Utopian Mscal Communities - 41203371

Aesthetic and Social Aspects of Emerging Utopian Musical Communities
Author(s): Michael Saffle and Hon-Lun Yang

Source: International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, Vol. 41, No. 2
(DECEMBER 2010), pp. 319-341
Published by: Croatian Musicological Society
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41203371
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M. Saffle - Hon-Lun Yang: Aesthetic and Social Aspects I |RASM 41 (2010) 2. 319.341
of Emerging Utopian Musical Communities |
Michael Saffle
Virginia Polytechnic Institute
and State University
Blacksburg, Virginia
24061-0227, U.S.A.
E-mail: msaffle@vt.edu
Aesthetic and Social
Aspects of Emerging
Utopian Musical
Communities
Hon-Lun Yang
Hong Kong Baptist University

Department of Music
Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong

E-mail: hlyang@hkbu.edu. hk
UDC: 78.01:78.06
Original Scientific Paper
Izvorni znanstveni rad
Received: March 16, 2010
Primljeno: 16. oujka 2010.

Accepted: June 8, 2010
Prihvaeno: 8. lipnja 2010.
Abstract - Rsum
i ne article identities ana examines
I. Defining Utopias I
aspects of Utopian thought and

action in music, especially popular
music, in several real, imagined,
and virtual aesthetic and social

manifestations. Three new terms
characterize these and other,
closely related phenomena: logotoAlmost everyone who speaks English

has used
pias or imagined communities
organized
largely around texts;
the words utopia and Utopian.
Everything
phonotopias or virtual communities
enjoyable, escapist, idealistic, or revolutionary

has
organized largely around
recorded
and tachytopias orby
real-life
probably been described at one time sounds;
or another
communities organized around
means of these words. The word utopia
is
derived
intermittent,
often
retrospective,
and occasionally tourist-like
from the Greek words for place (wn
or
topos)
events. Special attention is paid to
three pop-music
tachytopias: the
as well as no (ou or u)- or, in other
readings,
self-proclaimed Guitar Army of
good (eu or eu). Fictional utopias
be Europe
noand
1960smay
and early 1970s
the USA; the migratory American

places, but more than a few real-life
communities
Dead Heads of the later 20th
and the Cantopop
conof men and women have struggled to century;
construct
their
certs held in Hong Kong during the
own good places in several parts ofearly
the
world.
2000s.
Keywords: utopia, Utopian
This includes music. Consider the
following
logotopia
phonotopia tachytopia imagined communities
examples drawn from the world of
post-Beatles
Thomas
More Oneida Commu-
nity West-Eastern Divan Orchepopular music: In 1974 Todd Rundgren's

ensemble,
stra Daniel
Barenboim
Edward Said Robert Schumann
later renamed Utopia, released an album
entitled
Neue Zeitschrift
fr Musik
Glenn Gould Arturo Toscanini

Utopia; in 1980 the band released aThe
second
album
Beatles John Sinclair
Guitar Army Frank Zappa
entitled Adventures in Utopia.1 At least Freak

two
recording
Central
The Grateful
Dead Dead Heads Carnegie
firms with the same name- Utopia Studios
Hall Reeperbahn -have
Fillmore
auditoriums Hong Kong Hong

Kong Coliseum megaconcerts
1 See ANONYMOUS (n.d.)
Anita Mui Connie Chan
carnival
319
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done business in St. Louis, Missouri, and London, England.2 Other commercial
enterprises, including on-line record stores, have been described as Utopian
destinations or Utopian hangouts for youthful music-lovers.3 Hail to the Thief,
Radiohead's 2003 album, has been called deeply Utopian insofar as its music
and lyrics help us see the connection between ideals and the dismal world the
album envisages.4 Even MTV, with all its flaws and shifting stylistic enthusiasms,
has been epitomized as Utopian by Teenspeak critic Melanie Espeland.5
But utopias are more than simply escapist, fabulous, or fun. They are funda-
mentally disruptive. As Karl Mannheim explains, the quintessential^ Utopian

state of mind ... is incongruous with the reality within which it occurs; instead,
it is oriented towards objects which do not exist in ... actual situation[s]. In

Mannhein's opinion, only those orientations transcending reality are Utopian; if
and when they pass over into conduct, they tend to shatter either partially or
wholly the order of things prevailing at the time.6 In terms of literary utopias,
outright disruption is often replaced by satire. Modern English Utopian fantasies,
for example, employ a fictional future in order to look back at the present and
criticize it.7 Some fictional utopias are in fact dystopias (from the Greek for bad
[5ua] and place): hideous portrayals of what could happen rather than hopeful
portrayals of what should happen. Furthermore, real-life utopias often incorpo-
rate disruptive and even dystopian elements: Lenin's economically radicalized

Russia is one example, Hitler's racially purified Germany another. In terms of
the pop-music examples cited above, only Hail to the Thief is obviously Utopian in
its satiric, disruptive, and even dystopian character.
II. Music and Utopias Real and Imaginary

Since 1516, when Thomas More published a volume whose title begins On the
Best State of a Republic, the word utopia has generally been employed by
scholars- as Ruth Levitas explains- to identify two empirical phenomena: social
experiments and Utopian literature.8 Since the actual world is an imperfect place,
any utopia, real or imagined, must embody the incongruous or fantastical as well
as the disruptive.9 More's Utopia, for example, describes an imaginary society even
2 See ANONYMOUS 2-3 (n.d.).
3 See ANONYMOUS 4-5 (n.d.).
4 BURT (2009), 166.
5
6
7
8
ESPELAND (n.d.).
MANNHEIM (1936), 192.
GERBER (1955), 81.
See LEVITAS (1990), 1-34.
* it is tor tms reason mat a great deal ot modern Utopian literature ana mm is saence-nctionai.
See JAMESON (2005).

