kagablog

syd is like franz kafka in bataille’s description - a man who refuses to grow up into the adult world around him (= apartheid manhood) and so becomes its image from within an eternal, very intelligent, teenhood.

his takes on the gruesome second hand trombone and musical saw numbers are worth the price of admission.

the great harry partch was like him except in a frenzied, gay version. your film is a rehearsal with so many asides that everything becomes an aside - including the performance. here is keith richards, stripped of his johnny depp guise and now a bare legend stalwart medusa’s head to gross-out white hip sensibility. he is the perfect kinderschrek to white pseuds - close to death several times, immortal as a cat, a nihilist filled with wholesome advice, a cyclops for whom only music is sacred.

defiant, hazed in his suicidal cloud of smoke he goes on about the innocence of childhood and the evils of society (including dire warning about emphysema) as if he were channeling rousseau to the sounds of leo kottke.

the crazy, temperamental, hybrid guitar is exactly like its owner. he is the great durban pleb - the wozzeck of blues or maybe the nosferatu of the guitar - the klaus kinski of the lowered third.

musical britain re-invented rock from the remaindered bins of black american vinyl. it also invented itself and then invented monsters like dylan via the posey rolling stones. amazing how the UK-sanitised black american music became available to woody guthrie /kerouac/ intellectual wannabes - the common thread? wildmen, noble savages all except of course the original blues inventors who were utterly sophisticated and civically nuanced (blues is a black urban culture but a white gauguin’s tahiti)

when syd performs all this above becomes a detail. he is a fantastic, total inhabiter of musical time.

you reinvent all this perfectly on tape, the coughing punctuations are a masterstroke. your piece is one more cigarette in the lungs of the hunger artist of cool durban: long live the sages of the g string.

jean-pierre de la porte

There is a Buddhist ideal of writing all the worlds stories on a bean.

The piano is such a bean- what Michael Blake has written on it are not just his stories but a considerable number of its own.

The piano lives between a scientific and an economic boundary It has the same uniformity, comprehensiveness and principled purity that made the nineteenth century able to populate the periodic table. The piano is a conveyance, exactly like photography; both advanced by increased accuracy, range, sensitivity and fidelity until the burgeoning figures of the symphony orchestra appeared in the one and the spectacle of the metropolis in the other.

The nineteenth century sustained writing as an industry Friedrich Kittler has framed its ideal as an Aufschreibesysteme. The piano was the hardware to musics torrent of printed software that rivaled Goethe Hegel, Balzac, Marx, Ruskin, Tolstoy and Darwin in prolixity

Three events mark the pianos contemporeniety–or separate us from its being in the nineteenth century

Arnold Schonberg interrupted its communion with the symphony orchestra by writing piano pieces where pitch is shrunk to a partitioning device. This lets asymmetries of tessitura, attack, phrase and rhythm assume its role. The pianos encompassing neutrality becomes a violent laboratory of the exception. Schonberg painstakingly mapped these singular constructions onto ensembles of no fixed genre. In Pierrot Lunaire it is the piano which is being dramatically, unsuccessfully transcribed by the voice and instruments: saturating them with its anomalies.

Claude Debussy exceeded the piano in the opposite direction ,drawing refractions of the Parsifal orchestra back into it to the brink of ambiguity. The greatest transcriber of Wagner after Liszt he was the first to exceed the limit of the pianos resolution, forcing him to rethink it into an original instrument, an iconic sign in the place of an indexical one.

Being in Morges and remembering rather then identifying is a heroic task: in Remembering Stravinsky we meet Michael Blake’s imagination under torture. If memory is the root of abstraction we find many of Michaels concepts- his furniture for hosting other composers- openly arrayed in these four minutes: like a glimpse into the living room of a bombed out building.

Applying Stravinsky’s mastery of caricature to himself , we meet , along a clear horizon, the seeds of the tiniest Stravinskian world : the tick-tock answer of chord to chord, the instant neutralization of motifs to block phrases forming, the shuttling of material across registers. Yet the plane of this horizon is not Stravinskian - it is Ivesian -and we sense there the tempo of the monument and silent factual inscriptions of the first of the Three Places in New England – one of the earliest compositions to direct utterances into the past tense.

This séance between Michael and the two dead masters is also a public piano story , the third at the base of modernity: Stravinsky’s neutralization.

Few other composers so grasped the tectonic value of the piano , its ability to project structure in place of form. Those pianists who play versions of le Sacre evocatively learn this to their cost. Stravinsky’s coloured pencils, his flirtation with the pianola and his lifelong taste for muted uprights are ancillaries to this massive reduction of the piano from image or voice to diagram: to an empty sign capable of arbitrarily matching any dimension of sonic design.

The longest piece in the collection- Ways to Put in the Salt – has Michaels Ouija bottle pointing to Debussy. The black people of Southern Africa are spectacular pioneers. Jared Diamond famously used their crossing from present day Cameroon to the unknown south through several biomes, social pressures and worlds inhospitable to domestication to prove that ingenuity and resilience rather than empire and wealth are the rewards associated with north south rather than east west migrations. Part of this African self-reliance is an intensely economical culture- where single idioms encode books of statutes, The great Xhosa woman musicians speak of putting the salt into their songs and Michael, familiar with this tradition unpacks this as well as he can into ‘cross rhythms, clap delay techniques, altered scale tones, parallel harmonic and melodic parts , non harmonic tones, dissonance, pattern singing and varied vocal techniques’.

His list becomes a challenge to musical synonymy- functioning like similar instructions in Jasper Johns diaries or Fluxus recipes to block the piano from functioning as a realist instrument, a snapshot – and pushing closer to a properly iconic function.

This is the Debussy edge of the triangle formed in the refolding of the nineteenth century piano-mirror. Michaels reading of Xhosa idiom is inevitably channeled through the author of Voiles - not in style but in logic- exemplifying the ways to put in the salt but never stooping to illustrate them

Their Souls Go Marching On is a fortuitous coda to a collection spelled in the three afterlives of the piano: Schonberg -130 years after his birth and in the company of his co founder of the modern canon ,Charles Ives -finds Michael Blake at his most autobiographical.

Caught between two masters he attempts their manic elision, jolting each one a click forward along their patrimony- Ives in the tempo of Nancarrow and Schonberg in the counterpoint of the Lyric Suite. But two minutes and fourteen seconds are too long to run ahead of the gods and this extraordinary cut-up falters at one minute forty seconds to reveal its most Schonbergian moment of all - a motor coughing into a stall and its most Ivesian- two imbricated styles falling away from each other. This is the essential piano tale – the instrument of balanced neutrality made to ricochet between every kind of asymmetry: the piano as a dictionary to which double grammar is applied to fend off realism.

Once established the Schonberg Debussy Stravinsky triangle is probed in different directions. Three Toys is a commission designed to engage Satie . the spinning top – a presumed source of the famous pear- is pointlessly viewed from different angles- a feint that would have amused Eric. Michael Blake shifts the engagement to a musical equivalent of Duchamp’s rotoreliefs- gramophone driven optical effects from the time when the great Dadaist styled himself as a salesman of visual gadgets. Jill Richards renders these anti-variations - studies in indiscernible difference- with exact irony. These three pieces are the zero on the number line of Michael Blake’s inventory.

French Suite pursues Satie into the domain of Ravel , affectionately teasing the exponents of African Pianism – a debate with which Michael Blake’s name is often associated – with a short cut between Couperin , cinematic motion and dance made in their name. In a similar gesture 38 a Hill Street Blues mosaics the near Webernian Uhadi bow music with Meade Lux Lewis’ Honky Tonk Train Blues- itself a Stravinskian exercise in intervallic economy and gestural counterpoint.

Such pieces highlight the condensation and polyvalence of African music and the inanity of treating its powerful architectures as colour, ornament or citation.

Nightsongs - a construction from eponymous Cole Porter numbers plus the apt ‘ I concentrate on you ‘ recreates in the friction of a single composers work with itself avenues into Scriabin and Ives of the Concord Sonata- an echo in Porterese of Holloway’s Gilded Goldbergs or Flaubert’s Dictionnaire des idées reçues

Expanding this drift are BWV Fragments, a Kagelian misprision of Bach cello suites and Oh Claire ,an acronym on Myra Hess’ blueprint of Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring – soaked in figuration and whipped along by Percy Grainger.

Bach is perhaps to Michael Blake the utopia of the keyboard , a moment when it could balance a dialogue between two eras, one filled with myth, the other with science , an ideal transparency and pure function before pianos began to illustrate orchestras and then flew apart into three exclusive domains modeled on the sign.

Jill Richards, the David Tudor of South African music, rises to the rhetorical challenge of these works which are Ivesian surveyors pegs around the three territories of the piano She buys into their multiple footings like a stand up comedian working the United Nations General Assembly. Her hypnotic Satie, her hysteric Ravel, her Debussian mimes, her Stravinakian greyness and her endlessly unbalanced Schonberg give her the perfect masks to unfold Michael Blake’s edenic worlds into a one -woman revue.

Rudiger Meyer once remarked that Kevin Volans was South Africa’s Jackson Pollock – if such parallels have any meaning, then Michael Blake -cool wrangler of the disparate - is it’s Jasper Johns.

‘you are an architect, you know special mathematics, and other things- make music from this and forget about learning harmony and counterpoint’

The Music in Exile conference produced several reactions in people. These can be sampled in the sequel discussions on Kagablog which served as a post facto clarification of what the conference was about.

My first impression of the conference brief was that it overstretched exile the way academic conferences of yesteryear once stretched already tenuous things like Freud into complete vacuity by applying them.

I wondered if Edward Said’s recent discussion of exile- a revaluation of the concept beyond its customary biblical and literary focus - had been deliberately ignored, making its omission a polemic or if it had simply been unnoticed.

I decided that either way Said on exile was the appropriate starting point for a contemporary discussion of music and exile for much the same reasons I believe a discussion of music and religion should take Messiaen or music and philosophy take Adorno or at very least Kivy or Scruton as their starting points.

This was a mistake. Only Christine Lucia and I mentioned Said as I recall and if not for Aryan Kaganof reproducing Howard Yoder’s excellent discussion of Said on exile we would have continued to have got puzzled stares for our trouble. Discussion was in fact dominated by two versions of South Africa in the twentieth century and played itself out in their incompatibilities: the conference turned on the rival potentials of Stalin and Hitler as ways of articulating South Africa’s musical past.

The parallax view of South Africa formed between the two great masters of undemocratic power was fascinating -with Tim Jackson’s untroubled reminders of the systematic Nazi strand in apartheid South Africa and several former exiles telling of how they sidestepped or danced with the ogre of Soviet communism during the ANC’s most vulnerable moments.

Powerfully reminded that South Africa scraped past alternate tyrannies by the skin of its teeth it seems better to forget about setting up exile for discussion in its contemporary sense defined by Said and his critics and focus on the more fascinating and anyway far more urgent thought that exile in its South African context played out an immense battle for integrity between neo-nazi white utopian harassment and neo-stalinist courtship.

It may well be South Africa’s most cosmopolitan moment- not because exiles were so widely scattered but because they formed the stratum between the twentieth centuries two defining pathologies of power; fascism and soviet communism.

The situation of non exiles was equally cramped by ideologically powerful and homogenous complexes; between a fake ethnicity and a fake republic veneered onto the old colonial framework. These vast configurations certainly set the programme for more than musicological research. The haze in which the presentations and discussions at the conference seemed to evolve was actually caused by the underlying problematics of Nazism and Stalinism, fake ethnicity and fake republicanism surfacing faster than they could be recognized and thought about around the theme of exile.

Obviously much needs to be done to understand the ways South African music resisted or capitulated to the force field of the Soviet vision of anti-imperialist struggle . Just as much needs to be done to understand the extent and inherence of Nazi conceptions of society, of race-unique modernization, of aryan manifest destiny, of cultural and educative frameworks and of mono-racial civil society in apartheid South Africa. A third research programme in musicology would be needed to understand the role of scholars like anthropologists or art and music historians and philosophers, jurists, economists and the media in bringing about the fake ethnicity and invented traditions of the ‘Bantustans’. Finally the way the white republic constructed itself out of the elements and styles of colonial administration while appearing to combat these is scarcely understood.

Despite the exile conference producing acuter awareness of these framing issues,exile as a theme may not be the most effective way to explore all of them . My own interest in the conference was as an occasion to discuss Mosoeu Moerane . I owe much of my growing understanding of this composer to the generosity of my friend and colleague composer Mokale Koapeng and also to the insights of Christine Lucia and the late Mary Rorich. In my initial discussion I compared Moerane to the great and equally easily misconstrued painter George Pemba. Both seem to take their bearings in an inherited and conservative-seeming western style but both stand out by making this pre-given language resonate with South African reality in an almost inexplicably powerful way- a power denied their contemporaries whose imaginations often seem simply westernized and colonized by comparison.

The ideas of Deleuze and Guattari about Kafka- ideas that circulate under the rubric of minor literature -seemed a useful way to understand how situating yourself in the language of the oppressor can give access to a new and subversive way of feeling, thinking and formulating rather than the expected mannerism, co-optation, stifling and sterility.

To explore this theme for music it is necessary to understand what cramped and exceptional circumstances force people into imposed languages – languages which are part of the greater systems by which colonies supplant existing experience with norms and co ordinates of their own. It is also necessary to show that the stance of Moerane – the creation of a voice through deliberate restriction – is an inherent and available potential of music and has been used to great effect as a strategy despite being mis-recognized as extraterritorial or naive art or as aesthetic conservatism.

What follows is merely a sketch of how such an argument may be developed around Moerane and how its assumptions fare when applied to other better known composers who I also regard as minor in the Deleuzian sense while being absolutely major in the way the still dominate musical discussion:

Gustav Mahler, Charles Ives and Conlon Nancarrow

cramped creation

Juan de Pareja was Diego Velasquez’ black slave and colour mixer. He was not allowed to handle a brush. In some versions of the story he practiced drawing in secret and emulated Velasquez from a distance. One day , expecting the kings studio visit, he placed one of his paintings on display. When the king reached it Juan de Pareja dropped to his knees an begged that he be allowed to paint. The king responded that nobody of such talent could possibly be a slave and Velasquez was obliged to grant his ‘indentured servant’ freedom.

Mosoeu Moerane was not that fortunate. There was no king in South Africa, only bureaucrats who were so witless about their job that they had to import hundreds of ex Nazis to talk them through the running of their rebaptised colony (now a whites-only utopia) and help staff universities. Moerane - heir of one of the worlds longest unbroken music traditions - had to seek assistance from one such redeployed fascist, Friedrich Hartmann, in order to receive the white mans music degree; the apartheid states way of granting black teachers a kind of license to speak in its territories.. Velazquez and the king had an easier time than Hartmann and his watchdog university because Juan de Pareja, as far as we know, did not carry the legacy of one of the great African traditions of design into his captivity with Velasquez. Possibly generations of slavery had obliterated any way of transmitting such traditions. It’s tempting to imagine de Pareja, who has already been the subject of a novel, sitting in his tiny room, the great autodidact exhausted by a day of pigment grinding and colour blending, bent over a copy of Vasari’s The Lives of the Artists -absorbing that saga of individual discovery as a single line from Giotto to Michelangelo.

