Note by The Saker: when I first read this paper I was, frankly, baffled. In my past I had studied musical theory (including dodecaphonism) and political science (including Marxism), but it never crossed my mind to combine these two. This essay does exactly that and while I do find this combination rather strange, I also find it very original and interesting. I hope that you will enjoy it too!
The Saker
The Music of the Beast: a historicist portrait
by Francis P. Ubertelli, D.M.A. for The Saker Blog
In 1516, in Thomas More’s socio-political satire Utopia, all forms of government constitute a “conspiracy of the rich,”[1] who, claiming the right to the administrative supervision of public management, are only interested in their own privilege. Henry VIII agreed with it during his break with the papacy through the Act of Supremacy of 1534,[2] an insane stroke of pride for Anne Boleyn’s heart. Then the Church belonged to him.
Any conspiracy is born of a context in favor of a cause. In this, it is a political statement. What can one say of the Apostles in the fourth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, in which none of them called anything they possessed their own? Was it a gesture recalling a certain Platonic collectivism? [3] Rather, it was self-denial for the sake of another’s good, “charity,” the best definition freedom has ever known, which triumphed. However, if the master one seeks to serve is man — a woman, in the case of Henry VIII — why would the greatness received at conception, the Image of God, demean itself in such a way whereas it insatiably cherishes a natural appetite for the endlessness of the hereafter? According to Church tradition on morals, it is God therefore whom man rejects in order to embrace a false freedom (necessarily), a freedom as far as possible from the One whom “it cannot even be conceived not to exist.” [4]
In 1848, also in England, Karl Marx published his Communist Manifesto and noted that the society of his time, Manchester and South Lancashire of the 1830–40s, through criticism of capitalism, was but “the history of class struggles.” [5] In the Manifesto, the bourgeoisie brought on the industrial revolution, overwhelmed the instruments of production, created enormous cities, world markets, and the proletarian working-class, useful as long as “the laborer lives merely to increase capital.” [6] Such abuse — the deterioration of the proletarian condition in the face of the growth of capitalism — urges the author to put the blame on the bourgeoisie, guilty of all troubles, to single it out as incapable of ruling society. Thus, he recommends the abolition of private property and the right of inheritance for the sake of the centralization of credit in the hands of the State, on top of free public schooling for children, in order to glorify the only Welfare State, the new conspiracy. The war cry for the liberation of the proletariat, following the passing of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, [7] became the spearhead against the “social murder” [8] perpetrated by the bourgeoisie; another conspiracy.
This desire for freedom in the face of industrial (and bourgeois?) tyranny was naturally justified, but it lit the fire of trade unionism as a means of collective management of the material entities of production, while atheistic Communism, its political arm, was nothing else than another fight against Western civilization in its desire to “uproot the foundations of civil society at large.” [9]
The historical events of this article are determined by the ideas that these events put forward, and not by cogitation of social interactions, as if one were to define the narrative of the Third Republic by the Dreyfus affair. Thus, they oppose the historic materialism of the conception of history that a certain Marx and Engels had indeed proposed in 1845.
This atheistic Communism, with its anarcho-unionist ideas, was nothing but a “false messianic idea, a pseudo-ideal of justice, equality and fraternity,” [10] because it considered human society through the lens of a material form evolving toward a universe without a specific working class and above all, without God, the God of the Apostles from the book of Acts, since Communism promotes uniformity between spirit and matter, soul and body, a universe in favor of humanity’s “progress” (evolutionist materialism calling Darwin to the rescue). The new society had to be freed from God’s dogma, it was proclaimed, because God is unbearable. God is man, yes, God ought to be man! The Christian God has to die.
In 1882, Nietzsche, having tried to steer humanity from faith to will (the nihilist force against Marx’s destructive force), having conceived art as the fusion of Apollonian and Dionysiac artistic impulses, concluded in the cosmic statement “God is dead,” [11] sealing, from that point forward, the advent of a man descended from a new humanity, the Übermensch, a physical metaphor that succeeded the Lutheran and Protestant reality of America, the new Communist El Dorado after Russia. But America would be neo-Marxist, although much later (or would it?).