320
M. Saffle - Hon-Lun Yang: Aesthetic and Social Aspects I .R.SM 1 Min 2. 317 3^
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as it satirizes a real one: sixteenth-century England under Henry VIII. On the

other hand, the Oneida Community, which flourished or at least survived in sev-
eral places between 1848-1881, was more disruptive than satirical; its founder
John Humphrey Noyes's insistence on male continence and open marriage- a
communism of affection - served as a controversial counterpart to his
communism of property.10
Real-life Utopian communities have often drawn upon literary models in terms
of organizational principles. Oneida's several settlements, for example, drew their
inspiration not only from Noyes, their charismatic leader, but also from a Perfectionist reading of the Bible.11 At the same time, literary utopias often incorporate
real-life references. Nineteen Eighty-four, George Orwell's mid-twentieth-century
dystopian novel, draws heavily upon 1930s and 1940s Soviet history.12
ILI Abstract and Concrete Utopias
Just as the Oneida settlements exemplify what Ernst Bloch calls concrete
utopias, so More's literary work exemplifies abstract utopias.13 Concrete

utopias are actually lived, while abstract utopias merely consider or criticize the
realities of living. Nevertheless, literary Utopian works are not altogether fantasti-
cal, nor are exclusively individualistic proposals and experiences altogether

Utopian. Instead, there is always something socially transformative, radical, or
even apocalyptic about authentic utopias of all kinds. As Krishan Kumar explains,
for example, the birth of the modern [literary] utopia coincided with a social
cataclysm: the break-up of the unified Christian world.14 This was true not only
of More's work, which in certain respects addresses a Catholic's concerns about
the Protestant Reformation; it was also true for the Oneida residents that watched
the United States grow into a powerful nation even as it endured the Civil War of
1861-1865.
II.2 Music as Essentially and Transcendently Utopian
Although many utopias, both abstract and concrete, have concerned

themselves primarily or even exclusively with religion, politics, and day-by-day
economic affairs, no form of expression has been as intricately associated with
10 WHITWORTH (1975), 113.

11 bee ibid., (1975), esp. 89-119 (lhe Fertectionists o Oneida).
12 See ORWELL (1950).

13 BLOCH (1986). See LEVITAS (1997).
14 KUMAR (1998), 22-23.
321
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the Utopian dream as music.15 Although it does not necessarily outline literary
or real-life Utopian longings like those associated with More and the Oneida
settlements, music creates an autonomous world of sound with its own set of
laws and relationships, its own sort of order, its own conceptions of tension and
release.16 For Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht, all music worthy of the name is
Utopian, presaging a world not yet reachable at present . . . [and] fulfills the longing
for transcendence.17 Just as there is something transcendent or spiritual (rather

than institutionally religious) about many utopias, so there is something transcendent or spiritual about music itself. According to Bloch, for example, music and
philosophy in their final instance[s] intend purely toward the articulation of a
final mystery. In other words, music is one way in which spiritual longing
calls out to itself in all of us and, as a miracle-working phenomenon, brings
us to a non-ordinary or Utopian state of awareness.18 Here we encounter an important contradiction: that of social utopias tolerating and even encouraging entirely
private transcendent experiences.
At the same time, music may also represent and even embody the disruptive
and critical aspects of both actual and virtual Utopian principles. For Igor Stravinsky, Beethoven's late string quartets were, in and of themselves, a charter of
human rights, and a perpetually seditious one at that.19
II.3 Music in Abstract and Concrete Utopias

Both More's abstract ideal citizens and Oneida's real-life inhabitants were
well aware of music. More's reference to services of praise unto God- diversi
fied with instruments of music, and sung or played so as to resemble natur
affections- represents an ideal of Christian worship (and of musical expressiv
ness) in place of their frequent failures in real life.20 Too, from an early date, music
was encouraged in the original Oneida settlement, and by the 1860s vocalists
and instrumental soloists had emerged and organized semi-professional enter
tainments.21 Perhaps an even better example of an American Utopian communi
devoted to music-making was Ephrata, where- as Mary Bednarowsky has i

the use of mixed choruses, in which women's voices dominated, provided
15 ROTHSTEIN (2003), 24.
16 Md.
17 Quoted in MUSIC (2008), 665.

18 BLOCH (2000), 158.
19 Quoted in MARCUSE (1972), 102.
20 MORE (1999), 197. The translation is that of Ralph Robynson, originally published in 1556.
Interestingly enough, More's description was interpreted several decades ago by Nan Carpenter as a
possible example of what the term musica reservtu really referred to. See CARPENTER (1981).
21 PARKER (1972), 244 and 247.
322
M. Saffle - Hon-Lun Yang: Aesthetic and Social Aspects I ras M 41 (2010) 2: 317-341
crucial means of communicating [the] reclaimed unity of the genders.22 In every

one of these cases, music-making is described or practiced on behalf of an idealized social goal.
II.4 Contemporary Concrete Musical Utopias: An Example
Occasionally a real-life Utopian experiment is carried out on behalf of music.

The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra is such an experiment, one that involves an
ensemble of young musicians organized in 1999, located in Sevilla, Spain, and
conducted by Daniel Barenboim.23 As collaborators in a project involving coexistence between Arabs, Jews, and Europeans, the ensemble's members have
criticized Israeli policy toward Palestinian refugees, distributed leaflets about
the history of Palestine, and waved Palestinian flags at concerts around the
world.24 In spite of widespread intermittent opposition to the Utopian republic
Barenboim continues to lead, co-founder Edward Said explains that it is culture
generally and music in particular that provide an alternative model for the conflict
of [social] identities.25 Through its concerts and confrontations, the West-Eastern
Divan Orchestra exemplifies all of the principal characteristics associated with
utopias in general: other-worldliness, social awareness, communal fantasy, and
disruptions of political and cultural expectations.
In order more efficiently to discuss other, less traditional, and mostly more
recent Utopian musical phenomena than the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, we
propose three new terms: logotopias (from the Greek for word [Xyo or logos]
and place), referring to imagined communities organized largely around texts;
phonotopias (from the Greek for sound [(|)dvoa or phonos] and place),
referring to virtual communities organized largely around recorded sounds); and
tachytopias (from the Greek for speed [x%v or tach] and place), referring
to real-life communities organized largely around intermittent, often retrospective, and occasionally tourist-like events. Insofar as these terms are concerned, the
abstract musings of More as well as the concrete activities of the Oneida commu-
nities and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra represent familiar, long-term,

concrete Utopian phenomena. By contrast, the phenomena discussed below- certain post-rock fanzines, the Alt.Country web page, Glenn Gould's studio recording project, Guitar Army, the Dead Heads, certain Hong Kong concerts, and even
Schumann's Neue Zeitschrift represent emerging, often virtual Utopian experiments more closely associated with the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
22 BEDNAROWSKI (1984), 121.
23WILLSON(2009), 1.
/4 Ibid., (2UU9), 13.
25 Ibid., (2009), 18.
323
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III. Musical Utopias in Print, on Records, and On-line