Perhaps de Pareja reflected on this adventure of appearances captured like himself and thanked what slight luck he had that instead of being the property of a blacksmith or pig farmer, he was the chattel of a man he could secretly observe extending this great Vasarian ambition of conquering the way the world looks.

De Pareja was fortunate too that the king didn’t believe as the architects of separate development did, that only a certain kind of art and culture was appropriate to him by virtue of the accident of his colour and insisted that he weave baskets or string beads or run a cultural centre in his new found autonomy. As a result of his more enlightened era, Juan de Pareja was eventually allowed to speak in the language of his captors, to paint their world in his own name, out of hiding and more than in the incidentals to Velasquez own canvases. Some smirking western commentators still remark that de Pareja did not learn much from his master Velasquez. His The Calling of Saint Matthew shows something far more interesting than a secondary Velasquian though.

It openly shows Velasquez world at its most conventional and bizarre . Its is baroque painting become unconcernedly artificial and indiscreet ; Figures from Raphael’s The School of Athens stand around philosophizing behind Christ who himself seems to have walked straight off the set of a Bellini painting. Holbein’s ambassadors rug supports a meeting of fences or pawn shop operators , three of whom are dressed as bourgeois dandys. Manet would be admired and chided centuries later for showing Spanish realist painting in all its latent artifice and disarray- his only precursor is de Pareja.

We meet around St Matthew the stock characters of baroque painting: humans frozen as types and versatile extras stretching back to the renaissance in an unbroken string of conventional roles. They return without the disguise of individual portraits in de Pareja hands. All around these usually hidden human props of the painter , the Vasarian myth of mastered appearances is evident in literal property which overshadows the generic people ; velvet on a drape coming to show itself out of nowhere marble, leather, gold light and shade, smoky figures in a mirror. These are the surfaces of goods and possessions seen by a painter who had recently been just such a subtle piece of property himself - one which could add value by opulently painting opulence and who now presents it in scarcely hidden tatters and seams.

Mosoeu Moerane’s problem was not simple capture in an identity as property along with cattle, goods or other slaves In his time colonialism was revised into an A stream and a B stream both consisting of humans. Both streams were realized as ‘nations’ rather than as owners and slaves although in fact they were nothing more than two classes; white supremacists emulating Nazis and a working class administered into ethnicities as spurious as Verwoerd’s own.

Moerane was unlucky to be part of a creative State- something far worse than a merely repressive one. He found himself reflected in the overnight State creation of white civil society with its orchestras, virtuosos, prizes and pretensions to white style, opinion, taste ,culture urbanity and civility - another polishing Nazi touch. Against this , spurious ethnicities were created , vast administrative and tactical stereotypes within the existing colonial manifest destiny. Moerane could not default from the noveau-white glitz to his own tradition because that tradition was occupied and driven by racist social science and apartheid eugenics.

Velasquez court of Philip IV was brutal but at least genuine, not reinvented with every generation of brainstorming colonial bourgeois. When Juan de Pareja was part of it - either as chattel or as free agent - he was at least part of something actual. When a slave spoke to a king it was not also through two layers of Nazi and colonial ventriloquism hastily knocked together into a republic.

Towards a minor music

Moerane’s double state-administered identity, double style veneers and double layer colonial class war was the map of his unique migration -from the vernacular space of an unbroken oral tradition to the caricatural curriculum of the school, to the white culture-vault of the university, to the fascist meister, to the colonial missionary space of sacred music which may have seemed a liberated zone beside its claustrophobic neighbors.

When scholars get beyond the sheer paleography of Moerane’s Fatso la Heso (who wrote what, could Moerane have managed it all or was it Hartmann sketching in solutions to get rid of his untermensch pupil and have a laugh at examining academics etc ) they will hear in its hesitations as much as its glibnesses the same things they see but seem not to see in the great painting of Juan de Pareja the slave.

There is something specific - certainly a genre- in the work of women, homosexuals, colonized people, workers, slaves -of all who are forced in one way or another to speak in the language of their oppressor. That the vast literature of this condition has not been focused on Moerane is surprising Franz Kafka epitomized this condition by writing in the language of the occupier. This feature of his work was what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari believed they captured in the notion of a minor literature.

Kafka captures the dimensions of his own situation in his story A Report to an Academy. He tells of an ape captured and transported on board ship in a cramped cage . During this passage the ape is faced with fading away in despair or escaping to leap overboard in suicide . It uses its enforced waiting to observe the humans around it so closely that it is able to copy, comprehend and reproduce their behavior and thoughts; it even seems to capture part of the soul of the distracted sailor who comes to feed it. This vast learning is undertaken to assist it to escape from its cage. Instead, on reaching a destination the ape is confronted with life in a zoological garden or life in the music hall. Choosing the latter it uses a succession of teachers to reach so high a skill in imitation that it reports- now under the name of Red Peter- to a scientific academy on its metamorphosis- so complete that it can no longer describe its emotions and experiences as an ape.

Red Peters report is the model of the minor - understood as a relation to the majority which it embraces and dissents from in the same gesture.

Gustav Mahler suffered the earliest forms of the antisemitism that would eventually grow to sweep away his world. His conversion was his primary bid for a place within a majority, his music endlessly rescinded this conversion as much as Red Peter - another converts- wry report rescinds his. The fertile anomalies in Mahler still occupy us far more than whatever arguments still surround his place in the succession of western music.

His finest biographer, Henry-Louis de La Grange, wrote that Mahler ‘cannot be classed in any definite category .Those who consider him a post romantic ,late offspring of the Wagnerian tradition are infallibly disappointed by the neoclassicism of the fourth symphony. Those who think of him as prolonging Bruckner’s monumental neoclassicism and who admire his prodigious craftsmanship and supreme mastery of form must concede that his art is more subjective than objective and that his aim like the romantics, is to convey a message by awakening the listeners emotions. And finally those who take him as a modern forerunner of the Viennese school and prophet of the future are disconcerted by the banality of his themes and by his fidelity to traditional form and diatonic harmony’ (H-L de La Grange Mahler -a Biography introduction xv Gollancz 1974).

In this a stasis is described in Mahler’s music and his reputation arising from existing between idioms . Twentieth century composing , performance and recording culture is filled with interpretations designed to push Mahler out of this stasis and towards an idiom. Bernstein construed Mahler between a Jewish past of popular music and a prophecy of twentieth century disasters. Bernstein’s Mahler becomes as sincere as himself, leaving no room for Mahler’s obvious irony. Abbado’s Mahler is filled with irony-but all suitably historicist as if coming directly from dialogues between the conductor and Luigi Nono. Levine arrives on cue with subjective irony which then all but disappears again into detailed musical tectonics with Gielen.

The inexhaustible demand for Mahler cycles is part of this ongoing hermeneutic obligation to strongly construe Mahler one way or another, as if he were troublesome evidence in a court case where sets of performances serve as closing arguments to the jury.

Mahler is also forced into blanket redefinition by composers: Boulez sees musical narrative in him and a new way of approaching Berg , Shostakovitch sees him as his particularly deep rooted contemporary , Stockhausen sees him encapsulating human experience in a way ready for visitors from another planet to comprehend.

Multiple Mahlers result from his inclusion in so many idioms while belonging to none. Thus spectralized Mahler becomes mythic -either as a monster made of different parts or a transcending spirit drawing then all together: at the same moment Ken Russell portrays the Mahler-monster, David Holbrook interprets him as the Kleinian quest for spiritual integration.

Mahler is modernity’s Zellig or Chancy Gardener, a cause of endless projections, famous because he is pervasive but pervasive because he is everywhere and nowhere -nameless- a perfectly modern vacant universal. de La Granges subtle antinomies turn into an epic biography which Stockhausen called a vast detective story in which anything might be a clue. In this sustained ambiguous perspective the only thing clear is that there is never going to be a definitive Mahler- neither in performance nor in some clarified canon. H e inhabits several incompatible idioms at once each one a lure to the hasty interpreter and he leaves these idioms untouched, unlike any modernist or postmodern successor. For Mahler the contemporary of Giovanni Morelli, Sherlock Holmes. Charles Peirce and Sigmund Freud reality consists entirely of details.

Through technical mastery Mahler possesses several languages- recrossing their terrain many times as a conductor, a reader and composer . He never takes the various escape routes he himself marks out in his music ; routes which Sibelius, Nielsen, Shostakovitch, Zemlinsky and Schoenberg each make their own. He begins in the same place over again bounded by the same triangle of romanticism classicism and modernism. This is what prompted Schoenberg to say that Mahler wrote the same symphony nine times.

But Mahler the great objective reader, particularly of himself, finds elbow room in incongruities between different languages. Incongruities that would disappear if he imagined a more coherent and consistent language at their point of convergence and moved towards this by elimination as Sibelius and Webern did.

Ives is as determined as Mahler to exist between host languages while letting them be themselves. An exasperated Boulez is referring to this when he calls Ives an amateur unable to impose a single body of technique on his material. Taking advantage of an American performance tradition not yet ossified or commercialized Ives easily situates himself across the entire spectrum occupied by music of his time : a vernacular, a commercial, a learned and a sacred language exist as unconnected layers in him and each language migrates freely between these conditions.

Unlike a modernist, Ives does not see in these varied states of music different meanings -in the way Stravinsky finds in jazz , fairground music or village wedding chants a distinctness which can only be drawn together in a collage.

In Central Park in the Dark we do not hear a place filled with different types of music but a music made up of different types of places . The act of moving between these places is presented in Over the Pavements. Ives contains no collages and nor does Mahler : like a soul caught in the wrong body and signaling this dilemma with unexpected twitches and stumbles both inhabit existing languages and force them to blurt out what lies against their grain. These blurts are not the unexpected distortions, and exaggerations of expressionism- they are as carefully prepared and deliberated over as fireworks.

These blurts are also very specific Conlon Nancarrow devises a technique and an aesthetic to produce and study them. They appear in him as virtual harmonic motions without literal pitches below them and durations irresolvable into rhythm or metre.

Everybody notices these things in Nancarrow but mistakes them for contrasts to the frozen melodies and modular phrases of his music- as if he were a minimalist become ornate. The legible surfaces of Nancarrow are like the stuffed goat and tyre in Robert Rauschenberg’s combine- not the subject of his painting but a frame for the daubs dropping down from the goats face which continue punctuating the hidden words and images it stands on.

Nancarrow’s neatly stuffed melodies and phrases are also defaced by smears of diminutions, superpositions and motion blur accelerandi which scatter off them to make a different musical plane. Paul Griffiths remarked that Nancarrow works like an animator, carefully designing legible transitions between music frames which when played back fast are stretched on the rack of mathematically assured nonproportion. Melodies attached to these warping grids become unrecognizable at breaking point and snap back to dots ,layers of polyphony form out of a shower of notes and are shaken off like water. Nancarrow’s cartoon physics, which no doubt comes from the technical matrix shared by cellular animation and piano rolls , hides under its freedoms the strangulated position he occupies.

He writes a score, transcribes it into another code giving the same microscopic control over its performed surface as any electronic music - this code is read by one or two pianos which have been altered to render the density of the music . For all the freedom of design and specificity this promises it also binds Nancarrow tightly in a three step transcription between layers which do not resemble each other . These are the strata Nancarrow must cut into at different points, a kind viscous layer which Nancarrow ingeniously instructs or coaxes along its way; the inertial dead music moving in the ingenious automaton of virtually alive music which he is famous for.

Nancarrow in his basement - pinned between nineteenth century music , a pianola code that speaks to no human eye or ear and fading obsolete instruments - dramatizes the way the intact layers of language in Mahler and Ives also constantly and uncomfortably partition their composing. A musicologist from mars would have no difficulty seeing Mahler Ives and Nancarrow as working with profoundly conservative languages, much as they would see Thomas Mann or Pierre Bonnard working with genres and idioms of the past.

But of course none of these seeming conservatives have conservative consequences in their work or conservative followers- therefore what are they doing?
An indication comes from Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of Kafka where we learn that minor literature is one which does mostly three things:

It unpredictably alters a major languages relationship to context and reference (’deterritorialises’ it) by being written in the major language but from a marginalized or minoritarian point of view.

It has an immediately political effect because in its cramped spaces what is individual and what is social are inextricable.

It has a collective value because what each author says individually also constitutes a common objective.

Compare any Mahler adagio to Strauss ‘Tod und Verklarung’ to see that that Mahler shifts the language he shares with Strauss far from its customary capacity for declaration and expression A Mahler adagio is Strauss off the Wagner-Strauss-Sibelius line on which he habitually travels . Not that Mahler’s adagios effect this by lying or being ironic , they are often intensely sincere and literal but are also quite simply elsewhere , unable to go on coding or conveying whatever they were designed for . They are not beside or beyond themselves at an extremity of the language in the expressionist manner, they are in a blurred or suspended relation to the entire history they gave rise to- hollowing from within its language and possibilities of use. In short Mahler deterritorialised the major language of his time by remaining within it.

The way Ives dissolves existing codes by means of themselves is apparent in all his music but especially where it pretends to be compendious and encyclopedic -in his orchestral works. Here a simple question must be asked : where this music is taking place? in a form? in a style? in a narrative? in an allegory? in a confession or a memory? in a tectonic continuity of technique? The impossibility of answering any of these questions means Ives evasion of the language he is in by means of itself is so complete that he threat ens to silently eviscerate even subsequent languages and hence the anxious concern of the avant-garde and post minimalists with him.

Nancarrow is marginal , an exile from American anticommunism working in obscurity. His music, which starts in earnest around his thirty fifth year, is a map of his alienation existing like the kind of forceps used to handle nuclear waste , reassembling at a distance the shell of mainstream music already pulverized by jazz, eroding that shells own internal forces of cohesion and presenting it in an altered state inside his machine, in its own afterlife as Nancarrow’s zombie.

By the second criterion of minor music it is immediately political because in its cramped spaces the individual is inextricable from the socius: The thoroughly, immediately political Mahler is not something hidden behind the massive cult of subjectivity surrounding him. It is that subjectivity. The Mahler biography is a rich compound of institutional power, antisemitic forces, generational bids for autonomy beneath aesthetic guises, patronage and deep hypocrisy all spun into a narrative center of gravity which Stockhausen, accurately called a myth which was only transiently Mahler and which may quite appropriately live on without him.

Ives space is so cramped that he cannot fit an identity as a composer into it or any of the musical legitimations or aesthetics of his day – he has to make do with a matrix remembered from baseball. The forensic tone of Ives scholarship indicates that he is nowhere present on the surface of his music - not even as its proprietor. His own social and patriotic writings delve back to the Bloomsbury of America, to Thoreau, Emerson, Hawthorn and the Alcotts ,suggesting that he experiences himself as the locus of an audience that has yet to come into being: where the people are missing (Kafka) you must freely shape them from your own void.

on the third criterion minor music has a collective value because what each composer says individually already constitutes a common action:

This predicts that Mahler, Ives and Nancarrow’s music becomes a tool of collective identity- and this certainly happened many times over . Mahler was the collective noun for soviet symphonism as well as for the western avant-garde’s conquest of complexity . Ives constituted an instant Americana and then became the hub of the American experimental tradition , Nancarrow precipitated Cunningham in the sixties and Frank Zappa in the seventies then became an idol to Ligeti and a universal precedent to American post-minimalism.