Music, in its representation of social values and change that it embodies in man, reacted to these upheavals and organized itself around the Schoenberg phenomenon, later financed by the new CIA from the Truman era. [12] It subsequently broke up into multiple academic ivory towers that followed diverse esthetic and political philosophical trends. It tamed a vast post-war public to be unknowingly in favor of Communist ideas, believing that the relinquishment of classic harmony served the ambitions of an expressivity that was finally new, the Übermensch, but again, without being perfectly aware of it. In the meantime, the over-emphasis on twelve-tone music was regretted, [13] but it was too late, as the Avant-garde virus had won over both hearts and morals.
The twelve-tone music puts Marxist ideas into sound
In 1908, the composer Arnold Schoenberg wrote the fourth movement of his second string quartet, the first twelve-tone music ever written. Such a work, because of the author’s prodigious writing technique and renown, stirred up a flood of questions and a lot of discomfort. For some, it was as if a flabbergasted audience was suddenly forced to pay serious attention to an infant banging on a piano keyboard and applaud; for others, it was a perfectly incomprehensible genius that nevertheless had to be heard.
The ideas and philosophical principles behind the work — unless the historical evidence is false — come from a Communist conception of humanity (Marx) and from a syntactical war against meaning, against the “signifier,” i.e., against everything that carries meaning (an anticipated Derrida). Since the members of the proletariat do not know private property, they will erase all sense of belonging so the working class itself will vanish. [14] Individualism will dissolve for the sake of the collective (distinctions will no longer exist; no individuality will be allowed). For music, the chromatic scale’s twelve semitones (the semitones inside a scale) will become equivalent, without any differences between them, without any affiliation to any individual chord at all, without any harmonic functional prevalence. Unprecedented!
A popular key to this concept was Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, A Space Odyssey in 1968. Kubrick fabricated hallucinogenic images with fanatical, mechanistic precision, consistently deploying György Ligeti’s music as planetary commentaries on “elemental states of undifferentiation (a primordial void),”[15] in order to put some of Nietzsche’s cosmic ideas on screen, doing justice, at that time, to the turmoil within the Catholic Church during the Second Vatican Council. He gave birth to a new Nietzschean Messiah with an ambiguous message of distorted hope, a dystopian allegiance to the machines and the New World Order to come. This appeared to be the best use of twelve-tone music: fear, unknown, horror, morbid fascination, the chant of the damned.
Sonic iconoclasm
Music is a collection of frequencies that sympathize in relation to one another; it creates movements in the soul. Since the Renaissance, once Gregorian chant had reached its peak, music began to focus more and more around the dominant-tonic tonal center of attraction (dominant chords are naturally attracted by the tonic, where they find their rest), up until the widespread predominance of classic harmony in the 18th century, which itself lasted around two hundred years. This historically informed prevalence stopped with Schoenberg in 1908. There was then a cryptic metamorphosis of tonal harmony toward atonal harmony. This progressive effort lasted 63 years, culminating in Boulez’s inflammatory declaration that the primacy of the dominant-tonic tonal center of attraction had lost its influence in the hands of composers who now wished to rebuild music, a new music “freed from the tyranny of classic tonality.” [16]
The twelve pitches of the scale suddenly became equal, with no differences between them. Through an algebraized syntactic structure, each pitch ceased to be compatible with the developmental forces of classic harmony’s center of attraction before dissolving into an anonymous collective. Only motion, colors and dynamics guaranteed some measure of understanding.
The semitone would fill the proletarian’s field of view; the other semitones, erected in identical, imperceptible structures, would be totally inaccessible to the average ear. The most macabre conspiracy that has ever existed will always be the one in which the twelve-tone reality is raised to the rank of learned music. It is the Iron Curtain between classic beauty and the abstraction of aesthetic ugliness, the Christian heritage and its hypnotic destruction.
John Cage et Pierre Boulez
The security of twelve-tone music is the determinism and predictability of its constitutive material. Whereas tonal music follows the quest of melody, micro-melody, leitmotif, aria, harmonic variation or the accompanying harmony, twelve-tone music embraces an ideology of disorder where classic beauty is seen as a discordant opinion, an anachronism.