III.l Musical Logotopias
In addition to the social music-making of Utopian communities, fictional or
factual, virtual Utopian communities have flourished since the early nineteenth
century in Europe and the United States. Unlike More's abstract proposals or
Noyes's concrete economic and social settlements, virtual musical utopias do not
merely employ music for primarily non-musical purposes. Instead, they are organized around music itself, and most of them have succeeded or failed because of their
members' musical enthusiasms. Those virtual communities created by the authors,
editors, and readers of books and especially of periodicals we call logotopias. Initially
or altogether, logotopias are populated by individuals who live elsewhere but
gather themselves together by means of printed or digitalized texts to pursue
idealistic and occasionally revolutionary aesthetic and social goals.
One early musical logotopia grew up during the 1830s and 1840s around
Robert Schumann's Neue Zeitschrift fr Musik. As Anna Celenza explains, the
impact of Schumann's unique editorial approach reached far beyond the

geographical confines of Leipzig and the temporal boundaries of his ten-year
tenure as editor to unite many musical enthusiasts throughout the Germanspeaking world.26 In terms of preferences and prejudices, Schumann's influence
over his readers extended to active participation in the Neue Zeitschrift'^ pages,
and subscribers were encouraged to become interlocutors in the 'discussions'
presented in [that] journal as part of a community that welcomed the participation of readers no matter where they were or what they thought about the topic
at hand.27 Benedict Anderson's notion of imagined communities holds true for
Schumann's virtual logotopia, which consisted of composers, critics, performers,
and scholars in mostly indirect contact with one another.28 At the same time,
several smaller concrete Utopian societies- the Copenhagen Davidsbund, for

example, and, less directly, the Neu-Weimar-Verein- consolidated their own faceto-face activities around Schumann's periodical and its musical perspectives.29
More recently, periodicals have helped bring together communities of popularmusic enthusiasts and shape real-life events. Magazines such as Crawdaddy! and
Rolling Stone flourished during the late 1960s and early 1970s because they provided
revolutionary reportage and commentary to like-minded music-lovers. Both of these
magazines, which began as or initially resembled fanzines (i.e., non-profit periodicals often privately printed and distributed), rapidly morphed into prozines (i.e.,
26 CELENZA (2005), 3.
27 Ibid., (2005), 6-7.
28 See ANDERSON (1991).

29 See CELENZA (2005), 8-25.
324
M. Saffle - Hon-Lun Yang: Aesthetic and Social Aspects I ^ (2010) 2: 317-341

professional publications publicly distributed and partially or entirely supported

through advertising revenue). Other, more recent fanzines have also attracted attention. One example is Music from the Empty Quarter, which- like Electric Shock Treat-
ment and Wig Out!- has been devoted to post-rock music of several kinds.30 All of
these scruffy, homemade little pamphlets 31 are intensely Utopian (albeit personal)
publications, virtual homes for short-lived communities of radicalized readers who

strive to remake the world of music in their own images.
To the extent that the Internet is text-based and encourages written give and
take- whether by means of blogs, chat-rooms, or Facebook pages- it too may

provide virtual homes for logotopian musical communities. Among many other
sites, consider Alt.Country, a virtual on-line country-music scene. Although
lacking many of the tribal markers associated with face-to-face clubbing and
live concerts, including loud music, dancing, and drugs, Alt.Country provides
its members with opportunities to distinguish themselves through the quality
and quantity of their written communications.32 Idealistic and edgy, on-line
logotopias like Alt.Country can be set up literally overnight, although their lifespans tend to be as brief as many of the disruptive and dream-like causes they
advocate.33 Logotopias may also intermingle with each other, and with real-life
activities, as one logger encourages actual concert attendance while another

presses for virtual participation through digitalized messages and sounds. In
these ways and others, as we shall see below, web-based musical logotopias also
resemble and often contribute to the enthusiasms of face-to-face tachytopias.
III.2 Musical Phonotopias

Concert halls have often served as venues for enthusiastic audiences to share
their momentarily idealized and radicalized musical dreams. Like such hallsand, in fact, like Schumann's Neue Zeitschrift, post-rock fanzines, and Alt.Country- recording technologies may serve as nexuses for Utopian gatherings of likeminded fans. As Walter Benjamin observes, the desire to bring things 'closer7
spatially and humanly34 may overcome the fact that, although recorded music
involves millions of people, it seldom occurs in an immediate social context.35
Instead, analog and digital recordings create virtual contexts for shared if
asynchronous personal experiences that may be- but by no means always have
30 HODGKINSON (2004), 227.

31 Quoted in ibid. (2004), 225. See, too, DUNCOMBE (1997).
32 LEE and PETERSON (2004), 194.
M Wld., (2UU4), 198-2U1.
34 BENJAMIN (1968), 221.
35 KEALY (1982), 101.
325
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been- (re)presented through face-to-face festivals, parties, scholarly symposia,

and the like. Instead of duplicating or eliminating the basis in ritual associated
with live performances, recordings have bred their own rituals, including the
tribal club music played by 1980s and 1990s DJs in several American cities.36
Like many areas of technology, as Chad Thevenot observes, innovation in

sound recording happens in a culture of destruction, a 'creative destruction' that
parallels the radicalism of societal utopianism and certain aspects of postmodern
musical utopianism.37
One ultimately Utopian, although initially altogether private musical project
began when pianist Glenn Gould withdrew in 1964 from the concert platform and
retreated into the recording studio. Gould considered recorded music a
commodity that bridged the gap between studio and living-room, facilitating
an abstract [i.e., virtual] form of cultural experience and performative possibility.38 Tim Hecker considers Gould's position nothing short of a Utopian ideal of
musical transmission and experience, one that contextualized and prioritized
listening as a singular, atomized, private form of audition.39 For Michel Foucault,
this atomization and privatization enables individuals such as Gould to attain a
certain state of happiness, wisdom, perfection or immortality.40 At the same time,
Gould's ideal atomized listener was replaced by thousands or millions of real-life

listeners who share, asynchronously, the same music and the same technological
dreams. Collectively these listeners, together with Gould as their leader, comprise
what we call a phonotopia.
Phonotopias have also grown up around other celebrated artists and
ensembles. The Beatles, for example, were performers who mostly reached their
audiences through films, fan magazines, and recordings rather than concerts and
other face-to-face encounters. Arturo Toscanini is another example. Throughout
the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, Toscanini's American fans- most of them resigned to
encountering their idol and each other primarily through radio broadcasts and
phonograph records- embraced his powerfully anti-fascist political opinions as
well as his distinctive aesthetic accomplishments.41
Insofar, of course, as web-based communities of pop-music fans are concerned,
logotopias and phonotopias can be difficult to distinguish from each other. The
web provides virtual homes for both text and sound as well as image-based
communities; so, of course, do television and film. All or almost all pop idols have
official as well as fan-managed websites: virtual internet communities incorporat36 THEVENOT (2001).
37 Ibid.
38 HECKER (2008), 78-79.

