burroughs's Phantasmic Geography’, in Contemporary Literature 40/1 (1999), p. 119.

6 Micheal Sean Bolton, ‘Get Off the Point: Deconstructing Context in the Novels of William S. Burroughs’, in Journal of Narrative Theory 40/1 (2010), p. 53.

7 My interpretation is hence partly an intertextual one – or perhaps more specifically what Gérard Genette called hypertextual: a term pertaining to ‘any relationship uniting a text B (which I shall call the hypertext) to an earlier text A (I shall, of course, call it the hypotext), upon which it is grafted in a manner that is not that of commentary’. See, Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), p. 5.

8 Throughout this article I regularly refer to ‘the listener’ or ‘a listener’. This listener is an idealised one who may be compared to Eero Tarasti's ‘implied listener’, explained in his Signs of Music: A Guide to Musical Semiotics (New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2002), pp. 73–5.

9 On how music can suggest place see Judy Lochhead, ‘Music Places: Imaginative Transports of Listening’, in The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Imagination, ed. Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard, Mads Walther-Hansen and Martin Knakkergaard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), vol.1, pp. 683–700.

10 The recording of Zorn's Interzone can currently be heard on YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7S96YAsEC8&ab_channel=HiddenTracks.

11 Paul H. Wild, ‘William S. Burroughs and the Maya Gods of Death: The Uses of Archaeology’, College Literature 35/1 (2008), p. 44.

12 James W. Grauerholz, ‘Gysin, Brion’, Grove Art Online, accessed 4 July 2020.

13 Jason Weiss, Back in No Time: The Brion Gysin Reader (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), pp. 79–80.

14 Grauerholz, ‘Gysin, Brion’.

15 Grauerholz, ‘Gysin, Brion’.

16 See, Nicholas Cook, ‘Uncanny Moments: Juxtaposition and the Collage Principle in Music’, in Approaches to Meaning in Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), pp. 107–34; John Brackett, John Zorn: Tradition and Transgression (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), pp. xvi–xvii.

17 William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, The Third Mind (London: John Calder, 1979), p. 95.

18 Anne Friedberg, ‘“Cut-Ups”: A Synema of the Text’, in William S. Burroughs at the Front: Critical Reception, 1959–1989, ed. Jennie Skerl and Robin Lydenberg (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), p. 170.

19 Burroughs, Naked Lunch, p. 90.

20 Interzone is also primarily based on the International Zone of Tangier: itself a culturally diverse city, having strong Arab, Berber, French, Spanish, English and American presences. See, James W. Grauerholz, introduction to Interzone (New York: Viking, 1989), p. xviii.

21 Hume, ‘William S. Burroughs's Phantasmic Geography’, p. 113.

22 Burroughs, Nova Express, ed., Oliver Harris (London: Penguin Books, 2014), p. 73.

23 SB2.13 in fact combines these wind-sounds with those of water to suggest yet another passage from Nova Express, where ‘composites shifting combos to wind and water sounds’. See, Burroughs, Nova Express, p. 132.

24 Burroughs, The Ticket That Exploded, ed. Oliver Harris (London: Penguin Books, 2014), p. 137.

25 Burroughs, Nova Express, p. 42.

26 Burroughs, Interzone, p. 183.

27 Burroughs, Naked Lunch, p. 173.

28 Hume, ‘William S. Burroughs's Phantasmic Geography’, p. 118.

29 Burroughs, Ticket, p. 39.

30 Burroughs, The Soft Machine, ed. Oliver Harris (London: Penguin Books, 2014), p. 67.

31 Burroughs, Nova Express, p. 157.

32 Barry Miles, Call Me Burroughs: A Life (New York: Twelve, 2013), pp. 9, 168.

33 Burroughs, The Soft Machine, p. 117.

34 Burroughs, The Soft Machine, pp. 177–8.

35 Burroughs, The Soft Machine, p. 12.

36 Lydenberg, Robin, Word Cultures: Radical Theory and Practice in William S. Burroughs’ Fiction (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987), p. 16Google Scholar.

37 Burroughs and Gysin, The Third Mind, p. 96.

38 Morgan, Ted, Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1988), pp. 194–6Google Scholar, 201, 215.

39 Burroughs, , Queer (London: Penguin, 1987), p. xxiiGoogle Scholar.

40 Burroughs, Interzone, p. 65.

41 Burroughs, Interzone, p. 65.

42 Burroughs, The Soft Machine, p. 89. The protagonist in this book subsequently makes ‘recordings of the festivals and the continuous music like a shrill insect frequency that followed the workers all day in the fields’.

43 Burroughs and Gysin, The Third Mind, p. 96.

44 Dunne, J.W., An Experiment with Time (London: Faber and Faber, 1969)Google Scholar.

45 Bolton, ‘Get Off the Point’, p. 61.

46 Gysin, , Here To Go: Brion Gysin (London: Creation Books, 2001), p. 85Google Scholar.

47 Burroughs, Queer, p. xxii.