In this construction it is possible to begin imagining Moerane not as the composer of a sparse thread in sacred and western orchestral music but as a maker of pieces so resoundingly odd, identical to their host languages but indiscernibly different as to cast the identity and direction of the host in doubt - the way Mahler denatures Wagner or Ives makes the synthetic symphonic genre appear like it was merely eavesdropping all along. In Moerane the identity of the composer fades as we approach it closely and where it stood we are sucked instead into the literal tempo of the moebius apartheid strip of pseudo western and pseudo ethnic events - and then we glimpse Moerane again- but as if an era had grown a personality and a face.

Moerane becomes the collective name for a project- of which Mokale Koapeng and a few others are co-heirs -pioneers of first hearing and then writing a South African minor music – ie. a properly revolutionary because properly unsettling music- beyond Stalin , beyond Hitler, beyond ethnicity and beyond the genteel colonial white music world- a world which today is merely the waxworks of apartheid culture.

This project- which is a reading of Moerane which some will see as his deliberate travesty, does not free itself of Stalins, Hitlers Mangopes and Verwoerds as much as invites them to saturate one another, to blend indiscernibly into a South African present no longer hidden by yuppie fog or deluded rainbows. It is a language caught only in the blur of their languages, another voice heard clearly in the fiery furnace of their old voices. Moseou Moerane, like all people too great not to be minor, is in the process of being born posthumously.

a sculptural performance piece for piano, marker pen and interference

Jill Richards, Aryan Kaganof & Jean-Pierre De La Porte

The piece must be performed on a FAZIOLI grand piano. Absolutely no other piano make will do.

Jill will perform continuously for 48 hours. The grand piano will be placed in the garden, surrounded by a sheet of clear perspex. On this sheet of perspex Aryan will write a text about the history of the piano, its development and meaning in contemporary music culture. This text will be researched and collated by Jean-Pierre and Aryan. The music that Jill performs will be a history of the instrument’s repertoire, but not chronologically played, rather guided and moved by instigation from Jean-Pierre. In the beginning of the performance the audience will be able to see Jill playing through the clear perspex, unhindered by text. However, by the end of the performance, the perspex will be completely covered in black marker pen text, the history of the piano, of pianism, preventing audiences from hearing any music on the instrument unframed by its past.

Jean-Pierre’s interferences will be sculptural as well as musical. He may drill through the perspex wall wherever he deems musically relevant (both in terms of Jill’s sound, and Aryan’s text). He may also set up other relationships between the piano notes and the pianistic text. In this sense he serves as a bridge between music and text - a bridge in the Heideggerian sense, a technological intervention with its own built-in auto-critique .

Aryan Kaganof
20/09/09

every good metaphor is a literal falsehood: saying somebody is like an asshole is stupid and meaningless - saying they are an asshole is mindbendingly apt.

blake writes this complicated gloss on david dargie and all the xhosa music he likes . you come and say it’s a transcription of a sketch for sein und zeit . you make your point with something very heideggerian - the Holzwege and the cars which are so nicely de-entifying.

the time fundamental is shot along by your cutting and the murmuring movements and zooms of the cam - just enough to stop anybody thinking it’s a poetic bunch of stills. the vertigo in the middle is fantastic as is the little window of clouds/ goosefeathers /blossoms - who knows and who cares because your point is not to culminate anything by anything else - so we see the big heidegger deal of 1925 - time is equiprimordial with being.

my son commented- unusually tender for blake - but blake in non-heidegger mode does not sound tende r- you have tenderised him.

it happens that mary rorich and i are making a sort of survey of western philosophy and western music together; we sit and present to each other - off the cuff but in some kind of sequence - the cross-play between music as an invention and philosophy as an invention. today we talked about heidegger and were struck by the way he straddles two avantgardes - he’s the peak of expressionism in 1927 and then he resurrects in 51 as the cool objectivity on everybody’s lips - from stockhausen to sartre.

what can i say? i prefer your sheer false assertion of heidegger in blake to blake’s assertion of dargie/xhosa and to my assertion that hes using the whole occasion to pay debts to debussy. now he has a debut piece to MTV too.

Morton Feldman was Adorno’s intimate nightmare: he was- with Cage Brown Tudor and Wolfe –the New York School of music. His intimacy with the great painters is legendary – hearing from his sometime teacher Stefan Wolpe that music ought to be understood by the man in the street, he glanced out the window to see Jackson Pollock crossing the road.

irrelevance has broken out -reputations are dropping like flies- bumptious, , pompous, bradburian, beside-the-point , criminally negligent read the tags on their toes . dead from overindulging in the lethal sideshows of anarchy is the overall diagnosis- killed by mislabeling is the second opinion. I agree with gwen ansell that the conference was utterly mislabeled The question now is whether this was deliberate misdirection - like those missionaries who go to haiti to snatch children , or was it haze from the poor academics bussed in to play cards already dealt?

The fund manager who signed the cheque for all this ought to be interviewed on these pages before we get to torturing each other to death by a thousand pixels.

Nazi architecture and public space was destroyed and left in conspicuous piles to discourage the emergence of right wing shrines. Tim jackson’s nazi sibelius is already welcomed to the fold on several neonazi blogs and websites- a phenomenon im sure he deplores but cannot prevent.

Suppressing unpleasant facts in history is not an option, hence my long-winded elitist and irrelevant argument with tim jackson to put hartmann squarely in context – if he is a victim, an exile in some extraordinary and attenuated sense, then lets have evidence for this condition. If he is a nazi, well , as gwen says of leni and martin and herbert and elizabeth-its no big deal, as long as we know. Just don’t sell us a nazi as a victim.

All this is overlain by something tim jackson and his maestro seem deeply unaware of- the role of hartmann in the overnight apartheid hijacking of civil society. This is where the hartmann discussion does indeed become relevant in the south african canonical sense expressed by muff and gwen and mokale because absolutely nothing has been done to transform the apartheid music establishment or the way it reproduces itself in south african society.

Expected to wither on the vine when state funding was redirected, the apartheid music juggernaut lives on and thrives below the radar like other relics of high apartheid- the awb, the lobby for pure afrikaans , the oranje separatists, the broederbond.

We need to urgently confront this musical time-capsule from the bogus white republic with its own genesis- this can be a far more effective exercise than discussion of economic justice and the morality of opportunity provision -although these are constantly necessary too.

A proper discussion of hartmanns patronage as well as of music and pedagogy under the white nationalists exemplifies, in my opinion, the africanization of scholarship unisa is trying - top down- to define and is not only indispensable to a proper grasp of moerane but basic to any tactic today for dismantling the scandal of opportunities-for-whites-only music life in south Africa - the white rhinoceros wearing an armor of charities and ‘black uplifting schemes’ which blithely hosted this hartmann conference and which continues to marginalize great musical presences like mokale koapeng in its icy well-meaningness

I truly enjoyed these paragraphs by Jean-Pierre:

“so far for every piece of evidence led, equally convincing arguments have come from both sides of the dispute. Now is the time for character witnesses- the community of sibelius scholars is being asked by tim to significantly revise its biographic conception of sibelius to include the fact of his being a nazi sympathizer.

This is equivalent of asking the golf community to revise their conception of tiger woods from overall mr nice guy to serial philanderer- except in sibelius’ case there are no publicity hungry aggrieved mistress having press conferences nor secret mobile phones with naughty messages about assignations. The burden then falls on tim to revise the entire pattern of sibelius biography - a huge network of actions, intentions and events in such a way as to make the nazi episode seem quite consistent,coherent and expected. The burden of circumstantial proof for the the pro sibelius camp is to fortify that same pattern of actions and events so as to exclude or make vanishingly small the probability of sibelius being a nazi sympathiser - with a sibelius of such consistently liberal character, tim’s accusations simply cannot stick.”

I think that I do have the historical “glue” in the form of documents to make my assertions about Sibelius “stick.”

As the author of the articles “Sibelius the Political” and “Sibelius and the SS” that have elicited a “Sibeliusstreit,” I thought that I should offer a very brief view of at least part of my research on the connections between Sibelius and the Nazi regime. The first article is about 100 printed pages with full documentation, to appear in“Sibelius the Political” in Sibelius in the Old and New World: Aspects of His Music, Its Interpretaton, and Reception, eds. Timothy L. Jackson, Veijo Murtomäki, Colin Davis, and Tomi Mäkela (Peter Lang: New York, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, Oxford, Wien), forthcoming 2010. It should be out soon.

An important aspect of the original documents that form the basis of my studies is not only their content but their tone. The Nazis had their own version of the German language – well described by Victor Klemperer in his Lingua Tertii Imperii – so that resonances of the original wording is almost impossible to translate; for this reason, in the scholarly versions, I have generally included the German originals in footnotes. Thus, the reader will be able not only to check the accuracy of my translations but also appreciate the mode of address; for example, by reading the German letters between Sibelius and Günther Raphael, it is possible to contrast the cold officiousness of Sibelius’s communications to Raphael (post-1933) with the warm, friendly obsequiousness of his responses to Thierfelder (more about this matter shortly). For a long time it has been asserted that Sibelius maintained a strategic distance from the Nazi regime, a “hands-off” policy so to speak, counter to Goebbels’ assertion that the artist must take a position. My research, primarily with documents in German archives - but also with help from Finnish colleagues (especially Prof. Veijo Murtomäki, although he has a different viewpoint) - in the Finnish archives, demonstrates this not to have been the case.

Sibelius was friendly with a conductor by the name of Helmuth Thierfelder, who was a card-carrying Nazi and SS member who wanted to propagandize on behalf of the “New Germany” in the Baltic Countries, Finland, Sweden, and promote the Finnish-Germany alliance. Since he proclaimed himself as a “National Socialist Conductor” of the “New German” music - as well as of Sibelius and the classics - when Thierfelder conducted in Sweden and Lithuania in 1938, he was greeted with resistance both in the press and public.

Only in Finland, which seems to have been more favorably disposed to Nazi Germany, was Thierfelder’s reception warmer. In 1933, he became a member of the SS-Berlin, in the Stabe of the 6th Standarte; since July 1936, when he moved to Hamburg, he was in the Stabe of the 28th SS Standarte. In Hamburg, he befriended his chief of the SS there, Guenther Pancke, then Stabsführer SS-Oberabschnitt “Nord.” (Pancke had served time during the Weimar Republic for throwing a gas bomb into a crowded theater showing the film “All Quiet on the Western Front.”) In 1937, along with the Swedish composer Kurt Atterberg, and shortly thereafter Sibelius, Pancke would try to help Thierfelder hold onto his job at German Radio (see below).

In another, printed version of his curriculum vita, Thierfelder proudly writes that from 1929-1933 he “took active part in the cultural-political battles in Berlin’s musical life against foreign [artfremd] Internationalism,” a code-phrase for Jewish, left-leaning and avant-garde artists and composers. For example, in May 1933, Thierfelder signed a public denunciation of Leo Kestenberg (music advisor in the Prussian Ministry of Education and the Arts in the Weimar Republic, condemned and exiled as a Jew) and Fritz Jöde (a music educator who later became a loyal Nazi Party member). In October 1933, Thierfelder received the Knight’s Cross, First Class, from Finnish President Pehr Evind Svinhufvud (Kivimäki was Prime Minister at the time) for “his service to German-Finnish cultural exchange.” In 1935, Thierfelder conducted Sibelius’s Second Symphony with the Frankfurt Radio Orchestra to celebrate the composer’s seventieth birthday, which coincided with Hitler presenting Sibelius with the Goethe Medal. At the same time, Thierfelder also published an open letter in the main German and Finnish music magazines addressed to Sibelius in German and Finnish - that Sibelius must have approved - the text of which makes Sibelius a Nazi sympathiser; this letter was probably the reason that Adorno branded Sibelius a Nazi sympathiser.

After these 1935 events, for a series of reasons, none of them “political,” Thierfelder found himself unemployed and in trouble with the Reich Radio authorities in Germany in late 1937 and early 1938. At this point, documents provide evidence for Sibelius’s intervention on Thierfelder’s behalf with Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry (ProMi). On February 6, 1938, four days after meeting with Sibelius and receiving a written general recommendation from him, Thierfelder penned the following letter to another SS friend Hans Hinkel, SS Oberführer, the (notorious) Reichs Cultural Officer: “Two days ago I returned from abroad [Finland] and, for some time, have tried to keep my nose above water as a German musician. I have succeeded, although with great difficulty because everywhere sit the emigrant types like Fritz Busch (Stockholm, etc.), who say that after they left Germany there are no more up-and-coming conductors. Therefore, as a National Socialist it is more difficult but better! I hope that you could glance through my report and the foreign press notices and be satisfied with my work.” After the meeting with Sibelius at the beginning of February, Thierfelder decided to appeal directly to Goebbels (in March). Did Sibelius and Thierfelder discuss this strategy? Could Sibelius have mentioned Heinz Drewes in Goebbel’s ProMi, who would become the director of the German Sibelius Society in 1942? All of a sudden, Thierfelder’s fortunes took a U-turn for the better. Apparently, he was allowed to conduct the Berlin Philharmonic in the Berlin Radio Hall on the evening before Hitler’s birthday, April 19, 1938! An internal memo directed to Goebbels represents a reversal in the views of the officials within the ProMi: “Dr. Thierfelder cannot be successfully employed as previously for cultural-political propaganda work in the Nordic countries and Baltic bordering states if he does not have some position in the Reich. It is especially necessary that his name not disappear totally from the programs of the Reich Radio Company. Politically, there are no concerns about Dr. Thierfelder personally. Even if he also first joined the Party on May 1, 1933, already since 1930 he was already active for the movement. Before the takeover of power he was a member of the Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur. In the years 1931-32, he repeatedly directed his own concerts with the Berlin Philharmoniker for subscribers to the NS Press, especially the “Angriff,” even though this effort represented for him an economic loss. Already in 1930, through Jewish machinations, he lost his position at the Berlin Sinfonie-Orchester. Considering Thierfelder’s cultural-politically valuable service, which goes well beyond that of the average conductor, I ask for the authority to signal to Dr. Glasmeier or a director of one of the radio stations, to employ Dr. Thierfelder. In this connection I am thinking above all of the radio stations that cultivate cultural connections with the Nordic and Baltic States. Heil Hitler!”

