Tuesday, February 21, 2017

Renewal: Some Reading Material for the Concert (parts 1 and 2)


You are at the 35th Birthday Concert of AC Charlap for which there are lots of fantastic musicians on the bill. Please ignore them all so you can focus solely on Charlap's music. If someone is making noise next to you while his music is playing, you needn't ask them to stop. They will shortly be shot. 

The composer is sure you thought you were at the concert of Evan Tucker. You are mistaken, the Evan Tucker you knew is dead; eaten by wolves, he was delicious. When he was resurrected on the third day, he became AC Charlap, a portmanteau of his Hebrew Name: Avraham Chai, and his original patrilineal surname - Charlap, a Hebrew acronym for Chiya, Rosh L'Galut l'Poleen (Chiya, head of the Exiles in Poland). Which means one of two things:

1. Someone in his family was really important and smart, for a Polish guy...
2. Some unscrupulous medieval Jewish ancestor was a merchant who knew he could make a killing by claiming he was from an important family.

This reading material exists to be consumed as you listen to Charlap's music. Please do not read this while other people are performing. as that is impolite, and we have to make it seem as though they, not AC Charlap, are the point of this concert. 

Like all musicians, Charlap is self-conscious about presenting his music to you. It's not that he finds it bad, though he knows it suffused with that touch of bombast present in all that he does; but as all composers are, he's aware of the inevitability of finding a polite but uncomprehending audience who listen to what a friend produces out of a sense of responsibility, but then go about their lives unaffected by what he's written - another forgettable experience that takes years to assemble, minutes to consume, and an instant to forget.

This anxiety is present in all artists of every form and every genre, but how much more true is it for the composer? It is a truth universally acknowledged that most Americans of the 21st century can find classical music of any kind to be a chore. Therefore the thought occurred to him that it might be a good idea to give a little bit of reading material to go along with it so that listeners might slightly better understand what his music might be alluding to. 

Writing about music, as the saying always goes, is like dancing about architecture. There is no reason to write about music unless the music is too boring to love without help. This thought is slightly despair-inducing in this composer, because in the context of 2017, it either means that his music is too dull for most people to love, or that nearly all the music he loves is too boring for most people to love. 

Of course, AC Charlap thought about turning this explanation of his music into a fire and brimstone Jeremiad like those he issues every day on social media to which you've become so accustomed to glazing over. He won't deny feeling the sore temptation to issue another denunciation/lecture of tempora and mores he types every day into the ether(net). 

But in this era of trial and tribulation, our troubles are so omnipresent that they needn't elaboration even from those who are clearly willing to give it. What is there that he can say about the universe you haven't heard from him a thousand times before? He has always found your universe a rather dispiriting, dull place. What could it matter that he says, yet again, that its recent turn to make manifest all those ugly things which always seemed to him to exist just beneath its vapid surface was, to his eyes, inevitable?

Whatever he has to say about this universe matters not at all. For the great AC Charlap, as I'm sure you've come to realize by now, does not exist in your universe. He is, rather, a holographic apparition hailing from a parallel universe, perhaps even from a parallel Twenty-First century; in which the crises of the Twentieth Century never obliterated the Nineteenth. In his universe, words like culture and civilization never acquired boredom's patina - let alone imperialism's. The world of this universe was always a dreary place to him, deserving to be burned to the ground by a President who is its most perfect incarnation. 

Whether or not this universe is as dirty and decrepit as it now seems to you, and always has to him, there is a better verse at just one remove from us all, and will remain at one remove no matter to what dark places the future shall remove us. A multiverse of ten dimensions exists where all things are possible - a decaverse where the trials and verdicts of our particular universes are met with a cosmic shrug.

The beginning was without form and void. When humans first attained consciousness, we perceived some form of infinity in our natural surroundings, to which we attributed the properties of higher beings. Whether or not higher beings are what endow us with the infinite, the infinite nevertheless exists for the simple reason that as a metaphor, we can conceive of it - shape without form, shade without color, paralyzed force, gesture without motion. 

Many thinkers believe that the simple fact that we can conceive of a dimension in which impossible concepts might exist is evidence that such dimensions do exist - and the best evidence we have of this is the arts, where the mission is to redefine how we conceive of possibility itself, and within the arts, the best evidence is music. 

