Image: © Manchester Museum, The University of Manchester
Oblique Strategy #1: Is it finished?
It’s morning, sometime in late 2021, and I’m standing near the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art’s river window, waiting to hear something special.
Today’s a bright day – the kind where light seemingly leaks from the air itself, and the river shines with a coinlike glimmer. Inside the gallery, the ambient air is filled with aleatoric song. The clamour of human babble plashes against the white walls and concrete floors, blending with echoing footsteps. Together, everything generates a gentle emulsion of noise, and I’m drenched in melodies unfolding and decaying. A sense of the births and deaths ever-present in our sonic world.
I’m here at the gallery, enfolded in sound and light, to hear my brother break a four-year musical silence. He’s a musician who stopped writing songs in 2017, and who has since lived in elision. For years he was committed to silence. But recently, an ex-boyfriend convinced him to join Brisbane’s Pride Choir, an LGBTQIA+ music group asked to perform here this morning. Soon, I’m going to hear my brother sing – a disquieting moment for us both.
To my right the crowd parts and the choir marches through. There are roughly thirty performers, and they assemble before us wearing scarves all colours of the rainbow. My brother stands stage-right, draped in a sky-blue wrap that rings in unison with his eyes. He looks around and catches my gaze. We smile and sign peace to each other, together becoming echoes of a family habit, loving memories resounding through our bodies.
Gradually, the crowd becomes quiet and the choir starts to sing. A spectral music fills the air, and the performers’ voices drift through one another like ghosts evaporating in the sun. The sound fills and surrounds the audience; consumed in the moment’s concert, we dissolve into a human harmony, into time that brims with clattering rhythms and infinite polyphony. Amid the choir’s music where words and sound are hopelessly entwined with feeling, I hear my brother singing a bass part, distinct within the beautiful mess of noise. With a flood of fraternal love, I think he’s never sounded better.
As I hear these songs of pure voice, I remember something I read about how we perceive music. Husserl once said that melodies can’t make sense to us unless the ghosts of earlier notes linger in our memories. We would hear disjointed noise without retaining the absent in the present. I wonder though if our memories might ever become too loud; if our world might fall quiet behind the thick of ghosts.
The choir finish their first song and the room becomes silent. In this lacuna, I inhale air stained by the melodies before and my hopes for the music to come, and as I breathe a memory of his words sounds within. I don’t want to do this anymore. I’m sorry. His words ring with a strange silence in my mind. While the choir prepares for its next song, that silence draws me into the inaudible noise of thought.
Oblique Strategy #2: Repetition is a form of change
These words: they form the sentences my brother said to me four years ago when he quit making music. They signify the lost future that haunts me today as I hear his voice again. In them, do you hear the quiet of the years that followed? Can you hear the silence in the sound?
When I first heard these words, I didn’t understand. Why would a singer opt for silence? That his desire for music had died baffled me, especially since my brother had a more beautiful voice than me. When we sang together, he was clearly more fluent in this sonic language than I. He spoke it like it was his mother tongue; I was more like a tourist in a foreign land, using words I learned too late to be a natural.
Since 2017 my brother’s words have haunted my mind, reminding me that his great hope is now a ghost, a dream, an imagined melody. But over time, their re-emergence has taught me the truth of what Brian Eno said in his Oblique Strategies, his card-set designed to resolve creative dilemmas: repetition is a form of change. Music equipment proves Eno’s point. When a sound plays through an analogue echo machine it decays with each repeat; through time, the audio degrades into unrecognisable noise. In the same way, repetition has erased the semantic meaning of my brother’s sentences and revealed what Ben Lerner called the ‘higher form of music’ behind language. The words have achieved purity through sonic degeneration, a purity that exposes the emotions he expressed through his voice’s prosody.
After years of repetition, I hear the music in my brother’s words. Seeing him sing today, proudly dousing the air in honest beauty while surrounded by others like him, I hear that his embrace of silence held no desire for quietude. Instead, I hear that his choice was for music of another kind. It was a matter of pride; a sign of a hope fulfilled.
