Hostages Need iPods

By Scott Giles

Metaphors are sometimes apt but often tiresome. And when the subject matter is dire then metaphors can appear almost glib, disenfranchising and disrespectful. I say disenfranchising in the respect that an interval is widened between the object and the description.

At times this interval can be useful (we shall drag out the old saw of “the forest for the trees”), but distance may also insulate and it is this segregating factor that does the greatest disservice to the most important subjects (and by extension everyone concerned with the subject).

With this in mind I shall dispense with the metaphor of the Sword of Damocles.

The ultimate expression of the negation of life is the atomic bomb. Vita occisor. Is interficio vita quod alveus in ipsum.[1]

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At present there are about 20,000 nuclear weapons aimed at everyone. (Webster, Paul [July/August 2003]. "Just like old times," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 59:4: 30–35). Just think, when you wake up in the morning, when you wash dishes, go to work, eat lunch, watch TV…every waking and sleeping moment of your life you are a hostage. And somewhere in the back of your head you are constantly aware of it.

What omnology can describe the effects of this constant strain? What philosophy would explore the violent decadence of this state of affairs?

It must be questioned. Is it enough that it is questioned? Or are questions irrelevant?

An Ouroboros quandary…recursive, perhaps infinite. It is interesting to consider but apparently is ultimately unhelpful. And this is the consideration: “ultimately.” What is at the center goes beyond human hubris. Eventually, this is about the attempt of Death’s triumph over Life.

The atomic bomb is the expression of the conquest of Entropy. This is a forced entropy of brutal extinction…a vicissitude turning toward the Erebus of somber intent.

I believe that there has resulted from this a mutability of reality that surpasses escapism, prompting a dash deeper into an affected technological future where the artificial is the ultimate aesthetic expression. Surpassing Borg idealism, where the factitious enhances the natural, our quiet panic requires the repudiation of the authentic…even dissolution of the natural world for the absolute civilized.

Some would say that this is not caused by the specter of the bomb but that the bomb is the result of this aforementioned rush from the intrinsic to a fairyland of mechanized teats, both sustaining and entertaining.

Maybe this “chicken or the egg” query would yield something important. Perhaps. But it is certain that the present latitude is untenable. A deadly dread shadows the world and seeks an embrace whose progeny is nonexistence.

Nex volo concubitus per orbis terrarum. Is somnium obscurum quod suus atrum somnium contamino sterilis, cynicis, vehemens. In terminus, is volo sulum futurus a maculo somes spargo in infractus vicus.2

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[1] The murderer of Life. It kills life and basks in itself.

2 Death wants to f--- the world. It dreams darkness and its dark dreams infect the vain, the cynical, the violent. In the end, it wants everyone to be a defiled corpse lying in a broken street.

The Great War

Expressionism was an attempt to make manifest inner motivation into the outside world. Psychological, subconscious motivation, more than any external happenings, is the source of drama.

This is the reason that Lulu, at the end of Pabst’s Pandora’s Box, is killed by Jack the Ripper. To an 18^th Century critic fed on the philosophy of Enlightenment, the story wouldn’t make sense. To him, for no reason at all, the heroine is killed by some character who suddenly appears at the end of the story, whose only purpose is apparently to quickly bring the drama to an abrupt and arbitrary close.

To an Expressionist, though, it makes every bit of sense. As Louise Brooks, who so masterfully portrayed Lulu, said of her character, “It is Christmas Eve, and she is about to receive the gift that has been her dream since childhood: death by a sexual maniac.” In true Expressionist style, the maniac emerges from the foggy gas-lit darkness to fulfill her subconscious desire and her destiny.

It makes sense.

Kafka, of course, was the darling of the Expressionists but one may easily site Tolstoy as the grandfather of the movement. It was Tolstoy whose dynamic observations and keen psychological insights inspired Expressionism. Tolstoy was Freud’s favorite author.

In the early 20^th Century there were other art movements with their own attendant philosophies. These philosophies each sought to give meaning to a world that seemed to be becoming chaotic or to, at least, underline the seriousness of the state of things.

The Naturalists presented life as it appeared to be. In a play, a man may go to the bathroom sink, shave, then go into the next room and put his shoes on and leave. In earlier plays this wouldn’t happen. Too boring.

