John R. Harris

Gary Inbinder

John R. Harris

Jim Pangborn

Michael Lythgoe

J.S. Moseby

*****

A Few Words from the Editor

It has been my conviction for years—by nature, an almost wholly unverifiable conviction—that the kinds of images and sounds we contemplate in leisure ("consume", as one must say nowadays) are related to the way we read and write. I do not mean anything so banal as that tribesmen of the Congo prefer bongo drums to Beethoven. Obviously, our culture submits us to a program of conditioning which heavily determines the inclination of our taste… but the academy has beaten this argument into a barren ground with its many thousands of war-dancing feet. For just as obvious, surely, is the phenomenon of the highly literate person’s discovering something powerfully evocative in jungle drums or in the vibrant colors and hyperbolic forms of hunter-gatherer artwork. Beneath all works of art lies a bedrock of humanity. Even the "accidental grandeur" (to borrow a phrase from my own ill-starred doctoral thesis) of naturally carved stone—the Grand Canyon or Monument Valley—involves the perceiving intelligence in pleasurable speculations which illustrate the essentially human ability to find pleasure in speculation.

The speculative habit of mind, however, should be enhanced by literacy: one has every right to expect that. Writing things down, especially—but also reading over what others have written—should invite one to study a second and a third time sensations which a dog would simply review for hazardous or edible content. The bushman can read spore in this way: a broken twig with its fibers still green and moist raises before him the image of a boar trotting hurriedly just beyond the next hill. Who knows if a stalking lion can make such projections to any degree at all, or instead must merely follow where instinct draws? At the risk of "cultural snobbery", nevertheless, I will observe that homo scribens enjoys an element of leisure in his reflections which is distinctly lacking in the bushman’s encounter. The reader does not risk being starved or getting gored if his meditation upon a poem should carry him a little far afield. His music and painting, likewise, are therefore more leisurely, less determined by the physiological need to release pressure or exorcise fear. He is not smarter than the aborigine, but he has certainly been blessed with the opportunity to listen more closely to the echoes within his imagination in relative confidence that a python is not about to devour his toddler.

What happens when you take this same child of cultural privilege and spoil him to death? Thinking is hard (as Tom Bertonneau has reminded us from the classroom’s front line). Literate man has now scaled to such heights of technological sophistication that he has begun to apply himself zealously to the "problem" of how to dispense—at least in the dreary quotidian routine of most people—with labors of thought. We now write and read, not to review our experience and stir speculation about it, but to compress it and bundle it off where it will no longer upset or "bore" us. In this, by the way, we are truly the most degenerate and ungrateful of our species on the planet. The aborigine did his best with what he had: we, with infinitely more, manage to ruminate less on major crises of our existence than he would do upon a new star.

And does our music not reflect as much? I honestly cannot think of a better way to characterize what blares over our radios than "thought-deterrence". Surrounded by the amplified bedlam of a rush-hour traffic jam, how could any person remember his middle name? No doubt, there is some cultural incentive for the audial lobotomy. Perhaps we seek to stupify ourselves because sober reflection upon our state has grown too depressing. Perhaps stupid behavior is requisite for social mingling in the same way that, say, gunning down a complete stranger in his front yard initiates a young thug into a gang. Perhaps this explosion of all fine discernment in a gaudy electronic supernova is a kind of "I don’t give a damn" gesture at people like me who expect more—a way of laughing at us, maybe, for being so dumb as not to know that the racket-merchants know how dumb they sound. Bad, man, really bad.

Concerning this final option (as a popular fifties song puts it, "Blow you, Jack, I’m alright!"), we must remember that the academic élite has long since formally blessed the deluge. Taste is a mere illusion created and sustained by dominant interests. The most valid, most genuine sentiment is therefore no sentiment at all. That the custodians of our culture have in fact spent much of the last half-century annihilating culture was borne in upon me recently when I read the line in García-Márquez’s Cien Años de Soledad, "He then made a last effort to find in his heart the place where all his feelings had rotted away, and could not happen upon it." I at once reflected, in a spirit of growing protest against this novel’s exalted position among postmodern letters, that no one in the book, after all, displays any depth of feeling. Five hundred pages of sentimental sterility… and a "classic" for an era that no longer tolerates classics!

