Sitting in the back seat of a 4x4 in the Algerian Sahara desert outside of Timimoun, I watch as someone pulls out a phone to show a musical performance by a group of local women. Five people sit in a row on a long, low cushion, each with a drum in hand. The camera is fixed, the music a thick, multilayered tapestry. Individual voices blend in moments, but also waver in and out of tune with each other. The video is full of discordance that is nevertheless held together by the simple acoustic structure set by the drums.
A hardback copy of Sara Nadal-Melsió’s Europe and the Wolf is tucked into the seat pocket in front of me, grains of red sand gathering, via the wind, along its spine. I take the book out when I can spare a moment away from the research trip. My attention oscillates between a landscape often instrumentalized as a foil to European civilization, its ultimate limit, and Nadal-Melsió’s meticulous analysis of disharmony’s pivotal political role in a European project that is obsessed with the disavowal of such.
Europe and the Wolf traces the fraught polysemy of the “wolf”—the animal, the mythic symbol of threat and otherness, and also the dissonant interval in a tuning system invented in the Baroque era—as a loose conceptual framework to present close readings of artworks by Pere Portabella and Carles Santos, Allora & Calzadilla, Anri Sala, and Tarek Atoui. Nadal-Melsió maps the notion of “Europe” through each artist’s practice against the background of the Catalan independence movement, the uneasy colonial status of Puerto Rico, the violent conflict in Lebanon as a theater for European proxy wars, and in the challenge posed to Europe’s political imagination by its Former East and the dissolution of Yugoslavia. She follows “the figure of the wolf, an acoustic condensation that bears witness to the discontinuous and dissonant ensemble, the fragile organization of differences, that we call ‘Europe.’”
“Wolves are ontological refugees,” Nadal-Melsió writes, but a full sense of this thesis depends on the musicological meaning of the term. It was coined by tuners in the sixteenth century to describe the runaway sound produced as they tried to get an instrument into a standard range of harmonious notes. A wolf tone manifested in the body of the instrument, a deep resonance that, once initiated, was hard to control. Described as “the greatest challenge to the dream of complete harmonization,” a wolf emerges in response to music conceived as the regulated juxtaposition of acoustic difference. Nadal-Melsió's conceptual proposition is that the problem posed by the wolf—its disrespect for the national border or the acoustic fiction of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century musical harmony—is actually the horizon for political possibility as the European project breaks down.
For example: virtuoso pianist and eventual avant-garde conceptual artist Carles Santos is imprisoned in Catalonia in the early 1970s for his clandestine anti-fascist activism. There, he finds a piano that has not been tuned in years. He proceeds to perform an entire Bach sonata as an act of defiance both against the political regime that imprisons its dissidents and, Nadal-Melsió argues, against everything classically organized and represented by the acoustically neglected instrument. Here the wolf tone is unfettered from tuning; here it can bounce along corridors in a mockery of the state’s containment strategies. In another example from the same chapter, she describes a scene in a work by one of Santos’s long-term collaborators, the filmmaker Pere Portabella, in which long-distance truckers discuss their relationship to music before one of them plays a classical piece on a harmonica against the sonic landscape of oncoming traffic. The noise of working-class life under late capitalism jars with the regulated harmonious sound. Nadal-Melisó argues that classical music, throughout Santos’s and Portabella’s practices, is deployed as an expression of the fundamental fugitivity of the political subject, regardless of their apparent submission to state force or class violence.
But Europe and the Wolf isn’t a book about music. It articulates music as a conduit for a contingent solidarity. For instance, Nadal-Melsió’s extraordinary analysis of Allora & Calzadilla’s body of work finds its climax in a passage about Raptor’s Rapture (2012), a film which moves between close-up shots of a griffon vulture and of a flautist playing an Upper Paleolithic instrument made from the bones of the same species. “The gesture of putting the dead to our mouths” is compounded here: the flautist puts the remains of the bird that eats the dead to her mouth in order to make prehistoric sound in an art installation first shown in a World War II air-raid bunker in Kassel, Germany. The artists confront the viewer with the limits of humanist philosophy in the strangeness of the vulture’s consciousness; in human entanglement with the dead, human and nonhuman alike; in staging this groping, uncertain musical performance.
The question that persists, as I brush the book cover clean of sand and slide it into my backpack, is whether a rehabilitation of Europe, no matter how contingently described, is the most relevant project today. At the end of Europe and the Wolf, Nadal-Melsió describes Lebanese artist Tarek Atoui making field recordings in 2006. Detained, questioned, and abused in the custody of Hezbollah on the charge of espionage, the artist sustained severe injuries, including the loss of hearing in one ear. Nadal-Melsió reads Atoui’s subsequent shift to vibrations produced in the body without immediate or exclusive recourse to sound waves as an instance of listening to a kind of silent wolf tone. Looking over the Sahara’s ancient expanse of shifting rubble, I wonder if the transition Atoui’s work embodies is not better understood as one out of “Europe,” out of its acoustic fictions and its fantasies of ideal socio-sonic regulation.
Sara Nadal-Melsió’s Europe and the Wolf: Political Variations on a Musical Figure is published by Zone Books and distributed by Princeton University Press.