How do you even describe music to someone who's never heard it without sounding like a schizophrenic? The most literal description of music is that it's vibrations that make patterns in your head that strongly suggest you to feel certain emotional states.... And yet music makes perfect logical sense to everyone who hears it. How do you possibly explain it except to say that it's a trans-dimensional experience that bends the rules of any universe of which we're yet familiar?

Perhaps this is why music and religion go so hand in hand for so many millennia. By any physical law yet discovered, music is an inexplicable miracle in itself. No neurologist can yet explain why or how the brain perceives music, only that it does. Music can open worlds of self-expression to both the performer and the listener, yet can also express things beyond the self that make each individual listener feel like just a quintillionth of speck within the oneness of all things - yet bonded with them all. To this composer's mind, music does not exist to change the world because music is not of this world. The world cannot be changed, it will always be the dreadful place whose chaos dashes hopes on the rocks. But it is the arts that give us a speck of order and harmony and peace that a better world is possible, if not here, then elsewhere. And of all the arts, none of them conjures that alternate dimension of peace with the specificity of music. Music is the only partial scientific proof we yet have of a spiritual world made manifest on earth. Every ring of a musical vibration you hear is comprised of aural rings at still higher frequencies. When it comes to music, we've never gotten a better explanation than the astral ones we got from Aristotle, Pythagoras, and Kepler.

This is, of course, the kind of pompous explanation of music that turns everybody off of classical music permanently. There isn't much Charlap can do about that. This composer's long since learned that he's a piss poor advocate for classical music. How can he possibly advocate well for something so embedded in the fabric of a life lived so differently from every other person in his generation? Not even his brothers grew up learning Yiddish. Not even his Jewish friends from Northwest Baltimore had grandparents from the 'old country,' let alone Greenie grandparents whom they'd see three or four times a week. No other family in Pikesville seemed to have his steady influx of relatives, not especially educated or wealthy, coming through the house who'd switch between English, Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian, and Spanish as though it were something everybody does at the dinnertable - and half-a-dozen other languages on special occasions. For a kid from Pikesville, it's astonishing how Europe seemed right next door.

Somehow, he never got the memo that America was something different than this. He was once the golden child of a paradise completely apart from America, who seemed to assimilate information as soon as he read it, and to leave this paradise was a decade long nightmare from which he shall never completely wake. How could he take to the music of this new world completely when so much of it reminds him of what he lost? There's a lot of music from these other genres which he likes very much, but he can never truly love them. He can love the people who make their music, he can esteem the music enormously, but it is that fusty, dusty, musty old music from a civilization everybody hates that has his heart and always will.

Because he is not of the 21st century, he is of the 19th and the 23rd. In the 21st century, he isn't much, just an eccentric in a small and declining American city. In the 23rd, he'll probably be even less. Not much he's written yet is worthy of any kind of posterity, though he's very proud of Psalm 2, but even if his music's better than he thinks it is, what use is posterity to a creator who isn't around to enjoy it? Nevertheless, when a musician encounters a tortuous path in his own time, he tends to find some solace in the idea that somewhere, someone, eventually, will dust off the manuscript (or eliminate 200 years worth of bugs from his Bandcamp website) and appreciate in the early 23rd century what people neglected in the early 21st.

No doubt this sounds like self-pity, a characteristic for which this composer is certainly not immune. But in his defense, as he's begun to age, he's come to pity the world more than himself for all which they've missed.

What is it that separates music like this from the music of surrounding eras? Surely, this is not 'better music' than other music. There is no such thing in the arts as 'better than', there are only different types of greatness - be it the joie de vivre of Louis Armstrong, the macabre resolve of Johnny Cash, the hallucinatory innocence of The Beatles, or the simplicity that conceals infinite complexity of Mozart. Once music strikes you as great, there is no way of saying one music is objectively greater than another. And yet the greatness of some art eludes people. Indeed, the greatness of some art eludes entire generations and centuries. This composer had the bad luck to be born in an era that wants nothing to do with the era whose music captured his heart. Friends seem to hear it and hear their parents yelling at them to practice piano, which as they get older, perhaps got conflated in their subconscious with all sorts of patriarchal concepts from masculinity to imperialism to social class.