If from one direction, then, our popular music might be called a blunt capitulation of the human intelligence, from another it is perhaps a tactic cheered, if not planned, by the astute engineers of our culture’s demise. Will they prevail—is fine feeling possible without the cultural forms painfully evolved to express it? The durability of great music may be the last outpost to contest this dubious victory.

  ~J.H.

P.S.  The Center for Literate Values has opened a Web page of recommended classical CDs (note the "horn" icon which appears at the top of this page and many others throughout the site.)  The list is very much a work in progress: we warmly welcome suggestions. Links to amazon.com have been provided. See www.literatevalues.org/classicalmusic.htm.

by

Thomas F. Bertonneau

It was easy for people of my generation to discover that they liked music—certainly easier than for people born in the previous two decades, and probably easier than for the generation born during the Second World War, who tend to devote their spare time to television.

My aim has always been to widen my musical taste in every possible way, to get the most out of the realm of music, which is, after all, a free gift.

Rilke said that the poet’s problem is to keep himself as wide open as he can, even if, like a flower in the sunlight, he might find it impossible to close up again (Colin Wilson, Chords and Discords, 1964).

I

My paternal grandfather—a product of the late-nineteenth century New Orleansian middle bourgeoisie—apparently played the violin with some proficiency. He appears in an atmospheric turn-of-the-century photograph holding his fiddle. Certainly New Orleans could boast a rich musical life, from vaudeville and minstrel show to chamber and salon music to opera and symphony. The most celebrated American musician of the mid-nineteenth century, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, was a wide-wandering son of the "Big Easy", who maintained friendly relations with prominent musical personalities of Europe. Gottschalk’s keyboard music mixed Chopinesque lyricism with the cakewalk rhythms of the Caribbean islands and the Mississippi delta. By a strange coincidence, Gottschalk’s favorite concert destination was the then thriving Lake Ontario harbor-city of Oswego, in upstate New York, where I now live, teach, and write. I once disinterred the Civil War era reviews of Gottschalk’s local appearances, which quote him as complimenting the musical refinement of Oswego’s fair citizens and the beauty of her young women. With wine and women, song seems eternally linked. I cannot directly affirm my grandfather’s musical achievement, as he died, in his mid-thirties, a casualty of the influenza epidemic of 1918. So far as Gaston Bertonneau indeed had a talent for the fiddle (I take the stories for true), or any kind of musical sensitivity, he spectacularly failed to pass any of it to my father, who, although admirable for many deeds, cannot whistle even a popular tune to save his life.

On my mother’s side of the family, a great aunt, Betty, and a great uncle, Dave, played the piano, which is to say that they banged out chords for rag-tag choral recitations of the "old favorites" at family gatherings or for a Sunday hymn or two. Uncle Dave, one of the most affable men I have ever met, also liked to listen to music. When he listened, he did so intently. His expression changed. He perked up his ears. He owned, in succession, a number of "hi fi" sets, as we called them in the 1950s, and, as soon as it came available, a large cabinet-stereo. The stereo apparatus encumbered several precious square feet of floor-space in the van Westen living room, much to the annoyance of Dave’s wife, Cleone. The record-playing equipment, not to mention the records, struck Cleone as an eccentricity, expensive and bulky. Since Dave applied his spare time already to a number of eccentricities—collecting old science fiction and adventure magazines and building balsa-wood models of vintage airplanes—the phonographic interest seemed to Cleone to compound the scandal beyond tolerable bounds. From the time when my active awareness of the world and people began to operate, around age nine or ten, I always looked forward to weekend visits to Manhattan Beach (a coastal suburb of Los Angeles) for dinner with the van Westens and other maternal relatives. I liked leafing through the musty issues of Flying Aces or Amazing Stories, which Dave stored in a large metal tool cabinet in his garage. I usually spread the issue that interested me on the hood of Dave’s ungainly Volvo, reading the fighter-ace stories by Arch Whitehouse or the planetary romances by Henry Kuttner and Nat Schachner while leaning against the machine. I took a related interest in goings-on around the phonograph, especially after the advent of the massive stereo. When you looked through the chinks in the structure, you could see the chessboard of vacuum tubes glowing in the device’s interior. Now and then a tube would fail and Dave would need to replace it. The operation suggested a hieratic quality, as we all watched in silence, until the engine spoke again.

