Idiomatic Avatar, Windy Air, Bang-on-a-Can Pawnstars
This is Issue 23 of 2020MG. Today our recommendations are regarding the ontology of both musical and James Cameronion avatars, the aurality of the wind, and a polemic on post-minimalist music.
Recommendation: Derek Bailey on Flamenco in Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music / Avatar, Avatar: The Way of Water, Avatar: Fire and Ash / Paco Peña - Fabulous Flamenco! / Ocean & Tulkun (Suite) - Avatar: The Way of Water (OST)
Back in January, I wrote a bit about Derek Bailey’s book Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music, specifically his writing on flamenco music and his conversations with Spanish composer and guitarist Paco Peña. This week, I want to hone into a particular quote from Peña: that “a complete flamenco performance is a group performance with singing, dancing, and instrumental music, containing possibilities for improvisation by all participants. The role of the guitarist is to help the singer or dancer to bring out the best of their talent. However, when the guitarist performs solo, they must also convey the whole atmosphere of flamenco.”
I’m interested in the idea of the flamenco guitarist as a soloist conveying “the whole atmosphere of flamenco,” and want to articulate some thoughts about “idiomatic improvised music” as containing both a personal commitment that crafts the evolution of said idiom, but also as an avatar—an incarnation of a deity—an embodiment of the progression of idiom throughout history, time, and space. We can look at this within the definition of what an actual avatar is—a concept within Hinduism that in Sanskrit literally means ”descent,” signifying the material appearance or incarnation of a powerful deity, or spirit on Earth. We can also look at this within improvisational idiom—the spontaneous creation of music within specific stylistic, harmonic, or other technical or formal frameworks. Here, I’m going to be talking about improvisational idiom in reference to James Cameron’s Avatar film series, which just had its third film (Fire and Ash) released a few months back.
Cameron’s Avatar, in my opinion, displays the complete totalization of colonization and the avatar concept as a mediatized and ontological reality. Throughout the films, we see human consciousness becoming embodied as Na’vi, the sapient humanoid beings of Pandora, evolving to become trained into the cultural customs and ways of the forest-dwelling Omatikaya, even reproducing and starting a family within this new embodiment. In the Way of Water and Fire and Ash, respectively, we see ontologically colonized human-Na’vi’s enmesh with the water tribes of the Metkayina, and befriend the Tulkun whale entities (who are also great composers of music); we see the villain General Ardmore also become a Na’vi, through the technological reengineering of the spiritual event that allowed the protagonist Jake Sully to embody as a Na’vi; we see a child (Spider) born on Pandora become totally immersed with Na’vi customs despite being human; we see Sigourney Weaver’s character become reborn as a child Na’vi; we see humans become ensnared in the fungi of Eywa to learn how to breathe Pandora’s foreign atmosphere; and, we see villains become romantically entwined in other villainous clans (the Ash people). Basically, the films develop a total ecological system of human consciousness extending itself into both embodied/physical and cultural spaces, becoming one with a new host planet—mirroring the transontological systems and microbiology of our actual Earth itself as a grand cosmic sci-fi blockbuster narrative.
Avatar’s transontology skirts over the celebratory, painful, and destructive narratives of culture and history to depict consciousness becoming embodied into an orbit of renewal (perpetually engaged in a subject/object collision event) forever entwined in a quest for inter-species planetary intimacy. Humanity serves as an asteroid violently impacting Pandora, an impact event leading to significant physical and biospheric consequences. Similarly, humanity colonizes Pandora in a search for sustenance and spiritual intimacy, like the colonies of microbiology themselves, forming plural systems and beings—Otherkin, Therians, and Vampires who become “transcorporeal” to connote being as a trans-species entity.