What separates it is neither that the music is more intelligent or more emotionally expressive. What separates it is its ability to articulate an extremely specific tension between emotion and intellect. What the majority of great classical music expresses is not emotion or thought, but the thoughts that our emotions generate,  the emotions between emotions, the process by which one emotion gives way to another, then another, and then another. Perhaps part of the reason that what is generally called 'classical music' is so neglected by his generation is that most people have much less need for it. In an era when people can speak their minds and freely say what they feel, there are few emotions left to bottle up. Classical music is very good at articulating emotions within you that you weren't necessarily aware existed, but in a culture that combs every hair of our emotional selves, what need is there for that?

Around this time two years ago, Evan Tucker seemed, relatively speaking, cock of the walk, yet fate ordained to teach him, yet again, that he is cock of nothing. In the span of three months, he endured the end of multiple friendships, multiple bands, and a relationship. Were his life ever made into a biopic, this would be an era when he, like John C. Reilly as Dewey Cox, would stare into the camera and say 'Wow, this sure is a dark period.'

Four years of trying to make something resembling a living as a non-classical musician was fun - but the party was over, and the more he listened to the music, the less reward he derived from it. The dance music reminded him that the party was over.The jazz reminded him of how uncool he was.  The rock reminded him how apart from the general crowd he always was. The earnest singer-songwriters articulated simple primary emotions while the emotions he felt were incredibly complex.

Only the classical music that everybody else in his generation ignores, grown like ivy over a thousand years to express the ambiguities of emotion with a specificity otherwise unknown to history, spoke to him anymore, and reached him in a dark time when every other music felt like sonic wallpaper.

Thursday, February 9, 2017

Reading Material at Evan's 35th Birthday Concert - Part I


You are at Evan Tucker's 35th Birthday Concert for which there are lots of fantastic musicians on the bill. Please ignore them all so you can focus solely on Evan's music. If someone is making noise next to you while his music is playing, you needn't ask them to stop. They will shortly be shot. 

This reading material exists to be consumed as you listen to Evan's music. Do not read this while other people are performing. as that is impolite, and we have to make it seem as though they, not Evan, are the point of this concert. 

Like all self-absorbed musicians, Evan certainly does not find his own music dull even if he sometimes finds it as bombastic as you find his personality. He does, however, realize that many Americans of the 21st century find music without comprehensible lyrics to be a chore, and therefore the thought occurred to him that it might be a good idea to give a little bit of reading material to go along with it so that listeners might slightly better understand what his music might be alluding to. 

Writing about music, as the saying always goes, is like dancing about architecture. There is no reason to write about music unless the music is too boring to love without help. This thought is slightly despair-inducing in this composer, because in the context of 2017, it either means that his music is too dull for most people to love, or that nearly all the music he loves is too boring for most people to love. 

Yes, of course Evan thought about turning this explanation into a fire and brimstone Jeremiad like those he issues every day on social media to which you've become so accustomed to glazing over. He was sorely tempted to issue yet another denunciation of his frienemies at this celebration of his clearly massive ego, and who knows, by the end of this pamphlet he may no longer be able to fight the urge to inflict upon you precisely that lecture he types every day into the ether(net) about all of your moral failings. 

But in this era of trial and tribulation, our troubles are so omnipresent that they needn't elaboration even from those who are clearly willing to give it. What is there that he can say about the universe you haven't heard from him a thousand times before? He has always found your universe a rather dispiriting, dull place. What could it matter that he says, yet again, that its recent turn to make manifest all those ugly things which always seemed to him to exist just beneath its vapid surface was, to his eyes, inevitable?

Whatever he has to say about this universe matters not at all. For your dearly beloved composer, as I'm sure you've come to realize by now, does not exist in your universe. He is, rather, a holographic apparition hailing from a parallel universe, perhaps even from a parallel Twenty-First century; in which the crises of the Twentieth Century never obliterated the Nineteenth. In his universe, words like culture and civilization never acquired boredom's patina - let alone imperialism's. The world of this universe was always a dreary place to him, deserving to be burned to the ground by a President who is its most perfect incarnation. 