Like most "hi fi" fanatics, Uncle Dave liked sound. This was not an exclusive preoccupation, but it played its role in his enjoyment. The 78-rpm records in his collection contained famous performances by Arturo Toscanini and Leopold Stokowski, but the scratchy surfaces and limited "dynamic response" gave them the aural flavor of champagne gone flat. The orchestra or the soloist reached out as from a dim distance, without touching one’s viscera. Dave extolled the virtues of what he called the demonstration discs—stereophonic long-playing records marketed to "buffs" who liked to show off the capacity of their sound-systems in a culturally refined, rather than in a vulgar, way. (Not that Dave disdained to have one or two "Tijuana Brass" LPs in the record closet.) The classical album covers carried warnings not to turn the volume up too much, in order to avoid damage to the speakers and other components. Dave owned, among others, a Mercury "Living Presence" LP of Antal Doráti conducting the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra in Peter Tchaikovsky’s indomitably popular Overture 1812, complete with patched-in canon shots from a genuine Napoleonic artillery piece. He cherished a recording, probably on RCA, of Jascha Heifetz playing the solo in Edouard Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole, a slightly unorthodox violin concerto in five, as distinct from the usual three, movements. The Symphonie espagnole definitely functioned on a higher aesthetic level than the Tchaikovsky piece: the concluding Rondo boasts an infectious Iberian tune, with virtuoso effects, such as a piquant pizzicato, that Heifetz brought off with his usual Olympian aplomb. Recently, Lalo’s lilting melody turned up as the background of a television commercial for a sports utility vehicle.

Later, Dave added Eugene Ormandy’s recorded performance of Gustav Mahler’s posthumous Tenth Symphony, in the completion by Wynn Morris. It was an unpredictable acquisition, out of character in that Mahler is a demanding, fairly intellectual composer who works on the largest scale. He was not Dave’s usual cup of tea. The frightening "organ chord" that comes halfway through the development of the First Movement of the Tenth tested—and proved—Dave’s stereo set-up.

There were other items, entirely eccentric, but still meaningful. I remember the early entries in "Professor" Peter Shickele’s "P. D. Q. Bach" series. "P. D. Q. was the last of Johann Sebastian Bach’s twenty-odd children," Shickele solemnly explained in the opening remarks, "and also the oddest." The color commentary on the First Movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, treating it as though it were a football match, also provoked me—no doubt because it deftly "explains" the movement’s sonata-allegro structure while poking riotous fun at the solemnities of the concert hall. I am not sure whether I got the joke plainly, but something in the silliness of it spoke to me, even while it suggested that one might understand the mass of sound of an orchestral composition.

I am equally unsure whether I "got" Tchaikovsky’s redoubtable battle-piece or Lalo’s congenial Symphonie (a good deal more française, by the way, than espagnole). So much of "getting" music takes place intuitively—at the level of what classical Greek calls Eros—that it is difficult to fix one’s response verbally. Perhaps the phenomenon was purely imitative. René Girard argues that almost all of our proclivities and desires are learned or borrowed from those around us. Uncle Dave, whom I respected, obviously put stock in this music, so I imitated his fondness matter-of-factly, without thinking about it. The fact that others regarded it as an affectation, or as "Dave’s new hobby", however, must mean that a differentiation had occurred, and that I could now imitate what others satirized, except for Dave. Let me not give the impression that Dave was a Bohemian. He was an expert tool and die maker who had worked in the aviation industry since World War Two. He had been employed overseas, in Belfast, helping to build much-needed fighter planes for the Royal Air Force as part of the Lend-Lease agreement before direct American involvement in the conflict.