duemling drewes goebbels

After all of these appeals, Goebbels decided that no one should be forced to hire Thierfelder, but behind the scenes everything should be done to help him. As a result, by the fall of 1938, Thierfelder had been engaged as the chief conductor of the Niedersachsen Orchestra in Hanover. With the outbreak of war, in 1939, while serving as a reserve officer training motorcycle-mounted troops on the Polish border, Thierfelder found himself threatened with being fired and his orchestra being disbanded. And again, there is evidence of intervention by Dr. Drewes within the ProMi to preserve the orchestra and Thierfelder’s position. In 1941, Thierfelder was put on the “valuable persons” (UK-) list so that he would never be drafted a second time and instead could continue his “important propaganda work,” once more with the support of Sibelius’s connections in the ProMi. Then, in 1942, Thierfelder, with Sibelius’s backing, organized a “Finland Concert” with his orchestra to perform some of Sibelius’s warlike music to celebrate the German-Finnish “Waffenbruderschaft” - this highly politicized festive concert immediately followed a conducting stint in Helsinki and a meeting with Sibelius - all events much publicized in the Nazi press. On May 10, 1942, the Hannoverscher Anzeiger, announced excitedly, “In the series – ‘Music of the Peoples’ – the Lower Saxony Orchestra of Hanover will present on May 14 a ‘Finland Concert,’ over which His Excellency the Finnish Ambassador Minister Professor Kivimäki and the Gauleiter and Higher President Lauterbacher will preside. Dr. Helmuth Thierfelder, the conductor of the Lower Saxony Orchestra, in the course of a guest appearance in Helsinki, had occasion to visit Sibelius and spoke with our special reporter about it.“ In an article published 12 May, 1942 in the Niedersächsische Tageszeitung, Sibelius is full of enthusiasm for the founding of the German Sibelius Society. There can be no question of the composer’s aloofness: for the first time, he feels properly appreciated in Germany. And he concurs with the author’s view of him as a composer who had to wait until the advent of the Third Reich to find his true place in German concert halls, which had been formerly dominated by “Modernists” – read “Degenerate Musicians.” This report also demonstrates a stunning obsequiousness on Sibelius’s part towards Thierfelder: “In April of this year, Dr. Thierfelder was again invited as guest conductor for two concerts in Helsinki. Sibelius wrote shortly before from his country seat in Järvenpää: ‘When you arrive in Helsinki, please call me by telephone immediately. You are heartily welcome. I am already looking forward to it.’ On the first day of his stay there was no opportunity for this call since the radio concert began immediately after his arrival; thus the telephone greeting had to be postponed to the next day. Dr. Thierfelder then conducted Mozart’s G minor Symphony, and shortly after the last tones had died away, the telephone rang in the radio studio; Professor Sibelius is on the line and wishes to speak to the German conductor. ‘May you be most welcome,’ says Sibelius to Thierfelder, ‘I have just heard your Mozart performance and wish to thank you for the wonderful tempi. Tomorrow we will meet at my house.’ This was a hearty greeting and at the same time a friendly invitation.”

No expense was spared for the elaborate decoration of the Domed Hall of the City Auditorium (see photograph), a clear indication of the political and cultural significance attached to the event by both Nazis and Finns. The concert, which took place on May 12, 1942, featured some of Sibelius’s most nationalistic and pugnacious music, “The Song of the Athenians” and the complete, newly revised four-movement Lemminkainen Suite in its German premiere. As Andrew Barnett observes concerning the text of “The Song of the Athenians,” “the poem [Dexippos] depicts the struggle between the culture and civilization of the Greeks and the might of the barbarous Persians – from the Finnish perspective, an obvious analogy with the relationship between Finland and Russia.” How fitting that this text should be sung by Hitler Youth, infantry and airforce choirs: its contemporary resonances are not lost on the critics, who comment on the appropriateness of these military forces, “joined in the beautiful presentation of a work that glorified war and heroic death [das Kampf und Heldentod verherrlicht].” The comparison between the warlike Lemminkainen and Siegfried resonated with another critic, August Uerz, who discerned in Lemminkainen the “Siegfried-like character from the Finnish folk-epic Kalevala” (review from Friday 15 May, 1942, Niedersächsische Tageszeitung). On May 19, 1942, Thierfelder sent all of these newspaper reviews and reports to Sibelius with the following letter: “Deeply honored, dear Master, as a small thank-you for the pleasant hours that I was again able to spend with you, I can report today of a new, wonderful success of your works in Germany. I hope that I am able to make you happy with this. If I do not find myself applauding everything that the newspapers write, nevertheless most if it is good and correct and will show you with what open-mindedness your wonderful works are received in Germany, and how one is concerned to perceive your complete meaning [Sie in Ihrer ganzen Bedeutung zu erfassen]. Enclosures: interviews and reviews.” Thierfelder’s comment that the Germans are “concerned to perceive your complete meaning” - or “significance” – is quite striking: he seems to be referring to Sibelius’s own interpretation of the contemporary relevance of his music.

letters from raphael to sibelius

My research on Sibelius and Nazism is composed of many strands. Another line of inquiry concerns Sibelius’s relationship with the composer Günther Raphael, the half-Jewish grandson of Sibelius’s former teacher in Berlin. On November 16, 1931, Raphael, a brilliant young composer who had already had his First Symphony performed by Furtwangler in 1926 and was teaching at the famous Leipzig Conservatory, wrote to Sibelius asking for help to organize a tour of the Nordic countries. Sibelius responded enthusiastically: “Dear Mr. Raphael, Your worthy name is well known to me. Also I have seen you conducting on the podium of the Singakademie in Berlin, when a choral work of yours was performed. I was unaware that you were the grandson of my highly revered Prof. Albert Becker under whose supervision I wrote so many fugues. It will be a pleasure for me if I could be in any way helpful to you. Today I spoke with the director of the Radio Orchestra in Helsingfors and the engagement in Helsinki is definite. Please, if possible, immediately write to Dr. Toivo Haapanen with regard to the honorarium etc. Concerning Reval and Riga I do not have personal connections. But you will have my recommendation, revered Mr. Raphael, always.” The trip in April 1932, which included the radio concert and a meeting with Sibelius, was a great success. Sibelius again promised to help Raphael whenever he might require it, especially with music publishers. Well, post-1933, as a half-Jew, Raphael would desperately need that help. On May 18, 1934, Raphael wrote to Sibelius asking him to contribute a few lines of reminiscence to a special issue of the “Allgemeine Musikzeitung” to celebrate on June 13th the 100th birthday of his grandfather Becker. The first indication of trouble was Sibelius’s one-line reply of May 28, 1934: “Young Master Günter Raphael, With the best knowledge [Wissen], it is impossible for me. Your sincere admirer, Jean Sibelius.” The context is this: to save his position at the Leipzig Conservatory, Raphael sought help from Furtwängler, Karl Straube, Hermann Abendroth, Rudolf Mauersberger, Walter Davisson (the Director of the Conservatory), and Carl Goerdeler (the Mayor of Leipzig). To their credit, all of these German luminaries did attempt to intervene on Raphael’s behalf. It was at this time that Raphael also tried to bolster his position by publishing the commemoration of his grandfather’s centennial in the Allgemeine Musikzeitung. A contribution by Sibelius would have lent the Becker commemoration – and by extension, Raphael himself - considerable prestige; however, Sibelius’s curt refusal of May 24, 1934 left Raphael without the hoped-for contribution. On June 6, Raphael wrote again to Sibelius calling attention to the potential importance of his support at this critical juncture (“I regret it all the more, since a few words from you would be of great significance, [and] since the next few days will decide my future”). If – if Sibelius had sent a short note of recognition, it would have carried enormous weight for the following reason: Furtwängler and other important musicians often came to Goebbels begging for protection for favored Jewish musicians; but any sign from Sibelius - as an “outsider” - that he respected and valued Raphael’s work would have been too important for Goebbels to ignore. But Sibelius did not reconsider his decision and remained silent. On August 16, Raphael wrote to Sibelius from Denmark, where he had gone to visit his wife’s family; this time, because there was no censorship, he could be more open. “Highly honored Professor, Whether you received my last letter, that I sent to you about six weeks ago, I do not know. I wrote to you then that I must leave my position as teacher at the Leipzig Conservatory because of the Aryan paragraph. [Raphael discretely does not use “the J-word,” but he meant because he was a half-Jew.] That has in the meantime now happened. In spite of all efforts by German musicians - at the head of them Richard Strauss, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Karl Straube and Sigmund von Hausegger - it was not possible to reverse my termination. The Propaganda Minister Dr. Goebbels decided that my dismissal should stand and in his decision nothing will be changed. How far this decision will affect my compositional activities and my position as a musician in Germany, I do not know. Furtwängler is of the opinion that I can still be performed in Germany. However, my present situation just does not look very bright.” Raphael went on to ask Sibelius whether it might be possible to find some sort of teaching position in Finland, to which, in November, Sibelius responded negatively. By now the wind had been blowing from a very different direction for some time; Sibelius was being wooed by the Third Reich with prizes and promises of new appreciation in Germany with concomitant potentially great financial rewards - and huge sums flowed almost to the very end of the war, not only royalties but a German pension. Given the new circumstances, Raphael had become for Sibelius what in modern parlance is called “a toxic asset;” in spite of repeated pleas for assistance, just a few lines of support or recognition from Sibelius (similar to those given by Sibelius to Thierfelder) would have made all the difference; but Sibelius turned his back on Raphael. Some of my German colleagues believe that Sibelius could have acted to support Raphael in his “hour of need” without jeopardizing his prospects in Nazi Germany, but he chose not to take that chance. In an e-mail to various colleagues involved in this “Sibeliusstreit,” I remarked upon how few characters were directly involved in the Sibelius drama. In 1942, Hermann Gerigk, the leader of Rosenberg’s Music Department, who was proposed to Sibelius as his biographer by his publisher, simultaneously to his discussions with Sibelius attempted to have Raphael “liquidated.” That Raphael survived at all was due both to sheer luck and the Rosenstrasse Protest, which caused Hitler, Goebbels, and Himmler to postpone the “final solution” for “mixtures” and Jews married to “Aryans” (since Raphael’s wife was Danish, he fit into both categories).

There are a number of further lines of inquiry that I explore that show Sibelius was far from passive, “hands off” in his relations with the Third Reich. I mentioned that he was close with Thierfelder, a member of the SS. More virulent SS intellectuals also met, communicated with, and wrote about Sibelius, including one individual, Günther Thaer, who was employed by Rosenberg to advocate for Nazism in Finland and involved with a German translation of the Kalevala for Himmler’s Ahnenerbe; a short monograph on Sibelius based on a long political discussion with the composer in his home was prepared by a SS war reporter Anton Kloss who, in Poland in 1940, had belonged to one of the most notorious units in the SS responsible for crimes against humanity. This unit was singled out for special blame by General Blaskowitz in a futile complaint to Hitler that was later used as evidence in the Nuremberg trials. All of the details will be provided.

hiummler, august 3, with boehme

Was Sibelius a humanitarian, was he against anti-Semitism? His diary, recently published in Swedish, contains remarks that are both anti-Semitic but also condemn anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. Some of comments that are recorded in Sibelius’s diary about Moses Pergament seem to fit into the category of what the Germans would call “Jude, aber anständig”-Antisemitismus [”Jew, but upright” (kind of) anti-Semitism”]. Unfortunately, we must not forget that this brand of anti-Semitism also played an important part in the thinking of the SS, of men like Thierfelder, Thaer, Kloss, Gerigk, etc. Let us consider a passage from Himmler’s infamous recorded speech in Posen, Poland, delivered on October 6, 1943, to a closed meeting of SS officers. “It is one of those things that is easily said. ‘The Jewish people is being exterminated,’ every Party member will tell you, ‘perfectly clear, it’s part of our plans, we’re eliminating the Jews, exterminating them, ha!, a small matter.’ And then along they all come, all the 80 million upright Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. They say: all the others are swine, but here is a first-class Jew.”

Himmler, august 2, at Kiestiki

Professor Erik Tawaststjerna, the author of the definitive five-volume biography of Sibelius, argued that there was “not a scrap of truth to the claim” that Sibelius was a Nazi sympathiser because Nazi doctrines were “completely at odds with Sibelius’s inherent humanism.” However, the widely quoted comments from Sibelius’s diary about his opposition to Nazi racial policies have been presented completely out of context. These cryptic remarks - not unequivocal in their interpretation – require elucidation. When, on March 26, 1943, Sibelius writes about the different “perspectives currently here and in Germany,” he seems to be contrasting Nazi ideology with the Finnish viewpoint. That Sibelius has Nazi racism in mind is clarified by the next entries of August 9 and September 6, where he states that now, in old age, he finds anti-Semitism “unacceptable.” The entry for September 12 is mysterious: what tragedy begins? In this case, the tragedy sounds personal; perhaps this entry is connected with that of September 15, which refers to the “trouble I have caused to Aino, my dear wife…..” The entry of September 13 may well refer to the still-gestating Eighth Symphony (“the Symphony in my mind”). Sibelius complains about hostile reviews; he feels that only “very few in the world” can understand his conception of “the symphonic:” for him, the symphony is not just a remake of old ideas – it is original, the product of “a unique talent.” Possibly the entry of September 20 continues the ruminations concerning the gestation of the Eighth Symphony (“Out of the chaos of thoughts perhaps eventually the essential, the true and the wise will crystallize”). Sibelius articulated a similar idea with regard to the Finale of his Third Symphony, describing it as “the crystallization of ideas from chaos.”

On September 16, Sibelius returns to the issue of Nazi racism. He remarks that he himself is not racially pure (“I am not a man of pure race [reinrassig]. Neither with regard to heritage, temperament, nor in nature”). He is both fearful and disgusted by what geneologists and racial theorists have said about him (“My heritage – God knows what they have made up!”); this may be a reference to Granit Ilmoniemi, who appears in the entry for September 20. Ilmoniemi had authored an article in 1925 in which he tried to prove that Sibelius’s ancestors were Finnish-speaking farmers - much to Sibelius’s annoyance - since he thought that they had been country noblemen. September 17 finds Sibelius in “deep anguish of the soul” over the use of race – something which is beyond individual control (“My inheritance to the children. I am not guilty of this.”) – to determine destiny (“Won’t the world realize the unfairness of this predestination”). The phrase, “What bottomless suffering,” may well refer obliquely to the persecution of the Jews.

On September 18, 1943, we come to the crux of the issue: the connection between these ruminations on Nazi racial policies and financial issues. Apparently, STAGMA has requested that Sibelius fill out some kind of questionnaire (Fragebogen) to move into a higher payment bracket (“As there is no question of me staying as a lower member of Stagma…”). If he wants to get paid, Sibelius is being compelled to apply for a higher status in STAGMA, possibly because of increased revenues generated by the founding of the Deutsche Sibelius Gesellschaft in April 1942. The next sentence suggests that Sibelius plans to withdraw from STAGMA altogether, but this is impossible because he remains cut off from his royalties from Allied countries: “But so far the timing makes it impossible since there is war and my plans cannot be realized.” The following day, Sibelius continues to vent his disgust with the “Aryan paragraph,” which he sees as a way of preserving mediocrity and excluding gifted Jewish composers (like Günter Raphael); he sarcastically ridicules the Nazi regulations, observing that “In certain countries like Germany, the ‘Aryan paragraph’ is necessary to get rid of talents.” On September 20, Sibelius admonishes himself (“How could you, Jean Sibelius, have taken seriously these Aryan paragraphs?”); rather, as an artist he is “a cultural aristocrat” who should be above such “bad social prejudices.” As he observes on September 22, it is “advantageous to benefit from the good sides of different descents,” i.e., to take advantage of diverse racial and social backgrounds.

