They Are There

Kyle Gann has been blogging the Ives Vocal Marathon at Wesleyan. where I just was a month and a half ago, bad timing, but at least I have Kyle's inspiring and uplifting infectious excitement about the whole deal to thrill me from afar. Happened across the above and must share. Don't watch, just listen.

Searching for Fast (formerly notes on the tape music concert on my birthday)

First night of the SF Tape Music Festival tonight. My colleague Thom Blum premiered a fantastically beautiful and nuanced piece, a state of grace. Aaron Ximm, recent father and former director of my favorite concert series in San Francisco, presented a painfully lovely modification of recordings made of Southeast Asian orchestras.

Overall, a lovely mix of modern fixed media works and some of the more famous works from the early days of electronic music, many from the first concert of musique concrète - the Concert du Bruits of 1958, my birthyear (and here today is my birthday). Sadly all of the old guard seem to have died in recent years: Pierre Schaeffer, György Ligeti, Vladimir Ussachevsky, but it was surprising to me how similar the old and new pieces were. The rhythms and the range of the sonic variations were quite alike, more amazing given the painstaking methods available in those heady early days: the razors and the tape and the wires and the bouncing and the fiddling with the oscillators, compared with the whiz-bang point and click technologies available to the sound-composer of today.

But what struck me the most was that the aforementioned rhythms, like the rhythms of the classical-to-modern instrumental music that preceded, fell into the range of speech rhythms, nothing happening too slowly or too quickly developing, all of medium tempi. It reminded me of a discussion in Gérard Grisey's composition seminar. It had been noticed that the tempo dimension had been woefully unexplored. But why was it that the European modern music of that time - the mid-80s - was pushing only towards a slower tempo? The harmonic rhythm of his music, like all the spectralists, was by its nature very slow, examining the intra-harmony of all the pitches of a single tone under a time-microscope. Why was no modern music fast? I answered immediately: because that would require a pulse, and pulses had been rejected by the modern musical establishment at the time. It took the music of the minimalists and maximalists and totalists to go back to fast.

When I was writing Little Girl and using bits of pieces of the minimalist language, I noticed the fact - and I wasn't the first, ok? - that passages of eighths could seem much faster than passages of sixteenths, and that the pulse depended on the perceptual rhythmic groupings or perceptual chunks of time. How we perceive these chunks are under the control of any good composer, but these issues stand out very quickly in patterned music, e.g., the Alberti-like arpeggios that attract so many of us. The problem with fast say, totally serialized music, is that without pattern or regular repeated rhythms, even as the notes whiz by ever faster, the brain keeps chunking bigger groups of them to bring the perceived tempo down into familiar territory. It has to be led by the hand into very fast tempi by the use of lots of patterned cues. House music does it, easily hitting 180 bpm, the distinction of genre sometimes falling almost exclusively to the tempo range, but within the limitations of extreme repetition and audiences under the influence of very particular drugs.

And, what is even more interesting about this speeded-up dance music is the concomitantly slow or even nonexistent harmonic rhythm. When writing my orchestral waltzes mentioned in recent posts, I realized that the harmonic rhythm of the famous old 19th century waltzes, e.g. those of the junior Strauss, was much slower than what I typically succumbed to in a waltz feel. Satie-influenced, I've tended to believe in the doctrine of one chord per measure, but that's clearly not the way the Kaiser liked it. But still, the Kaiser and I favor a harmonic rhythm that is within the normal range, that doesn't raise too many skirts up to allow us to see the brutish realities of nature beneath. I remember a composer friend being scolded back in college for too fast of a harmonic rhythm. That struck me strange back then and it still seems odd now. It's easy to make your harmonic rhythm slow - lots of music does that - but it's actually pretty hard to make it fast, and too fast? Well try it - it's not easy. At some point, the brain re-chunks the music to bring it back into the normal range. And, in the tape concert, you could hear an analogous timbral rhythm in all the pieces, old and new, again often falling into the same range.

One technology not so easily available to the old school concrète folks was the multi-speaker spatial diffusion on display, the performance aspect of the fixed media world that also gives us as the audience, sitting in the almost-dark, at least something to watch. The diffusion tended to coerce the primeval recordings into the same sonic world as those more recent. Sometimes, most noticeably for me in the Ussachevsky, it was a bit garish, pushing that piece in particular into a faster spatial rhythm that gave the whole thing a jazzed-up feel. But again, the spatial rhythms never seemed too fast. Even when there was a quick ping-pong-like panning, it was perceived as a gestalt, as a sound with a complex spatial quality, not leading us to tap our toes, not pulling us towards speed and all its dangers.

Birthday

M. Josh aka fognozzle sent me the following greeting today for my birthday. I have not yet today received quite this level of adulation, nor a shovel-salute from a bevy of topless and tow-haired boys, seen near the end of the video, just before the windows open on the bright and glorious future of the Fatherland.

Editor's aside: it seems to be impossible to use the word Fatherland, translated literally from Vaterland, without conjuring an image of the Nazis. The German word was used to innocuously mean homeland, although some in my country find an uncomfortable connotation in that word in the title of the US Department of suchsame Security. And there does seem to be a parent-gender-role association that colors Fatherland vs. Motherland: that of the stern dad who argues with his fists vs. the mom that coos and suckles at her teat. Although the Russian/Soviet use of Rodina-mat, translated to Motherland, still gives me a sense a hawkish xenophobia. I have to admit I come from a certain hippy-dippy-we-are-all-one background that bristles at the thought of God and the Kindly Ones choosing any particular people and/or country over any other and so may explain my overreaction. Homeland, motherland, fatherland, ancestral home and land of my birth. Creepy.

Well, the video seems long gone so whatever. 

The Wehrmacht Pope Speaks

There are several circumstances that help fuel my Nazi-interest addiction: (1) the fulsome record-keeping, film-making, accounting and cataloguing of the Dritte-Reichists themselves (2) the dumping into the public domain of the above by the Allied conquerors (3) the hundreds of thousands of post WWII memoirs by and interviews with and trials of combatants and non-combatants. So we do really know what happened, OK?