Like the rest of us, my uncle belonged unostentatiously to the working class. My father was a fireman, my mother a housewife. The main source of "culture" in either the van Westen or the Bertonneau household undoubtedly lay in the television set. My cousin Davy, Uncle Dave’s son, typified the Southern California beach scene at time. Sixteen or seventeen years old, Davy surfed the waves at the Manhattan and Redondo Beaches. He spoke in the slang of "hanging ten" and "shooting the tube." His shins sported "surfer bumps"—friction-induced swellings from contact with seawater at high speed. Davy liked cars and motorcycles; he worked in a surfing shop. He would not have been caught dead listening to his father’s classical music records on the stereo. My other cousin, Susie, a year younger than Davy, showed an equal lack of interest in her father’s hobbies; she made weird faces—grimaces, one must call them—whenever, in her presence, her father put on an LP of Franz Schubert or César Franck. The highbrow was intolerable. She would pinch her nose in public disapproval and make arm-motions to mock the conductor’s gestures of a Toscanini or a Stokowski. Susie did gravitate to music. It seemed as though she could never get enough of it. From her room one might hear, loudly, the repeating "top-forty" hits from her transistor radio. It is possible that I associated popular music with my cousin Susie and that I sided emotionally, without grasping it, with my Uncle, whose disappointment in an unshared enthusiasm one could not avoid picking up.

Uncle Dave’s small collection of stereo spectaculars afforded me my only contact with serious music (or with what aspired to musical seriousness) before I reached my twelfth year. Just before my thirteenth birthday, in the fall of 1966, my father moved us from our old house in Highland Park, near Pasadena in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, to our new one on Point Dume in far-flung Malibu. Land sold cheaply on Point Dume in the mid-1960s because of the remoteness from any significant retail. For the first few years of our residence there, my mother had to drive to Pacific Palisades, a nearly forty-mile round trip, to buy groceries. Neighbors were few. We watched many hours of television beginning with the Walter Cronkite news on CBS every evening, but my parents did insist that the two kids had to go off to bed at nine on a school night. I owned a small AM radio, which I usually switched on when I retired against the pillow. Reception being poor, I tuned to what I could hear, which meant an early foray into talk radio on a frequency whose call letters I forget (memo: KLAC) or the AM signal of the only classical music radio station in Los Angeles at the time, KFAC, which broadcast from a building on Wilshire Boulevard near the famous Tar Pits at La Brea. That signal, always clear, meant for me reassuring contact with a wider world, the world of the city, of Wilshire’s "Miracle Mile", with its tall white buildings and chic atmosphere of glassy offices and ground-floor boutiques. I listened while dozing off evenings in far-flung Malibu. My routine encounter with civic society happened once a week when I wandered around the Ralph’s supermarket on Sunset Boulevard in the Palisades.

From the 1940s until the demise of the station in 1989, KFAC broadcast a two-hour program five nights a week from eight o’clock until ten in the evening under the sponsorship of the Southern California Gas Company. Carl Princi, a long-time announcer at KFAC, introduced the selections and gave a minimum of commentary. Princi spoke with a suave, Hollywood-highbrow voice, a bit "oily", as one says of a delivery that trembles on the edge of unctuousness. It never passed that edge. It came across as tremendously convicted, as though one enjoyed the privilege of listening in to the crème-de-la-crème of transcribed performances. The monthly program could be obtained by mail, courtesy of the radio station and its sponsor, in the form of a booklet, eight-and-a-half inches tall and four-and-a-quarter inches wide when open at the spine. The annotations listed not only the work and its date, but also the conductor and the orchestra, or the soloist when relevant. The broadcast came commercial-free, with nods to the Gas Company tactfully only at the beginning and end.

The formula worked magic on me, so much so that I eventually started sacrificing my last hour of television between eight and nine in order to listen to the radio. I only made an exception for Star Trek on Tuesday night. "The Evening Concert" always began with the same musical signature: the grand cascading C-Major chords from the opening of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto; it always closed with the scampering, nocturnal sounds of the same Concerto’s slow movement. In the darkness of my bedroom I used to think of mice darting about in their warren—an image no more absurd than those that we attach to other music. Princi’s baritone threw the glamour of authority over the whole two-hour affair, five days a week. When I met him years later in his office at the KFAC studios, he looked to me exactly like his voice sounded. He had dark hair, cut short, an olive complexion, a pencil moustache, and he wore a finely tailored suit. For the time being, however, I identified him simply as that voice coming out of the aether: "On tonight’s Evening Concert we will hear…" –After the protocol would come the summary of performer-names and brief identifications of the items on the program. This was not trivial. Not only did each evening’s fare reveal some new and particular musical ravishment (Beethoven of the relentless beat, Mendelssohn of the sweet tune), but also the order implicit in the idea of a musical event became evident through the proceedings. An overture or equivalent short piece would "raise the curtain" flamboyantly, with a solo vehicle following, and then a large-scale symphonic work, either a symphony or a tone poem.