In 1952, Cage laid the Dadaist foundations of music without musicians, referring back to the destruction of man by man (music by the codified absence of performers and notated sound), the same diabolical nihilism of Auschwitz-Birkenau ten years earlier. Nineteen years later, Boulez would declare that all the art of the past must be destroyed, “cutting the umbilical cord connecting the public to the past.” [17] There will never be any artistic conventions built around silence unless music is made of something other than sound. Likewise, there will never be any social conventions built around man unless society is made of something other than man. The annihilation of Western music precedes the annihilation of Western civilization. It is the second-last conspiracy.
The “Chinese” virus and the Neo-Marxist West
Like constructed chaos, the current pandemic brought about a ban on working, forced isolation, fear, the unknown, debt, hunger; namely, the reduction of individualism to similitude … to an abandoned, unstructured sound in which the lack of context forms a supposedly understandable architecture. It is the music of the ruin of all rights, institutions, property and human society itself, a Cagean silence in which all the musicians have been brutally strangled and can no longer produce sound, whose corpses rot for months on an abandoned stage whispering the misophonic music of the burying beetles who quietly eat them.
Each individual is a semitone of no interest to the collective, although he remains closely watched. As soon as he stands out, he is obliterated. A fearsome paradox. It is the Beast singing the modern man’s new servitude, still unaware of the sensational liberties he has enjoyed since the Second World War which are now fading to the point of dissolution within a new collective under surveillance, the ultimate conspiracy.
Individuality is therefore necessary to battle collectivism, to contradict the Beast.
Francis Patrick Ubertelli is a “Composer, teacher, writer. Studied in Rome and Toronto. Faith and Reason shaking hands.”
La Caponiera, April 2020
https://ubertelli.com
“The Music of the Beast, a historicist portrait” copyright © 2020
by Francis Patrick Ubertelli, all rights reserved
- Artur Blaim, “A Conspiracy of the Rich: Dystopianizing the Real in More’s Utopia.” Utopian Studies Vol. 27 № 3 On the Commemoration of the Five Hundredth Anniversary of Thomas More’s Utopia—Part II (2016): 601. ↑
- Bernard Bourdin, La genèse théologico-politique de l’État moderne. Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 2004: 21. ↑
- In the Republic, Plato describes an ideal of wealth sharing, the Commonwealth, where there would be a community of proprieties, of meals and of women. The State would control education, marriage, births, citizens’ activity and distribution of goods. This ideal would respect the perfect equality of conditions and careers of every citizen of both sexes. Yet, Plato’s goal was individual well-being, not the State’s extension. In 1822, Charles Fourier, in his Traité de l’association domestique-agricole, would go as far as to propose a guaranteed minimum wage in connection with comfortable means of existence. ↑
- St. Anselm of Canterbury, Proslogium; Monologium: An Appendix In Behalf Of The Fool By Gaunilo; And Cur Deus Homo. Translated by Sidney N. Deane. Chicago, The Open Court Publishing Company, 1903, reprinted 1926. ↑
- From the very first sentence of the first chapter, Bourgeois and Proletarians. ↑
- Chapter Two, Proletarians and Communists. ↑
- George R. Boyer, “Poor Relief, Informal Assistance, and Short Time during the Lancashire Cotton Famine.” Explorations in Economic History № 34 (1997): 56. ↑
- Expression of shock from Friedrich Engels in his book The Condition of the Working Class in England written in 1844. Translated by G. Badia and J. Frédéric (Paris: Éditions sociales, 1960): 101. The Communist ideology would not have been possible without him. ↑
- Pope Leo XIII, Encyclical Quod. Apostolici muneris, December 28, 1878 (Acta Leonis XIII, vol. I): 46, thus continuing Pope Pius IX’s condemnation in Qui pluribus where “such a doctrine would be a complete ruin of all rights, institutions, proprieties, and human society itself.” ↑
- Pope Pius XI, Encyclical Divini redemptoris, § 8, March 19, 1937. ↑
- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science. Book III, Aphorism 108, New Struggles. Translated by A. Vialatte (Paris: Gallimard, 1950): 152. Book V, Aphorism 343, We Fearless Ones, confirms that faith in the Christian God has been cut off from its plausibility. The “Death of God” means the death of the supersensible and the unilateral refusal of ideas on which existed the Christian civilization. The death of God is the condition for the freedom of man. Such a death marked the beginning of nihilism. The sign of the new man, the superman who will be in a position to establish new values replacing “the old,” is inseparable from the Death of God. ↑