39 IhiH 7Q
40 FOUCAULT (1988), 18. Quoted in HECKER (2009), 83.

41 See HOROWITZ (1987).
326
M. Saffle - Hon-Lun Yang: Aesthetic and Social Aspects I RASM 41 (2010) 2: 317-341
ing texts, sounds, and images. Take, for example, the late Michael Jackson's official
website, itself a virtual utopia-cwra-fanzine; there one encounters not only essential
facts but also recent news about him.42 Most of all, Jackson's website is a virtual
club house where fans can drop in, look at their idol's photos, listen to his music,
and watch his performance- an imagined community that affords real-life

experiences as well as a safe place to vent one's emotions and opinions.
III.3 From Logotopias and Phonotopias to Tachytopias
All these virtual communities, whether situated in the realms of print or

sound or the internet, exemplify what Henri Lefebvre calls the '[social] production of [social] space': a phenomenon fundamentally produced by and through
human actions rather than defined in terms of geography or architecture.43 Lefebvre's three-fold vision of spatial practices, representations of space, and spaces of
representation together suggest space[s] as directly lived, if only through associated images and symbols.44 Certainly a few logotopian and phonotopian musical communities have flourished in virtual spaces that simulated or facilitated
public communication even as they have helped fulfill entirely personal dreams
and desires. Within such communities, citizens have been free to satirize, disrupt,
or muse as they wish, momentarily free of real-life problems.
At the same time, virtual communities simply aren't the same as real ones.
Unlike concrete utopias of the past, logotopias and phonotopias often lack the
immediacy, convictions, and multifaceted opportunities that prolonged personal
contact provides. Virtual communities are no places in two senses of the Utopian
tradition: in spite of their visionary and potentially radical aesthetic, political, and
social agendas, they lack actual settlements or homes.
What, however, of short-lived, real-life musical communities: groups of

people that gather together, share experiences, call for social changes of one kind
or another, and disperse - all within a few hours? To what extent can these club
scenes, concert audiences, and other assemblages of performers and listeners be
considered Utopian in some of the same senses as Noyes's Oneida settlements or
nineteenth-century Copenhagen's and Weimar's reading circles? We believe that
the people, places, and goals associated with certain kinds of concerts, especially
pop concerts, can justifiably be considered short-lived Utopian communities. To
identify as well as epitomize important aspects of these ephemeral, idealistic,

socially critical and increasingly common communities, we call them tachytopias.
42 See ANONYMOUS 6 (n.d.).

43 Quoted in WEGNER (2002), 13. See LEFEBVRE (1991), 26-27.
44 LEFEBVRE (1991), 39.
327
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Several social theorists, including Lefebvre and Paul Virilio,45 have contributed to
our understanding of tachytopias as manifestations of particularism populist,
often nostalgic, and - above all- momentary experiences that simultaneously

struggle against certain aspects of our increasingly globalized, consumer-driven,
late-capitalist world order even as they validate others. In the pages that follow,
we also refer to well-established definitions of utopia and Utopian communi-
ties in order to situate the tachytopias we describe in terms both of more

traditional aesthetic aspirations, and of music as one medium through which
emerging political and social aspirations of various kinds have been and continue
to be expressed.
IV. Contemporary Musical Tachytopias: Three Examples

IV.l Guitar Army
One dispersed but nevertheless concrete communal experiment that embodied

the hopeful and potentially apocalyptic dreaming associated with abstract Utopian
criticism was Guitar Army: a term employed specifically by John Sinclair to
describe himself, his immediate followers, and certain musicians he admired, but
elastic enough to encompass a great many late 1960s and early 1970s radicalized
European and American music-lovers and their intermittent Utopian activities. In
political terms, Guitar Army was made up of young people (and a few older people)
opposed to America's involvement in Vietnam, the capitalist culture that supported
that war, and certain forms of class-based, gendered, and racial oppression. Whether
gathered together for concerts, love-ins, or political protests, Guitar Army's millions
of volunteers continuously reorganized themselves into a host of unevenly

radicalized tachytopian communities and events.
For this large, restless body of mostly adolescent men and women,46 rock
wasn't simply an entertainment or individual passion. Instead, as Sinclair proclaims in his manifesto, from the beginning rock & roll was also about a whole
way of life and not just the music, although the music was certainly the core of
that new life in 1954 just as it is today [i.e., in 1972]. 47 These people- the blues
people- live their music full time, Sinclair explains. It is in no way a luxurythey make their living playing it in murderous bars and dives, and the music
45 Virilio, for example, employs the phrase monument of a moment to discuss contemporary
Utopian museum experiences, in contrast to monuments viewed for long periods in the past. See
VIRILIO (2004), 111.
46 Although large by the standards of an individual family or small town, membership in Guitar
Nation never included more than a fraction of the total population of any one country: France, say, or
the United States. See STATER (1975), 3-44.
47 SINCLAIR (2007), 24.
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flows directly from their lives in these places, in the sinkholes of Amerika's [sic]
cities where black people are kept penned up and treated like dogs.48 For Sinclair,
music itself was a way of life in economic and political as well as cultural terms.
At the same time he understood that music wasn't an entirely satisfactory answer
to political oppression. For MC5, Sinclair's own band, music as well as violence,
free sex, and drugs were seen as the means to a complete revolutionary overthrow
of the U.S. Government.49
The ever-shifting membership of Guitar Army, of course, had no fixed