But the Naturalists saw in this realistic (even mundane) portrayal a truth. Perhaps even seeing the character going through a ritual of grooming and girding himself for what comes next. The apparently insignificant (again a nod to psychology) has hidden meaning.

The Objectivists sought to distance themselves from drama. Or, more accurately, to present the material and let the audience supply their own emotional investment without recourse to artificiality. Stravinsky was speaking as an arch Objectivist when he said, “Music can express nothing…. It expresses itself, which it does eloquently.”

As Barry Paris wrote in his excellent biography of Louise Brooks, the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) was a “…movement…developing in reaction to Expressionism. Disillusionment was its emotional source, and indifference its attitude…. That indifferent attitude stemmed from the corruption and apparent meaninglessness of European life between the world wars.” It is safe to say, though, that this nihilism had another, even darker source.

Consider that these artistic movements were not insignificant. In the 18^th and early 19^th Century, philosophy had, with some noteworthy exceptions, the quality of a parlor game. But by the 20^th there was a desperate earnestness to philosophy.

These artists of the Teens and Roaring 20s were seeking a means by which society, even civilization itself, might survive. For the 20^th Century had begun with a bang.

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The First World War was a cataclysm. It was a “dirty” war, without clear objectives, motivated by politics and fought on an immense scale. It was hard to be Romantic about it (unless one were, maybe, a pilot). Soldiers trudged through mud, lived in trenches, were gassed, machine-gunned, bombed, incinerated, caught on the wire and left to rot or died of disease. The civilian populace itself was targeted. And this war, or something very near like it, was expected.

Numerous writers of the 19^th Century warned of it. The most brilliant, like Wells, were able to prognosticate in great detail. Many anticipated the 20^th Century to be a period of intense change, severe mechanization and unparalleled violence. Significantly, Richard Strauss subtitled his tone poem, Also Sprach Zarathrustra (Thus Spoke Zarathruustra, about the ancient philosopher Zoeraster, who after spending 30 years living with the eagle and the bear, surviving and contemplating, awoke one morning and greeted the rising sun. And the sun said to him to go down. Down to the villages and speak to his fellow men and tell them of the things he had learned), “Symphonic Optimism for the 20^th Century.” Tellingly, the piece does not end on a happy note.

A Hungarian word, robotnic, meaning, “slave,” began to have import. The Robot was seen as a symbol of the coming age. It was the slave, the servant and also the dehumanizing machine and New Adam. The Robot and later the Airplane were symbols of the Future. And often in the 19^th Century mind this was a dystopian future. A future of gigantic warfare and Millennialism.

It is a pity that Victoria, who died in the very first year of the 20^th Century, (as befitting the end of her era) was not a better queen. In her reign the sun truly did not set on the British Empire. England was the superpower. Yet, for all its wealth and might, it was full of the impoverished. And despite the warnings of her writers and best intelligencia, the Great War loomed.

Had these forewarnings been heeded and had there at least been a more decent social consciousness, the whole shape of the 20^th Century would have been different. The Serbian problem would have been taken care of. And even if it hadn’t, the political state could have been engineered so that the assassination of the Arch Duke Ferdinand would merely have been an item in the paper, of no world-shattering importance.

But this is not what happened. The warnings were ignored with a charming sort of blithe hope-for-the-best Positivist attitude. The expected war happened. And from it an experiment in Utopian Realism made manifest in violence, the 1917 Revolution. And also from The Great War: The Armenian Genocide, World War II, The Holocaust, The Long March, the Viet Nam War, the Cold War. The Atom Bomb.

We’ve been fighting the Great War continuously.

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Romanticism was a philosophy prevalent in the 19^th Century. It said, among other things, that our emotions matter. One isn’t angry for no reason; there must be something to be angry about. It was a series of ideas that actually gave legitimacy to emotion in a way that Enlightenment never did.

The artistic movements of the early part of the 20^th Century carried on the personal gestalt of Romanticism into the mechanized age. But whereas the Romantics focused on color, Eros, heroism and beauty, the art movements of the 20^th Century generally reflected the mystery of the subconscious and the dark, black dissonant recesses of the human soul.

The 20s were a kind of reaction against the hideousness of the war years. People tried to find beauty once again, but more usually degenerated into a dazzling debauched decadence without any purpose except escape.

The Great War had been fought with weak leadership, often corrupt industrialists and, as previously mentioned, no clear goals. Could the attitudes or even artistic color of the 1920s been any different? The chroma of 20^th Century (and now 21^st Century) art was set.