We can also extend this process to improvisational idiom. I’m currently disturbing myself by listening to Peña’s flamenco music while consulting various scenes from the Avatar series. Sully’s quest for humanity to express and embody itself on Pandora is evoked in the flamenco guitarist’s concern with their idiom—their performance serving as the idiom and also the expression of that idiom in a multi-faceted way, representative of its entire atmosphere. Derek Bailey described this as “Improvisation supplying a way to guarantee the authenticity of the idiom, which also provides the motor for change and continuous development.” With flamenco, the player embodies the history and development of the idiom in their playing—a fraught history originating in Andalusia and Catalonia—where nomadic groups in the 1400s mingled in Cordoba (the then capital of the Western Islamic world) with Andalusian folklore. The idiom is seen from the outside as something “stable” as a genre in recorded music history. But, this ignores its performative upkeep—its perpetual embodiment through expressing its atmosphere and development. The way improvisation is sustained is a progression tracing processes of human survival and conflict, but also its performative commitment and evolution. In 2026, we must ask: what happens when the atmosphere of the idiom collapses? When does that idiom need to flee to a new planet?
This recommendation might both valorize and embarrass improvisation within Avatar’s interplanetary drama. We could look at musical idioms as always finding new hosts (a new player) and a new embodiment in its performance. Certainly too, we can also look at strands of idiomatic improvisational practice as the frail human being walking on Pandora in an oxygen mask, unable to breathe within its diminishing or alien planetary contexts. In 2026, I think it’d be easy to view plenty of idiomatic practices as being unable to subsist in our current atmosphere. Improvisers, maybe time to hook up that ponytail into the grand neural planetary queue and seek union with the great Eywa. To you, I speak the great Na’vi expression Oel ngati kameie, a declaration of total acceptance: I see you.
—Nick James Scavo
Recommendation: The Wind
It was very windy in the Catskills this past weekend. The wind was at a much lower pitch than I am used to hearing in the city. Regarding this frequency differential, artificial intelligence tells me that “what I noticed is real,” which is always reassuring. The wind was pummeling and it became hard to concentrate. At one point we stood next to a waterfall somewhat dangerously. I heard signals between 50 and 100 hz, and thought it might be all the trees funneling the wind, or the wind smashing against a mountain, or careening through the valley. Various resistances against atmospheric pressures invisible beyond their sensory effects, blowing leaves around, shepherding a bracing chill across the earth’s surface.
Back in the city, walking up a hill, I listened to GloRilla’s “Tomorrow 2” with Cardi B. In the first verse, the Memphis rapper informs us: “Just like the air, I’m everywhere.” I thought we listened to a song with a lyric about an anechoic chamber on the way back but that might have been a dream.
—Alexander Iadarola
Recommendation: Bang on a Can
I’m stepping back from some recent one-offs about my heroes in the vernacular avant-garde to set up a short series on the cultural situation of contemporary classical music. This week: a critical post-minimalism literature review; next week: a review of David Lang’s New York Philharmonic premiere of the wealth of nations (a setting of the text by the Scottish economist Adam Smith); and we’ll see after that.
Bang on a Can has long been a curiosity and a sustained critical interest of mine. The compositions of its founders—Michael Gordon, Julia Wolfe, and David Lang—each, in their own way, represent a kind of flavor-blasted 1980s-coded music intellectualism: breaking with many stylistic orthodoxies of musical modernism while also avoiding the traps of pretentious counterculturalism. Historically, this makes a great deal of sense. Academic composition was slow to accept new forms and styles (à la Glass, Reich, etc - not to mention deeper experimentalists), while progressive popular music pushed away from sheer commercialism toward higher intellectual stakes in recorded music.
Bang on a Can is one of many efforts from that moment to bridge institutional, cultural, and economic gaps in the art music ecosystem—recognizing that composers and performers with this omnivorous sensibility required new presentational and performative frameworks that reflected broader shifts in culture and industry.