quarters, as did the inhabitants- respectively, abstract and concrete- of More's
Utopia and Noyes's Oneida settlements. Instead, its soldiers had many encampments: some more or less permanent, some ephemeral. Long-standing outposts
included much of San Francisco's Haight Ashbury district, a scattering of rural
communes throughout the United States, and a few nuclear households where
music, social protest, and experimental lifestyles were embraced for months or
even years at a time. Among these last small-scale and informal organizations
were 710 Ashbury Street, where the Grateful Dead settled briefly in 196650; and
Freak Central, where Frank Zappa and his wife Pamela Zarabica, together with a
number of transient performers, fans, friends, and runaways, shared a house at
8404 Kirkwood Drive in Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles County.
Zappa's legendary musical career itself exemplified a number of Utopian

elements, including the socially disruptive and stylistically experimental character of his many recordings. Yet Zappa's relationship to the counter-culture and
even to Freak Central as a communal nexus remained ambivalent. An aesthetic
dreamer, Zappa wanted society to change; at the same time he did not condone
the methods used to attain what Barry Mills calls widened consciousness which is to say, psychedelic drugs.51 In other words, Zappa embraced certain
aspects of Sinclair's agenda and rejected others. At the same time, everyday
communal experiences at Freak Central ran the gamut from idealized and socially
radicalized musical experimentation to all-out sexual orgies, at one of which rock
artist and Andy Warhol groupie Nico once dragged some unfortunate woman
off the man she fancied at gunpoint.52 As Edward Rothstein reminds us, the real
is always less elegant and more complex than the ideal.53
Another broader-based but less permanent and more consistently imagined
Guitar Army outpost involved the music of the Beatles as well as the ensemble
itself and its legions of 1960s fans. For John Lennon, as Greil Marcus explains, the
48 Ibid.. 141.
49 PERONE (2004), 100.

50 By 1968, however, the band had relocated to California's Marin County. See GAIR (2007), 132.
51 MTT T 5U?nn4V 1??
52 Ibid., 120.
53 ROTHSTEIN (2003), 22.

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Beatles and their fans played out an image of utopia, of a good life that
encompassed] every desire for love, family, friendship, or comradeship: an
image that also informed love affairs ... politics ... [and] shaped one's sense of
possibility and loss, of the worth of things as a whole.54 The fact that, over time,
nightmares grew out of dreams testifies to the fragility of concrete musical
utopias, no matter how scattered and seemingly diversified their memberships
may be; it exemplifies what Kevin Courrier identifies specifically as the dark
side of the Beatles' dream.55
For a few years rock music represented a [social and political] possibility, a
whole new way to go for many young Europeans and Americans of the middle
and late 1960s.56 Both Zappa's real-life home and the Beatles' more imagined
community, as well as a great many other contemporaneous Utopian musical
(dis)organizations were filled with secular visionaries. So were the communal
homes of the Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and
other San Francisco ensembles.57 Inevitably, perhaps, as the Vietnam War moved
toward its conclusion, the visionaries dispersed and the music died. As 1967's
Summer of Love (itself a media invention, although one adopted enthusiastically
by a great many music-lovers) gave way to 1968 and 1969, the dream expressed in
the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's album, a phonotopian rallying place for milder-mannered Guitar Army soldiers, gave way to Woodstock- according to Barry Melton,
the last authentic countercultural event58- as well as to the White Album and the
Summer of Hate associated with the Altamont disaster and the Manson Family
murders.59
JV.2 The Dead Heads
Guitar Army was only partially defined and staffed by musicians and their
fans. It was a transient, semi-coherent, sometimes abstract community or collection of communities; and although some of its outposts stood for years, others
vanished overnight. Several subsequent and even more ephemeral musical tachy-
topias have grown up around closely related aesthetic and social enthusiasms.
Beginning in the 1960s, for example, and tapering off after the death of Jerry
Garcia in 1995- or so Timothy Miller puts it in The 60s Communes- a great many
Dead Heads (i.e., followers of the Grateful Dead) constituted themselves a rolling
34
55
56
57
58
59
MARCUS (1993), 167.

COURRIER (2009), xxxiv; italics added.
MILLER (1999), 142.
SINCLAIR (2007), 24.
Quoted in CHEPESIUK (2007), 246-47.
COURRIER (2009), xxxv.
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M. Saffle - Hon-Lun Yang: Aesthetic and Social Aspects I | 41 (2010) 2: 317-341

tribal community, living out Summer of Love Fantasies before, after, and especially during the ensemble's numerous concert appearances and tours.60
To some extent, similar forms of behavior have characterized audiences at
charitable 1980s and 1990s megaconcerts such as LiveAid, as well as cycles of

tours undertaken by the Dave Matthews Band, Pfish, the Rolling Stones, U2, and
other rock groups. None of these tachytopian communities, however, equaled the
Dead Heads for long-term devotion to particular musical ideals and social
behavior patterns. At the same time, the Dead Heads ultimately failed to establish
a stable Utopian society. Nor did they intend to. Their collective activities may
have been real, located in actual space and time, but individual Dead Heads
were too geographically and psychologically scattered, and many of them too
intensely involved with personal musical pleasure, to construct societies as
durable even as Freak Central or Haight-Ashbury's communes. Is all in the
music, one Dead Head explains. It's magic. You can look for this kind of magic
at other shows, but I'd bet you everything I own . . . everything I'll ever own, you
won't find it anywhere else.61
For individual Dead Heads, the momentary magic (much of it drug-induced)
was often enough. Yet the Dead Heads collectively developed and endorsed a series
of rituals and a body of generally altruistic and socially transcendental attitudes
altogether Utopian. What counted wasn't watching pop stars but the atmosphere,
the friendly attitudes, the [shared] good humor.62 At the same time the Grateful
Dead as an ensemble indulged in at least one aesthetically disruptive and potentially self-critical activity of its own: that of spontaneous programming. Instead of
playing what their audiences often asked for, they played whatever they wished,
whenever they wished. Each concert assaulted the senses with so many different
musical forms and styles that the diversity itself [was] somewhat disorienting.63
Garcia himself observed that what was required for the band's particular brand of
musical success was a sense of daring, a certain amount of recklessness.64
Finally, the freedom, simplicity, and natural beauty associated with the out-
of-doors (where many Dead-Head events took place), combined with leisurely
indulgence- many Dead Heads followed their bliss wherever it led (and it led all
over North America) - conjoined a mild sense of disruption with two [other]
Utopian visions: the first of a world free of social and gender inequalities, the
second replete with an easy abundance of time and affluence.65 These factors
60 Ibid. The Grateful Dead and their followers have been much written about. See, for example,
DODD and SPAULDING (2000).
61 Quoted in JACKSON (2000), 154; italics in the original.
62 Quoted in ALVAREZ (2000), 232.
63 Quoted in JACKSON (2000), 157.
64 Quoted in ibid., (2000), 156.
65 ILLOUZ (1997), 96.

