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Re: Best wishes to all Americans:



Hmmmm ...
 
Well.
 
Is there appropriate music for something like this?
 
And actually, as I try to search history, there is nothing "like this." There are, of course, volcanos and tsunamis and earthquakes. But they are things without villains, without fiends, without human monsters. Though thousands scream and flee in terror, to the planet itself, they are just normal stretching and yawning and belching.
 
I have a special interest in the revolution and explosion of music in Europe that followed the catastrophe of World War I. This body of music is fascinating, startling, often mesmerizing. But very hard to call beautiful. The intellects and emotions of these composers were in shock, reeling from carnage and madness -- "the peace of unburied dead" as a line in a science-fiction movie puts it.
 
The major key was dead, and even the minor key failed to begin to express what they felt. They had to invent entire new tonalities and dissonances to reflect the high explosives and the machine guns and the collapse of every truth and comfort that European societies had taken for granted before the Great War.
 
Yet even this strange, startled music to reflect horror and collapse -- the musical accompaniement to Edvard Munch's "The Scream" -- seems inadequate this week.
 
I suspect that for most of the thoughtful and sensitive people on this list, the Old Forms -- the hymns, the requiems -- will do best for the challenges our hearts face. I will be seeking solace in some of it myself and hoping for the best.
 
But when I have the courage to move beyond the obvious, I suspect I will cautiously and gingerly seek different and more modern forms of Western music.
 
First, from some of my dearest experiences, I think I will ask Charles Ives if he has anything for my aching and confused heart and nervous system. His genius seems to have taken up the challenge of the collision between the Old Forms -- "The songs our fathers loved" -- and the shock of the New. He wrote his music in a little shed on a farm in the New England countryside. But every workday he took the train into Manhattan, where he was a captain of American industry, a creative pioneer in, of all things, insurance (as was the poet Wallace Stevens). Some of his symphonic music soothes, some of it weeps, some of his songs curse violently and damn modern greed and toxic pollution and political corruption ...
 
O the People
NOT the politicians --
Goddam thieves!
 
(to the tune of "Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean")
 
Ives's music had the capacity to consider villains and fiends and scoundrels, and to put them in their place, and then to consider and praise and celebrate courage and endurance and survival and beauty and triumph.
 
I have a suspicion it may actually be up to the impossible task of making some sense of this ghastly week.
 
A couple of weeks ago, some lovely person brought the unique contemporary music of John Zorn to F_Minor's attention, a repost of someone who was bringing GG to the Zorn list's attention. Zorn's music -- or whatever you want to call it -- I think is up to the task not perhaps of any healing, but of standing up to villains and fiends and perverts and terrorists and fighting them, loudly, harshly, violently, to defend music and community and human beings -- he most typically performs his evolving musical experiments live at NYC clubs.
 
The terrorists wanted to drag us back to the stone age. Zorn violently defends our aspirations and our needs to crawl forward with art and thought into the future. I think I'll ask John Zorn if he has any music -- lately he's been experimenting with Klezmer -- for these strange times. He certainly has the heart and guts and ferocity.
 
And I think I'll be listening to a startingly unique orchestral work, "Apocalypse," by John McLaughlin, his Mahavishnu Orchestra, Michael Tilson-Thomas, the extraordinary violinist Jean-Luc Ponty, and I think the London Symphony Orchestra. Despite the title, it is not about destruction. It is, I think, about the birth of creation out of its intimacy with destruction, the equation of creation and destruction. If our familiar perspectives falter this month, maybe we can profit from the Hindu view of life and the universe, perhaps this ancient civilization has something to say and give to us. I can't recommend this richly musical and richly spiritual piece highly enough under these dreadful circumstances.
 
I'll be listening to a lot of Billie Holiday. I know of no artist so adept at turning torment, sadness and oppression into spiritual flight -- her astonishing alchemy to turn the unbelievably bitter into unbelievable sweetness.
 
And if I don't unwisely take pains to filter them out, imbedded in her earlier albums are a surprising number of songs of laughter and playfulness, and of deep love and romance. I could use some of that.
 
The best music can do, I think, is to be an important but only partial salve and unction for our sad travels through this week and through the months and years to come.
 
Jost just reminded me of Thornton Wilder's play, "The Skin of Our Teeth." I hate to say this, but what will get us all, we who have, thank God, survived, from this dreadful moment into our future will be our sad but remarkable nature to endure and survive anything. Fiends. Villains. Psychos. Volcanos. Sabre-tooth tigers. Lions and tigers and bears.
 
For those of us wondering why this happened, and what it means, and why Them but not Us, there is also Wilder's strange, original and deeply moving novel, "The Bridge of the San Luis Rey."
 
Bob 
-----Original Message-----
From: Jost Ammon <Jost.Ammon@GMX.DE>
To: F_MINOR@EMAIL.RUTGERS.EDU <F_MINOR@EMAIL.RUTGERS.EDU>
Date: Friday, September 14, 2001 3:42 AM
Subject: Re: Best wishes to all Americans:

Theoretically the only appropriate music in a mimetic sense I can imagine is Art of the Fugue's last contrapunctus: a complex bundle of ongoing threads just stop into nothing.
 
But as I've said - the idea of music is in my world the opposite of what has been going on, so there is nothing to hear for me.
 
Jost