Both the structuralists and the deconstructionists tell us that culture consists of arbitrary arrangements of things that could be and perhaps should be otherwise. Maybe it is so—and then again maybe not. Those arbitrary arrangements (supposing them actually to be arbitrary) nevertheless constitute what we have in place of dissolution and chaos. The concert structure conformed to a comprehensible logic. The overture, normally a brilliant piece of musical obviousness and clarity, awakened the auditory senses and whetted the appetite for form. The concerto reminded the listener of the human virtuosity that lay, unseen, behind the execution. The symphony or tone poem implied a drama complete with catharsis and brought matters to a satisfying conclusion.

As program director, Princi observed a didactic principle. He never selected idiosyncratically, but drew rather from the standard repertory, from Haydn to the French impressionists, emphasizing the Austro-German mainstream of the Romantic school (Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms, Bruckner), while also including the Russians and Czechs. Those years of nighttime listening endowed me with a powerful education in basic music familiarity. My sojourn in the Los Angeles and Santa Monica public schools produced, with one exception, nothing like it. I remember no "music appreciation" in school except for a perfunctory semester in the seventh grade, mostly devoted to jazz. "The Blues are a minor-key ballad-form with a thrice-repeated phrase at the beginning of each strophe," wrote the teacher on the blackboard. We ourselves repeated that phrase, indicting it in pencil on our midterm and again on our final exam; we all passed with a bluesy "B."

The exception I speak of above occurred in high school and involved a teacher-dissenter on the English, not on the music, faculty. I will come presently to Gary Johnston, about whom I have written before in Praesidium. KFAC, I note, conducted itself commercially and entrepreneurially; it was not a manifestation of so-called public broadcasting. Audience loyalty meant that the station manager could sell advertising time with the guarantee that so and so many discerning people would be listening at a given hour. The Evening Concert’s underwriter, a utilities company, took care to keep a low profile precisely so as not to give the appearance of preening itself on the largesse of ten hours a week of high culture for the instruction of the willing. No taxpayer money subsidized the effort; no "pledge week" ever interrupted the broadcast’s continuity. No gratuitous political remarks blemished the artistic presentation. The beauty of it came out of the night as a gift, with no strings attached.

I pressed my parents to take me to a symphony concert. Los Angeles has prided itself on a fine symphony orchestra since the 1920s. The Philharmonic always gave a summer season in the Hollywood Bowl, which invariably included an evening centered on a performance of Overture 1812, with cannon-fire and pyrotechnics for the added attraction. The special effects made for good box office. The arrangements entailed that the Bertonneaux should meet the van Westens at the Bowl. Uncle Dave, the instigator of it all, was fittingly present on that first occasion when—amidst an honest-to-God cannonade, the rocket’s red glare, and the hyperbole of the California Air National Guard Brass Band augmenting the orchestra—I attended by urgent request a formal concert. Vulgar let us judge it, but it left me breathless, in a veritable spasm of gooseflesh, participating spiritually in the triumph of "God save the Czar" over La Marseillaise. Perhaps surprisingly, the flashiness of it, the tumult of decibels, concealed an ineradicable, a non-vulgar kernel. The lovely Noble and Sentimental Waltzes by Maurice Ravel had subtly balanced Tchaikovsky’s drum-banging trophy in commemoration of the Battle of Borodino. Ravel’s stately dances (in the ancient modes) contributed that night to keeping the soul in its healthy harmony and in sustaining it in its firm orientation on the Aristotelian middle path. I was transfixed, like a nutty martyr on his homemade cross. I was as hooked as any sampler of opium in a Turkish den. The identical moment likewise cosmically confirmed me as a perfect nerd, since no male fourteen-year old in 1968 was supposed to be agitated in one way or mesmerized in another by Tchaikovsky.