Whether or not this universe is as dirty and decrepit as it now seems to you, and always has to him, there is a better verse at just one remove from us all, and will remain at one remove no matter to what dark places the future shall remove us. A multiverse of ten dimensions exists where all things are possible - a decaverse where the trials and verdicts of our particular universes are met with a cosmic shrug.

The beginning was without form and void. When humans first attained consciousness, we perceived some form of infinity in our natural surroundings, to which we attributed the properties of higher beings. Whether or not higher beings are what endow us with the infinite, the infinite nevertheless exists for the simple reason that as a metaphor, we can conceive of it - shape without form, shade without color, paralyzed force, gesture without motion. 

Many thinkers believe that the simple fact that we can conceive of a dimension in which impossible concepts might exist is evidence that such dimensions do exist - and the best evidence we have of this is the arts, where the mission is to redefine how we conceive of possibility itself, and within the arts, the best evidence is music. 

How do you even describe music to someone who's never heard it without sounding like a schizophrenic? The most literal description of music is that it's vibrations that make patterns in your head that strongly suggest you to feel certain emotional states.... And yet music makes perfect logical sense to everyone who hears it. How do you possibly explain it except to say that it's a trans-dimensional experience that bends the rules of any universe of which we're yet familiar?

Perhaps this is why music and religion have gone so hand in hand for so many millennia. By any physical law yet discovered, music is an inexplicable miracle in itself. No neurologist can yet explain why or how the brain perceives music, only that it does. Music can open worlds of self-expression to both the performer and the listener, yet can also express things beyond the self that make each individual listener feel like just a quintillionth of speck within the oneness of all things - yet bonded with them all. To this composer's mind, music does not exist to change the world because music is not of this world. It is the only partial scientific proof we yet have of a spiritual world made manifest on earth. Every ring of a musical vibration you hear is comprised of aural rings at still higher frequencies.

This is, of course, the kind of pompous and condescending description that turns everybody off of classical music permanently. There isn't much we can do about that. This composer's long since learned that he's a piss poor advocate for classical music. How can he possibly advocate well for something so embedded in the fabric of a life lived so differently from every other person in his generation? Not even his brothers grew up learning Yiddish. Not even his Jewish friends had grandparents from the 'old country,' let alone see them three or four times a week. No other family seemed to have a steady influx of relatives, not especially educated or wealthy, coming through the house who'd switch between English, Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian, and Spanish as though it was something everybody does at the dinnertable - and half-a-dozen other languages on special occasions. For a kid from Pikesville, it's astonishing how Europe seemed right next door.

Somehow, he never got the memo that America was something different than this. He was once the golden child of a paradise completely apart from America, who seemed to assimilate information as soon as he read it, and to leave this paradise was a decade long nightmare from which he shall never completely wake. How could he take to the music of this new world completely when so much of it reminds him of what he lost? There's a lot of music from these other genres which he likes very much, but he can never truly love them. He can love the people who make their music, he can esteem the music enormously, but it is that fusty, dusty, musty old music from a civilization everybody hates that has his heart and always will.

Because he is not of the 21st century, he is of the 19th and the 23rd. In the 21st century, he isn't much, just an eccentric in a small and declining American city. In the 23rd, he'll probably be even less. Not much he's written yet is worthy of any kind of posterity, though he's very proud of Psalm 2, but even if his music's better than he thinks it is, what use is posterity to a creator who isn't around to enjoy it? Nevertheless, when a musician encounters a tortuous path in his own time, he tends to find some solace in the idea that somewhere, someone, eventually, will dust off the manuscript (or eliminate 200 years worth of bugs from his Bandcamp website) and appreciate in the early 23rd century what people neglected in the early 21st.

No doubt this sounds like self-pity, a characteristic for which this composer is better known to some people than he is for his music. But in his defense, as he's begun to age, he's come to pity the world more than himself for all which they've missed.

What is it that separates music like this from the music of surrounding eras? This is not 'better music' than other music. There is no such thing in the arts as 'better than', there are only different types of greatness - and the greatness of some art eludes people. The greatness of the old standards of 'classical music' eludes a great many people from his generation, and that fact has always filled this composer with terrible sadness that he has very few people with whom he can share his love.