Sibelius is angry and frustrated with the fact that currently he is not being paid by STAGMA, presumably because he has hesitated to fill out the Fragebogen. This continuing lack of payment would explain the outburst of September 22: “As Stagma pays money to other Finnish composers (like Kajanus [unreadable words]) and leaves me unpaid [unreadable words].” Clearly, if he wants to be paid, Sibelius must address the issue with STAGMA (“The thing with Stagma must be clarified”). The concluding sentences of the September 22 entry are open to quite different interpretations (“Let it be conventional. Leave now finally all sentimentality and defend yourself. Just be for this time a real man!”) Either, Sibelius is admonishing himself not to bow to the request to fill in the Fragebogen and simply demand payment, or he is telling himself to put aside any scruples he may have had and simply complete the Fragebogen as required. (Unfortunately, I find the second reading more compelling in light of the entry from September 30 discussed immediately below.) On the 23rd, Sibelius seems to be profoundly depressed because he does not know what is happening with STAGMA (“In such a deep valley, like never before. I cannot figure this out with Stagma. They may have their reasons.”) Finally, on the 24th, Sibelius notes “Received a letter from Stagma. Happy over that.” Presumably, in this letter from STAGMA, the Germans indicate that they have moved Sibelius to a higher level in the organization, and promise to resume their payment of royalties. The notation from September 30 suggests that Sibelius did indeed capitulate to the request to fill in the Fragebogen. Vaughan Williams dedicated his Fifth Symphony to Sibelius and he listens to it broadcast on Swedish Radio conducted by Sargent. Williams’s music breaks over Sibelius like a “soft touch by the sun” because he hears in it “culture and rich humanity” – qualities he bitterly contrasts with his own “unculture,” i.e., his own moral capitulation in the STAGMA affair, which he nevertheless justifies as being necessary for survival under the circumstances: “My fatherland has a tragic destiny. We have to resort to the rawness and unculture/lack of culture [in German: Endkultur] – or otherwise we will perish.”

After the war, there was a tendency to cover up, hide, and obfuscate the past. Every German had to have their “Persilschein,” and their one saved Jew as an alibi, and then, cleansed by the Spruchkammer and with a clean bill of health, they could resume their professional lives as if nothing had happened. Additionally, we want to think of our great artists as moral people - as humanitarians. This tradition of associating greatness in a given field with virtue extends back to the ancient Greeks. Unfortunately, it often proves not to be the case: the greatest artists have worked for and associated with the most vile of masters. In this regard, Sibelius, like some other great composers and performers of that period, was no different.

Post-war scholars have attempted to distance Sibelius, the most important Finnish composer, from Nazism. In an effort to sanitize him, for the past half-century, for the most part, historians have ignored, suppressed, misrepresented or simply remained ignorant of the primary sources demonstrating Sibelius’s Nazi sympathies and active support for the Nazi regime. The significant “new” evidence showing Sibelius’s close engagement with the Third Reich is “novel” only in the sense that it has – until now – failed to figure prominently, if at all, in Sibelius historiography: the hagiographical picture has been painted over and touched up to conform to post-war mores, and the fallacious belief that great artists - who are also national heroes - must also be decent people. Nor are such issues irrelevant to the interpretation of the music itself. The situation is, of course, special for Sibelius who - fortunately - composed his music before the Nazis assumed power. Nevertheless, it is my contention in my study of “Sibelius and the SS” that there was a convergence of ideologies that allowed for a kind of “interpenetration” between his music and their ideology, the significance of which was never lost on either party.

Tim

the music in exile theme now has a robustness it lacked in its first outing thanks to these pages. an obscure politically ambiguous austrian sunday composer and a great national icon have fallen on opposite sides of professor jackson’s sword. The issue seems to turn on whether being a nazi sincerely is any worse than being a nazi expediently.

In the case of sibelius the entire argument is circumstantial, this is not unusual in historians’ claims and some fine convictions have been got circumstantially. short of future scholarship providing a smoking gun (say a letter by sibelius gushing about benefits of nazism) or a watertight alibi (say a letter by sibelius from that time damning the nazis in unambiguous terms) the argument will remain circumstantial. Ad hominem claims about finns being hagiographic or texans being quick to judge and hang notwithstanding.

so far for every piece of evidence led, equally convincing arguments have come from both sides of the dispute. Now is the time for character witnesses- the community of sibelius scholars is being asked by tim to significantly revise its biographic conception of sibelius to include the fact of his being a nazi sympathizer.

This is equivalent of asking the golf community to revise their conception of tiger woods from overall mr nice guy to serial philanderer- except in sibelius’ case there are no publicity hungry aggrieved mistress having press conferences nor secret mobile phones with naughty messages about assignations. The burden then falls on tim to revise the entire pattern of sibelius biography - a huge network of actions, intentions and events in such a way as to make the nazi episode seem quite consistent,coherent and expected. The burden of circumstantial proof for the the pro sibelius camp is to fortify that same pattern of actions and events so as to exclude or make vanishingly small the probability of sibelius being a nazi sympathiser - with a sibelius of such consistently liberal character, tim’s accusations simply cannot stick.

Of course we are not there yet in this lively debate but I do hope this turn will be taken soon and allow both sides to pursue the inquiry beyond preliminary ad hominem rebuttals and ad hoc explanations.

In my response to christine, stephanus and tim I more than jokingly suggested that denazification protocols and truth and reconciliation norms be applied to artists like strauss or hartmann, or theorists like heidegger or verwoerd. This is not merely in the interests of historical fairness or serving the present public’s right to know but also because of the sophisticated and pragmatic procedures which exist in such the political and juridical contexts – their concern for justice as well as contextual motivation which probably comes as close to a model of warranted assertability and reliable evidence as we will ever have in this under-lit territory.

Now a few words on hartmann two days on - michaels- blake and haas -debating the musical merits of four winds bring home clearly the need to know what kind of document this piece is. Let us imagine that despite tim’s paleographic skills four winds turns out to be lifted by hartmann note for note, from the work of a clever but forgotten student? Would this change in the identity of its author make a difference to what we hear?

Jerzy Kosinski was famously accused of plagiarizing his novels this way by eliot weinberger and others. Did this make a difference to how we read the painted bird or being there? I think undeniably it did. When a thorough phd student (a kind of tim jackson of deconstruction) found clear evidence that paul de man had led a previous life in wartime belgium as an able and prolific fascist propagandist and had abandoned that life along with a wife and child to reinvent himself in america this was not shrugged off as a matter of mild regret. It became the occasion to reread this incomparable theorist of the secrecy and the indiscretions of writing in an additional way. In a similar way evidence seems to be led for the homosexuality of goethe and of nietzsche. If this eventually sways consensus then no doubt some very different readings of werther or the genealogy of morals will be undertaken – if such readings become possible overnight on the basis of new facts about authors then are the texts not different overnight as well? To deny this is to propose a heaven in which words, notes, concepts or images are buffered against history, events and causality.

The identity of an author or composer is paramount to how we receive their work - to exactly what kind of document that work is. michael haas asserts this when he invokes wellesz and goldschmidt’s circumstances as a case for a more nuanced appreciation of their music. In precisely the same way it does make all the difference to what hartmann’s music can be (since it has almost all of its life ahead of it ) if it is the music of a victim, an exile, a misunderstood but well meaning political blunderer or the music of a a sly renegade, an incorrigible fascist and a pillar of apartheid culture.

Finally: tim takes me to task over three paragraphs for what he thinks are my views on the concept and reality of exile. But in my second line I made it clear that those views were edward said’s -

‘for a start the term exile exists under leaden skies after edward said : he conducted its most recent examination and concluded that using it to characterize anything short of mass political denationalizations like the palestinian disaster is misleading and frivolous’

and so on for the rest of said’s famous characterizations and conditions.

I don’t think said’s attempt to raise the philosophic and ethical stakes of exile succeeded as he hoped and argued that in my presentation. I am in much agreement and sympathy with tim’s counterpoints.

jean-pierre de la porte

1) “Exile is neither creative nor allegorical.” As I suggested at the conference, exile can be both creative and allegorical. For composers like Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Hindemith, Rathaus, Hartmann, Weisse, just to name a few forced to leave their homelands, the experience also had positive aspects; new environments prompted reassessments, reinventions, creative reconsiderations, volcanic bursts of artistic activity. “At least none adequate to serve as a voice to suffering collectively borne.” No, Schoenberg’s “A Survivor from Warsaw” eloquently disproves your point.

2) “characterize anything short of mass political denationalizations like the Palestinian disaster is misleading and frivolous.” Re. the Palestinians, reality is always speckled and gray, never black and white. Let Said simultaneously speak out of both sides of his mouth, let him also address the “Disaster of the Arab Jews:” It is estimated that 800,000 to 1,000,000 Jews were either forced from their homes or left the Arab countries from 1948 until the early 1970s; 260,000 reached Israel between 1948–1951, and 600,000 by 1972. The Jews of Egypt and Libya were expelled while those of Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon and North Africa left as a result of physical and political insecurity. Most were forced to abandon their property. By 2002, these Jews and their descendants constituted about 40% of Israel’s population. One of the main representative bodies of this group, the World Organization of Jews from Arab Countries, (WOJAC) estimates that Jewish property abandoned in Arab countries would be valued today at more than $300 billion and Jewish-owned real-estate left behind in Arab lands at 100,000 square kilometers (four times the size of the state of Israel). For anyone interested in the “Catastrophe” of the Arab Jews, see: http://www.theforgottenrefugees.com/. Seeing the documentary footage of Arab pogroms against their fellow Jewish citizens is believing. Do not remain silent! I would revise jean-pierre’s sentence to read: “the cruel political punishment meted out to the Palestinians AND Arab Jews and others in their plight.” And, what about the million or so ethnic Germans who were thrown out of what is now Poland, the Czech Republic, the Baltic States, at the end of WW II? (Here I am not talking about those Germans who were settled by the Nazis on stolen property, but those who had lived in these lands for centuries, just like some Palestinians in what is now Israel.) Who today says that they should all go “home.” Would the Poles and Czechs take them back? Never! Truth is not one-sided or simple.

3) “Biblical exile- despite its extremely rich theology of covenants, morality for life among strangers and vast pretext for prophecies and condemnations was too identified with Zionist Nationalists to illuminate other stories of exile without prejudice.” “Go Down, Moses” was the national anthem of the oppressed Blacks in the US. There is a long and rich history of Jewish-Black civil rights struggle successfully employing the Biblical exile and Zionist narratives. Also, in South Africa, I believe that Jews played an important part in the anti-Apartheid movement (including Hartmann’s Jewish son-in-law, Goldstein). Consider just one now-famous incident in June 21, 1964, when three young civil rights workers—a 21-year-old black Mississippian, James Chaney, and two Jewish New Yorkers, Andrew Goodman, 20, and Michael Schwerner, 24—were murdered in Nashoba County, Mississippi. Goodman and Schwerner were both undergraduates at the then largely Jewish Queens College. The three students had been working to register black voters in Mississippi during “Freedom Summer” (again modeled on the Biblical narrative) and had gone to investigate the burning of a black church. They were arrested by the police on trumped-up charges, imprisoned for several hours, and then released after dark into the hands of Klan, who beat and murdered them. It was later proven in court that a conspiracy existed between members of Neshoba County’s law enforcement and the Ku Klux Klan to kill them. See also, Bruce Feiler’s excellent study, America’s Prophet. Moses and the American Story, 2009.

4) “to rehabilitate his [Hartmann’s] political reputation.” No. I do not - did not - seek to “rehabilitate” him. I could have suppressed the information from his file in Austria. But since I consider myself a historian rather than a hagiographer, I presented the information. I did not attempt to sanitize him.

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that Jean-Pierre’s second “worse” scenario is true: “B) Friedrich Hartmann was a deeply sincere fascist. He joined the Austrofascist Fatherland’s Front because it was politically and institutionally dominant - dominant enough under Mussolini’s protection to actively persecute Nazis as well as communists in the Austrian opposition. When it became clear that Hitler was in the ascendant, Hartmann decided to switch allegiance to the Nazi party as more appropriate to his convictions. To achieve this he was prepared to abandon his wife and to persecute Jewish students. He sincerely wished for Nazi acceptance and was shocked when his former allegiance to the Vaterländische Front was, despite his sincere zeal , held against him and he was purged from his job. His fascist beliefs led him to chose South Africa as more promising frontier for his extreme rightist thinking, using his wife’s half Jewish status as a sweetener to his immigration bid he entered South Africa under the mask of political exile and joined over six hundred other fascist and Nazi diehards who were recruited by the sa nationalist government to man its upcoming state and academic takeover. When the South African government realized that it could achieve its white supremacist goals without retaining now unpopular neo Nazi ideologies , Hartmann found his role as fascist aesthetic and ideological exemplar undermined. Unable to endure the decline of explicit fascist thinking in the wily apartheid state- by then trying to construe itself as a democratic whites only republic- Hartmann went back to Austria where a strong neofascist movement had never declined and where he lived in hope of the return of the VF.”

Even if scenario B were mostly true, would – and should - this discount the revival of Hartmann’s music in South Africa or elsewhere?

Consider that Richard Strauss presided over grand larceny whereby, under his leadership of the Reichsmusikkammer 1933-35, Jewish and left-leaning composers in Germany were robbed of their professional existence and their savings, and their pensions were stolen. All this happened under Strauss’s watch while he himself raked in the equivalent of millions in today’s dollars. Should we still play Strauss’s music? Strauss hagiographers, both American and German, solve this problem simply by remaining silent about Strauss’s most serious crimes. As I have written elsewhere, “Looking through the biography and works list of a whole generation of famous and not-so-famous twentieth-century composers in the Grove Dictionary - and even the new MGG (not to mention the old MGG) – frequently does not tell the whole story regarding what they did – and did not – do during those infamous twelve years 1933-45. Consider one example as representative of many. In Franz Trenner’s Richard Strauss Werkverzeichnis published in 1985, one looks in vain under the entry for Feierlicher Einzug der Ritter des Johanniter-Ordens, o. op. 103, for any mention of the 1937 reworking as a piece for men’s chorus and large orchestra renamed Feierlich Anruf with a text by Rudolf G. Binding (1867-1938) and dedicated to Hitler, essentially a panegyric to him: “Grossen Volkes heiligen Rache – tief im Schlafe dumpf in Fron” (“The holy revenge of a great people, in deep sleep, lumbering in drudgery”). This arrangement, which for copyright reasons could never have been made without Strauss’s express permission, and even active collaboration, was premiered on April 18, 1934 in Berlin at a SS concert with Hitler and Goebbels in attendance. Surely, the existence of this version should not be concealed – but Trenner obviously felt that it was too embarrassing to include in the works list. Publications of Strauss’s letters have been edited in a similar spirit so as to omit Strauss’s offending Nazi circumlocutions and expressions; and thus, we still lack reliable, complete transcriptions of his original German letters, not to mention accurate English translations.”

