From: mclaren
Subject: America & microtonality
--
"Don't start thinking this is a real country just because
you can get some high school kids together and make them
spell out `banana' in the bleachers." -- F. Scott Fitzgerald
Trapped on a narrow spit of land between the blood-curdling
hordes of Canada and the ruthless Prussian efficiency of Mexico,
America boasts a quaint and amusing native culture.
For one thing, the U.S. is the world's largest exporter of neo-Nazi literature; it is also the world's single largest consumer of hard drugs and pornography. America boasts far and away the highest per capita murder rate in the world, and the highest rate of violence against women.
Moreover--as the head of the FBI's criminal profiling division points out--the single most distinctively American pastime is serial murder. "The three most typical aspects of American culture are: baseball, apple pie, and serial killing. We have far and away more serial killers than any other country in the world. America is the capital of serial murder. In fact, you might say that serial killing is one of the great American inventions." [KPBS Interview, May 18 1997]
And so ya gotta wonder... What influence do these traits of American culture exert on our music--specifically, on microtonal music in the United States?
Plenty, and baleful.
America is the land of the lynch mob. Only in America would towns post signs reading "NIGGER, DON'T LET THE SUN SET ON YOU HERE." Only in America would a Southern city be named "Lynchburg." (This is like naming a German town "Final Solutionville.")
America was built the old-fashioned way...on genocide.
We tend to forget that Puritans were the most radical of the wild religious extremists in England. In effect, America was colonized by the David Koreshes of Britain...a gang of religious psychopaths and God-fearing loonies.
These guys hated art and despised music. And as soon as the Puritans arrived in Salem, they started torturing and burning witches as fast as they could. When they ran out of witches, they started on the Indians. Then those impudent Mexicanos who dared to claim that half of their country actually belonged to them (what infernal gall!), then Red commie bastards who tried to subvert democracy by demanding an 8-hour workday, then Japanese Americans (not one of whom ever committed a single documented act of sabotage), then Viet Nam era antiwar protesters and civil rights activitists, and now...well, no doubt folks like Greg Taylor have interesting plans for me and my ilk.
We may be sure that Eric Lyon and company keep a little list. A dandy piece of butcher's paper thirty or forty feet long...whereon, no doubt, are inscribed the names and addresses of folks they'd like to "visit" at 3 in the morning.
In the meantime, America responds to crises the way it always has: by boldly and courageously looking around for an uppity nigger to lynch.
As WW II/Korean War veterans observed, American POWs were always the first to knuckle under and turn stool pigeon; Americans were always the most spoiled and least disciplined prisoners. American POW barracks were always the most notoriously riddled with spies and informers; and this is as we would expect, since the American response to any problem is always bully-worship, lynch mobs and witch hunts.
Thus, common sense and a knowledge of history inform us that at this moment of crisis for modern music, the characteristically American response to the problem of declining audience for "serious" modern music will be...to run around hysterically with noose in hand, hunting for an uppity nigger to lynch.
On this particular forum, the uppityest intonational nigger is (of course) Yours Truly. And so the usual lynch mobs have formed, the standard ritual phrases have been thrown in my direction ("insane," "ranting," "blathering," ad infinitum). This is exactly as we would expect from America, land of the noose and the McCarthy witch hunt.
All standard stuff, true enough: but, alas, none of it solves the crisis of modern music...any more than all those lynchings solved the problem of race relations in America. The crisis inexplicably remains. (What a surprise, eh? Surely Greg Taylor and Daniel J. Wolf thought they could magically fill those empty concert halls featuring John Cage's noises merely by calling me "ignorant" and "inane" and "uneducated.")
Yes, the crisis in modern music inexplicably persists, despite all the enormities of which these worthies have accused me.
What crisis, you ask?
To put it bluntly, young people are actively hostile to "serious" music nowadays. Surveys demonstrate this clearly: the drastic drop in classical CD sales, the 60-year-old average age of the typical symphony audience, and the ever-increasing number of bankrupt orchestras throughout the United States offer confirming proof.
Young folks perceive in "serious" (and especially in classical) music a deliberate attempt at thought control by an arrogant, ignorant and opulent musiKKKal elite.
Are young people wrong?
It's hard to argue that they are. Observe the fabulous sums pissed away on Lincoln Center so that a handful of ultrawealthy Manhattanites can bask in Mozart, and you realize the truly Himalayan mountain of cash being wasted. Just one concert of Mostly Mozart would pay for literally hundreds of small concerts of new music in less opulent venues around New York--to say nothing of the rest of America.
Of course, we must bear in mind that America is a puritanical sadomasochistic country in which pain is good and pleasure is a sin. Therefore only the most hideous-sounding new music can be taken seriously: given America's puritan heritage, the lush consonances of just intonation or 41-tone equal temperament are forbidden fruit--highly pleasurable and thus a mortal sin.
So it makes perfect sense that on those rare occasions when Lincoln Center does feature a concert of new music, the musi c performed will be aleatoric noises or some cacophony excreted by the New Complexity, or by post-Webern serialists like Elliott Carter... In short, if new music IS performed at an elite venue, then the music MUST be ugly.
Remember: this is America, where pain is good and pleasure is evil.
This explains why the yakademics concentrate so obsessively on anal-retentive 12-tone equal tempered music theory: in America, pain is good. Therefore all worthwhile music must be torture.
Torture to compose, torture to analyze, torture to listen to.
In fact, paging through classified ads in search of used synthesizers the other day (you never know what people will sell dirt cheap in a small town!), I came across the following:
MISTRESS HELGA - EXOTIC PAIN, DOMINATION, TORTURE AND SLAVERY -- CALL ME NOW!
This sums up po-mo music theory in a nutshell. "EXOTIC PAIN, DOMINATION, TORTURE AND SLAVERY." Just like the daily spectacle afforded by TV shows like "Cops" and "LAPD," in which helpless dirt-poor victims are hounded out of their ratty trailers and chased by beefy deputies, beaten, dragged through the underbrush and slapped into handcuffs while police dogs tear at their flesh. (Oddly enough, we never see crooked stockbrokers or thieving corporate CEOs hounded out of their penthouses on COPS; we never see corrupt pols chased by beefy deupties, beaten, dragged across K Street in Washington and slapped into handcuffs while police dogs tear at their flesh. For some reason, COPS and LAPD never show us any scenes like that. What an odd coincidence...all the criminals in America seem to be...dirt-poor white trash who live in trailers.)
This is America, after all. In our culture pain is good: pleasure is evil. Thus it stands to reason that all our politicians talk about "getting tough" and "punishing" this or that minority. America is about punishment. Torture. Pain. Suffering. We're a purtian culture, founded by religious whackos and looney cultists who hated art and despised music as "sinfully sensual" and "un-Godly"...so naturally, this is the way we approach things.
Which means that the "official" so-called "serious" music of America must also be about punishment, torture, pain and suffering.
Once we understand what's going on (given our puritan culture) we can immediately see why microtonality isn't more popular.
Microtonal music is, after all, FUN. This is a serious offense in America, where the most popular arcade game ("Mortal Kombat") encourages you to rip out your opponent's bloody spine and beat him to death with it.
The droplets of blood are lovingly rendered on the video screen. MORTAL KOMBAT is a real stomach-churner. It's quite something to see, and wonderful if you want to go on a diet, because you damn sure won't be able to eat anything for about three days after you see the carnage on the video screen.
But this is as we would expect. Remember: in America, the most popular movies feature people shooting each other with machine guns, exploding each other into hamburger, knifing each other into giblets, slicing each other with chainsaws. How could something as innocently delightful as microtonal music possibly make headway in such a culture?
This is, after all, the country in which Henry Ford's racist company newspapers inspired "Mein Kampf." During the 1910s and 1920s all Ford dealerships were required to carry a company newspaper full of editorials written by good ole' Henry Ford himself--editorials chock full of vicious lies about a purported "international Jewish conspiracy." (Given the fact that "Mein Kampf" actually steals a number of Henry Ford's anti-Semitic phrases outright, perhaps the motto of Ford Automotive Company ought to be "Have You Hated A Jew Lately?")
In such a witch's brew of puritanical sadomasochistic racism and frenzied lynch mob violence as American culture, is it any wonder that something as musically delightful as microtonality never caught on?
After all...we Americans live in a country where the most popular computer game is called "DOOM."
Have you ever played this game? It's a real revelation.
In "DOOM," you are literally plunged into hell with a shotgun while demons try to torture and murder you. You kill anything that moves--you blow its head off, graphically, blood showers the screen. Corpses litter the computerized hallways. Shrieks of agony and roars of rage emanate from the speakers.
Any sane person would loathe this game: any sane person would consider such a game pscyhological torture.
But Americans love "Doom."
They play it incessantly. They devote huge sites to it on the internet.
The only possible conclusion is that Americans ENJOY being plunged into hell.
ÿAnd why not? After all, hell is where you maximize your torture and pain and suffering--therefore, in a puritanical culture like America, the goal MUST be...to plunge everyone into hell. America is the place that invented the slogan "No pain, no gain..." And if that slogan is true, then hell is definitely the place to be!
Once we understand this, we can decipher the behavior of forum subscribers like Greg Taylor and Eric Lyon and expatriate Daniel J. Wolf. These people want to put us all in hell and keep us there. These folks want to maximize our suffering. So, naturally, they exalt the hideous noises of inept charlatans like John Cage and sally forth with frenzied verbal bastinado against anyone who dissents.
The idea that microtonality could be fun is anathema to the average American--and especially to the American academic music professor. After all, American culture dictates that pain is good and pleasure is evil...therefore the idea of exploring lush and gorgeous new harmonies and beautiful new melodies strikes the American yakademic as horrible. To these folks, marinated in the pain-and-suffering puritan ethos of the good ole U.S. of A, microtonality is ONLY worthwhile if it can be used to intensify DISSONANCE. To these folks, microtonality is ONLY musically significant if it amplifies the musical anguish of audiences already tortured by aleatorism, post-Webern serialism, etc.
Naturally a vocal minority of forum subscribers will now accuse me of being "un-American." This is a flattering compliment. Appalled and disgusted by so many of the sick twisted values of American "culture," I consider the term "un-American" a badge of honor and a sign of merit.
A culture in which the population spends more on veterinarians to cure cats and dogs with broken legs than on battered women's shelters to help women beaten to a pulp...that's a depraved culture.
America is a country which refuses to ratify the International Charter of Children's Rights because that document would prohibit us from executing children under 18, and we in America eagerly insist on the privilege of frying 16-year-olds and 14-year-olds and, yes, even 13-year-olds. Believe it or not... This is a fact. We live in a culture which indignantly demands the privilege of strapping 13-year-olds into the electric chair and ogling them while their eyebrows burst into flame, while their tongues smoke, while their eyeballs roast and their blood soars to the temperature of boiling water... Imagine a group of adults gloating as they watch THAT happening to a 13-year-old.
Now, THAT'S a depraved culture.
(Some of you will predictably refuse to believe this. In 5 different states, 13-year-olds can now be legally tried as adults and subjected to the death penalty. Check it out: you will be appalled. This is what is known as "getting tough on crime" in America...roasting 13-year-olds in the electric chair.)
A country in which every male movie star must appear at some time in his career on a billboard brandishing a gun...a country in which used electric chair clothing (sold at charming stores in San Diego, Chicago and New York) and art by serial killers become hot commodities...that's a depraved culture.
Yes, well might you call me "un-American." And a high honor it is indeed, if these depraved values represent what is "American."
65 million years ago an asteroid with an estimated diameter of ten kilometers impacted in the Yucatan peninsula at Xichilub. The detonation released more energy than all the nuclear weapons in existence, and destroyed 90% of the living creatures on earth.
Sometimes I look up at the sky, sigh, and mutter, "Hey...sounds like a plan!"
--mclaren