And yes, they, the National Socialists really did kill a whole heck of a lot of people, Jews and Romanis and Slavs and Gays and Jehovah's Witnesses and the Infirm and Intellectual and Freethinking, and they really did run the exhaust into the back of the transport trucks and they really did slaughter them wholesale in gas chambers and they did machine gun them while standing in their self-dug graves and they did work them to death to build weapons and vengeance weapons and did inject them with diseases and decompressed and pickled and chopped up and tortured and starved and killed in every way imaginable. And such behavior naturally upsets those who remember or are related to those who remember.

And thus, the denial of the same is a reasonable symptom of a certain type of mental illness, a lack of willingness to accept reality, the real reality that is, i.e., our consensus hallucination of the way things actually are. I personally think that one needs to suffer from this particular illness to accept the Catholic Church's teachings and behaviors through the centuries, from the Assumption of Mary to the Cadaver synod, so maybe it isn't hard to understand that a Catholic bishop might believe that "the historical evidence" was hugely against the Holocaust, but still, for a Church and a Pope that suffer from too close a connection to the above, one would think they would be sensitive to the unbelievable awfulness of the whole situation, bending over backward to salve and soothe the wounds so recent and so deep.

But no, today we see that Benedict XVI doesn't get it, reinstating Richard Williamson and other right-wing bishops. The story in the NY Times here. Yes, these are "declarations that we don't share in any way," well, except that we have brought these declarations back into the Church. Gott im Himmel.

UPDATE: Richard Williamson's un-excommunication has now been made contingent on his recanting of his no-gas-chamber belief. zmjezhd sent me a link to the bishop's blog where I'm sure we will all be able to follow his crisis of faith.

Natzweiler

From Hitler's Death Camps: the sanity of madness, by Konnilyn Feig:

Today the hotel has recovered its prewar fame. Its dining room is in demand for fancy wedding parties by the elite of Strasbourg and surrounding towns. A visitor sees wedding parties drive up to the hotel and park in front of the gas chamber. The wedding guests walk into the hotel dining rooms, sparing not a glance for the gas chamber, clearly marked only a few feet away. And they dine and celebrate a new marriage - so very close, so very, very close to that spot where many human beings lost their lives. Hotel guests during the war had perhaps a more unnerving experience, because the men and women to be gassed stood nude outside that plain building across from the restaurant, in full view of the luncheon patrons and the visiting professors. The victims' screams in the gas chamber were easily heard in the hotel and provided the background noise for the diners and sleepers.

Once again we come fact to face with the great question: how were so many so easily inured to the sufferings of others? And well we might ask it of ourselves.

February 28th 2009, Van Ness & Sacramento, SF 8pm

Two Orchestral Waltzes for Lynne

1. Ludmilla Waltz

2. Empress Waltz

"The waltz, in fact, is magnificently improper - the art of tone turned bawdy. I venture to say that the compositions of one man alone, Johann Strauss II, have lured more fair young creatures to lamentable complaisance than all the hypodermic syringes of all the white slave scouts since the fall of the Western Empire. There is something about a waltz that is simply irresistible. Try it on the fattest and sedatest or even upon the thinnest and most acidulous of women and she will be ready, in ten minutes, for a stealthy kiss behind the door - nay, she will forthwith impart the embarrassing news that her husband misunderstands her, and drinks too much, and cannot appreciate Maeterlinck, and is going to Cleveland, 0., on business to-morrow..."  from H.L. Mencken, Prejudices, Second Series.

The two waltzes here are written for my inamorata, and reflect two of her most beguiling facets, the first: as the fallen Russian aristocrat, the woman of a certain expectation lacking the allowance that would sanction it; the second: as the haughty and dominating sovereign, unwilling to brook any usurpation of her ultimate and crushing authority. Popularly, waltzes are thought of as dances in 3/4 time, but the word waltz merely means a revolving dance, as both words come from the same root, and many dances named waltzes over the last few centuries have been in a variety of meters: 2/4, 3/4, 6/8, 5/4.  But in the end, composers get to call their works whatever they want, so, while the first soi-disant waltz is in 3/4, it is hardly a dance at all, more a concert statement of unbridled passion, discords and all, and the second, while primarily in a fast 3/4 with shifts to 2/4, carries us away in a whirl, a flash of ankle as the ball gown spins up, bodies pressed against each other, a fevered head falling to a shoulder in a swoon of sweet and utter surrender.

Seven of Nine

My enviably witty friend Dave Ginocchio of the Russian River Wine Co (highly recommended), upon hearing of all this during this last Xmas season, replied "Feliz Nazi Blog," a saying I wish I had invented, but also made me promise to, at some point, connect Seven of Nine to the Nazis, not actually that difficult since the Star Trek franchise is such a sprawling monstrosity that it has touched on just about everything, and the reference is already there, ripe for the picking, from the Voyager series (VOY to those in the know):

TUVOK

I don't recognize this program.

TOM PARIS

I do. He's wearing a Nazi uniform. We're on Earth, during the Second World War.

SEVEN OF NINE

Nazi?

TOM PARIS

Totalitarian fanatics bent on world conquest. The Borg of their day ... no offense.

SEVEN OF NINE

None taken.

All this being only one of many Nazi references throughout the various incarnations. The picture above being from the visit of Adolf in an alternate 1944 (one many alternate WWIIs where the Nazis prevail) to the occupied US of A, this from ENT, Storm Front Part II (again, to those in the know).

But, in both cases, 7 of 9 and the NS, the uniform is the thing.