- Amy Beal, “Negotiating Cultural Allies: American Music in Darmstadt, 1946–1956,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 53, № 1 (Spring 2000): 105–39. ↑
- Microfilm 1949, Records of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Section (MFAA) of the Reparations and Restitution Branch, OMGUS, 1945–1951 [RG 260, 43 rolls]. National Archives and Records Administration, Washington DC, 2008. ↑
- Philippe Chenaux, Humanisme intégral (1936) de Jacques Maritain (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2006): 44. ↑
- David W. Patterson, “Music, Structure and Metaphor in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey,” American Music 22, № 3 (Autumn 2004): 449. Ligeti’s music consists of superposed atonal counterpoint. ↑
- Pierre Boulez and his inflammatory words, in Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Ed., Orientations. Écrits, Pierre Boulez. Translated by Martin Cooper (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986): 481. ↑
- In 1971, in Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Ed., Orientations. Écrits, Pierre Boulez, ibid. ↑
The more wholesome alternative to non-tonality is sacred pan-tonality, in which the formulas of conventional classical music are largely ignored but the spiritual qualities of the notes and keys are observed. Scriabin dabbled in this genre but he was diverted by his own Anti-Christly tendencies. What we really need are collaborations between experts on music (like Scriabin, Kapustin) and experts on spirituality (Solovyov).
The real Music of the Proletariat is much more harmful than mere “classical” music: it is Lady Gaga, P-Diddy, Justin Bieber and their ilk. The sheer effort required to listen to Scriabin, Feinberg, Mosolov and Roslavets may be too much mental and spiritual exercise to be entirely harmful, unless Scriabin really did practice sorcery as he claimed.
Maybe the traditional aristocracies were more easily overthrown by godless communists/capitalists because they were spiritually weakened by confusing avant-garde music. Yet, the proletariat would benefit from this very same music if they could bear it in place of the unambiguously satanic drivel they so love. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4y2iJJQfXI
“Hell is full of musical amateurs ; music is the brandy of the damned.”
George Bernard Shaw
I listened to some of this Schoenberg – meh. It only confirms the truly modern ethos:
Rock and roll will never die!
I really like music from the post-war era on (except disco and a few others), but some videos I watched about Laurel Canyon and it’s connection to the see-eye-aye’s em-kay ultra programmes made me wonder exactly what is behind it all…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ag_Noz4WfdM&list=PLc72c9omb9kczeQyB7Xvwt-pfg-jc-7eI
In college I took a basic course in the history of music; the name of it was Music 1.
At the end of the course we reached atonal music. Because it was part of the history of music and part of the course, I had to listen to it. I thought it was garbage and nonsense and ugly and a joke. It certainly wasn’t music.
Most of the classical canon of composers from the madrigalists to the romantics, passing through the Early and Late Baroque, Early and Late Classical, Early and Late Romantics, and on to the great popular composers of the Broadway stage, drew heavily and consciously on the musical Gut (German alert) of the people: their dance forms, their melodies, their song plots, their rhythms, their instruments, the tonalities they and their instruments used, their pageant of traditional characters and costumes and festivals, their singing techniques. (Just as the classical dramatists drew on the tales generated by generations of folk tales and folk epics.) The feedstock of the lyricism and emotional power of the canonical “classics” was the music created by farmers and rovers and other folk over the ages (with a small possible boost from monastic chants, but as far as i can see Gregorian chant was kind of a dead end and has left few traces in the folk or classical canon). Imposing some tonal order in the sense of developing the major and minor scales out of multiple modes, giving the tones names, figuring out the mathematical relationships that underlay their emotional impact, figuring out how to manipulate the math and physics to develop ever more expressive and powerful instruments such as the piano, the modern brass instruments, the modern string instruments, the saxaphone—all of this was frosting on the cake, working out the details, of the enormous musical resources that resides, or used to reside, in the people.