And because of the lack of solid objectives the conclusion of World War I was, in reality, no conclusion at all. The unfinished business would be picked up time and time again and the conflict would be waged in every part of the world, claiming billions of lives and shaping every significant social, philosophical and artistic movement.

In Tempor Bellum January 20^th, 2007

Halbierte Abbildung, The Story Continues! Part 3

Halbierte Abbildung has not turned out to be as non-tonal as previously planned. It is, rather, a-tonal. There are sections that have cropped up that turned out to be in d minor, Bb major and modal structures recurrently influence its direction. Traditional harmonies riddle the work.

This is not because I wanted to do the old saw where we have the nightmare/nuclear holocaust non-tonal dissonant music answered by the happy ending in C Major. The story of the Phoenix has been told enough for now.

The tonal music is part of the logic of the work. Indeed, these are not references to 18^th and 19^th Century common practice. Reference is often, (though not always) something just tacked on. The tonal material here is integral to the identity of the music.

The association of dissonance with angst, horror and depression strikes me, at best, as hokey but generally simply as primitive and childish. Not everything needs to be powerful, but indubitably the most robust method of producing emotion is as the product of reason. An A Major chord can be as desolate as a C minor so long as they flow from a logic that is a kind of mapping procedure of drama onto the template of the musical fabric.

When a character in a play weeps it may be comical or sad or nothing much at all, depending on the context. Our response depends on the reasons for the weeping. Context, more than anything, generates emotion. Logic, too, governs not just the organization of music (the difference between noise and music is organization) but its expressive impact as well.

I find many parts of Halbierte Abbildung to be beautiful. If a musician were to regard the score without listening to it in their mind’s ear, they would see sections of unrelenting sharp dissonances. This musician would assume it to be a harsh work mean enough to set one’s teeth on edge.

This is no such thing. Many components are lonely, haunting, spectral and romantic. Certainly it would be difficult to mistake much of it for Cole Porter, nonetheless its lyricism is obvious.

And yes, I use the word “much” as the last movement continues the trends set in the first movement but with a greater generative ferocity. So much that Jazz (or, for the sake of purists we will say “Jazz-sounding”) music flowers out of the abiding premeditated musical substance.

I am happy with this composition.

Nature Holds Hands With Man

So here we are at the end of the world. Or at least, as was a popular phrase in Science Fiction movies in bygone years, “The End of the World As We Know It.”

And, frankly, I don’t feel fine.

Nature has teamed up with its old nemesis, Man, to inject a little drama into the history of the world. Or perhaps they plan to bring the whole story to a screeching, agonizing end. We’ll have to stay tuned to see how it comes out.

The mechanism is attached to the warming of our climate through ad hoc, even impulsive, industrialization. This will give rise to failed crops, starvation, disease, flooding and the inevitable political spasms known popularly as wars. (Perfect drama for celestial sweeps week).

On the positive side, we don’t have to worry so much about that overpopulation problem we’ve been fretting about for the last forty years. That will be taken in hand quite readily.

That Nature and Man should become such perfect bedfellows would, in other circumstances, be a cause for rejoicing, but their distinctive, grandiose cleansing program, set on sterilizing the biosphere of the most troublesome of the planetary inhabitants, ironically will create more panic than merriment.

“Will,” future tense, as circumstances haven’t deteriorated enough to freak out the man on the street. By the time he gets scared it is just a matter of time before the elites start loosing sleep. Eventually, when they are uncomfortable enough, we might get some action on handling the predicament.

The dungaree-ed dub thumping college student peacenik will whine that by then it’ll be too late. We need action now! That’s crap, though. It’s been too late.

This is a done deal.

We cannot follow Barney’s admonition to Andy and “Nip it in the Bud.” It is time, now, to deal with the reality. Just as any adult (real one, mind you) must deal with reality. The dynamic duo of Nature and her idiot child have sealed our fate.

Any crisis, even fatal ones, can be managed. There are several steps and the result will be a horrible catastrophe…but one that is not as heartbreakingly excruciating. For many of the population (a painless way of describing actual people with feelings and throbbing hearts) the situation is terminal. But it is possible for human culture to endure.