What he has come to realize is that the love of a very specific period of classical music



Psalm 1:

Shostakovich:

Brahms:


Psalm 2:

Mahler:

Wagner:

Ives

Penderecki:

Stravinsky:

Part:

Berio:

Stockhausen

Schnittke:

Berg:


Psalm 3:

Vaughan Williams

Ligeti

Schoenberg


Psalm 4:


Golijov:

Berlioz:


Psalm 5:

Messiaen

Richard Strauss

Tallis

Saturday, February 4, 2017

It's Not Even Past: The History of the Distant Present - Episode 1 Epilogue

Much has obviously happened since recording this podcast a week or two ago. The past two weeks have ensured that there will be much, much more to say going forward about precisely how our era has taken on precisely the spirit it has. But since we have spoken so much about Putin's Rasputin, it would seem that we badly need to take just a moment to speak about Trump's, and how terrifyingly similar to Dugin Steve Bannon's worldview seems. 

I came across an article yesterday which raised my alarm to truly Red Alert. While I don't wish to terrify anyone any more than they already are, it seems ever more necessary to scare the daylights out of anyone who will listen in the hope that someone somewhere will come up with a solution to lethal conundrums that seem ever likelier to present themselves. 

If Aleksandr Dugin seems preoccupied with a Pitirin Sorotkin, a Russian thinker who to my mind clearly patterns himself on Oswald Spengler, then Bannon seems to have found American thinkers who also follow Spengler in the most ominous possible way. The article which elucidates this was from Business Insider, hardly a suppository of Leftist Agitation. The article piggybacks on Time's Profile of Steve Bannon, and elaborates on the book which Bannon was said to value so highly. 

The particular book that seems to infatuate Bannon is the Fourth Turning by William Strauss and Neil Howe. The idea animating the book is the idea of the Saecula, which is an ancient Greek concept meaning roughly 'lifespan,' and because within a lifespan, the entire population of the world will die off and be replenished by new people, these new people will lack the memories of the generation who came before. Just to take one obvious historical example that I alluded to at the very beginning of this cast, we now live in a time when you can practically count the number of people have even childhood memories of World War I on your fingers, and therefore, we have no living memory of the circumstances that lead to it. And that leads us to its second Greek concept: the 'ekpyrosis.' An ekpyrosis is, and I couldn't possibly improve on the magazine's description: "a cataclysmic event that destroys the old order and brings in a new one in a trial of fire." One finds this idea in Spengler, one finds this idea in Sorokin, one finds this idea in Strauss and Howe, one finds this idea in Dugin, and clearly one finds this idea in Bannon. It is possible, however unlikely still, that there has been some sort of coordination between the Putin side and the Trump side to find a similar animating intellectual to give shape to the apocalyptic longings which Putin and Trump may share. To say this inevitably sounds like a conspiracy theory, but I was loathe to believe that Russia was involved in the hack of the Democratic National Committee listserv long after everyone else had acclimated to it. We are clearly living in a conspiratorial era. Whatever other qualities this era has, it's worth noting that Strauss, Howe, and Bannon all believe that the three great Ekpyroses of American life were the Revolutionary War, The Civil War, and World War II. It would seem that Mr. Bannon is determined to bring about the fourth. 

A saecula takes roughly 80 to 100 years to run its course. During which it runs through four stages and four turnings and is about to commence its fourth cycle in American History - one already has the sense that these thinkers are much too mystically inclined for their ideas to be very serious. If one's not careful, the reading of history can easily turn into the astrological mysticism of the testosterone laden male. 

The four turnings are 'high', when individualism is weak and institutions are strong.  The second is 'awakening', when institutions are attacked when reaching the zenith of their achievements because people tire of the discipline to take us there. The third stage is unraveling, when personal expression is prioritized above all else, and the fourth is crisis, when the institutions are too weak to stand collapse in a great cleansing event.  

From the crisis, a hero generation emerges who reestablishes the primacy of collective institutions - libertarian objectivists tempted to make common cause with Trump take note. We won't go through the cycle of archetypes except to note that the opposite of the hero archetype is the artist - who is the ultimate individual who owes nothing to the institutions who allowed his freedom - which, one must say, is an incredibly odd formulation for a man like Steve Bannon, who once was such a prolific filmmaker and documentarian.