I grew up singing folk songs and figuring out the harmonies for the proper chords on an old ship’s piano we had. This was before the “folk revival.” Much later I became interested in simple music theory, because it actually helped me understand the basic piano pieces I wanted to play, and also helped me understand and correct certain mistakes I would constantly make. Soon I became fascinated with the system qua system, of which I grasp only a tiny fraction. Recently I had reason to wonder what is the dominant chord of a minor scale. I googled the question and found myself reading a fascinating discussion. There is little agreement on what constitutes the dominant chord of a minor scale, but the differing reasoning was the result of differing opinions on the relationship between the two most important tones in a (Western) scale. The importance of the tones is kind of axiomatic. You can hear it. Your ear leads your emotions and the brain follows.
I am sure it is an oversimplification, but to me the whole atonal business was a scam, intellectual BS, a bad joke. It assaulted the ear. Yet I had learned music by ear. So had hundreds of generations of humans going back to the dawn of human time. Different societies have a different concept of what is a beautiful sound or the proper type of principal scale. In India, in the Middle East, in the Far East, these sound systems differ from those of Western Europe. But they are all recognizable as musical systems, with hierarchies of tones and combinations of tones that evoke powerful emotions. Most people raised in one system can nevertheless either immediately or over time, with familiarity, tune in to the strange system and feel similar emotional alignments as the musical “natives.”
So where would atonal music fit in to a human scheme? IMHO it simply does not. It is inhuman and artificial and could only have arisen from the mind of someone who (1) hates music, and (2) is utterly musically deracinated to the extent that he no longer feels any connection to the thousand of years of music that have gone before him, and (3) utterly and forcibly detaches himself and his ear from music in order to produce a weird graphic image that sort of looks like music by means of his quill pen or typewriter or whatever, but that the ear rejects as “music.” To what purpose? Fling s— against a white wall? Epater la bourgeoisie?
“Atonal music” is an oxymoron.
Katherine
.
For me it has been a long, long climb up the scale of understanding. In retrospect I see clearly we were all terribly harmed by the travesty of learning at the top of the American intellectual pyramid. All our teachers and authorities told us to admire and emulate the historians, artists, composers, architects, and what have you ensconced in the houses of learning.
I wasted so much time and energy trying to understand, assimilate, and ultimately love what has turned out to be utter garbage. My instincts were like an instrument panel with all the lights flashing red. But I “knew” that my feelings must be wrong. Hadn’t I been told that so many times? And I was so keen to conform to social authorities.
Katherine, your recounting of your own experiences has brought all this painful personal history back. And yes, it is appropriate to say “Thank you”. So much bitter irony!
I have to also say that your comment helped me see why your comments have so much value.
I will share a firm conviction: It takes a great deal of intellectual power to be truly stupid.
You need never fear for Joe Sixpack. Look at the upper floors of the great skyscrapers for the real fools.
Hi, Ed,
I’m glad my experience and comment resonates with you.
Re “I will share a firm conviction: It takes a great deal of intellectual power to be truly stupid. ”
I guess a lot of people get paid to be stupid.
Repressing and denying the obvious also wastes a huge amount of personal and social energy. .
cheers, Katherine
Katherine
Hi, Ed,
I’m glad my experience and comment resonates with you.
Re “I will share a firm conviction: It takes a great deal of intellectual power to be truly stupid. ”
I guess a lot of people get paid to be stupid.
Repressing and denying the obvious also requires, and wastes, a huge amount of psychic and social energy. .
cheers, Katherine
Apologies for double post glitch!
i don’t know how that happened.
Katherine
I am afraid the author is seeing connections where none is to be seen. Schönberg’s fourth movement of his 2nd string quartet is very touching music. He wrote mostly strictly classically organised music, although there are some exceptions, Erwartung being one of them. There is no such thing as atonal music, a buzz word. The 2nd viennese school used the terms free tonal and twelve tone. Schönberg’s Violin Concerto Op. 37 for example is my absolute favourite of the genre, the 1st movement thoughtful, the 2nd touching and the 3rd a firework. No attack on traditional values intended. And no connection to the communist working class movement and Marxism at all.
Schönberg’s music requires curiosity, patience and concentration. It’s not consumerism. You may find it annoying, but music from the 14th century may also annoy listeners who are not used to it.
He was connected to the Frankfurt School which is definitely connected to Marxism.
@” For music, the chromatic scale’s twelve semitones (the semitones inside a scale) will become equivalent, without any differences between them, without any affiliation to any individual chord at all, without any harmonic functional prevalence. Unprecedented!”