Should we perform Sibelius, although he was a Nazi sympathesizer – I would go further and say collaborator - and also raked in millions of dollars and, most significantly, actively supported Goebbels’s propaganda campaign to win over the Nordic countries and Germans themselves to the Nazi cause? Should we play Bruckner, who was friends with some of the most right-wing and viciously anti-Semitic figures in the Vienna of his time? One of them even became his official biographer. Should we play Wagner, whose perverse “philosophy” simmers beneath the surface of his “total artworks.” To say “no” is to equate ethical with artistic values. Despite the long Western tradition stemming back to Antiquity that artists should be virtuous, the connection is untenable. Thus, Hartmann can be a great artist and a flawed human being and political figure. A great work of art can be – and most often is - shot-through with false ideologies - religious and political. A “holier-than-thou” attitude is impractical. For inescapable historical and artistic reasons, South Africa owns Hartmann, and Hartmann South Africa.

5) “It is likely that this evaluation exceeds the capacity and expertise of any one scholar. Judgment beyond musicology is required to understand the migrations between the VF and the Nazi party- the kind of judgment possessed by general historians of the era such as Michael Kater and his colleagues. The relation of Hartmann to fascist recruits into South African administration and universities needs to be investigated by historians of apartheid structures and of the fascist diaspora.” Well, to this point, at last, I agree! But, it may well turn out that Hartmann never “chose” to come to South Africa at all. The sources indicate a sustained attempt to emigrate to America, which faltered, and South Africa was the only country willing to offer him a job and a chance to save himself and his family in time. I am sorry to disappoint, but I strongly suspect that politics had little if nothing to do with Hartmann being hired by Smeath-Jones: Rhodes needed someone with great musical expertise whom they found in Hartmann and Hartmann needed to get out of Austria immediately.

“If B turns out to be well supported then South Africa has unwittingly hosted the celebration of a fascist, an apartheid zealot and an unrepentant opportunist.” Oh dear! Please don’t worry too much! In Hartmann’s case, apparently his only daughter and son-in-law (both scientists) were forced into exile in England because of their anti-Apartheid stance. While the father may not have had exactly the same principled ideology as the daughter, fathers do tend to influence daughters - and Hartmann apparently was proud of his daughter. All of these considerations, and other factors, suggest “scenario B” to be highly unlikely. My sense of Hartmann’s biography is that such alarm is unwarranted. But if you really want to worry - and also protect the South African public from exposure to amoral composers like Hartmann - then please don’t forget to agonize about Sibelius, Strauss, Wagner, Bruckner, Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart, and Bach, just to name a few unsavory individuals.

With all best wishes,

Tim Jackson

A conference on exile organized by musicologists is bound to raise some ambiguities. For a start the term exile exists under leaden skies after Edward Said : he conducted its most recent examination and concluded that using it to characterize anything short of mass political denationalizations like the Palestinian disaster is misleading and frivolous.

This also puts the topoi of literary exile off limits as voluntaristic and too imbued with creative transcendence to characterize the cruel political punishment meted out to the Palestinian people and others in their plight.

Biblical exile- despite its extremely rich theology of covenants, morality for life among strangers and vast pretext for prophecies and condemnations was too identified with Zionist Nationalists to illuminate other stories of exile without prejudice.

In sum Said was concerned with the way exile entered public opinion and wished to remove certain decoys between the public sense of culpability and the condition of ten million denationalized people whom he felt obliged to speak for.

Exile is neither creative nor allegorical, it has no distinct genres – or at least none adequate to serve as a voice to suffering collectively borne. It is not laden with promise or at least with no promise different to the promise of arbeit macht frei or the promise of self determination in homelands for the millions of south africans apartheid white supremacists denationalized between 1950 and 1988.

Said’s ultimatum -no metaphoric use of exile after the Palestinian disaster -has the same weight as Adorno’s more famous ‘all culture after Auschwitz is garbage’. Neither thinker wants to be thought of as placing the topics of exile or genocide off limits , merely highlighting inappropriate means by which to inquire into them.

Now since Adorno was a defining figure in musicology and the sociology of fascism and Said equally inaugural of postcolonial studies it would be expected that a conference on Friedrich Hartmann and exile in the then quasi colony of South Africa would be an enterprise laced between Adorno and Said. What occurred was something quite different. A concert of music by a former leader of the Austrian Fatherlands Front - a fascist organization- was played . This was the centerpiece of the conference which turned out to have been occasioned by the musicological effort of Timothy Jackson to rehabilitate the music of this controversial figure -Friedrich Hartmann-and to rehabilitate his political reputation.

Jackson , a Canadian professor working in Texas, argued that Hartmann had been relieved of his teaching post in Austria because his new Nazi overseer did not believe his sincere declarations that he would divorce his half Jewish wife in exchange for keeping job. Nor was Orel , the Nazi in question swayed by a student petition instigated by Hartmann approvingly describing him persecuting his Jewish students. Hartmann was at that time a voluntary leader of the Austrian Patriotic Front.

Hatmann lost his job and came to South Africa with his wife and child where he continued his career as an academic and composed the music which Jackson aired. Subsequently Hartmann returned to Austria.

Now this would be merely one of those sidelights on twentieth century music which illuminate the roads not taken by the renowned composers - except that this all took place in South Africa. Now few sensibilities are so far off the beaten track as to have not heard of the apartheid government, a white supremacist prolongation of colonial minority rule which hijacked South Africa between 1948 and 1994.

This regime imposed its racist separate development policy on over ninety percent of South Africans, denationalizing people and forcing them into bogus reserves called native homelands. This event stripped rights from , displaced and deracinated far more people then even the Palestinian disaster and counts as one of the largest sustained political harassments in history.

South Africa is still counting the cost of this political misadventure which only came to an end when the apartheid government capitulated in a civil war. Many people who took part in that war were forced into exile by state terror and assassination programs which they were not spared even far over South Africa’s borders. Some of these people were present when Jackson made his case for F. Hartmann being an exile too - a fascist exile ironically fleeing Nazi persecution to became a civil servant in the apartheid regime.

From Jackson’s account, which he never claimed was more than an initial assay, certain facts about Hartmann are not yet clear . These facts determine the status of Hartmann in both 20 c Austrian history ( both fascist and Nazi) and South African apartheid history. These facts will shape Hartmann’s reception in South Africa and the entire scholarly and aesthetic perspective imaginable towards him.

The role of these facts is best grasped via two divergent historical narratives. We do not yet have the information to choose between these narratives. They are as follows:

A) Friedrich Hartman sincerely believed that volunteering for a leadership position in the Austrian Fatherlands Front was a reasonable thing to do. Since antisemitism was not official policy of the Austrofascists he married a half Jewish woman. He felt pressured to lie in order to keep his job in Nazi Austria. These lies included declaring he was in the process of divorce from his wife and also petitioning students to vouch for his zealous persecution of Jewish students .

When these lies failed to prevent his dismissal he fled Nazi Austria for South Africa with his wife, presumably not divorced and settled into an academic position where, chastened by his experiences with fascism, he became apolitical and applied himself to composition , administration and teaching. Alarmed by the growing intolerance in apartheid South Africa and by xenophobic denials of opportunity to him in the musical world, he ended his exile and returned to Austria where he spent the rest of his life.

B) Friedrich Hartmann was a deeply sincere fascist. He joined the Austrofascist Fatherland’s Front because it was politically and institutionally dominant- dominant enough under Mussolini’s protection to actively persecute Nazis as well as communists in the Austrian opposition.

When it became clear that Hitler was in the ascendant, Hartmann decided to switch allegiance to the Nazi party as more appropriate to his convictions To achieve this he was prepared to abandon his wife and to persecute Jewish students. He sincerely wished for Nazi acceptance and was shocked when his former allegiance to the Vaterländische Front was, despite his sincere zeal , held against him and he was purged from his job. His fascist beliefs led him to chose South Africa as more promising frontier for his extreme rightist thinking, using his wife’s half Jewish status as a sweetener to his immigration bid he entered South Africa under the mask of political exile and joined over six hundred other fascist and Nazi diehards who were recruited by the sa nationalist government to man its upcoming state and academic takeover. When the South African government realized that it could achieve its white supremacist goals without retaining now unpopular neo Nazi ideologies , Hartmann found his role as fascist aesthetic and ideological exemplar undermined. Unable to endure the decline of explicit fascist thinking in the wily apartheid state- by then trying to construe itself as a democratic whites only republic- Hartmann went back to Austria where a strong neofascist movement had never declined and where he lived in hope of the return of the VF.

both scenarios are over etched, designed to convey the ideal-typical sketches which Max Weber believed were indispensable to the beginning of any historical or social investigation- ladders which, once climbed, can be thrown away in favor of more subtle hypotheses once the most parsimonious explanations are put in place.

The historical and aesthetic evaluation of Hartmann, which Tim Jackson has begun will not progress until scenario A can convincingly refute scenario B or vice versa.

It is likely that this evaluation exceeds the capacity and expertise of any one scholar. Judgment beyond musicology is required to understand the migrations between the VF and the Nazi party- the kind of judgment possessed by general historians of the era such as Michael Kater and his colleagues. The relation of Hartmann to fascist recruits into South African administration and universities needs to be investigated by historians of apartheid structures and of the fascist diaspora.

Why does any of this matter ? Because Hartmann’s music was presented in South Africa on the strength of narrative A. This narrative is based on anecdotal evidence which at the moment is insufficient to rule out the plausibility of narrative B.

If A turns out to be well supported in future then premiering Hartmanns music and theming a conference around his then proven exile will seem a commendable exercise in historical objectivity and insight.

If B turns out to be well supported then South Africa has unwittingly hosted the celebration of a fascist, an apartheid zealot and an unrepentant opportunist.

The present issue is simply whether the conference rooted in Hartmann’s exile and promoted alongside a premiere of his music should ever have gone ahead before the musicological, historical and South African political communities had an opportunity to adequately weigh the evidence for A or B. No single scholar, however gifted, can claim to represent consensus on a matter that they themselves have only recently brought to discussion I hope that the decision between A and B is not still simply seen as some scholarly stake because it is a political issue which at worst portrays South Africa today as a safe cultural harbor for neofascists.

Today we consider the merits and contributions of Leni Riefenstahl, Martin Heidegger, Gottfried Benn, Werner von Braun, Giuseppe Terragni, Richard Strauss, Herbert von Karajan, Paul de Man and many others only against a clear understanding of their involvement in fascism . It is only correct that a recently rediscovered composer who shares their provenance should be subject to equal deliberation and scrutiny. This has nothing to do with witch-hunting ; it has everything do with bringing appropriate collateral and contextual information to bear before putting a work of art into candidacy for our appreciation.

The denazification process around Heidegger did not turn on the high opinion in which he was held by peers- including Sartre- but around his role in the National Socialist state and institutions. The German people had a right to deliberate whether they wanted Heidegger’s ideas to re enter the public realm as authoritative opinion in a society recovering from Nazism. South Africa held a truth and reconciliation process to deal with apartheid crimes against humanity. Its statutes ought to apply to the process of rehabilitating Hartmann. Certainly no more unilateral construals of Hartmann or other apartheid era public figures as exiles or victims ought to be simply accepted at face value. What if , on further examination, Hartmann turns out to be Hartmann B?

After decades of equivocation few who examine all the facts doubt that Heidegger was a sincere Nazi. Somehow it became possible to imagine Germanys best philosopher and Nazism as compatible- a perception that eluded earlier generations.

Has Nazism become more subtle? Has Heidegger simply slipped out of contemporaneity in being well enough understood and settled more obviously in his era?

When a significant piece of thought, art or music is put into candidacy for our appreciation, it is vital that its provenance be disclosed and understood for this alone confers its identity. This is obvious in those far from rare cases when a painting long attributed to a famous name is revealed as a fake (despite remaining physically identical to itself , it becomes a different work overnight ) The great Viennese architect Adolph Loos stands today under consideration as a pedophile.

Perhaps everybody who knew Loos knew this fact about him. Perhaps only today has pedophilia become sufficiently established as a violating criminal occurrence to begin attracting some sense of heinousness to Loos? The recent arrest of Roman Polanski has brought underage sex and the power to evade answerability for it into public debate . Nobody can argue that the answer to these questions is irrelevant to our relationship to Loos. Nowadays he has to be great despite his vice- a complex case to argue, not viceless because he is great.

Hartmann’s actual stance on Nazism and his role in the apartheid state makes a nonnegotiable difference to how we consider his music. Riefenstahl’s lifelong denial of the extent of her Nazi involvement is a salient fact in how we experience her films . Her achievement would be different- not better or worse but different (as all historical differences picked out by counter factual conditional sentences are) if she had even once seriously been puzzled by her former self. If Tim Jackson wishes to attain historical justice for Hartmann, pre empting reliable consensus by presenting Hartmanns music as the music of a victim is not a useful way to do this.

Another strand at the exile conference that struck me as interesting but exposed to misunderstanding is the movement to meticulously reconstruct the worlds and idioms of Afrikaans composers of the mid twentieth century. Flowing from the very innovative Stephanus Muller a new kind of archival awareness and biographic detail has entered the musicology of the nationalist and apartheid period: it certainly achieves, in that scholar, a tremendous suggestiveness and adventurousness - as in his examination of Arnold van Wyk via the counterfactual setting of a vast roman a clef. Esme Berman and Karel Nel’s extraordinary Alexis Preller monograph and exhibition is of a piece with this fine grained contextual , document and biographic based inquiry, a final dispensing with the thin, allusive generalities that have stalled South African art writing for decades.

But before this kind of study can reveal the fine grain of musical cultures – the way Baxandall , Podro and Alpers revealed the filigree of period visual cultures, the issue of the cultural policies and academic framework of the apartheid state needs to be addressed. This is not from some wish to put an obligatory political ball and chain on this scholarship but to augment its strength and consequences. It is hard to imagine a contemporary study of reniassance painting without an understanding of mercantile capitalism or a study of Thoreau which ignored agribusiness or the civil war. The danger in South Africa is that apartheid is so central to post 1948 scholarship that it has become a kind of premiss, a background noise to be acknowledged with regret. In recent South African memory, apartheid was the ether in which the spectrum bathed- capitalism, politics, rights, culture.

Ironically it regained some of this former pervasiveness after 1994- the study of apartheid seems always to be either completed or to be somebody else’s problem.