Strauss and Howe seem to list every thinker but Spengler as influences, but the influence of Spengler is so clearly obvious that it's either an act of dishonesty to not mention him or repression. The number four is so unbelievably important in Spengler's work - which he ties not only to the four stages of civilization, but to the seasons themselves. In both cases, these theories are anti-individualist, pro-institutions, and clearly regard liberal individualism as a force of destruction. 

But unlike the other figures mentioned - Spengler was an extremely powerful thinker and a magnificent writer who makes the best possible case for an extremely flawed system of thinking. He has an almost occult view of history that to a certain reader can seem to reveal an impossibly intricate spiritual machine at work that seems to animate civilizations as though they were as alive as humans, with all the same milestones that all human beings reach. Spengler can almost make you feel as though astrology can be developed into hard science. Like many antidemocratic thinkers, it is very easy to fall under his spell, and I must say that there are moments when I was all too seduced by his pessimistic logic. But what Spengler never acknowledged is that such pessimism, even if it could ultimately be true - and of course there's no way of knowing, is completely self-fulfilling. If you are a person of great influence determined to destroy civilization as we know it because such destruction is inevitable, then of course, such destruction becomes inevitable. A destroyer like Steve Bannon has a much easier task ahead of him than whoever succeeds President Trump and may have to build a greater civilization from the rubble of what's destroyed. 

Spengler was clearly an anti-democratic conservative who believed in the omnipotence of the State, and perhaps that's why Strauss Howe list a whole dozen thinkers as influences but neglect to mention the clearest influence on them. However, when Spengler died in 1936 he'd established himself as an avowed anti-Nazi. He strenuously objected to Hitler's treatment of Jews, not because of any liberal notion of tolerance or alleviating suffering, but because it would be a tragedy to reject the creativity of, as he put it, such a gifted people. It is entirely possible that Spengler, however fascist his mentality otherwise, would look upon our new administration's treatment of immigrants with unmitigated horror that we have rejected such great potential sources of talent that can, perhaps, stave off civilization's decline and prolong American civilization's lifespan. 

The idea of generational life cycles or even civilizational life cycles needn't come from an anti-democrat like Spengler, it could just as easily come from more tolerant liberal thinkers like Arthur Schlesinger or Jared Diamond, or lower-case r republican conservative thinkers like Arnold Toynbee and Samuel Huntington, or an older liberal thinker like Giambattista Vico or even an old Tory like Edward Gibbon, or even ancient thinkers like Polybius and Ibn-Khaldun. Even the novel that made Thomas Mann's career, Buddenbrooks, is not only a chronicle of the Buddenbrook family over four generations of their rise and fall, but a chronicle a similar trajectory in the entire surrounding German civilization. Maybe it's even where Spengler got the idea - like Spengler, there are an inordinate number of symbolic details of color which are tied to rise and fall, health and sickness, youth and old age. But every one of these thinkers and many more have their own spin of these theories in which civilization rises and declines in three, four, six, seven, eight, nine, twelve stages. It ultimately doesn't mean a damn thing except as a metaphor, because nobody can agree on how exactly to define a civilization, and nobody can work out the reasons for civilization's rise and fall with much verisimilitude. When fifteen hundred civilizations have strode upon the world stage, maybe we'll have enough sample size to understand the process, but according to Spengler, there have only been nine. 

It is not the idea of a generational or civilizational conflict between rise and fall, institutionalism and individualism, yin and yang, in which one or the other always has the advantage that makes cyclical theory so dangerous, but the idea that yin and yang must always be in permanent enmity and therefore their conflict must result in the inevitable collapse of the defeated. If a world leader thinks the world is going to collapse and reacts according to his belief, then of course he will bring about a collapse. If America avoided a collapse in the manner of Europe during World War II, and make no mistake, America came closer than we can ever know just about every year from the Stock Market Collapse to the end of the Cold War, it is because of the insistence of many Americans, though of course not enough, that the true enemy was not dissenting forces that seem decadent but the intolerance of their dissent. Just as Lincoln expressed the sentiment at the end of the Civil War: "With malice towards none, with charity for all," his greatest successor, Franklin Roosevelt pre-emptively embodied that sentiment before such intolerance could dominate American discourse: "If civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships - the ability of all peoples, of all kinds, to live together, in the same world at peace." Or this other FDR quote which seems so particularly apropos in our new era: "Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough."