07.31.2008: Security and Resources

In a February 2008 interview in New Scientist Magazine, scientist Raphael Sagarin applies insights from marine biology — his area of expertise — to human security systems. He asks, “How do other creatures maintain their security, what systems have evolved and can we learn from them?”

He cites the fiddler crab, which has one huge ungainly claw that it waves at its adversaries — usually other fiddler crabs — who have almost identical claws with which to make similar threats. They posture and threaten, but almost never come to blows. He compares the scenario to Cold War nuclear deterrence: a stand-off in which the two sides are comparable, and more or less evenly matched weaponry. Of course both sides are always looking for an advantage, a way to upset the balance of power. But nature’s balance is quite resilient, and returns relatively quickly when upset, often in some modified form.

As for the current “War on Terror,” Sagarin is not very optimistic. The various insurgents, terrorists, and disgruntled citizens differ so greatly from a traditional enemy, that trying to attack them with masses of soldiers, technological devices, and extreme force is a complete waste of time and money. The adversaries are so completely different, that no balance, and therefore no security, can be achieved by those means.

Sagarin argues the need for a different approach. For starters, he suggests breaking up the massive Homeland Security agency into smaller autonomous units. He feels the current centralized approach might lend the appearance of control, but biology suggests that other strategies may prove more successful.  The odds of attaining balance are greatly increased when people (or organisms) work through a problem simultaneously from many different directions, and when each individual or agency  has a sense of autonomy.

So, can we win the war on terror? Sagarin responds: “It is politically expedient to say we are going to eliminate risk, so we have a “war on drugs”, or on terrorism. But organisms inherently understand that there is a risk in life. The idea that we can eliminate these risks would be selected against quickly in the natural world since any organism that tried to do so would not have enough resources left for reproduction, or feeding itself.” Or for dealing with disasters like Katrina, the search for alternative energy sources, or remedying the mortgage crisis, I might add.

Should anyone doubt the current system’s lack of success, I remind you that not a single terror suspect outside the U.S. court system has been tried since Sept 11. Not a single one. (Check the record for Spain to see how success can actually be achieved.) Guantanamo Bay Prison, and all the other black sites and secret detention centers have yielded little but injustice. Only a handful of Guantanamo detainees have actually been charged with criminal behavior, and not a single “enemy combatant” (as Rumsfeld reclassified these prisoners) has seen the evidence with which he is being held. You can’t have a trial until habeas corpus is restored. In addition, since information obtained under stress or through torture is usually unreliable, much of our country’s evidence against its detainees will find itself inadmissible in court. The way I see it, there is a good chance that none of the U.S.-sequestered detainees will ever be legally tried or convicted. That’s not to say there won’t be some show trials and executions; but legitimate trails, I doubt it.

How then, do we combat this elusive adversary? These days, being powerful requires not military intimidation and antagonism, but rather, economic  prowess, development, and opportunity — exemplified by China for one.  Increasingly, many around the world argue that China is the new model of security and prosperity, superseding the U.S.  That China is not a democracy is generally viewed as unimportant, and even perceived by some as an advantage: its autocratic rulers can make a decision unhampered by haggling and politicking of democracy.  While I’m not advocating autocratic rule, the current interpretation and implementation of democracy in the U.S. seems hypocritical and almost farcical — a rule by the few masquerading as a rule by the many. And to the rest of the world, this idea of democracy may be less appealing than we’d like to think.

07.28.2008: Almost Everything

Brian Eno and I have finished our new record, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today. One of the songs, “Strange Overtones”, will be available free via everythingthathappens.com in exactly one week — you can log on and get a reminder if you like — and the whole record will be available August 18th.  A company called Topspin Media helped to set up the website and our online business.

In a nutshell, Brian wrote most of the music, and I composed most of the vocal melodies and lyrics, and then sang them. Other musicians play on the album too. It’s not Bush of Ghosts II: this is a record of sung songs, and the result really surprises me. Despite a sinister inflection to both the lyrics and the music, many songs feel fairly uplifting and the overall tone is hopeful. From where does this quality derive?

Eno and I hadn’t worked together for many years, but since the Nonesuch reissue of Bush Of Ghosts in 2006, we’d kept in contact fairly regularly. In spite of a slow start, we began to collaborate, still with no plans to make a whole record (or whatever a collection of songs might be called now). After a while though, it became obvious that we were indeed making a record. As it neared completion, we decided to try releasing it ourselves — so far there is no record label involved — though various independent distributors will handle the physical CDs. Those who follow the music industry will know this idea is not entirely new; but every experiment in this area turns out a little different, as no model is right for everyone.

The artist and designer Stefan Sagmeister is busy creating the packaging and graphics. We’ve worked together before and it always results in something new and surprising; I have no doubt it will happen again here too. Do I sound like a salesman? Am I too enthusiastic?

Anyway, the album release has kept me pretty consumed in the last few weeks. A week ago, Brian was in town for some wrap-up talks and meetings. During a visit to Stefan’s studio, the two of them riffed on politics and economics. Stefan mentioned that his American friends used to point to the higher taxes in his native Austria as an example of the high price of Euro socialism and a reason they are happier in the US. Stefan pointed out that he now pays almost the same percentage in taxes here in the US, but gets almost nothing for it. Almost half our taxes goes to the Pentagon, and though some claim we need to invest in the protection and defense of our country, one can just as easily claim that we are more susceptible and less respected despite all the billions spent. It’s a waste that we have been able to  support for decades, but no longer.

In most industrialized countries, tax money provides — for starters — free medical care and free or highly subsidized higher education.  Here in the U.S., the insurance companies, the medical establishment, and Sally Mae (the student loan company), have thus far prevented the emergence of a similar scenario. My analysis is obviously oversimplified, but I suspect pragmatics will soon change people’s attitudes here.  Recent news articles have pointed out that often a relatively minor medical issue is responsible for driving middle and lower income people in the US into a downward economic spiral. A frightening number of people are living off credit cards and mortgage debts and are able to maintain that delicate balancing act until something — sudden hospital costs for example — tips them off their tightrope. The lack of a net then becomes painfully obvious. I’m not arguing that everyone who got into living in debt should be bailed out, but if the system doesn’t change soon, there will be a lot of bodies on the big top floor.

Brian added that the U.S. relies on what he aptly refers to as “cowardly socialism.” For decades at a time, we permit laissez-faire capitalists to espouse the harsh, invisible hand of the free market, until giants like Bear Stearns, Chrysler, and Fannie Mae threaten to go under because of greedy behavior or bad decisions.  Then the government will begrudgingly bail them out and maybe even adopt some protective or regulatory policies. But only when pushed to the wall do they admit that the implementation of vaguely socialist policies — policies that value people over quick profits — may prevent the collapse of their whole house of cards.

We moved on to marvel at how Hallmark can put a music player in a greeting card. And in case you were wondering, none of the above political complaints are in evidence on the album.

07.09.2008: Modern Music - Die Soldaten

On Monday evening I attended a performance of the opera Die Soldaten (The Soldiers), by Bernd Alois Zimmermann.  He began composing the piece in 1957, but it was not until 1965 that the first stage performance was produced. (Personally, I think I might go kind of nuts if I had to wait six years before hearing some music I’d written, but given the nature of the work, I doubt the delay came as much of a surprise to Zimmermann.) The opera is a classic of 12-tone technique, which means that all 12 notes of the chromatic scale are permissible at any time, and none are emphasized over and above the others. This type of musical composition — initially devised by Arnold Schoenberg, then espoused and promoted by composers in the Second Viennese School, like Alban Berg and Anton Weberg — avoids being in any particular key, and thus, there is almost no conventional melody or harmony.  To the ear, the notes appear almost random, though the textures change completely and wonderfully throughout. How the singers can memorize atonal, seemingly random sequences of notes is beyond me — it’s an inhuman exercise, a kind of sadomasochism perpetrated by the composer on the poor singers. Indeed the opera may contain organizing structures, but for most of us in the audience, they remained inscrutable.

The playbill refers to the piece as both a monument and a tombstone, since music in this genre couldn’t really develop any further. With this opera, the end of the road had been reached: like a Finnegan’s Wake of classical music, an aesthetic and formal investigation was carried to it’s logical — and some might say ridiculous — extreme. Joyce’s novel is just about as unreadable as this music is, for many, almost unlistenable. Funny that in the visual arts, it turned out a little differently: that same all-over chaos, no-holds-barred and no-rules-apply aesthetic resulted in works which many now find beautiful and pleasant to behold. (I think the same is true of the late 70s, early 80s No Wave bands, whose noisy music could only be enjoyed in short bursts, yet their artist friends expressing similar impulses became hugely successful.)

Despite being pretty much tuneless, the opera is far from chaotic. It opens with a sustained roar from the over one hundred person orchestra similar to György Ligeti’s “Atmosphères,” a piece most of us first heard in the psychedelic sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The opera’s orchestral textures continue to mutate, and sometimes all the notes and instruments seem to be sliding from one to another, without regard to harmony of course. The effect is disorienting, as if the earth is being tilted and everything is sliding to and fro, and I assume this was his intention. At another point, low gurglings evoke the stomach rumblings of an invisible giant, and sometimes surprisingly gentle plinks and plonks sound almost pretty, but for their lack of melody and harmony.

Later, a lounge band plays on stage while the orchestra provides a dissonant counterpoint. At the finale, the volume ramps up with the addition of prerecorded industrial sounds and finally climaxes in a dissonant roar even more massive than the one at the beginning, which all implies the collapse of something very, very big. So, although there are no tunes to speak of, there is still plenty going on musically, and aside from fairly tedious dialogue scenes, the actions moves along fairly rapidly for an opera.

There are lots of books exploring what the fuck happened with 20th century classical music, when many composers willfully sought to alienate the general public and create purposefully difficult, inaccessible music. Why would they do anything that perverse? Why would they not only make music that was hard to listen to, but also demand, as in the case of Zimmerman, that the piece be performed on twelve separate stages simultaneously, with the addition of giant projection screens and other multimedia aspects? Were these composers competing to see whose works could be heard and performed the least?  Why would anyone do that?

Having closely observed the behavior of New York’s downtown, avant-garde music scene for a few decades, I can say that this impulse is not limited to academic classical composers. There are many musicians and composers of experimental works who seemingly compete for the title of most obscure and most difficult for the listener, and even record collectors like to play along. In this world, any trace of popularity, however slight, is distasteful and to be avoided at all costs. Should a work become unexpectedly accessible, the artist must then follow the piece with something completely perverse and disgusting, encouraging members of the new, undesired audience to walk away shaking their heads, leaving behind the core of pure and hardy aficionados. This is elitism of a different sort. If one can’t be fêted by the handful of patrons at the Met, then one can be just as elite by cultivating an audience equally rarified in the completely opposite direction. Extreme ugliness and unpleasantness becomes the mirror image of extreme luxury and beauty.

Zimmerman, Schoenberg and a few others eventually saw their works performed, though not often. I visited the preparations for this performance about a year ago in Bochum, an industrial town in the Ruhr valley of Germany. The town’s former steel foundries closed down one by one throughout the post-war decades, and the vast, empty hangers and steel buildings are being converted into cultural spaces, mainly for performance. I was there to perform in a former foundry, and the old gas power plant, Jahrhunderthalle (or, Hundred Year Hall) was being refitted for a production of Die Soldaten.

Given the shape of the hall, I suspect that the production team decided that an unconventional staging would work best. As one can surmise, building a stage at only one end of this massive building leaves much of the audience ridiculously far away. So, in keeping with Zimmerman’s dream of “total theater,” the team employed an innovative alternative. They built a ramp that ran the entire length of the space, and at one end there was bleacher seating on either side. In front of the bleachers were rails, and the idea was to move the audience alongside the runway and the action would take place in stages. The German government subsidizes theater with massive grants, and the public has grown accustomed to weird, massive, innovative productions — but this one was rare even in that world.

This staging was recreated in the Park Avenue Armory here in New York. The choreographed scenes — with marching soldiers, bar patrons, society louts and others — were, well, horrific and beautiful, like George Grosz paintings come to life.

In one scene, a group of bourgeois businessmen in pig masks lurch along the runway followed by two guys in Santa outfits, one of whom rapes a young woman screaming ceaselessly. When I saw the approach of the evil Santas, I got all excited — we’d suddenly descended into slasher movie territory. Killer Klowns: The Opera! The folks around me did not seem amused; I’d never seen so much seersucker in one place in my life.

Still from the video  "Die Soldaten: Opera in the Armory" on NYTimes.com

Another visual featured an incredibly bright HMI light at the far end of the runway, like an evil, cold sunlight piercing a smoky world. Very cool looking.

Sometimes the music was even ironic. At the end of an act, one poor character, abandoned by his lover for a sneaky baron, howls, “I’m not mad!” But the music, a sustained piercing note from the strings insists, “Oh, yes you are.”

Thankfully, the in-between scenes detailing the melodrama of a fallen and betrayed young woman are not too long, and regularly interrupted by choreographed pigs, Santas, topless women and men in bath towels.

It’s almost disappointing that all this fuss centers around one womanl, and the cruel Baron who betrays her. Faced with such wild, unearthly sound, one expects at least a plague of Biblical proportions, or an alien invasion, or the end of life as we know it. If only one could jettison the Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz play from which the opera was adapted, and substitute something more earth shaking or chilling. OK, maybe he wants this girl’s degradation to stand in for all the horrors of post-war Germany, but it just doesn’t quite do it these days.

Back to the music. The use of the orchestra defies traditional expectations, employed here as a massive sound effect machine. Rumbles, groans, roars and shrieks replace melody, and sometimes this sounds OK. We’ve grown accustomed to this kind of music these days, although not from operas or classical music halls. We’ve heard these sounds in movies and on TV, like the scene in 2001 that I mentioned previously. Bernard Herrmann, the film composer, was a contemporary of Schoenberg, and both were on a similar 12-tone musical road when they found themselves in LA. Herrmann was much more accommodating to the demands of producers and directors, and though he kept a surprising amount of creative control, his style varied considerably. Even so, one can hear elements of the 12-tone ethos in the shrieking violins of Psycho, and the bombastic theramins of The Day The Earth Stood Still. Schoenberg, predictably the greater purist, had relatively little success in movies.

We’ve become habituated to the use of atonal chords, weird, high suspended notes, and creepy plunks and plinks. In every apocalyptic sci-fi, horror and suspense movie for instance, this music warns us that something incredibly bad is about to happen — so, say your prayers now, ‘cause da creepy music has started.

As classical music followed this bizarre, perverted road for some half of the 20th century, the audiences left in droves. I hope the composers were pleased, because it seems they got what they wanted in that respect. Their compositional ideas live, and even thrive in movies; but as a form of music and music-theater, they simply died — rumbling and roaring all the way.