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are also closely associated with tourism, in which even the tawdry McDonaldization of personal experiences66 occasionally gives way to transcendent reveries
and radicalized perceptions of global poverty and oppression. This is what Claudia Bell and John Lyall dub the accelerated sublime: tourism as it has evolved
from the nineteenth century to the present day, helping to transform our senses of
time and place beyond those traditionally associated with stable communal life-
and to encourage us, however briefly, to consider the social transformations

implicit in Utopian possibilities.67
IV.3 Hong Kong Pop Concerts
Other clusters of musical tachytopias involve pop-music concerts presented

in fixed locations. Live performances of all kinds grip our imaginations; we can
lose ourselves, collectively as well as individually, during such events. Furthermore, pop concerts have become almost ubiquitous, thanks to the pervasiveness
of Western popular culture. Finally, as Richard Dyer demonstrates, forms of entertainment such as song-and-dance numbers in musicals are Utopian insofar as they
provide temporary answers to the inadequacies of the society.68 Locations

famous for their escapist musical opportunities and temporary answers to
life's problems include Carnegie Hall, the bars of Hamburg's Reeperbahn during
the early 1960s when the Beatles gave their first performances, and the Fillmore
auditoriums of 1960s San Francisco and New York City.
The concerts and concert series held in post-Handover Hong Kong, the former British colony recovered in 1997 by the People's Republic of China (or PRC),
exemplify these possibilities. In their combinations of sound, staging, scenery,
costumes, dances, and drama, they fulfill wishes rather than challenge aesthetic
and social precepts. For a couple of hours at a time, performers and audiences
together construct alternate realities that incorporate idealized aspects of Hong
Kong's own past, present, and future.
Guitar Army's members celebrated aesthetic experimentation and social

disruption, while a great many Dead Heads ignored outward appearances in favor of inward (yet snared) experiences.69 If Guitar Army occasionally indulged in
paramilitary activities and Dead Head gatherings often resembled festivals] of
66 See RITZER and LISKA (1997), 96-109.
67 See BELL and LYALL (2002).
68 DYER (2002), 25.
69 Dead Heads often behaved in socially challenging ways, yet without intending disruption of
any kind. One male figure, who swayed and gyrated, coiled and uncoiled during a four-hourlong Grateful Dead concert, for example, wore a printed skirt rather than trousers. A lot of Deadheads [sic] do that, Al Alvarez explains. Is not a sexual statement. Instead, he considers it an aid
to ecstatic experience [ALVAREZ (2004), 232].
332
Dionysius,70 the Hong Kong concerts can be likened to theme parks filled with
interactive, nostalgia-oriented rides. The remedies effected by these comfortable
diversions- the feelings of abundance, energy, intensity, transparency, and

community they inspire- help everyone involved to escape, however briefly,
from real-world difficulties.71
Most Hong Kong pop concerts take place at the Hong Kong Coliseum, a plain
and unattractive sport center with a seating capacity of 12,500. No singer can
claim local success until s/he has appeared there at least once or twice. A pilgrimage
destination, the Coliseum is at once familiar and transformable: the setting for
spectacular performances that many Hong Kong citizens attend at least once a
year.
For each concert at the Coliseum, a new stage is built; together with dcor
and lighting, the stage designs themselves reinforce illusions of living dreams.
The quasi-Broadway stage designs for Connie Chan's 2003 Coliseum concert,72 for
example, recreated the ambiance of the bygone 1960s during which American
influence in Hong Kong was strong and positive. Anita Mui's opulent 2003 concert,
complete with velvet curtains and staircases, embodied its theme: Classic
Moments Live.73 To emphasize the event's classic quality, Mui hired the
Shanghai Symphony Orchestra to accompany her throughout the series.
Other production details also contribute to each concert's fantastical and

visionary character. The outfits performers wear; their song lists, dance sequences,
and speeches; the rosters of invited guests; and the juxtapositions of various
numbers- their tempos, historical associations, and styles: all these things contribute
to overall impact as well as profit. For example, most Coliseum performers change
outfits six or seven times during each concert. The outfits themselves, glamorous
symbols of success, are carefully crafted to appeal to different age groups and
gender orientations. From frilly and feminine to explicitly (hetero)sexual as well as
ambiguously butch: each performer's persona addresses a different fantasy, and a
few even challenge social assumptions. The sheer value and extravagance of many
costumes are in themselves Utopian.
70 McNALLY (2004), 166.

71 Hong Kong was hard hit by the 1997 Asian financial crisis shortly after her return to the PRC,
and the city experienced a 40% drop in property values. Many Hong Kong citizens were left jobless or
stood on the brink of bankruptcy.
72 The English translation of this event's title is Here Come[s] Connie Chan's Concert, available
on DVD through YesAsia, product no. 1003363059. Po-chu (Connie) Chan was a renowned movie
star and the cultural icon of Hong Kong in the 1960s. Even today, she attracts a large number of devoted fans. NB: Po-chu (Connie) Chan is a Westernized form of her name, with her surname appearing last; the Chinese form of her name would be Chan Po-chu.
73 The English translation of this event's title is Anita ['s] Classical Moment Live. It took place
from 6-11 November 2003. Yin-fong (Anita) Mui (1963-2003), a renowned Hong Kong pop singer,
came to the limelight in the early 1980s.
333
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Anita Mui's stage apparel is a case in point. For twenty years Mui reigned as
Hong Kong's pop queen; she rose to prominence after her winning the first prize
at the Pop Song New Comer's Competition in 1982. Dubbed the Queen of a
Hundred Faces for her ever-changing stage appearances, her bad girl image
also earned her the nickname Madonna of the East. For her 2003 performance,
Mui appeared in a series of elaborate gowns designed by Hong Kong's leading
couturier as well as Christian Dior. She several times asked her listeners whether
they liked her outfits and bragged openly about how much they cost. At the same
time she made fun of her cake-like stage clothes and laughingly explained that
one dress weighed as much as she does: something over 80 pounds. Whether lost
in admiration over the beauty of her costumes or entertained by their elaborateness and weight, Mui's fans found themselves, momentarily, in a world without
everyday concerns. At her final concert she lived out her own dream of being
married in a beautiful gown even as she sang one of her best-known songs.74 The
contrast between fantasized tachytopian experience and real-life struggle was