Since 1964, at least , the frame of art and music study has been the elaboration of a world- an art world through which works achieve stable identity or value or a music world such as the ones elaborated in recent ethnographic studies of IRCAM or the attempts to see Darmstadt and die Reihe as a discursive formation. There is - following the extraordinary work of Mary Douglas, Bruno Latour, David Bloor or Ian Hacking, no way in which even the study of logic,probability or polynomials can evade the methods by which groups achieve cohesion and consensus. The synthetic moderne whites only civil society is a veritable Mont Blanc on the horizon of worldmaking - of contrivances of cohesiveness- its reach into education and patronage was subtle and filled with paradoxical effects. The school of Muller- as I like to imagine it, is as close to a genealogical perspective as SA scholarship has yet come. It is a phenomenon to be strongly supported and encouraged for its subject matter as well as the methodological and stylistic sophistication it brings; nonetheless it stands in the same danger as Tim Jackson’s far more conventional dealings with Hartmann- in all these excavations of the personal and the contingent a dimension for analysis of power and the state needs to be reserved Not as a concession to South Africa’s perennial Marxism – which like its expressionism missed its moment and lingers on as a ghost- but as an analysis of public life, patronage, civil society and consensus building that can only honor music by illuminating the seductive matrix in which it made its way.

jean-pierre de la porte

27 January 2010 9.00 a.m. – 6.00 p.m. (followed by the Hartmann/Moerane concert at the Linder Auditorium at 8.00 p.m.)

Wednesday 27 January 2010

9:00 Welcome and introduction

Session 1: Exile, Literature and Music

9:15 Muff Andersson - The nomad sings, the nomad walks, the nomad rests: the ‘condition’ of exile
9:35 Matildie Thom-Wium - ‘My country, my dry, forsaken country’: On exile in Arnold van Wyk’s, NP van Wyk Louw’s and Ovid’s Tristia.
9:55 Willie Kgositsile - Title to be confirmed

10:15 Questions/comments/discussion
10:45 Tea

Session 2: Identities

11:15 Michael Haas - From Bach to Schönberg: How “German” was music from fin de Siècle Vienna?
12:05 Xoli Norman - Title to be confirmed
12:25 Stephanie Vos - Interpreting the notion of nationality in the case of John Joubert

12:45 Questions/comments/discussion
13:15 Lunch

Session 3: In conversation

14:00 Stephanus Muller, Steve Dyer, Warrick Sony, Michael Blake and Mokale Koapeng
Discussion panel

15:30 Tea

Session 4: Exile in composition and performance

16:00 Jean-Pierre de la Porte - Exile on the spot: how does one recognize minor music?
16:30 Pre-concert talk by Mokale Koapeng (on Moerane) - Title to be confirmed
17:00 Pre-concert talk by Tim Jackson (on Hartmann) - Title to be confirmed

18:00 Symposium ends

18:05 Drinks and dinner at Goethe
19:15 Travel to Linder
20:00 Concert at Linder - Moerane, Hartmann and Mozart

Thursday 28 January 2010

Session 5: Places

9:00 David Coplan - S.A. Jazz in Exile: Exporting Sophiatown and District 6
9:20 Hilde Roos - Opera in exile: the Eoan Group
9:40 Gwen Ansell - So close to home: South African jazz in African exile

10:00 Questions/comments/discussion
10:20 Tea

Session 6: People

10:50 Tim Jackson - keynote address - Title to be confirmed
11:40 Aryan Kaganof - Blue Notes from Johnny
12:00 Chris van Rhyn - The wingless flight – A consideration of Priaulx Rainier and her Requiem in the context of exile
12:40 Colette Szymczak - Jonas Gwangwa, musician and cultural activist

13:00 Questions/comments/discussion
13:30 Lunch

Session 7: Perspectives

14:15 Christine Lucia - The smell of a grass fire
14:35 Chats Devroop - Emotional displacement amongst South African Jazz Musicians who stayed behind
14:55 Mokale Koapeng - Composing in South Africa

15:15 Questions/comments/discussion
15:45 Closing remarks
16:00 Symposium ends

Goethe Institut Johannesburg

The Music and Exile: North-South Narratives Symposium explores the relationship between sound and place in South Africa and internationally. This is done from the perspective of scholars, performers, composers and other stakeholders in the discourse, and covers a wide variety of music, including art music, jazz, South African traditional and popular music. The Symposium forms part of the Johannesburg International Mozart Festival, and will present an informative and thought-provoking extension of the Festival’s 16 music concerts. The Symposium is specially linked with the concert on 27 January at the Linder Auditorium, where works of double-exiled composer Friedrich Hartmann and South African composer Michael Moerane will be performed.

The topic of exile is of great significance in music of the twentieth (and twenty-first) century, as the political situations of Apartheid and the Second World War, to name only two instances, caused many migrations. Exile is, however, not only limited to experiences of political oppression: exile could be forced or voluntary (or combinations of both), as well as physical and/or spiritual. Composers or performers who have been forced to leave their countries are different to those who leave it voluntarily; musicians who use their music to migrate ‘inwards’ in their art are different to those who use it to remember the places they have left behind. Exile prompts categories like ‘Before the departure’; ‘uprootment’, ‘flight’, ‘arrival’, ‘place’, ‘new beginnings’, ‘nostalgia for home’ and ‘return’. Although these conditions of exile are universal, and enable a geographically and historically wide-ranging discussion, exile can be seen as a topos of South African cultural, and specifically musical, production.

Some of the prominent scholars who will present papers at the symposium include Timothy Jackson (University of North Texas), Michael Haas (Jewish Museum, Vienna), Christine Lucia (Stellenbosch University), David Coplan (University of the Witwatersrand) and Gwen Ansell (author of Soweto Blues). There will also be discussions led by Stephanus Muller (Stellenbosch University) with composers and performers Michael Blake, Mokale Koapeng, Steve Dyers, aryan kaganof and Warrick Sony.

Members of the public are welcome and attendance is free. To reserve a place please send an e-mail to dpt@johannesburg.goethe.org. For more information, contact Stephanie Vos at 012 429 6782 or svos@unisa.ac.za, or visit the website www.join-mozart-festival.org. The symposium programme will be made available on the website next week.

Sms sugar man - a fantasy

seen without memory or expectation sms sugar man is claustrophobic. This is a clue. Sugar man climbs to the top of a building to condemn his enemy – the father of Selene’s child- as if going up into the head, eyes and ears of a body to see who and where his double is.

Selene is introduced as preening - making her body acceptable to a stranger, more defined where its eye openings, lips and hair are vague, perfumed where it is odorous etc - as if shifting towards her double, the mirror, gives her power over and information about her place in darkness.

The car is a valiant steed – the means by which the three moles tunnel from place to place. It is also a kind of dustbin in which their reservations are expressed and a source of bounty (the money able to change fate, kill rivals or start life anew). sugar man carefully presides over exchanges in the car as if it were the antechamber to a dream. A fear is expressed to him - he splits it into the thought of consuming a lollipop plus an object dismembered and expelled (the rosebud). the car is a generation old- precisely the car sugar man’s father might have aspired to . By driving his father’s car illicitly he has one more magical means- besides cynicism – of moving about inside the huge body in which they all find themselves trapped.

Certain guests are allowed to enter this body to feed it with money. These are among the many denizens of the contact barrier between inside and outside. Such wallets are admitted only on condition that they stringently caricature or impersonate some aspect of the body itself 1) its generational structure (father -son) 2) its split between vilified past and ideal future (I told my wife I love you) 3) its ambiguity (listen to the great sex i’m not having over the phone) 4) its dissimulation into ideas (the Shakespearean sex sermon) 5) its dissimulation into personification (a grandfather in drag). Although coming from the outside (from nowhere) the wallets bring no news of this outside. They immediately change into a fragmented aspect of the body-surface below which sugar man and his avatars wait for clues like ant lions or tics.

The series of tricks extend to infinity - fragmenting both experience of the inside and losing whatever pattern the short intrusions from outside carry. The contact barrier, for all the characters’ preoccupation with it (dressing up, nursing a fantasy, investing money, traveling to rendezvous) becomes tattered and shredded by their use but yields nothing about its form or many compartments.

Rage remains possible – hence sugar man and Atilla’s bids for omnipotence -and so does hibernation (drugs, short circuiting the trick by having sex with your double). Both possibilities fuel the mirror of fascination and aggression where sugar man and Atilla , Selene and Grace collide with each other.

sugar man combines omnipotence (I am the author of vengeance, I allocate sex) with inanition (he can neither sleep nor wake), making his character the most complete reflection of the imprisoning city as well as the victim of its Chinese finger traps. Character though is a misnomer because Sugar man requires the two women even for the realization of the meager range of actions available to him. His preoccupation with their liaisons (spying, recording, revulsion) is like a breathing pipe from his captivity to an imagined supply. He wants to know them filled by other men (interestingly this hardly happens in the film) and wants them as microcosmic proof of a coition that, in his hopes, takes place elsewhere – between father and mother producing a child- a coition only rumoured in the body where they are all trapped .

Within this irreparable situation only a fresh beginning in death is possible – hence the sentimentalizing of death magically seen as rebirth into a family cosmos – a tantalizing clue that the entire action may be taking place within a wildly anamorphosed family structure - the city viewed through the noisy keyholes of the cams as an unencompassable mother’s body- sampled only grain by grain in sex with the sugars.

If sms sugar man is a fantasy (= bions alpha and beta functions in projective identification mode) then its resolution (endlessly extending uniform city becoming a particular mixed body) demands depression. Aryan Kaganof has functioned as a scapegoat in this regard. He told me that this film almost killed him. It has also taken on some of the peripatetic fate and irresolution of its contents; embroiled in legal wrangles and generally bouncing on the surface of south african sensibility like a stone across water.

Sms sugar man is of course many other things – if it has a personal unconscious it must also have a social one. The anthroploogy of the film - the nature of its particular society - has yet to be explained. Sex as exchange but with only incidental procreation is a regal or priestly model.

Christmas as a family rite celebrating procreation without a father and conception through the ear is highly unbalancing of kinship. The permeable inside-out structure of sugar man-society mirrors the outside-in claustrophobic fantasy that draws the fate of its individual members.

Viewers might wish to dust off their Vladimir Propp and tick off his sequence of 31 narratemes and seven character types while watching the film. This formal saturation of an otherwise boiling surface lends sms sugar man great charm and ingenuity: as if Aryan Kaganof were spending his captivity like the Birdman of Alcatraz -patiently taming and propagating whatever element of form strays through his bars.

there is something of this film about Aryan Kaganof - as if he sloughed it off in search of a new skin. For example, his love of Heidegger makes sense as part of its endless wandering on dead end forest paths with no clearings - crushed under somebody else’s interpretation of being. His admired Adorno turns here into pure dislocation of subject and object. Even the derive is tied in its own entrails – tunneling the city for money and sex makes it less and less marvelous, unable to sustain a psychogeography or even a literal one.

It is not surprising that he could fulfill so many roles within its realization: writer, director, actor, editor. His presence in these functions does not unify but serves to underline splits - just as his own versatility as writer, artist, film maker, composer and raconteur makes him less polymatic than unnervingly spectral . Aryan Kaganof is therefore the perfect ghost to haunt his own projects, animating them without personalizing them - exploring their pockets, bodies and caves with unmatched humility.

A few South Africans are trying to escape the fog of self congratulatory bombast, yuppie grandness and voluptuous white self pity that masks south africa now. Some, like painter Karel Nel, attack identity itself as delusive and parochial, others like composer Mokale Koapeng desaturate western music with African choral tradition . Some like choreographer Vincent Truter use Butoh to strip the over-signifying south african body. Aryan Kaganof belongs with this group of precise deflators.

Sms sugar man plots the growth phase of south african dystopia - predatory righteous whites, a new bourgeoisie eager to sleep with its money, opaque streets filled with calculatedly wasted people - all trapped inside a soap bubble or bloating corpse. As such it is already an overnight piece of Afrikana, like the Bitterkomix of Botes and Kannemeyer. Nevertheless it would be a mistake to see in Aryan Kaganof a Savanarola: he has an exact sense –hegelian or freudian it does not matter- that somehow the private vice is a public virtue and that his bombast-driven country must travel to the end of its grandiose night to become something worth sublimating. Sms sugar man will be the charts of Magellan to future navigators in this void.

perhaps because film has its origins in photography it remains receptive- it accommodates itself to images, actors, sets, foley, music , plot etc .-seldom do you get images, actors etc reshaped and wrapped around film.`

architecture also has people, cities, contexts , images- which it might easily become shaped around but it also has phases ,its utopias, when it is expected to remake the city, the nation, people, its context etc. effectively molding these former contents around itself, changing their shape and nature.

film has some obvious powers to reshape its ‘contents’ -time lapse or extremely high frame rates dig into the micro structure of sequence and show objects or acts in ways inaccessible without film.
editing rhythm and randomness in vertov shatters the boundaries of the city making it a nonstop stage or a moebius strip.

so it would be interesting to imagine a film in which these primary form-giving powers are used to warp and remake the music the events and actions and shots. stockhausens hymnen is tape music which has the power to warp other rmusic, radio sounds, crowd noises and static to its own momentum, this also makes hymnen the greatest storyboard awaiting realization as film , a possibility the composer clearly invites in his notes. this is the only music i can think of which would have parity with film.

it is nice to imagine film , music, script , lighting etc all dealing directly with some issue none of them has a monopoly on ( say for example, forces -muybridge comes close to this but of course without even having film- he actually splits still photography into elements with greater parity with horses)

a common problem like force , light, time , illusion etc would split each element in film into even smaller elements which would gain more and more parity with every split until the music, shots, plot, and film become modular and interchanged almost at will. at this point it becomes impossible to say that the music was too short and the montage too long etc, everything simply fits and feels interchangeable with everything else.

the orders of classical architecture were of this nature and allowed the most incredibly disparate things to feature in a building -architecture inevitably being mixed in its sources.
le corbusier tried to reach this common point of interchange with his modulor ( so influential on xenakis but also on stockhaUsen via paul gredinger)
noel burch once took boulez lectures on composing technique and stitched them into film theory , perhaps vertov-lenin- hegel form a similar complex- whats important is that these links break their elements down in new ways rather than treat some as form and others as content.

today christopher alexander has suggested fifteen transformations in architecture which he calls structure- preserving transformations ( michael is lamentng a structure dissolving transformation in your heidegger film) . it would be interesting to make a film based on these 15 moves - (they are already rampant in software development, in poetry and in management theory -what could be more disparate? )in themselves they are neither forms nor possible content but actions ie events that happen to the emerging design. at this kind of extreme film and music wil have entered into a mutually dangerous dialogue in which it becomes impossible to imagine the one pre-existing the other.( music and tales fused this way with opera so there is a precedent although they seemed to collect one another’s most conservative notions)

I’ll try and be brief: I think this is an opportunity because for the first time Michael’s music is coming out in a way in which you can re-hear and re-examine. And I think people will be contemplating the music more exactly and finding in repetition what a concert often hides, so I’d like to sketch three broad ways in which one can see his music as a project, as a work in progress, and I hope that removing himself from teaching and organising activities a little, his music will fast fill the horizons you possess in blueprint in this CD.

The first of the three themes which really resonate with Michael Blake’s music is his place within the historical tasks of any composer growing up and having their formation in the 1970s: aware of their situation in Africa but also aware of the indifference of the rest of the world - and he’s taken a very unusual stand within his broader historical situation.