Youth culture had descended from huckster heaven; on the Ed Sullivan Show, teenage girls squirmed in their seats as The Beatles or The Rolling Stones played. The Summer of Love had flowered in San Francisco, as the Haight Ashbury neighborhood filled up with its undeodorized compactness of flesh in flight from civilization. The muddy face of the Woodstock concert already peeked one bloodshot eye around the corner. Of the Bowl and of the soul, of youth culture and of agitation, as of Mr. Johnston the English teacher and his uncanny sense of the real curriculum, more anon…

II

When I say that the symphonic display transfixed and hooked me, I also mean that it decisively turned me around, quite as in Plato’s "Parable of the Cave" in The Republic. My inner ear now directed its attention away from the immediate scene, typified in pop-tunes on AM radio, to the Pythagorean Music of the Spheres, as made manifest in the sublunary—and therefore slightly gross—conventions of Tchaikovsky in his supreme facility. Because the "Parable of the Cave" is merely a "text", we rarely contemplate what the periagogé, or conversion, means for the one who suffers it. The same goes for the deeply serious, the life-and-death, pronouncements that Plato makes about music. We think of music as an ornament on life, not as the nexus of our soul, where all the spiritual faculties meet and from which they stem, like refractions of some fundamental tone. Plato, who grudged a modicum of respect for Pythagoras, certainly saw it this way; we encounter something like the Pythagorean musical cosmos in Plato’s Timaeus. My encounter with the Petersburg maestro knocked me as silly as did my encounter around the same time with the eighth grade’s opposite sex at Malibu Park Junior High School’s bimonthly Friday Night Dances. I grasped (in my groping way) that the two cataclysms were related—that they put me in touch with something colossal and transcendent. I had an intuition of the great crystalline spheres turning in their harmony. I nevertheless entertained no notion how much the first of the two encounters had guaranteed for me a peculiar mixture of pleasure with misery. It is most happy to like what other people like. It makes for smooth integration with the peer group. Whether it is good to integrate with the peer group therefore depends on what the peer group likes. My peer group was heavily invested in the perpetual adolescence of three-minute top-forty "hits" and the weekly twenty minutes of The Brady Bunch, interspersed with many commercials. I had a glimmer of something else.

Again in The Republic, Plato argues that music performs an important role, morally as well as aesthetically, in civic life: healthy music imbues social ties with robustness and sensitivity, and attunes the people not only to one another but also to the world and to the divine; while unhealthy music intoxicates and subverts the body politic. Some modes (the Mixolydian or the Ionian) in combination with some rhythms exercise a powerful allure and influence many people, perhaps a majority in any actual city, for the worse. Some instruments sap morale and corrode order. Socrates mentions the flute, for its allegedly lascivious character. Plato is thinking, as he always does, of Athens, a city in perpetual crisis, regularly fevered by the disharmony of its internal factions. The affirmation of the majority does not, however, guarantee the merit of the person or behavior or commodity so endorsed, as democracy in Athens proved. The criteria of excellence exist, objectively, in a realm beyond any passing consensus. By Plato’s standards, that Hollywood Bowl concert must have twisted my soul in turning my senses around, as Tchaikovsky employs a large orchestra of many and various instruments, most of which The Republic author would (apparently) disapprove. Overture 1812 requires not only four flutes, but also a piccolo, not to mention the brass band and the battery, both percussion and artillery. I incline to the view that The Republic exaggerates in the direction of strictness in order to make its point that the real polity is the internal one of the well-formed soul and that we can only make indulgences safely in the external domain when we have set our internal monitors on their vigil. Socrates withstands the flute music during the famous drinking party at Agathon’s house just as he withstands the unmixed wine that puts everyone else in a drunken stupor. Socrates’ soul is beautifully ordered; everyone else’s is in barbaric disorder.