Oblique Strategy #3: Disconnect from desire
Recently I read an essay Walter Benjamin wrote for the tenth anniversary of Franz Kafka’s death. In it, there’s a passage where he says Kafka believed ‘music and singing’ were ‘a token of escape’ and ‘hope.’ Having read Albert Camus’ essay, ‘The Enigma,’ I found that I agreed with Kafka. Camus says our actions always imply a ‘value judgment’ or a preference for the future that follows. For him, nihilism is thus incoherent and a ‘literature of despair’ is ‘a contradiction in terms.’ Following these writers, I see that there are no songs of hopelessness. If we choose music we reject despair, because our sounds and silences always glimmer with hope. I also hear how my brother’s songs and his decision to quit music were both saturated with hope – a hope, I think, for emotional honesty.
My brother realised he was gay when he was thirteen and he struggled with sexual repression through his teenage years. Like many queer people, he was afraid of the harms he might suffer for his love. Despite his terror, he bravely came out to me when he was nineteen and we celebrated his liberation. But we both knew his freedom was stained by the sad fact that six years had to pass before he could name his desires. We could hear how his liberty was haunted by a soundless ghost.
In all his years of quiet fear, my brother was never unwanting, so his silence caused him an immense deal of pain and shame and rage. It breaks my heart to think of my brother as a boy, afraid, hurting so noiselessly and hiding so violently. That we live in a society where children are made to feel this way should drive us all to fury.
Despite his anguish, my brother was lucky in at least one way. At the same moment he discovered his desires for men, he started playing guitar and singing. Out of chance – and perhaps necessity – his sexual and musical desires were brothers, tied together at birth.
Before he came out, my brother never hinted at his real feelings in speech. But because of the fraternity of his love and music, his desire could speak if he dressed it in the drag of metaphors and melodies. Musically partnered, his heart and voice could allude to his desires under the cover of songs. In music, my brother found he could remain quiet and resound with truth. Songs, then, were his ‘token of escape,’ and each melody he wrote was composed in whole tones of hope.
Oblique Strategy #4: Listen to the quiet voice
Franz Kafka once said that art is ‘a mirror which goes “fast” like a watch – sometimes.’ By this, he meant that art often reflects not what is, but what will be. A music production technique called ‘reverse reverb’ embodies the same logic: placing a reversed recording of a musical part’s ambient trail ahead of the original part in a song, producers make it sound like the original part is introduced by its ghost. As if you’re moving backwards through the future that will follow.
A few days before the GoMA performance, I listened to an EP my brother and I released in 2015, six months before he came out. The music was a Kafkaesque mirror, a trail of reverse reverb – it contained all the future that was to come.
All through the EP, its form and content resound with my brother’s coming truth. We complexly embellished our songs’ harmonic structures to make them sound unresolved and ambiguous, and we designed their textures and ambience to signify beauty and sadness beyond words. Atop our instrumentals, my brother sang elliptically of what I now hear as his secret, alluding to guilt and sorrow, to vast emotional distances, to ambient presences that are unnamed and invisible but real.
The most direct reference to the schism between my brother’s desire and the words he could speak is found on the EP’s final song. ‘When your mind says no / and your heart says yes,’ he sang as the song built to its climax, ‘where do you go / when your life is a mess?’ After these words, his voice disappeared and we answered his question with a wall of sound – with noise made for the gooseflesh that followed. The moment is a synecdoche of my brother’s deepest conflict; it also shows his way of coping with it. When torn between desire and prohibition, the song seems to say, plunge yourself into music and drown in sound.
As always, the future changes the past. Not knowing his truth, I couldn’t hear the depths of my brother’s music at the time. But I now see that music was a sublime and transcendent space for him. In music he could be quiet and blare with noise. He could place his great secret on the border between sound and silence, allowing it to be heard and unheard at the same time. Singing at the limits of disclosure and secrecy and possessed by desires both there and not-there, his voice could house the ghost of his truth. Music, a language of the liminal space between meaning and meaninglessness, was a place where my brother could come out and remain hidden all at once.
Oblique Strategy #5: Make something implied more definite (reinforce, duplicate)
Bursting with soundless disquiet, my brother was a boy desperate to be seen and unseen. His songs are a record of the fact he was racked by hope and anxiety when he sang. Yet by virtue of his music’s existence, his desire for honesty was clearly stronger than his fear. The very fact he sang shows he hoped to quiet his silence by repeating his conflicts in his song.
To repeat an earlier point in a different mode: repetition is a form of change. Turning an analogue echo machine’s feedback dial to full, its repeats grow so loud you hear nothing else. So it went with my brother’s secret: by repeating his ambivalence in music, the truth hidden in his voice grew loud, undeniable, nameable.
In late 2015 my brother silenced his fear with courage, and he came out as a gay man. No longer bound to secrecy, what was once spectral became real; he embodied his truth and transformed his future. Now he could affirm an identity that enabled his becoming, he became unusually prolific and wrote three albums in a year filled with spirited, vitalist songs that openly proclaimed his desires. Gay and proud and filled with sounds of love, the songs tumbled out of him while I listened in wonder, shocked by the way truth pulls power into the light. Music had flooded his words with love.
Oblique Strategy #6: Once the search is in progress, something will be found
The French composer Claude Debussy once said that la musique y commence là où la parole est impuissante à exprimer; in English, this means ‘music begins where words are powerless to express.’ People often enlist Debussy’s words to argue that music expresses what is ontologically irreducible to language. (Aldous Huxley: after silence, music comes closest to ‘expressing the inexpressible.’) The idea is valid; yet I am more interested in the psychology than the metaphysics implied by Debussy’s words.
Debussy understood that music is linked to linguistic impotence. Read literally, his words say musical speech starts at the point where this impotence begins. Because his idea predates The Interpretation of Dreams by a decade – it’s from 1889 – Debussy spoke without knowledge of the Freudian ‘semantics of desire,’ or what Ricœur described as the ways desires ‘achieve speech’ or ‘fail to speak’ altogether. Nonetheless, Debussy’s words sound like a trail of reversed reverb. Ahead of time, they echo Freud’s idea that separating our desire from our words eliminates the latter’s expressive power, and translates it into non-verbal languages like symptoms, dreams, and – like my brother’s art shows – music.
Homophobia forced my brother’s desires out of language. Yet repression and expression are brothers; they share a last name because the words we speak are born alongside our secrets. Each is a ghost that disquiets the other for life, extinguished only when its sibling dies. When fear left his words ‘powerless to express,’ my brother turned his yearnings into music that could hold their sound without their meaning. In songs, his desires quietly ‘achieved speech;’ his music began where his psyche made his words fail. But as his history shows, expressing his desire in music was not a neutral act; it contained a hope for the truth. When he sang, my brother made his desires conscious, loud and nameable. Through musical expression, he found power for his words and overcame his repression.
Judging by my brother’s experiences, I believe Debussy was correct – music does begin ‘where words are powerless to express.’ I also think we can extend his idea. Music didn’t simply express my brother’s desires – it also helped him name them, reconnecting his language and his emotions. While his music began because he was powerless, it ended by giving his words the power to express once again.
Music revitalises language. Speaking in songs and melody, we can rewrite the semantics of our desire; we can gain the courage to speak honestly once more. To borrow from Aristotle, music lets a man be ‘open in his hate and in his love.’ It can help us care more for our ‘truth’ than ‘what people think.’ As such, there’s only one word that describes the telos implied in songs and music. It is what Aristotle called ‘pride.’
The hope in music is a hope for pride; it is a hope to be heard.
Oblique Strategy #7: Courage!
When my brother sang, he did so for pride. It isn’t an accident, then, that the last song we recorded together was called ‘Pride.’
My brother and I recorded the song during our final days of music-making. First, we laid out the song’s instrumental. He played the drums and rhythm guitar and I recorded bass and lead guitar. We collaborated on the synthesiser part that opened the song: an ambivalent cluster chord in Bb major we used to signify the fear of choice. And together, we stood side by side and yelled the song’s chorus into a microphone, recording layer after layer of affirmation, our arms around each other, making a group out of just two.
I then worked the computer while my brother recorded his vocals. He only needed one take. I listened in a state of awe and admiration as he belted out his words, driving the song to its emotional peak. When he approached the song’s end his voice transformed, admitting all his love and rage into his words, until he burst into tears while repeating the song’s final lines: ‘Come on baby / this is pride,’ he cried.
The song finished and my brother started sobbing. He collapsed to the floor, tears streaming down his face, and I lay down next to him and draped my arm over his chest. The shattering rhapsody of felt melodies: the room resounded with his fear and love, and in the air, we felt the spectres of melancholy and wonder, a tragic sadness for all the time he had lost and ecstasy for all his days to come. Lying there, my brother and I both knew the sounds he made had obliterated whatever words had split his head from his heart. His music was over; pride had begun.
Oblique Strategy #8: Cut a vital connection
A few weeks later, my brother told me he could no longer make music. Music had given him all it could, he said; now his heart was so open, he had nothing left to sing. A new language of love brimmed at the back of his throat but it was one of touch and gaze and time spent loving instead of in song. I don’t want to do this anymore. I’m sorry. My brother spoke those final words and silenced our musical future; quietly, we separately stood before an inaudible dawn.
When I first heard my brother’s words, I didn’t understand. Why would a singer opt for silence? But as I hear him sing today, four years later, I finally understand his music and his lacuna. When his words resound in my mind now they ring with their secret history and their quiet future; they make a complex chord that enfolds the spirits of the past and future into the present, wherein I hear the hope behind his request for silence. Having sung, my brother could breathe, he was known, he could speak. Music had given him all he needed; now, he could be proud, he could become who he needed to be.
Lamenting language’s impotence, Beckett once said words are a ‘stain on silence.’ In a different way, my brother’s silence is stained with all the music he made and the sound of the songs to come – of noise no longer made of counterpoint and melody, but of time that sings with liberty. Of hope fulfilled. Of pride.
Today I hear my brother’s silence and I fill with sound. My body rings with the words and music of brotherly love.
Oblique Strategy #9: Trust in the you of now
I return my attention to the gallery and I look to my brother. His white-blonde hair burns in the matutinal sun as he sings his last song, his voice sounding like dawnlight lancing through dust. The performance ends and the audience applauds, scattering an accidental music of claps into the air. The choir dissipates and becomes one with the crowd, and my brother walks over to me. We embrace; he thanks me for coming and I tell him it was beautiful to hear him sing again.
Needing some coffee after his performance, we decide to find a cafe. Outside the gallery, our lambent world bursts with the sounds of life. We walk and an anarchic chorus of fauna and flora adorns the air, their discordant harmonies underpinned by the polymetres of the street: steps, traffic, birdsong, language, all colliding in complex rhythms. In this pulse of melodies and overtones, I remember that every moment brings new sounds and quiets. Always, the unsilent dapples and patterns our time, endlessly, restlessly, gorgeously.
We order our coffee and sit at a table, and our words turn first to history. I tell him I relistened to our first EP, and that it inspired a polyphony of feeling. I felt the agony of lost time, of slow failure, of infinite hope, of unrealised dreams, of pride for our young selves and the person he is today, and finally, the sheer, wordless beauty of the music itself. I tell him I could feel his pride fighting its way into the light in our songs, and that it was completely audible in his voice today. I tell him I love him for what we had and who he is now; that it was right he stopped singing. All ways, I guess, of saying I embrace time and I accept music. That I’m proud of him.
For a moment we create a silence together; it fills with the burning clarity of grace and love and sadness and affirmation. The spectres of memory and expectation descend upon us; together, we become euphonious time.
My brother says I heard him right. When he was young, he used music to give himself a future he never thought he could have. He tells me he chose to sing again today to remind himself that he has that future now. No longer yearning for something he lacked, he can simply rejoice in what he has, who he is, and what he can become. He sang today not to create, but to proclaim his pride.
My brother has another performance in fifteen minutes; he tells me he should go now. We stand to leave, and he walks back to the art gallery while I head toward the bus stop.
As I walk, my mind returns to Husserl, and I think of how art doesn’t just rely on time – art is always an intervention in time. Art is an attempt to make time lovely, to make our future desirable, to create seconds and hours we adore. And the artist is someone who tries to change time, using the present to alter our future and shift our view of the past, to fill the hours gone and years to come with the spectres of beauty.
My brother, the artist, intervened in time to become proud. He patterned time with his pridesongs to leave his words brushed with love – this is what it meant when my brother would sing, quietly howling with hope.
Oblique Strategy #10: Don’t break the silence
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Alasdair Cannon is an Australian author currently based in London. His second book, Infinite Discontent: Writings on the Allure of Fascism will be published in December 2024 by Eidolon Ink. His first book, an essay collection called Holding Patterns, was published in 2022 by Bonfire Books.