highlighted a month later, when Mui died of cervical cancer.
Although Hong Kong pop stars rarely compose their own music, each singer
has his or her own special numbers. Sometimes individual numbers reinforce
not only individual but social values. At her 2003 concert, for example, Connie
Chan acted out a theme song from one of her 1960s movies by transgressing
gender boundaries as a killer who punished evil-doers and rescued the poor
and weak. Hong Kong artists also routinely juggle, perform acrobatic stunts, as
well as do stand-up comedy! The interweaving of these acts with speeches creates
a kind of melodrama in which much is told and acted out as well as sung. Connie
Chan's 2003 concert, for example, featured two dramatic interludes that referred
to and summarized her 1960s movie career. Like the Dead Head's enthusiasm for
the lost 1960s and John Sinclair's fondness for authentic 1950s rhythm and
blues, Hong Kong performers often evoke nostalgia as an entertaining way of
comparing past and present realities.
Such realities are strategically constructed through a sense of audience-
centeredness that producers and performers work carefully to cultivate in the

form of symbiotic relationships between each star and his or her fans. When stars
thank audience members for their love and support, addressing them as though
they were family members, they establish a momentary Utopian sense of familial
unity and love. This tactic, remarkable as a gesture of intimacy especially within
the boundaries of traditional Chinese culture, inspires fans to scream out their
favorite singers' names over and over. Chan and Mui have gone so far as to
proclaim their fans their greatest accomplishments in life. Sometimes, too,
performers sing along with their audiences or walk among them, bestowing
74 For photos of Mui's concert apparel as well as a short bio, see ANONYMOUS (2003).
334
M. Saffle - Hon-Lun Yang: Aesthetic and Social Aspects I -f (2010) 2a 317-341

smiles, hand shakes, and flattery on those around them. In return, fans arrive at
every show carrying flowers and gifts of money wrapped in red paper: the last a
symbol of good luck and New Year's greetings as well as an actual financial contribution to the star's lifestyle. All these gestures are tachytopian, establishing- if
only momentarily- a sense of classlessness and togetherness.
Like traditional Carnival celebrations, Hong Kong Coliseum concerts are

sensual extravaganzas, rituals in which the past is at least occasionally buried and
the present or future portrayed as reborn. As Mikhail Bakhtin explains, Carnival
affords participants a temporary liberation from ... prevailing truth and ...
established order.75 In other words, Carnival is itself a tachytopian phenomenon.
Individual Coliseum concerts, of course, are anything but spontaneous; instead,
every detail is worked out in advance for maximum profit. Nor, in terms of their
well-mannered and somewhat abstemious participants (alcohol and drugs are

tacitly eschewed, and food is explicitly forbidden during performances) can
Coliseum concerts be considered Dionysian. Nevertheless, each event enables the
members of its momentary society to enjoy liberation from everyday truth and
order. As Theodor W. Adorno points out, most important among the functions of
consumed music- which keeps evoking memories of a language of immediacymay be that it eases men's suffering under the universal mediations, as if one were
still living face to face in spite of it all.76
V. Conclusion
Guitar Army's multiethnic and transnational encampments, the Dead Heads'
migratory gatherings, and Hong Kong's Coliseum concerts represent three

varieties of musical tachytopias: ideal, occasionally disruptive, short-lived
communities no less Utopian than More's literary fantasies or Oneida's real-life
social experiments. The activities of most Guitar Army soldiers, many Dead
Heads, and at least a few Hong Kong performers and audience members have
devolved upon social and political issues: other markers of utopianism. If utopia
as a category of critical discourse is ultimately about anything, it is about placeeven if, as Lefebvre points out in The Production of Space, places must be considered processes as well as forms of physical materiality. Tachytopian places may be
short-lived, but they are real: momentary creative-arts venues, as Jill Dolan points
out, where people come together, embodied and passionate, to share experiences
of meaning making and imagination that can describe or capture fleeting intima-
tions of a better world.77
75 BAKHTIN (1968), 10.
76 ADORNO (1988), 46.

77 DOLAN (2003), 21.
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The sheer power of such experiences, although temporally and geographically transient, cannot be discounted. Often they inspire self-improvement as well
as shared aesthetic experiences and transcendent social dreaming. As Timmi

Magic reports of one Acid House rave he attended in the 1980s, There wasn't
nothing stolen, nothing ruined - any animosity was lost. Everyone whipped
round to get some money together, when people were hungry, food was brought
in, drinks. It was a revolution, a dance revolution, James Baillie says of a similar experience. You felt like you were underground Russian revolutionaries.78
The logotopias, phonotopias, and tachytopias identified and evaluated in the

pages above illustrate the extraordinary power of music to provide transcendent
experiences and fulfill wishes: events, according to Richard Dyer, essentially

Utopian.79
Preliminary versions of portions of this paper were presented at the national meeting of the International Association of Societies of Popular Music, Charlottesville, Virginia, 13-16 October 2004; the
Fifty-first national meeting of the College Music Society, Atlanta, Georgia, 25-28 September 2008; and
the Crossroads cultural studies conference held at Lingnan University, Hong Kong, 17-21 June
2010.
Michael Saffle would like to thank Virginia Tech, especially the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences, for support in terms of attendance at two of the meetings identified above and on behalf
of this project as a whole. Hon-Lun Yang would like to acknowledge Hong Kong Baptist University
for support toward the completion of this project.
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VIRILIO, P. (2004). The Last Vehicle, trans. David Antal, in The Paul Virilio Reader, ed. Stephen Redhead. Columbia University Press, New York, 109-20.
WEGNER, Ph. E. (2002). Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories
of Modernity. University of California Press, Berkeley.
WHITWORTH, J. M. (1975). God's Blueprints: A Sociological Study of Three Utopian Sects.