Auf der Heide blüht ein kleines Blümelein

Flash: Miss Erika, one of our remote correspondents, has sent along this communiqué.

re: Nazi Blog

Are you aware of the nazi sweetheart march "Erika" ,1939, by composer Herms Neil (was the marching song of the Waffen SS)? I feel it needs a place in your blog as it has such a forceful & catchy refrain.

here are video links (montages, etc):

www.youtube.com/watch

www.truveo.com/Erika/id/2182569962

www.youtube.com/watch

German Military Composer Herms Neil blurb:

www.pzg.biz/herms_neil.htm

www.tomahawkfilms.com/herms.htm

Lyrics in English:

1. On the heath there grows a little flower

And its name is Erika

A hundred thousand little bees

Swarm around Erika

Because her heart is full of sweetness,

Her flowery dress gives off a tender scent

On the heath there grows a little flower

And its name is Erika

2. In the homeland lives a little farm maid

And her name is Erika

This girl is my true treasure

And my luck, Erika

When the flower on the heath blooms lilac red,

I sing her this song in greeting.

On the heath there grows a little flower

And its name is Erika

3. Another little flower blooms in my small room

And its name is Erika

In the first rays of the morning and in the twilight

It looks at me, Erika

And it seems to me it speaks aloud:

Are you still thinking of your little bride?

Back home a farm maid weeps for you

And her name is Erika

Name "Erika" had been derived from the heather plant (German: Heide, Erika; Latin: Erica). Vast heather-yards are one of the proud symbols of German natural heritage.

Just thought I'd bring this to your attention.

The small room of the third verse no doubt a prescient image of the small room his corpse will inhabit soon. It is in fact a fine example of the excessively sentimental and jingoistic Soldier Marching Song, like so many others, e.g., Just Before the Battle Mother ("Farewell, mother, you may never / Press me to your heart again"), with a tune that, although needing to be carried along with the heavy rucksack, lightens the load, and reminds the bit of cannon fodder why they are fighting and dying, romanticizing the blown apart bits of body and blood mixing with the bittersweet tears of the girl and/or mother left behind. Once heard, these tunes are hard to forget, and I have found myself since Erika Deer's dispatch humming the chorus as I have gone about my day-to-day.

And I find myself hoping that, in the new coed & don't-don't-ask-don't-tell army of the US of A, there will be both gender-neutral and gender-preference-neutral marching songs as stirring as this, sung by legions of men and women and all points in between, marching to their deaths filled with a heady and passionate joy.

Waltzes

After a weekend's nose-grindstoning, I dashed off a second waltz and an OK orchestration of both: the Ludmilla Waltz and the Empress Waltz, named after two of the formal natures of the most lovely and admirable Lynne R. It was easier to orchestrate the new one since it was conceived from the start as an orchestral being, whereas the older one had gotten into my head a bit too much as a piano work with its piano sensibilities and pianistic tendencies. But the two together are a good match. Once again, I had a grand plan to write of every moment of the great creation, but that again proved elusive. I'm in a difficult-to-verbalize place when I work, and each decision seems either too small, too arbitrary, or too suddenly insightful.  And it's hard to glean something that is good enough to pass down to the younger generation. But I have discovered one thing: the more I write these chamber orchestra pieces, the more I yearn for the subtler timbres of a larger orchestra, a much larger orchestra.

whitebread stomach division

A point of historical interest, from a freelance correspondent:

Walcheren Island in the Netherlands: the Romans called it Vallacra, and there was a temple to Nehalennia there, but towards the end of WW2 it was the scene of the Battle of Walcheren Island. Where, what? I must admit: I am a fan of WW2, battles or otherwise, but, you know, I’d never heard of this battle before. Perhaps it’s because the Canucks were to blame or thank for it ...

The savage fight for Walcheren Island, key to Antwerp, had an almost comic ending when fussy little Lieut. General Wilhelm Daser, commander of the Wehrmacht’s 70th (White Bread) Division, suddenly made up his mind to surrender.

Some 250 British and Canadian troops, ready to drop from battle exhaustion, stumbled into 15th-Century Middelburg to find that Daser had paraded all his available troops—more than 2,500 of them —into the square and ordered them to squat down for the night. Then individualist Daser wrapped himself in a yellow patchwork quilt, retired to his bedroom with quantities of aspirin and Veuve Clicquot champagne, refused to go through with the formal details of surrender before dawn (link).

These quotidian images are disturbing, n’est pas?

die nazisau

Another missive from a foreign correspondent:

The Mel Brooks video of the previous post reminded me of another contemporary take on the musicality of Adolf, this time hunkering down in his bunker. Walter Moers, a German author, created this great take on the absurdity of Hitler in today’s world.

2B ∨ ¬2B

One of my foreign correspondents sent me the following, and so I quote:

Has it really been a quarter of a century since Mel Brooks re-made Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be Or Not To Be? Here’s a little hip-hop number of the same title with Mel Brooks qua Josef Tura qua Adolf H.

Valkyrie

I had intended to discuss the new Tom Cruise epic in terms of its pro-Prussian nationalist blinders and its rather ridiculous implication that Claus von Stauffenberg was some kind of hero to the world for merely coming to the conclusion that, after six years of doing his darnedest for his beloved leader and his beloved leader's inestimable awfulness, that maybe the way things were going wasn't the best for the future of his beloved Deutschland and maybe he and some of his cronies better off the guy in charge before he did any more damage. Not to the world, mind you, but to Germany and especially to its officer corps. But Roger Friedman has already done it for me, better than I could have, in a beautifully lilting and scathing review, from which I quote a choice passage:

... in “Valkyrie” Singer opens the door to a dangerous new thought: that the Holocaust and all the other atrocities could be of secondary important to the cause of German patriotism. Not once in “Valkyrie” do any of there “heroes” mention what’s happening around them, that any of them is appalled by or against what they know is happening or has happened: Hitler has systemically killed millions in the most barbaric ways possible to imagine.

It’s kind of galling to allow now, in 2008, that von Stauffenberg et al were either totally unaware of this, or that they felt their mission superceded it. In “Valkyrie,” at the expense of making a joke, they are almost like Franz Liebkin, author of Mel Brooks’s fictitious “Springtime for Hitler.” His famous line in “The Producers” is: “War? What war? We vas in the back. We didn’t see a thing!”

