Hearing the Present, Remembering the Past: “Aural History” from Charlie Haden and John Zorn

The representation of the past in “postmodern” musical works is often seen as a rejection of coherent historical narratives. Works featuring a mixture of styles (“polystylism”), “borrowed” sounds (either sampled or quoted), and a collage structure supposedly reflect and enact postmodernism’s rejection of “grand narratives” in general and the idea that history has a coherent meaning in particular. This essay contests this interpretation of such postmodern devices by looking at two works using such musical features in the service of what I call “aural history”: the musical enactment of historical events. Using Bakhtin, I argue that Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra (1969) and John Zorn’s “Shtetl” (from his 1993 composition Kristallnacht) use postmodern devices to craft dialogical narratives. Rather than mirroring postmodern undecidability, such musical narratives “orchestrate” (Bakhtin) historical voices into an enactment of the past as seen from the present.