Routledge & Kegan Paul, London and Boston.
WILLSON, R. B. (2009). Whose Utopia? Perspectives on the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra,

in Music & Politics, 3/2, 1-21.
340
M. Saffle - Hon-Lun Yang: Aesthetic and Social Aspects I IRASM ,DAeu A4 41 /94' 2: . 317341 i47 o*
Hon-Lun of Emerging Yang: Utopian Aesthetic Musical and Social Communities Aspects | ,DAeu IRASM 41 A4 (2010) /94' 2: . 317341 i47 o*
Saetak
Estetiki i drutveni aspekti nastajuih utopijskih glazbenih

zajednica
U lnku se identifciraju i istrauju vni aspekti utopijske misii i akcij vezanih uz

glazbu, osobito populamu glazbu, u nkoliko recentnih suvremenih stvarnih, zamiljanih i
virtualnih estetikih i drutvenih manifestacija. Termin utopija dolazi iz grkih rijei za ne
(ili dobro) i mjesto, sugerirajui neki imaginarni ili savren lokalitet. Za karakterizaciju
ovih i drugih usko vezanih utopijskih pojava rabe se tri nova termina. Prvi je logotopias
(logotopija, od grkih rijei za rije i mjesto) i oznauje imaginrn zajednice organizi
rane uglavnom oko tekstova; primjer za to je itateljstvo koje se okupilo oko asopisa Neue
Zeitschrift fr Musik Roberta Schumann tijekom 1830-ih i 1840-ih. Drugi je phonotopia
(fonotopija, od grkih rijei za zvuk i mjesto) i oznauje virtuln zajednice organizirane uglavnom oko snimljenog zvuka; fonotopijskim se mogu mtrati entuzijastiki sljedbenici Glenna Goulda, Artura Toscaninija, i do neke mjere pop skupin Beatles. Trei je tachytopias (tahitopija, od grkih rijei za brzo i mjesto) i oznauje zbiljske zajednice
organizirane oko povremenih, cesto retrospektivnih, dogadaja, pokatkad turistikog tipa
Posebna je pozornost upuena trima tahitopijama na podruju pop glazbe. Prva tahitopija
su zajednika okupljanja, javni protesti i koncerti koje organizira i pohada samoproglaen
Guitar Army (Gitarska armija) - termin kji je izmislio John Sinclair kako bi oznaio
solidamu i revolucionamu djelatnost u ime rock skupin MC5 - tijekom 1960-ih i 1970-ih u
Europi i SAD-u. Druga tahitopija bili su lutalaka skupina American Dead Heads i njihove
aktivnosti u SAD-u tijekom 1960-ih, 1970-ih, 1980-ih i 1990-ih. Trea tahitopija je podulji niz
koncerata Cantopopa (tj. populrn glazbe na kantonsko-kineskom jeziku), odran u Coliseumu u Hong Kongu tijekom ranih 2000-ih godina.
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Aesthetic and Social Aspects of Emerging Utopian Musical Communities

Author(s): Michael Saffle and Hon-Lun Yang

Aesthetic and Social

Hong Kong Baptist University

Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong

Original Scientific Paper

Izvorni znanstveni rad

Received: March 16, 2010

Primljeno: 16. oujka 2010.

aspects of Utopian thought and

and virtual aesthetic and social

characterize these and other,

closely related phenomena: logotoAlmost everyone who speaks English

enjoyable, escapist, idealistic, or revolutionary

the USA; the migratory American

nity West-Eastern Divan Orchepopular music: In 1974 Todd Rundgren's

Glenn Gould Arturo Toscanini

Guitar Army Frank Zappa

entitled Adventures in Utopia.1 At least Freak

auditoriums Hong Kong Hong

1 See ANONYMOUS (n.d.)

Anita Mui Connie Chan

IRA5M 41 * (2010) iOMtw 2: iti 317-341 | Qf Emergjng utopjan Musica| Communities

mentally disruptive. As Karl Mannheim explains, the quintessential^ Utopian

it is oriented towards objects which do not exist in ... actual situation[s]. In

rate disruptive and even dystopian elements: Lenin's economically radicalized

II. Music and Utopias Real and Imaginary

See JAMESON (2005).

as it satirizes a real one: sixteenth-century England under Henry VIII. On the

ILI Abstract and Concrete Utopias

utopias, so More's literary work exemplifies abstract utopias.13 Concrete

cal, nor are exclusively individualistic proposals and experiences altogether

II.2 Music as Essentially and Transcendently Utopian

Although many utopias, both abstract and concrete, have concerned

10 WHITWORTH (1975), 113.

12 See ORWELL (1950).

for transcendence.17 Just as there is something transcendent or spiritual (rather

II.3 Music in Abstract and Concrete Utopias

devoted to music-making was Ephrata, where- as Mary Bednarowsky has i

15 ROTHSTEIN (2003), 24.

17 Quoted in MUSIC (2008), 665.

crucial means of communicating [the] reclaimed unity of the genders.22 In every

II.4 Contemporary Concrete Musical Utopias: An Example

Occasionally a real-life Utopian experiment is carried out on behalf of music.

nities and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra represent familiar, long-term,

25 Ibid., (2009), 18.

III. Musical Utopias in Print, on Records, and On-line

impact of Schumann's unique editorial approach reached far beyond the

several smaller concrete Utopian societies- the Copenhagen Davidsbund, for

28 See ANDERSON (1991).

M. Saffle - Hon-Lun Yang: Aesthetic and Social Aspects I ^ (2010) 2: 317-341

professional publications publicly distributed and partially or entirely supported

publications, virtual homes for short-lived communities of radicalized readers who

take- whether by means of blogs, chat-rooms, or Facebook pages- it too may

activities, as one logger encourages actual concert attendance while another

III.2 Musical Phonotopias

30 HODGKINSON (2004), 227.

35 KEALY (1982), 101.

been- (re)presented through face-to-face festivals, parties, scholarly symposia,

Like many areas of technology, as Chad Thevenot observes, innovation in

retreated into the recording studio. Gould considered recorded music a

Gould's ideal atomized listener was replaced by thousands or millions of real-life

Phonotopias have also grown up around other celebrated artists and