A good list of Hitler assassination attempts is here, some by people less reprobate. Many involved in the German resistance were less bloody-handed than von Stauffenberg: for example the leader of the anti-anti-Semitic Confessing Church in Germany, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, hanged with piano wire during the post-Valkyrie purges, and the Weisse Rose, all beheaded by the Gestapo in '43.

Stalags

Nazi exploitation films such as Ilse, She Wolf of the SS fueled my youthful groping endeavors, and similar imagery has tentacles throughout American culture, including the "Men's Adventure" pulp fiction post WWII, but the weirdest and most Freudian-ly complex conjunction is the immense popularity of the Stalag among Israelis of the second generation post Holocaust, a "peculiar Hebrew concoction of Nazism, sex and violence," no doubt bred in large part by the Israeli culture's repression of the horrors of recent past. In these books, the protagonists are typically Allied soldiers who act out a series of power exchange exercises with jackbooted female SS-Helferin, ending in a rape-snuff orgy where evil gets its due.

In reality, of course, female guards and the few women that formally made it into the SS did not wear leather Nazi-chic fetish uniforms and those that were most sadistic, such as the notorious Dorothea Binz, later hanged by the British, were of the typical 'banality of evil' type, enjoying the corruption of power over life and death that affected so many ordinary German maids and ticket-takers and accountants, and existing in a netherworld of horror and brutality and filth, hardly the supervillians of such masturbation fodder. But such tidy sexualization of horror is common, clearly the most common progenitor of the grindhouse genre. The best-selling Hebrew novella House of Dolls, linked by some to the rise of the Stalags, which purports to tell the true story of Jewish women forced into prostitution in the camps is marketed as an exposé, but veers dangerously close to pornography in its explicitness. And, maybe even more dangerous is that fact that such ill-supported notions, carried forward into other cultural objects including the Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling vehicle The Night Porter, tend to blame the survivor of the horrors, villifying them for their toady collaboration with evil.

Feliz Nazi Blog

My literate writing time recently has been spent primarily on the blog I started with my sometimes librettist and always friend Jim Bisso, the explanation for which is somewhat difficult but is revealed by the gestalt of the postings en masse. UPDATE: this blog is no more, but its core has been folded into the E.W. blog hierarchy.

But I'm now in the process of composing a new waltz for Lynne, a companion piece as it were to the old one, both of which will be presented by the orchestra in the most waning day of February. My visit to New York has imbued me with a deep piety for all things artistic and renewed appreciation for hard driving ambition and a work ethic that allows not for fiddle-faddle.

Indulgence

I met Jesus tonight at a Party.  He offered me a vegan sweet as the body of Christ.  I told him that I had written much music to his glory. He laid his hand on my head and blessed me.

Conversation

Erling (explaining things to Bruce): I'm not actually pro-Nazi, I'm just fascinated by the Nazis.

Bruce (in simulated conversation, mockingly): voice 1: Oh, I don't actually like chocolate, I'm just fascinated by chocolate. voice 2: Oh, really, what is it that fascinates you? voice 1: The taste!

Erling: point.

Jim (in response): Oh, oh. I think we, and our age cohort, were inoculated with a dirty Axis needle. All those movies, TV shows, cartoons, and other ephemera. But I know what he means, whenever looking into any of this stuff online, I run across both ends of the spectrum (from Holocaust to Neo-Nazi sites), but it's the ones in the middle that usually give me pause. Those U-Boot, Axis military history, Waffen-SS, Iron Cross medal winners, that profess a fascination (phallic gazing) with but protesting an utter horror of Nazis.

Toothbrush with a Smile

The fact that Basil Fawlty can simply put his finger over his upper lip and flick his combover over his brow to evoke the greatest evil of all time shows the intensely iconic nature of these most simple of facial features, notably The Mustache, AKA the Chaplin, the Hitler, the Toothbrush. And in The Great Dictator, Mr. Chaplin exploited his aforementioned painted-on mustache in his excoriating portrayal of the title character, the familiarly fascist and anti-Jewish dictator of Tomainia, made to look so very terrible and ruthless but also somewhat funny and maybe even just a bit understandable, as don't we all just secretly want to be a little bit of a dictator ourselves, and not merely a tinpot one, but the next one up, like way up, because we agree with the following, one of my personal favorite quotes:

"The greatest happiness is to vanquish your enemies, to chase them before you, to rob them of their wealth, to see those dear to them bathed in tears, to clasp to your bosom their wives and daughters."

to quote Genghis Khan, an even greater megalomaniac than our dear and beloved Führer. And the cutesy-ness of the latter terrible and most evil evil brings us to the cutsily evil tees, marked by the infamous toothbrush, of the squeaky but not necessarily clean, but most prepubescent duo above, the notorious Prussian Blue, named after so many things:

Part of our heritage is Prussian German. Also our eyes are blue, and Prussian Blue is just a really pretty color. There is also the discussion of the lack of "Prussian Blue" coloring (Zyklon B residue) in the so-called gas chambers in the concentration camps. We think it might make people question some of the inaccuracies of the "Holocaust" myth.

Oh my oh my.

my german question

From Anonymous Admirer: The historian Peter Gay (né Peter Fröhlich) wrote in the preface of his poignant memoir, My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin (1998),And so I asked myself, Why didn’t we pack our bags and leave the country the day after Hitler came to power? It was an agonizing question that I am going to ask again and again in these pages. I came to believe that I could appear as a witness as well as taking satisfaction from unsparing self-examination—and, I hope, giving satisfaction as well. Whether I have succeeded is not for me to say. But if I had thought I had failed I would not have published this book. Gay was born and raised in Berlin and lived there until, at age 16 and just after Kristallnacht, he and his family left for the United States via Cuba.