And we won’t use labels such as “Global Warming.” Yes, it’s accurate. More freakin’ accurate than “El Niño!” (Remember a few years ago El Niño was the darling scapegoat of a moronic media?) But labels seem to somehow make it all a little unreal. We do best with nameless threats. Let’s not call it anything.

Nature now holds hands with Man. This is not the utopia we wanted nor is it the tender and downy union we had hoped. The menace accelerates like water down a pipe. Hold your nose; here comes the cold water.

The calamity is on top of us. We are living in it. These are the early days of The End of The World As We Know It.

Correggio's Danae

Recently I was looking at Danae, by Correggio. Antonio Allegri Correggio (1489—1534) was a rather sad fellow, fretful and disheartened who is said to have denied himself happiness in its many forms. He was rather different from Raphael, who was a happy party boy who screwed around every chance he got. Correggio was a contemporary of Leonardo and was generally admired, even liked, by other painters (not necessarily a given!).

Danae is a strange painting. Muted, greenish colors, darkness next to an open window…and let’s not forget the angel doing something with that naked lady’s blanket! I’ve got to admit that I don’t know the story of Danae. I imagine there are several Danae’s and each has a story, but I’m happy as well not to know. For, even though I can look it up easily enough, if I knew the story, that might take some of the charismatic weirdness from this image.

The attitude of the nude (nude woman, not spirit. After all, all the humanoid figures here are naked), is intriguing. Legs spread; massive long arms, head tilted down, eyes looking at nothing (is she high?), and seemingly uncomfortably propped up in bed.

The angel (with a diminutive penis) is not looking at her. He’s looking up. At God? At a fill light?! This muscular, winged youth, who inclines his body toward Danae, is at once also detached from her.

Is he offering her the sheet to cover her nakedness or is he pulling it away? It looks like she is pulling it back but whatever they are doing, they both seem only half interested.

Half interested, as opposed to the cherubs, the fat baby angels who are involved in something that has their total occupation. Are those kids playing with an arrow?

There is a light source out of frame to the right. The window, which occupies the left of the picture, does not seem to admit any luminosity. Outside we see a distant little building with two arches and the impression of hazy hills. The sky is a murky aqua.

The composition is solid. The fat babies in the lower right balance the window in the upper left. They do so imperfectly, adding a pleasing dynamic. As well, the larger figure of Danae is roughly the same size as the window, while the angel is roughly the size of the fat babies. One of the winged bambini leans back while the angel leans forward. The shadow side of the figures is toward to window, which is light. This is a composition of point and counterpoint.

This serenely erotic tableau of muted colors is full of interlocking relationships. There is a whole story with the pillows and the bed, a big story with the textures…and this is to ignore the most obvious point and counterpoint, the angel leaning forward while Danae leans back (in a state of cool receptivity?). The little willied angel looks up while the naked lady looks down. One can go on and on.

This appears at first glance a simple picture, but its intermingled composition of dynamic opposites makes it so much more. This is the work of a master.

Halbierte Abbildung in Progress Part 2

A considerable amount of time has elapsed since I began work on this. I began in the last week of November and here this piece and I are in the first week of January and I am not yet done. I was stuck for an ending and in my search found that the ending was two movements away.

It is now a symphony. Not a terribly long one. The first movement is just over 35 minutes. The second, scored for brass alone, is almost seven and the last movement is presently about 22 minutes long and will go on for something like ten more minutes. If I were to get exhaustive in the development the piece could go on for more than an hour and a half, but I’ve chosen only to hit the highlights, as it were, and chop down the machinery to only the most interesting and potent material.

That said, there is a certain amount of fabric that is repeated, at times with only slight variation. I’m not sure why this happens. And it always amazes me that I, the creator, am ignorant of aspects of my creation. This very thing that I have written has mystery. Mystery I do not comprehend.

A composer directs a fluid. The music flows, following a course that is quite natural, a fate innate, inherent to it own tissues, dictated by its own internal forces. The music’s journey is governed by its specific logic to a fateful state of equilibrium. Once the machination of the material…the engine, is built and started…the vehicle of the composition caries it to its logical conclusion. I may nudge it here and there along the way but only to steer it away from stagnant waters, sudden deaths, fragmented or staid harmonies and other dramatic mortal pitfalls. I direct it slightly for its health.

I compose a lot of symphonies and was looking forward to writing something that wasn’t another symphony…but the material demanded a full development and it is a certain type of vanity to deny material its natural tendency.