He could have been a very successful parochial composer had he chosen to be, but he has chosen to confront a number of widely defined historical problems directly in his work. And so it’s quite easy to locate Michael Blake stylistically in a kind of force field opened between the great alternatives of the 1970s: the path taken by Stockhausen and the path taken by Feldman.

But on the other boundary it’s also easy to locate Blake in another - derived - force field: that is one moving from the present to reprise the nineteenth century in the hands of Kevin Volans and moving the opposite way with Wolfgang Rihm, who crosses the various boundaries which made strands of twentieth-century music in the 50s and 60s – a kind of trek towards the present based on fecund taboo breaking.

Now Blake is so interesting because he’s not trying to adhere to a path, even idiosyncratically - he’s trying to create the exception. When I met him he was one of a few proficient double bassists so he was conscripted into the student orchestra. And the conductor of this orchestra was a very idiosyncratic man who thought he was Herbert von Karajan, and would make cutting remarks - I remember he made a nasty remark to Blake who’d second guessed him about something - he said “Mr Blake, one rotten apple spoils the barrel!” And in that way he characterised something really unique and fundamental about Michael without knowing it. If you observe a thousand white swans you’re still not sure that all swans are white, because the 1001st swan might turn out black. But if you observe just one black swan then you know for sure that all swans are not white. So Michael has always gone after the exception in terms of the historical frame of reference, the international force field in which his music operates - hoping it will cause the barrel of meek assumptions to rot. He has always tried to find the loophole, that one black swan, that one case which either makes other bodies of work seem absurd, paradoxical or portrays them in a very strange light.

So if there is quotation of style or engagement with other composers, it’s usually to wring their neck. And this maybe explains why his work has such a broad spectrum - it seems to drill here and then there, it feels like a whale moving under water popping up to spout here and then somewhere quite unexpected - in fact its sole consistency is that it exists to find the loophole and the exception.

The second perspective from which to approach Michael’s music is its return - in several ways - to an ideal of the baroque: to find the machine that could be infallible, could implement a method perfectly, that could correct itself. We know that when Bach was dying he had a copy of Leibniz’ Théodicée next to him, so there was this great dialogue between composers and thinkers who were each trying to find a machine of knowledge, a machine of experience, something that could run all by itself - the fugue in the case of Bach and the monad in the case of Leibniz.

Now it’s tempting to draw a parallel between Michael’s compositions and today’s equivalent of Leibniz - somebody who is trying to find the machine that can not only correct itself - interrogate itself - but perhaps become conscious of itself. One would like to see the parallel developed between Michael Blake and Douglas Hofstaedter. Hofstaedter became famous for his book on Gödel, Escher and Bach, but very few people saw that he was really talking about a power of a system to be self-referring, to create a kind of loop with itself, and to gather what new kinds of consequence may come from the loop.

A great deal of Michael’s music is self-referring - what is extremely systematic or motoric in his music, or what seems almost formally or fugally structured is a scramble to use the ongoing output of the composition as its input - to make an automaton.

Hofstaedter and Blake share an instinctive love of anagrams. Hofstaedter wrote a very brilliant book on anagrams and he anagrammatises his way through all of his books, even on very technical subjects, and nobody is ever safe from Blake’s anagrammatic wit either. I think in a century which saw Schoenberg and Webern creating such anagrammatic music, it’s interesting to see this somewhat taboo sensibility returning, but in an often explicit form. I like to fantasize an opera by Blake on themes by Douglas Hofstaedter. That would define the second platform for finding in his work every kind of contemporary automaton.

And the third way of catching Blake on the move - very briefly - is to think about the way he approaches the dialogue with African music. He has come after a cusp of great visibility in this matter and he’s exercised tact and reserve. He is not concerned with quotation, he’s not concerned with content, nor with transcription - he seems to be wholly concerned with certain procedures or habits, heuristics or mannerisms, not ways of thinking but ways of putting things together, which are the tectonic qualities of African music and which increasingly make up the tectonic or constructional qualities of his own music.

It’s very interesting to see this resonance develop between two musics as artefacts rather than as ideas or ideological toys and to see compositional procedures which, in the hands of this very literate composer becoming more and more fluent, more and more heuristic, more and more oral-seeming through this immersion. So what you see deep in the CD is a wonderful set of animations in Michael Blake - his storyboards. I believe he is working in all of these directions. It remains to the future to see which becomes strongest or whether he turns all into something we can’t yet imagine in synthesis.

cherry-bomb has as usual pinpointed the essential- the music-noise rendezvous must have levity, be full of accidents , lack premeditation and especially programs ( college-course hell- noise and music 101). the best would be a detournement , a hijacking or perversion similar to CBs list and as far away as possible from the respectability driven manifestos of newly pious rockers. the cardew post seems on a better track and maybe performing his works-as michael blake suggested yesterday - would be a way of steering the phenomenon of an informel music into peoples hearts and ears where it can grow or die properly and not struggle on as a theme of wishful thinking or of manifestos

1. Simplicity

Where everything becomes simple is the most desirable place to be. But, like Wittgenstein and his ‘harmless contradiction’, you have to remember how you got there. The simplicity must contain the memory of how hard it was to achieve. (The relevant Wittgenstein quotation is from the posthumously published ‘Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics’: “The pernicious thing is not, to produce a contradiction in the region where neither the consistent nor the contradictory proposition has any kind of work to do; no, what is pernicious is: not to know how one reached the place where contradiction no longer does any harm”.)

In 1957 when I left The Royal Academy of Music in London complex compositional techniques were considered indispensable. I acquired some -and still carry them around like an infection that I am perpetually desirous of curing. Sometimes the temptation occurs to me that if I were to infect my students with it I would at last be free of it myself.

2. Integrity

What we do in the actual event is important -not only what we have in mind. Often what we do is what tells us what we have in mind.

The difference between making the sound and being the sound. The professional musician makes the sounds (in full knowledge of them as they are external to him); AMM is their sounds (as ignorant of them as one is about one’s own nature).

3. Selflessness

To do something constructive you have to look beyond yourself. The entire world is your sphere if your vision can encompass it. Self-expression lapses too easily into mere documentation -’I record that this is how I feel’. You should not be concerned with yourself beyond arranging a mode of life that makes it possible to remain on the line, balanced. Then you can work, look out beyond yourself. Firm foundations make it possible to leave the ground.

4. Forbearance

Improvising in a group you have to accept not only the frailties of your fellow musicians, but also your own. Overcoming your instinctual revulsion against whatever is out of tune (in the broadest sense).

5. Preparedness for no matter what eventuality (Cage’s phrase) or simply Awakeness.

I can best illustrate this with a special case of clairvoyant prediction. The trouble with clairvoyant prediction is that you can be absolutely convinced that one of two alternatives is going to happen, and then suddenly you are equally convinced of the other. In time this oscillation accelerates until the two states merge in a blur. Then all you can say is: I am convinced that either p or not-p, that either she will come or she won’t, or whatever the case is about. Of course there is an immense difference between simply being aware that something might or might not occur, and a clairvoyant conviction that it will or won’t occur. No practical difference but a great difference in feeling. A great intensity in your anticipation of this or that outcome. So it is with improvisation. “He who is ever looking for the breaking of a light he knows not whence about him, notes with a strange headfulness the faintest paleness of the sky” (Walter Pater). This constitutes awakeness.

6. Identification with nature

Drifting through life: being driven through life; neither constitutes a true identification with nature. The best is to lead your life, and the same applies in improvising: like a yachtsman to utilise the interplay of natural forces and currents to steer a course.

My attitude is that the musical and the real worlds are one. Musicality is a dimension of perfectly ordinary reality. The musician’s pursuit is to recognize the musical composition of the world (rather as Shelley does in Prometheus Unbound). All playing can be seen as an extension of singing; the voice and its extensions represent the musical dimension of men, women, children and animals. According to some authorities smoking is an extension of thumbsucking; perhaps the fear of cancer will eventually drive us back to thumbsucking. Possibly in an ideal future us animals will revert to singing, and leave wood, glass, metal, stone etc. to find their own voices, free of our torturings. (I have heard tell of devices that amplify to the point of audibility the sounds spontaneously occurring in natural materials).

7. Acceptance of Death

From a certain point of view improvisation is the highest mode of musical activity, for it is based on the acceptance of music’s fatal weakness and essential and most beautiful characteristic -its transcience.

The desire always to be right is an ignoble taskmaster, as is the desire for immortality. The performance of any vital action brings us closer to death; if it didn’t it would lack vitality. Life is a force to be used and if necessary used up. “Death is the virtue in us going to its destination” (Lieh Tzu).

Cornelius Cardew
Towards an ethics of improvisation
complete document is here

there is an entire mystique around noise. cage was interested in ridding music of intention- not in using noise constructively. his focus is contingency and to this end he carefully used notation as well as maps and diagrams in a very duchampian way as indexical signs. there is a total aversion to improvisation in cage who is among the most literal of composers. Improvisation is the an orphaned resource today - i used to slip into la trinite to listen to messiaen improvising and this great composer steeped in talas and nonmetric plainchant seemed to be playing composition sketches. Stockhausen culminates process pieces like plus-minus with intuitive music like “aus den sieben tagen” but as jerome kohl shows they are fantastically closely designed (http://www20.brinkster.com/improarchive/jk_7t.pdf)

folk instruments often don’t aim at high amplitudes and so don’t have the pressure chambers or string and bow tensions of their 19 c descendants- this means articulate stabilisations around intervals take second place to noticeable slides from noise to pitch, making folk instruments models of the phoneme in their reliance on consonant transitions.

acoustically the noise-pitch distinction is void- extreme upper partials hardly belong in the pitches when you transpose them down and time base manipulating uses dc pulses or square waves which are as totally non periodic as clicks to make pitches and glissandi - look at the famous transition in kontakte from tapping to pitch lines drawn in no more than the speed of pulses. with the granular synthesis of gabor and xenakis the pitch noise distinction totally sinks into oblivion.

daniel dennett talks about freedom as evitability- working out how to avoid something otherwise inevitable - notions of freedom as lack of determination would see spontaneously jinxing out into the oncoming lane of the highway as paradigmatically free. this spinozist ( and deleuzian btw) notion of freedom as comprehended necessity perhaps finds the composer playing fully notated music at the well tempered keyboard the freest of all.

Cardew and Christian Wolff both take up questions directly and pragmatically and try to fill and reshape the shadow of Adorno.

I remember when the great american philosopher Hilary Putnam became Maoist and rewrote his own highly technical analytic philosophy as an auto critique- a moment right off the pages of Bellow or Stoppard.

today the problems have shifted- Mao belongs in the history of religion , Marx is now most accurately accessed via Deleuze, the field is neocolonial rather than post imperial -Mbembe and Said replace Castro and Lenin and the enemy is identity and universality - the two weapons in Cardews armory. In this context Mantra looks radical- particulalrly in its mysticism- and Stockhausen joins Kafka, Bacon Artaud and van Gogh as a saint of the mineure while Cardew becomes as quaint as an Orthodox Freudian or a Christian Scientist. Christine Lucia is incubating a new kind of discussion of Cardew that may rescue him from the comic genre of spiteful Stockhausen disciples: Cardew’s polemic and the Neue Einfachkeit are sparks from the same furnace.

Nevertheless musical South Africa ought to read Cardew and this book ought to fly between indignant and enthusiastic readers for a long time. South Africa never had its Malcolm X or Franz Fanon or Leopold Senghor -the closest it came to Genet was Vyfster - and even Adorno remains a kind of mystery cult reserved for postgraduates. The musical right should read Cardew to learn how bankrupt its missionary and patronizing attitudes are and the musical left should read Cardew to be reminded that they are fighting an institutional form – a network with its own cronyism, admins, economy and forms of judgment - and not the dimwitted individuals that fly off its surface – for they too are the victims of their class.

this article first appeared in the weekender of 7 november 2009

wednesday november 4@arts on main
live 6pm till 9pm composer’s workshop:
MANTRA as formula and as process

LEADER: composer mokale koapeng

WITH: pianists jill richards + liza joubert

producer jean-pierre de la porte

MANTRA is probably the most influential piece of music of the last four decades. It allowed karlheinz stockhausen himself to move uniquely between intuitive, process-based music and more structured, notated music without losing the power of either. MANTRA is at the heart of wolfgang rihms fluent yet logical composing, it is a kit of parts for ‘new simplicity’ composers and a blueprint of karlheinz stockhausens own 27 hour long music theatre LICHT. MANTRA has had a shotgun effect on the way musical possibility is imagined and listing its effects on current music, whether acknowledged or not, would give it the same status as marcel duchamps LARGE GLASS or Picassos DEMOISELLES d’AVIGNON - not to know MANTRA is an irremediable handicap in understanding the present. This is why it is important for MANTRA to be performed many times and in many ways. It needs to enter the repertory of young pianists from where it immediately expands into a new way of hearing and performing bartok, schonberg, messiaen, nancarrow, stravinsky debussy webern boulez and the great jazz piano idioms –few if any compositions have so much power to reinvent their ancestors, to completely disturb and redistribute the 20 c canon and its performing traditions. This is also why composers of all genres need to invent music able to resonate in different ways with MANTRA – not because MANTRA is definitive- nothing is- but because it subtly yet fully translates so many of the objectives of 20 c composers and seems to present a violent and compellingly OTHER reading of ten decades of its- and our- precursors.

technique is knowing how to find the problem in your own material and on what level to begin to alter it for the better - expression - to me- is the intuition that allows you to find the best starting point or entry point into a problem.

in pianists technique is how to play intervals like tenths fast without putting your elbow in your eye and expression is faking sex with the instrument

i think musicians are vastly too precious–its because they dont give themselves footage.–imagine if there were no numbers, no logic and no shapes–then mathematicians would be so precious and tetchy about every scrap in their constructions because unique reality is lost if you spill something. fortunately they can spool through the footage of the number line, of standard proofs and of topologies , grab what they want and cull whats less appropriate- some other cat will sweep through the cutting room floor one day and find their particular treasure and repeat the process., when music was like a form letter you could hot rod it by adding accessories from other music- or your own. vavalidi is like this- a huge pool of gestures and forms- so is handel, haydn — mozart especially- you could probably scramble mozart and nobody would notice. romantic music is more sensitive to cutting only because its dramatic and a narrative- but a composer like mahler repeats the same narrative ten times -so you could probably shuffle his movements together without much violence. same deal with ives and debussy who are like thesaures of themselves.

architects dont fret if you ask for another bedroom and you could probably make sugar man again from your trashed cuttings if the present one were lost. webern and mondrian i can understand- because they had pared things down to almost vanishing and everything depends on secondary things like balance and sequence- but minimalists are like soap operas- you get the plot whenever you drop in. artists who repeat ought to expect cuts in performance - its the feldman fetish of imagining they are capturing time literally that makes them think you’re amputating or castrating the piece.

inside a neutron star processes occur millions of time faster than in our tardy chemical universe - in the time taken to write this mail they have had a rise and fall of a roman empire- so who cares about a few cuts?