Propaganda

There is quite a wonderful archive of German propaganda from the Nazi years and beyond at the Calvin College website. Propaganda works quite well, and the average person basically accepts it either whole or half heartedly, and so it's worth a look to see something of the point of view of the Germans during the conflict. As an example, the cartoon on the right is quite enlightening. The context is the (from our point of view) accidental bombing of Switzerland, a 'neutral' country (more on that in a later post). The guilty airman is being questioned as to why he made the mistake and his response is that the flags of Switzerland and the Red Cross look so similar. To understand the humor of this cartoon, you have to know that it was a common belief in Germany that the Allies were deliberately bombing hospitals and Red Cross vehicles and facilities. Maybe we were, maybe we weren't. In Chunk Yeager's autobiography, he describes being given an order to go to a particular mile-square grid location in Germany and kill every living thing in it: person, animal, etc. He says he didn't feel too good about it, but he did it because that's what you did when you were given an order, the classic Nürnberg defense. Luckily for him, there are two major requirements for being a war criminal: one is committing the atrocity and the second is losing the war. Victors so write the history books as we know.

The German Problem

In the afterword to The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William Shirer looks back at the unexpectedly overwhelming response to his book, positive in the former Allied countries and decidedly defensive in the former Axis. In recalling the attack on the book by the then-chancellor Konrad Adenauer, he points out that the Germans simply could not face up to their past, i.e., rampant adventurous conquest and slaughter. It is in this context that he discusses, as he calls it, 'The German Problem:"

And now, as the thirtieth-anniversary edition of The Rise and Fall goes to press, the world is suddenly confronted with a new reunification of Germany. Soon, united, Germany will be strong again economically and, if it wishes, militarily, as it was in the time of Wilhelm II and Adolf Hitler. And Europe will be faced again with the German problem. If the past is any guide, the outlook is not very promising for Germany's neighbors, who twice in my lifetime have been invaded by the Teutonic armies. The last time, under Hitler, as the readers of this book are reminded, the German behavior was a horror in its barbarism.

This raises the curious question: is there really something different about the Germans, different from the rest of us? If we say, yes, that there is inherent evil in the German People, then aren't we faced with an issue similar to that hallucinated by the Nazis, i.e., the alleged "Jewish Problem?" Or was Hitler somehow irresistibly charismatic and is there something inherently evil in all of us, although a difficult and bitter cup to drink, possibly true, and, as we face the current descent into economic chaos and the decline of the American Empire, maybe a glimpse into our own future?

I remember, after the wall came down, the raised hands of the nervous peoples of Europe, asking the obvious question, to wit: What are your intentions toward our sons and daughters?" and the hesitation of Germany, just a beat, but a hesitation nonetheless, to promise they wouldn't try to rebuild Grossdeutschland or maybe even just a bit more. As the Wikipedia article says:

To facilitate this process and to reassure other countries, some changes were made to the "Basic Law" (constitution). Article 146 was amended so that Article 23 of the current constitution could be used for reunification. After the five "New Länder" of East Germany had joined, the constitution was amended again to indicate that all parts of Germany are now unified. Article 23 was rewritten as keeping it could be understood as an invitation to e.g. Austria to join. However, the constitution can be amended again at some future date and it still permits the adoption of another constitution by the German people at some time in the future.

The final line is, of course, the kicker, and shows the apprehension of the encyclopedist, but I guess, if I had to choose, gun held to my head, that there is a little German in each of us, that given the proper confluence of economic misery and jingoist propaganda, we could find ourselves swept away, wondering why the bombs are now falling on us. No, wait, I'm wrong, it really is just them - the evil others - and now I may sleep a bit more soundly.

die untertitel sont erronés.

Also from an anonymous admirer: The film Der Untergang (2004) has spawned a slew of viral videos. One scene in particular. Deep in the Führerbunker, Hitler (Bruno Ganz) has realized that his house of cards is about to collapse. While the German soundtrack remains the same, folks have added new subtitles with alternate content. The first one I saw involved Hitler’s car getting jacked. The meme has just about run its course, but recently a sort of meta-meme has arrived on the scene. Quotha: Bad subtitles are sweet. All our base are belong to you. That is the fucking benchmark, not this shit.
"

take your daughter to work day

From an anonymous admirer, a picture of Heinrich Himmler’s daughter, Gudrun Burwitz, visiting KZ Dachau with her father and SS-Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff. Born in 1929, she’s still alive and the “fickle Nazi Princess” (schillernde Nazi-Prinzessin) of the Stille Hilfe, a relief organization for arrested, condemned and fugitive SS members.

New Music Theater

Went to The Cell Theater in New York tonight to see a panel discussion of the book on the left.  Eric Salzman also wrote Twentieth Century Music, which many of us read as children, and this latest is coauthored by Thomas Desi, whom I met at NewOp, I think in Amsterdam, which is how I met Eric as well.  Eric and Thomas are both talented composers and impresarios, and the book looks great. It's waiting for a read after The Piano Teacher. Afterwards, dinner with the two authors and Grethe Holby, who danced in Einstein and started American Opera Projects.  Eric doesn't like using "opera" or "chamber opera" for what we all do, as he thinks it carries too much baggage and too much of a connection to the opera singer voice of the 19th century. "Music Theater" is his preferred term, although I think that term is usually confused with American Musical Theater, and I kind of like taking back the Opera word. It sounds highfaluting and pompous but it's all meaningless to the person on the street anyway.

Polish Anti-Nazi Art

I had a lovely visit with my Art History Teacher Aimée Brown Price, whom I hadn't seen in a dog's age, today and noticed some Polish and Polish-Soviet War and Nazi Resistance art sitting about. Created soon after the war, they show a somewhat romanticized view of the Soviet involvement in the liberation.

Too Big

My fellow new music blogger Kyle Gann recently wrote a discussion of a discussion of the Nazis and the Republican Party, but the truth is you can't really compare anything to the Nazis. They are just too big. As Godwin's Law implies, they are the super-ultra-end of all comparisons, off the charts. Hollywood and the Video Gaming industries have always plucked them out of the bag when they need some Unrepentant Evil that requires no character development, no softness, no compassion, no other side to the argument that is their malevolence incarnate. I remember reading that Kubrick always wanted to make a film on the Holocaust but decided that it could never be done, that Schindler's List isn't really about the Holocaust, it's actually about the opposite of the Holocaust, hope in the face of hopelessness, but the reality of the Holocaust is really the all-encompassing horror of horror and hopelessness without end, with no escape, an abyss and a void, even the concerted disremembering of its own existence in the fall of the Reich. Even The Producers, which so wonderfully skewers the Prussians, doesn't mention the Shoah; its inconceivable savagery would overwhelm. The Fox News-ites who paint Obama as a Messianic Charismatic Hitlerian figure who will lead us into a Götterdämmerung are simply idiotic, simply haven't read their histories. There is no way to again be as big as he was, as big as they were.

Cold Comfort

I'm having sex in Ron Kuivila's bed, guest bed that is, with one of the other guests here in the house he shares with Bobbi and their young 'un in Middle Haddam, just north of Lower Haddam in the 'fucking Xmas card' that is Connecticut of the Holiday Season.  Ron and I have some connections going way back, having both appeared on Tellus cassettes back in the day (I particularly liked Canon X), and Ron and David Anderson collaborating on the design of FORMULA, a FORth-based Music LAnguage which I've very surprised didn't have broader uptake. It was amazingly well-designed, with a highly-threaded process-based model that seemed remarkably suited for music.  My late and amazingly talented composer buddy Jim Horton used it exclusively near the end, when his arthritis got so bad and his hands so crabbed and swollen that he could only peck at the keyboard, but through the tidy naming of a few very simple processes, could generate huge masses of sound. Dave was a professor at UC Berkeley when I was a grad student there and later was the ex-boyfriend of my now girlfriend: a plaything of We who struggle in the Incestuous Appalachia that is the Life in New Music.

It's so wonderful to be here, to talk about Music and Art with someone who knows more about it than me.  I don't get that much in SF these days.  I need to come back soon to the Methodist-sanctified ground here in the shadow of Wesleyan University.

Die Aktphotographie

I've always been fascinated by the utterly insane and so, toward that end, I present a feast of Scientific Racism, the perfectly sculpted Aryan Master Race Corpus:

and let's not forget Leni, who tried so hard later in life to find absolution for her early sins, namely and once again, the perfectly sculpted Aryan Athletes in their many and womanly almost-nakedness, putting the shot and throwing the javelin and in general prancing about:

Hey, it's funny

"For the amoral herd that fears boredom above all else, everything becomes entertainment.  Sex and sport, politics and the arts are transformed into entertainment. Even religion will have to become show business if it is to survive. Nothing is immune from the demand that boredom be relieved (but without personal involvement, for mass society is a spectator society). If television does not yet exist in this society, it will have to be invented."

from Kierkegaard's Critique of Reason and Society by Merold Westphal.

the rights...

Several times in my life I've been tempted to set a pre-existing bit of lit, something that somehow inspired me language-wise or otherwise. And, in fact, I have from time to time succumbed to this temptation, the whisk of the devil's tail against my ass, and have paid a price for it, a sin confessed through the grill whilst the priest daydreams of beddable young 'uns spurting out wet, white and jam-like decades of the rosary laying recumbent upon the altar.

But let me give the reader a bit of advice. When the itch comes upon you to adapt, first, step into the kitchen, put the kettle on the boil, traipse out into the garden and pick a bit of fresh mint, pack it into a clear glass teapot, pour the water hot over the aromatic plant, pick the pot up and then smash the whole thing hard against your face. And the point of this exercise is to allow you, the reader, to experience a scale model of a simulacrum of the pain that will ensue if you are foolhardy enough to follow this path, a scarring burning pain that never never never ends.

I'm feeling this pain once again as I'm trying to assemble a DVD box set of my operatic legacy (titled Erling, a life in Opera) and once again the pain is beginning to throb deep behind the eyes. Once again I'm on the phone and the email and the written letters with the lawyers, the agents, the holders of rights, the representatives, the money changers and all their ilk, and the wretched torture rises again.

When I first read queer, Burroughs was quite alive and, as I thought of writing an opera based on the novel, I figgered I would just write him and ask him if I could do it, auteur to auteur, assuring myself that he would put his arms around me in a fatherly way and tell me sure, go ahead, I'd like that. But then, like a number of my erstwhile partners, he went and died on me, leaving me in the hands of his estate, a cold institution not so fatherly, unless we consider fatherliness to be the quality of the absent father, the dad that doesn't take you fishing and isn't there for you and turns his back when you say I love you.  I had contacted Burroughs's longtime secretary, James Grauerholz, who was into the project, but the institution and its lawyers were not satisfied.  I wrote many letters and many many emails, pissing into the wind, and the months and years went by and time was running out. The theater calendar had been set, the costumes were on the drawing board, the greasepaint was already being poured into the troughs and I was considering going forward guerilla style when, one day, I mentioned to my colibrettist John Morace that the latest roadblock was that the lawyers had informed me Steve Buscemi had optioned the rights to queer for a movie and all was in limbo while he scared up money for it.  Upon which, John picked up his phone, dialed the number of Steve's brother from memory, and all was taken care of.  As it turned out, John and the brother had been friends since childhood and once the outer defenses of the celebrity fortress had been penetrated, well, Mr Buscemi could give a shit about some small-time chamber opera writer infringing on his option. I rapturously forked over a $1000 to keep the lawyers sunny and all was then right with the world.

But, every time I think how lovely it would be to resurrect the piece, to see Trauma act it again, to put out a DVD, to do any more than think about it, I realize I have to face this all again.  The Buscemi version seems to have never materialized and who knows who has their hands on it now. 

A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil I ran across at Cody's on the remainder table in the early 80s, playing with it for a decade before taking the plunge and setting the whole thing. As this was before the experiences with queer above, I was even more the naif. Permissions were an ephemeral notion that turned solid enough when I ran headlong into them. Unraveling the tentacles of the octopus that is the rightsholder to the Ernst artworks was a process that took over six years from start to finish. The English translation was by Ernst's wife, Dorothea Tanning, pictured above, born 1910 but who was and is still alive and writing and painting. I tracked her down and received permission, I thought, for everything, but the underlying untranslated text was still held by the Artists' Rights Society in New York City, and the images by ADAGP France, facts that took years of investigation.  Like all good rights societies, they slice and dice Ernst's holdings into the smallest pieces possible, and my six years of effort and another $1000 led to the acquisition of the limited rights to print up 1000 copies of the opera CD and perform the piece three times: San Francisco, Klagenfurt, Brühl. Again, happiness at the end of a long road.

But, once again, every time I dream of reviving the piece, of hearing the music come to life, of finishing the DVD, the familiar weight comes upon me and drags me down into the mud, where I struggle in vain, lungs filling with muck.

The secret of success in New Music

Lou Harrison's Music Primer was one of many very influential and important books in my musical development.  At the time I read it, I was rediscovering a certain melodic simplicity in my own work. His ideas shaped some of mine, but I was especially taken with one particular passage, somewhat outside of the world of music composition per se, but dealing with that which is most important to a career in the arts, namely that a pure career in the arts is an essential impossibility:

If you really have to be a composer and are attractive and uninhibited, then try and get yourself “kept” – whether by woman or man.  This might be easier than undertaking a whole second career in order to be able to afford composing, and you might get a little restorative affection as well.

Unfortunately, I was stupid enough, and probably too inhibited at the time - my late teens, not to follow his advice, to try to make a go of the 'second career' path, to give up sleep, and not to take the high road: to flatback and think of England, to become a good wife, flipping my hair and asking on my knees for a bit more pin money from my loving husband.

But later in life I did figure out that the judicious - or injudicious - placement of my unit in a number of compromising positions could in fact be helpful to the bit of musical career that I eked out on the side.  In the late-mid 80s I started working with choreographer and dancer Miss W_ on an extended series of pieces. The first and maybe the best was Crash, an hallucination on the already hallucinatory J.G. Ballard novel.  My pal Henry Kaiser had recently purchased a Synclavier and a few of the local classical avant types were thrusting their bowls in his face and asking for a bit of the corn gruel drippings off its gleaming steel and black plastic but I had a key, haha!, since Hank and I were working on Secrets and Mysteries (aka Secrets of the Unknown) with Edward Mulhare, using the early sampler to write as much music as quickly as possible. I stole into his beautiful little studio and worked all night every night coaxing as many floating microtonal lushnesses as I could for Crash and Hagalaz and the others. And why, may one inquire, would I work my little ears to the ossicles to find the perfect romantic musical moment, the perfect twist of pitch ratios adding a glint of a knife to a pretty harmony? Because I was in love. And, when Miss W_ came to hear it for the first time, sitting in the dark of the studio late at night, the fullness of my gift fell upon her, parting her lips, spreading her legs ever so slightly. Later, at a restaurant far away, she looked into my eyes and told me of her most favored venereal pleasure, something so near and dear to my heart that my pulse quickened at the thought, and I flipped through a number of scenarios and possibly near-term advantages and pleasures, but, like everyone else who desires and desires so strongly, I hadn't quite thought through the rest of the story: the pain, the recriminations, the crying and the destruction and the loss, but, before that all came to pass, we spent ourselves through a burst of creativity that produced some of my still favorite works, and some of my still favorite memories: risky sweaty writhings under soft sheets, towels put down to catch the blood; hot tubs overfilled of naked lissome dancers, their supple fingers probing under the foaming jets; furtive quasi-couplings in cars, backstage before a performance, in the corner of a darkened gay bar; sweet shared conspiracies.

And at one of our performances at the Lab in San Francisco was a young choreographer named Robert Wechsler, just beginning to develop a new language of sinuous dances based on groups, canons and symmetries, where the dancers moved quickly through each other in seemingly impossible ways, who took a liking to me (and I'm sure Miss W_), and he kept in touch, asking me from time to time to contribute short soundtracks to dances, e.g. Modules and Loops. Not long after, Robert developed some financial complexities in the US, and moved to Nürnberg to allow things to cool. By the mid 90s I had forgotten all the lessons learned with Miss W_ and was embarking on another long walk off a short pier with Ms. A_. Once again, I enjoyed a burst of creativity, my pen pouring out one inspired score after another, intending to woo and succeeding again beyond my expectations and beyond my ability to deal with it. Once again, I found myself pressed against a lithe body, this time straddling me, allowing my hands to wander over her prepubescently boyish frame, a suggestion of immodest nature whispered to me, hot breath on my ear, kisses on my face. Once again, I was caught up in clandestine plans, this time of a global nature, a vast intrigue tapping into a worldwide network of co-conspirators. I accepted an offer from Robert to come to Europe to work with his company, Palindrome, on an evening of dance and music using a set of interactive technologies: a MIDI controlled pipe organ, dancer-tracking software, heartbeat monitors, the very new and pre-browser Internet. And surprise, it so happened that Ms. A_ was working on a project in Prague, a short train ride away, and so came to visit, pleasantly insinuating herself in the company and, after I left, performing on tour with them through Austria.

While performing with Palindrome in Klagenfurt in the south of the Austrian republic, Ms. A_ left a tape with the theater of my first chamber opera, A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil. Although they didn't care much for the production, a reflection I believe on the cultural divide between the Old and New World, they found themselves drawn back to the music a number of years later and asked me if would be willing to have them perform it and, if possible, to develop a version in German. Although, by the time this came about, my life had plummeted into chaos and into an even more complex sexual by-now-quadrangle including another Ms. A_, a young woman of great vigor and blondness who evinced in me a before unknown tendency for obsessive stalking behavior, one of the high points of my life came while descending into the Klagenfurt airport, a Tyrolean Air flight attendant in an absurdly sexy dirndl leaning over me, noticing a photograph of a woman's mouth covered in blood in the newspaper of the passenger in front of me, seeing my name in the caption of that gory image, landing a few moments later and being greeted as Maestro by the theater director, sweeping me into the dress rehearsal and a magical otherworld, jetlagged and fagged and fashed. The first Ms. A_, who was again performing in the Easter bloc, once again came to meet me, but this scene quickly descended into the by now familiar recrimination, tears, anger, drama and worse and worse. As Ali Tabatabai once told me, we theater folk know not where the stage ends. But, just possibly, do the means justify the terrible endings?  

And this now reminds me: a dream-like trip to Amsterdam with a friend to live out one of her fantasies: that of having two young Dutch boys simultaneously. We tripped and traipsed and shagged our way through the red-light district looking for connections to these ultimate striplings, the perfect combination of enthusiasm and ability and fresh-faced boyishness. In one of these fact-finding encounters of flat-backing fieldwork, the two of us were huffing and puffing and panting over a quite amazingly beautiful and busty Dutch fille de joie who, hearing of our desires, gave us her mobile number and invited her to her wedding in Rotterdam the next week, assuring us that her soon-to-be husband and one of his friends would without doubt fill the bill and that having some other artistic & libertine types there would surely be of benefit to all.

And so, after Klagenfurt and the collapse of the entire quadrangle in flaming death, and as a period of even more intense sluttiness and my relationship with Lynne "die Zweite" began, the Max Ernst museum in Brühl and I planned to have the Little Girl opera performed as part of the dedication of an Ernst sculpture, newly installed. I showed up in town with my freshly blue hair, gathering some curious stares from the locals, overseeing the installation of an outdoor stage for the production, the arrival of the ensemble and all the rest. Also, at this time, Sub Pontio Pilato, also recently translated into German, was heading for its quirky premiere in Austria where a certain Miss B_ was starring, who wanted to come up to Brühl to meet me and see something of what I do. I was feeling my oats, as virility comes with success, and something happened which my gentlemanly upbringing does not allow me to divulge. Even though, with some familiarity, this led to some drama back home with the Empress, Miss B_ and I cemented a personal and artistic connection so that, after the Pilate premiere, she went back to St. Gallen and played the Credo from the opera for the musical director at the Abbey. After an Austrian review of Pilate claimed that the Credo must have come from a pre-existing Mass, I wanted to create such a thing: a crucifix of pieces overlaid, a pre-existing piece from an alternate youth, a time of innocence and faith, before the devil grabbed hold of my soul and I made that Faustian bargain, taking the path of sin, the path of success.

On the Sanctity of Stage Directions

Finally picked up the latest issue of Opera America's rag and betwixt its covers are the usual snaps of Grand Opera productions featuring Giulio Cesare's Divine Julius (as in Gaius Ceasar) in a vaguely fascistic 20th century uniform or Wagner's Das Liebesverbot in a 50s disco setting.  The cover displays a Tales of Hoffman which seems to include robots of a breed I believe unknown in Offenbach's time as well as a white-lab-coat-frocked doctor with steampunk gizmos on his head.  I was drawn back to a jet-lagged endurance-fest in some sunken Dutch city trying to make heads or tails of a Peter Sellars "contemporary staging" of a Rake's Progress which seemed to have been rethunk as a anti-prison-industry diatribe. And there is my friend of a friend Roy Rallo too (although I do have to say I loved the bit in his Finta Giardiniera where, in one of those comedies of misidentification so belovéd of our artistic forebears, the lady who has just mistakenly given a blow job to the wrong fellow in some sort of 70s high-school auditorium or something rises as the lights come on, fades away and draws the back of her hand across her check in a lovely post-head gesture.)

Yes, I know, I know, in our remix culture® we all love the vegematic mish-mosh and hotch-potch of low and high and black and white where blending usurps creating and simple-minded novelty wrests the crown of achievement from laborious toil.  And I accept all that.  I myself have manipulated, slowed down, processed and otherwise pissed on pieces of high art and then called them my own. But why, beseechest me of thou, is it OK to totally ignore the stage directions of the opera libretto, the settings and characters and motions and decor that provide some context for the piece, but it is somehow not OK to touch the music or the words? Why don't these postpostmodern reimaginings apply themselves to the notes and rhythms and other composerist bits as well? Well, we know why: stage directions are second-class citizens, not at the level of the real art.

We see the same abominations in the non-music-theater world as well. The fact that the following anonymously authored entry is considered a point even deserving of empathy is somewhat shocking to me:

Since Beckett's death, all rights for performance of his plays are handled by the Beckett estate, currently managed by Edward Beckett, the author's nephew. The estate has a controversial reputation for maintaining firm control over how Beckett's plays are performed and does not grant licences to productions that do not strictly adhere to the writer's stage directions. (from Wikipedia)

Would there be such gumption if the evil estate made vain protestations against those productions that ignored all the other words appearing on the page?  I mean, sure, do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law, so go ahead: blend, chop and liquefy it all, but why, after one is done changing all the author's words that just happen not to be actually spoken, do you, yes you, the one with bloody hands churning the grinder handle demand that the poor and probably dead author's name be kept on the marquee?  

When the director of my own opera Mordake worked with the libretto - a beautiful object written by the young, gifted & macabre Douglas Kearney - the sung words were changed hardly a bit and only after careful consultation with the writer, whereas the stage directions were ignored from the get-go, and my mild remonstrations in favor of at least considering their value were met with an awkward silence, some quiet coughs, knowing glances in the direction of the cast member and then quietly ignored.

So, the libretto for St Cecilia, the new twinkle in my eye, is being written only as stage directions, no dialog at all, no escape from the handcuffs for the poor director assigned to the task. I'm doing this out of a certain cantankerousness of course, but goddamn it my rage must be assuaged; and I pray that the wails of anguish that rise from the theater soothe the now-avenged souls of the dramatists so cruelly wronged.

Jolie Holland!

Saw my old friend Jolie at Bimbo's tonight.  Over the many years I've seen her perform, from the olden days at the Rite Spot to her vaunted entry into the seraphic heights crowned with the pop music diadem, it was the best of them all.