I agree with the author’s thesis, that Marxist political ideas of democratic equality and revolutionary freedom underpin Schoenberg’s musical revolution of “12 tones equal to one another” and “emancipation of the dissonance”. The rest, as they say, is noise.
But the atonal noise is dying down in academic circles, same as Marxist materialism is dying in socialist circles. The attempt to abandon religion was the biggest mistake of the Russian Revolution. Age old rules of harmony (classical tonic-dominant-mediant) never left popular music; and the people gave Stalin’s heirs their answer to his materialist sneer: “How many divisions has the Pope?”.
It is not generally known that traditional harmony has a strong scientific basis: a really fundamental feature of the natural world, as discovered by Pythagoras in ancient Greece and developed by a brilliant series of mathematicians in modern France: Descarte, D’Alember, Fourier and De’Broglie: the tones are the eigenvalues of their wave equation. It was a great French musician contemporary of D’Alembert who predicted that matter itself obeys the rules of harmony: what is known today as wave mechanics. An outstanding US physicist, Frank Wilczek in his book Listen to the Harmony, pointed out that the first wave mechanics physicists had to study Raleigh’s textbook on classical sound propagatio in order to predict results in quantum physics.
The idea of “12 tones related only to each other” is scientific nonsense; the eigenvalues of their wave equations will tend to structure a set of tones into a definite hierarchy: tonic, dominant, mediant and so on. Same as quantal eigenvalues will tend to structure radiant energy into definite particles: electrons, protons, quarks etc. Atonalism is not only against Art; it is against Nature.
The idea of democratic equality is also against nature: we are herd animals, we depend for our survival not only on taking shelter in the herd but also on having someone to “lead us to green pasture” in times of crisis (see Prince Kropotkin on Mutual Welfare among Siberian reindeer). It was by democratic vote that ancient Athens executed Socrates, “their best and wisest of men”.
Well, I continue to develop my point of view.
I don’t agree that Schönberg’s music is the music of the Beast. The Beast is of course Satan. It is an empirical fact that Satan has much more mass appeal than Christ. Satan is after all the prince of this world. And that is not because Satan appear with the image of an ugly beast. A friend of mine who is a reverend, once said that it is not true that Satan is ugly. On the contrary, he is the most beautiful woman in the world. (Or the most handsome man.) Satan is above all the temptator, so look out for the beast where temptation is. We, sinners, are tempted by everything that gives us pleasure. And since truth tends to give us pain, we sinners often prefer delusion. Being sinners, we dislike the truth about ourself and our life.
The ability to tolerate spiritual discomfort and to confront unpleasant emotions, isn’t inspired by Satan. As Dostoevsky said, we grow through pain. For me, it was very painful to accept the truth of 9/11. I suffered the discomfort of my world view being demolished. Even more painful it is to confront my own covardise. Yes, to confront all of my vices.
I think that the Beast is more dealing in the hedonist music of Justin Bieber than in the music of Heinrich I. F. von Biber. Amusing ourselves to death, as Neil Postman said it. I think there is more of the Beast in the music of Lehar than in the music of Schönberg, which had and has next to no commercial potential.
Schönberg’s harmonic doctrine evolved from more use of the cromatic scale in the late romantic period. He understood the relativity of dissonance. So did Mozart too, when writing the slow introduction to String Quartet K. 465, a strictly forbidden «querstand», against the scientific laws of music, and when «the publishers, Artaria, sent the quartets to Italy for publication, they were returned with the report “the engraving is full of mistakes»». (Wikipedia)
So much for scientific laws of music. These laws are changing with the historical periods and from culture to culture.
So from Mozart, let’s take a trip to Bulgary: «The distinctive sounds of women’s choirs in Bulgarian folk music come from their unique rhythms, harmony and vocal production. Characteristic polyphony, such as the use of close intervals like the major second and the singing of a drone accompaniment underneath the melody, are especially common in songs from the Shope region around the Bulgarian capital Sofia and the Pirin region (Bulgarian Macedonia).» (Wikipedia)
And then some corruption: «Koutev became perhaps the most influential musician of 20th century Bulgaria, and arranged rural music with harmonies more “accessible” to audiences in other countries, to great domestic acclaim.» (Wikipedia)
I object to the tendency to comdemn everything that is difficult to understand as satanic. It would perhaps to much to claim that the banality of evil is the evil of banality. But I think this link is more essential than a supposed link between Marxism and twelve-tone technique. And now I am going to listen to my beloved recording of Schönberg Suite op. 29 with London Sinfonietta under Atherton, fresh, youthful, funny, energetic and sometimes touching – perfect music for springtime with lots of yellow dandelions at the ditchlines!
For a slightly different take, you might want to check out E. Michael Jones’ Dionysos Rising (1994) who goes from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde to Verklaerte Nacht to the gnostic-ish 12-tone music of Hauer/Schoenberg. (Hauer is a minor figure in music history, yet believed by some to be the “inventor” of this “system”). From there the author through Nieztsche and Adorno to get to the Rolling Stones. Yes, the book is somewhat of a rant with selective methodology. But it is thought provoking and well written.
While I have to be in the mood for complex music like Schoenberg, when I am, it very much reflects the complex world of modernity that surrounds me: Much of it chaotic and cruel, some of it wondrous, some of it seductive. Not all art must reflect classical beauty. We already have Beethoven. Art like Schoenberg’s tells a truth that is not intended to pacify, because that truth is not pacific. Some people prefer their art to always be pleasing to their senses. I get that. The world is enough of a struggle. But I personally find comfort in knowing that someone else “gets” the angst that characterizes the normal background noise of contemporary consciousness.
Semitone. We have become a facsimile of life, and of each other, in self-enticing similitude. And there are 12 equivalent disharmonious notes, all equally voiceless, because there is no agreement, no harmony, and therefore nothing to build upon. This article is speaking against conformity, and is therefore a doorway to authenticity, if we should hear it. The author is not limited by the fixed narratives, which are like a random toss of two-sided coin: Conform or Rebel; with the resulting jumble of head-and-tail arguments of the photocopy people. Time for self-analysis, is our voice in harmony with our inner being, or in opposition to it. The sounds of disharmony have silenced life.
These kinds of papers (not the first one I’ve seen on the topic) must be part of a plot to shitcoat Marxism by association with inanities. Why not an architectural school demanding that each different construction material be used in equal quantity to all others. A painting school doing that with colors. A writing school with letters.
About 7 years ago, I was waiting for my wife at the cashier during Christmas shopping…Out of boredom, I picked up one of the issues of Vanity Fair, and started reading an article about some high end art dealers from London who specialized in selling abstract paintings to super rich clients. The point of the article was about the absolute absurdity of pricing, and the utter stupidity of the “art clients”.
The dealers (later I researched a bit deeper, and found out how some of them are intertwined with the CIA) used their extensive connections in the mainstream media to hype some talentless artists, and their paintings, in order to create a whole market for things that otherwise would not be even noticed. The psychological trick was to build an air of exclusivity with an internal massage- “if you don’t understand/appreciate this art, then you are a total, unsophisticated, unrepairable idiot”.
I believe that in music, there is a similar movement that is designed to create confusion under the guise of sophistication and fraudulent depth. Obviously, there is also an occult dimension to this whole theme, but that is a whole other subject matter.
On the whole, I really enjoyed how things are juxtaposed and mixed in this article. I hope there will be more articles tackling the intermingling of art, spirituality, science and politics. Thank you!
PS. BTW, Personally, I love some of the atonal music when it is used in combination with images.
The only composer able to compose 12-tone music that reflects the human spirit and affirms an authentic (if wounded) sense of life was the Swedish composer Allan Pettersson, whose Seventh Symphony is inexplicably, paradoxically, loved by people who detest atonal music. It takes repeated listenings to intuit the sense of it, but richly repays the time spent. Even at its first performance it left many audience members in tears.
If you’re sampling it on the popular music video site, choose the broadcast tape of a performance by the Netherlands Radio Symphony at the Concertgebouw (the one with the army of invading orcs and the mammoth monster on the cover).
>Auschwitz
I doubt the symphony at Auschwitz (weird thing for an “extermination camp” to have, no?) was playing anything as nihilistic as the new (((12 tone music))). My instinct would be that the camp guards only allowed the residents to perform wholesome classical music.