I remember listening to Michael Gordon’s Trance as a composition student—with its crunched, polyrhythmic electric bass and Glassian repeating figures—and thinking: this is cool, I get it, but what, exactly, is the point? Who is this for? Why all this populist pomposity? (I’ll return to that question.) I performed David Lang’s Pulitzer-winning the little match girl passion in school, which was an incredible and moving experience. But even having absorbed and enjoyed the BOAC literature to that extent, I still feel a kind of bodily discomfort, or even embarrassment, when confronting some of the musical and cultural propositions at play.
Its core mission suggests a withered pragmatism that has aged out of step - stuck in an optimism that was appropriate at its founding, but has since drifted the way of most classical institutions: fighting for survival, defending its territory rather than pursuing music in the more general liberatory spirit it suggests. The New York Times says BOAC plays “a central role in fostering a new kind of audience that doesn’t concern itself with boundaries. If music is made with originality and integrity, these listeners will come.” But to what extent must we narrow and contort our understanding of terms like “new,” “boundaries,” “originality,” and “integrity” in order to make that claim hold?
I should confess that the irritation behind this line of inquiry, for me, comes from a sympathetic place—and from personal experience. I stopped well-short of pursuing composition as a career, in part, because the same dissipating economic and cultural conditions BOAC identified in the 1980s have not been resolved; they’ve worsened. This area of historical and industrial inquiry has been a focus of mine on 2020MG. I’m not suggesting that BOAC and similar institutions are the cause of the problem, nor that they are responsible for solving it. And yes—perhaps I simply don’t like the music, and this is all a bit petulant. You’re free to read this as a millennial complaint, and jealousy toward a moment when these optimistic efforts seemed both viable and sustainable.
However, it is precisely because the underlying conditions of institutional failure appear so unaffected by efforts like BOAC—arguably the most prominent progressive “classical” organization of its kind—that I want to examine both its noble aspirations and the artistic complacency that may accompany them. In a spirit aligned with BOAC’s highest aims, I want to pose a set of questions over the coming weeks, from multiple angles: why are the conditions not improving for “serious music,” despite sustained effort? Where exactly does this idealism that underwrites institutional projects centered on “new,” “boundaryless,” and “original” music of “integrity” come from? And most importantly: what are the structural forces we still struggle to identify when trying to create social coherence around music as a space for serious, sustained intellectual play?
I’m going to speed-run these questions here (developing them in detail later)—a couple of “whats” and a “why”—by returning to Michael Gordon’s Trance, and to that earlier question: why this populist pomp? I don’t want to dwell on or speculate about the reasons behind Gordon’s style as much as I want to meditate on how I critically hear it: as a kind of stalled-out dialectical synthesis that reflects the formal modernist modality, but renders its basic intellectual ambitions toothless. Not only is it not “boundaryless,” its combinations of various pop music genres, textures and idioms within its stable minimalist composition procedures feel so boundaried as to, again, seriously beg the question: are these what we imagine the boundaries of music to be?
I want to clarify, in good faith, that I’m not suggesting the above to be Gordon’s explicit aim. There are many virtues and great qualities in the craftsmanship, curiosity and musicality that he brings to his composition. I do, however, feel that it’s important not to let “the ear lie back in an easy chair” (as Charles Ives said). Earnest, young composers eventually become ambassadors of their craft; and musical, stylistic synthesis is a powerful tool, but towards what end? For the sake of evocation, and in the Oedipal spirit of this polemic: Bang on a Can is a concession to, or at least reflection, of the end of musical history as it had been previously articulated by institutions and music’s industrial economy.
There is a present danger that the rent-stable territories of modernist and minimalist formalism become a sort of pawn-shop for musical aesthetics: a sanctioned fence by which to launder the intellectual surpluses of vernacular music, as well as prop up the failing value propositions of the old academic estates. Lord, lords, ladies, (readers), have mercy on me, when it is my time to be judged. I’ll return to this line of thinking next week, after I’ve attended the David Lang the wealth of nations premiere.
—Alec Sturgis