Inoculated (if not entirely immunized) against vulgar allure, I could enjoy the rhythmic racket made by the garage bands that provided the music at the junior high school Bimonthly Dances—held in the all-purpose "Cafetorium"—without being paralyzed into the parochial rigidity of rock-and-roll and nothing else. Amplified tunes like "Light my Fire" and "Inna gadda da vida" served for dancing (with Electra Reed or Virginia Trumpy or Jennifer Morse, plump sweethearts of class); they suited the purpose competently. The German composer Paul Hindemith claimed that people had a practical need for a certain type of music, to which he gave the name of Gebrauchsmusik, whereupon he composed a good deal of the stuff. Little of it today seems inspired; most of it is forgotten, although Hindemith did other, serious things well—he wrote some of the finest symphonies of the Twentieth Century. Garage-band music constituted Gebrauchsmusik for early adolescent flirtations on the "Cafetorium" parquetry, nothing less but also nothing more. Between "Inna gadda da vida" and Overture 1812, I could sense the gap. Even considering the merits of the Overture, the gap veritably yawned. For what reasons who can say—but most of my peers and friends remained unaware of anything beyond the entertainments offered by commercial entertainment to the buying masses. I claim no special virtue for my novitiate taste. Many accidents had awakened my as yet unformed faculty of musical-artistic discrimination. Looking back, it seems paltry enough. It was a kernel nevertheless, something apart from me. So I seek no credit for it. In the fairy tale, the adventurer needs magical helpers in order to gain the pot of gold or win the hand of the princess. Often trolls or hermits offer their aid—quasi-people who live at the margins of the community.

Without calling Uncle Dave a misfit or an eccentric (much less a troll, a hermit, or a quasi-person), he fills the helper role in the musical department of my particular education sentimentale, or in the training of my aesthetic sensibility. So does Carl Princi, despite my having been only barely personally acquainted with him. In what circumstance did Dave experience his awakening? Who was his helper and who was his helper’s helper? I do know the generic, if not the specific, answer to this last question. The answer is one word: civilization. Civilization in turn cherishes itself, which is to say, it cherishes its own refinements, subtleties, and politesse. Those people pass civilization along who understand and cherish it, for itself. The most unlikely characters qualify as transmitters of the dispensation. Some people quite refined in their appearance (Madison Avenue types, the intelligentsia) are, on the other hand, deceivers at heart and destroyers of the dear. Those who receive the dispensation must therefore give thanks for a mystery and a grace.

I come back to my thesis about musical experience as a lesson in aesthetic differentiation and—yes, because I refuse to yield to relativistic snobbism—in refinement of judgment. The decision that distinguishes plainly between the gross pleasure of "Let’s do the Twist" and the refined pleasure of Marche Slave, another Tchaikovsky warhorse, reveals a minimum of civilized initiation. To realize the pleasure of "Let’s do the Twist," one twists until one is sweaty and exhausted. The occasion calls hardly at all on the mind; any savage might do it. To realize the pleasure of Marche Slave, one does not literally march: one imagines, not oneself, but (I guess) the Czar’s army on the march, with all its uniformed gorgeousness in the cadre, all its equine pomp, and all its caissons and field artillery in train. It is a different sort of satisfaction, with the advantage that one need not sweat in medias res or collapse afterwards from exhaustion. Mind you, I liked to dance until I dropped; I was not, nor am I, immune to the Dionysian. Most male connoisseurs of what, for lack of any better term, is called classical music, probably began with Tchaikovsky, perhaps even with Overture 1812. After that came the Fourth and Fifth Symphonies, with their march tunes and wild fanfares, and the barnstorming concertos. Often the other Russians, Tchaikovsky’s contemporaries, form the next developmental phase of musical-aesthetic taste. I know the reason for this.

Russian music maintains close contact with the Dionysian. It also has a strong narrative, almost pantomimic, impulse—hence its connection with the rhythmic articulations of ballet. Nicolas Rimsky-Korsakov, Mily Balakirev, Modest Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky himself, and the dozens of minor figures who followed their example brought to orchestral music on a large scale an unprecedented sense color and incident. They had their model in Louis-Hector Berlioz, who played his Symphonie fantastique and Harold en Italie to Russian audiences in the 1840s and 50s. Rimsky-Korsakov taught himself the art of orchestration by studying Berlioz’ famous Traité sur l’art d’instrumentation. Rimsky’s orchestral canvases—Russian Easter Overture, Antar, and Scheherazade, to name the most prominent—highlighted individual instrumental timbre and created new, unexpected combinations of timbre of a distinctive type. Drawing on the rich folklore of Imperial Russia’s outlying regions, especially the Caucasian ones, Rimsky also mined new veins of exotica, taking to its farthest a trend begun timidly enough by Mozart, when he incorporated "Turkish" music in his "song-play", The Abduction from the Seraglio. Russian cuisine, like the Scandinavian, runs to bland; the spicy dishes come from Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Armenia. Rimsky understood this musically and served up feast after feast to his Moscow and Saint Petersburg concert audiences, who were familiar mainly with Italian opera and early nineteenth-century concertos in the French virtuoso style. All that was genteel and inoffensive. Instead of the courtly minuet or courant, Rimsky gave listeners heavily accented hopaks and lezhginkas. Invoking imagery out of Central Asian legend, erotic and violent, and illustrating it with the full resources of the modern orchestra, he shocked and delighted his listeners with the carefully structured phantasmagoria of archetypal drama in sound. Rimsky’s students Igor Stravinsky and Ottorino Respighi grasped the formula and repeated it, respectively, in The Firebird and The Pines of Rome, the latter of which trades Gregorian for Central-Asian modality, but with the same exotic result. Ravel knew the Russians well. In his Noble and Sentimental Waltzes he does Rimsky over, so to speak, in pastels; in his Daphnis and Chloe he reverts to oils à la mode Russe and uses a paint knife to apply the primary hues.

When, in the eighth or ninth grade, I started spending part of my allowance on records, the first ones I collected were the Russians. The album covers were part of the experience. They usually reproduced some Slavic or Caucasian scene as painted by Rimsky’s younger contemporary, Ilya Repin. The pictorial connection reminds me that this gorgeous, entrancing music had something in common with my reading of the time: science fiction paperbacks with exotic covers containing planetary romances that might have provided as convincing a program for Antar as Rimsky’s announced Perse-Armenian saga of princely revenge. Some pieces of this puzzle of enthusiasms were about to join together. I was about to meet someone who could explain my fascination—and explain its sources—with convincing clarity; someone who knew, it seemed, as much about science fiction as he did about the historical details of Russian, and other, music.

On the fourth or fifth class meeting of World Myth and Folklore, in its six-week summer edition of the year 1969 at Santa Monica High School, Mr. Johnston asked us to close our eyes and put our heads on our desks. He would be turning out the lights so that we could listen undistracted to a symphony, Der Titan, by Gustav Mahler, a composer’s name none of us had previously known. The occasion was our preliminary study of the hero-motif in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, armed with the scheme of which we were preparing to tackle the primary syllabus: Homer’s Odyssey, the Anglo-Saxon poet’s Beowulf, Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faust, Hermann Hesse’s Demian, the Hindu epic Baghavat Gita, and a batch of short stories and Märchen by Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm. Bored with Malibu, I had jumped at the chance to start high school in the summer just after the ninth grade, instead of waiting until the fall. Santa Monica, perched on cliffs overlooking a magnificent beach, lay twenty-three merciful miles from Point Dume. Johnston’s syllabus—for tenth grade students—indicates his independence from the usual teacherly assumptions about the secondary curriculum. In his view, we could rise from our benightedness into the realization of our better intellectual nature, acquire discipline by applying ourselves to demanding books, and gain a deep sense of the human condition through acquaintance with provocative aesthetic encounters of a wide variety. The exercise entailed more than Campbell’s Hero and the myth-narratives: it also embraced Gustav Mahler’s First Symphony, Richard Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra, Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, and Alexander Scriabin’s Poem of Ecstasy. Johnston, an aspiring composer who was studying composition nights at USC, explained to us that the patterns discovered by Campbell in his survey of much ethnic folklore, and which he attributed (Jungian that he was) to archetypes of the universal unconscious, might be discerned in musical, as well as in verbal, narrative. In particular, the sequence of starting the journey, being dangerously waylaid, facing and overcoming a deadly challenge, and at last returning home with the treasure—seemed to be implicit in the idea of large-scale musical structure using the so-called sonata form.

Mahler only ever thought on the largest possible scale, stretching sonata form to its comprehensible limits. Der Titan takes its name from an eponymous novel by Jean Paul, although the connection is slim, the fiction having served Mahler merely as a jumping-off place for the musical imagination. Like all effective symphonies, Mahler’s First Symphony explains its own procedures as it unfolds: the opening sounds of the First Movement are hardly music at all; they are fundamental tones and then octave doublings and then triadic harmonies in motion. Birdcalls emerge in the woodwinds until, after the summons by distant fanfares, a real tune at last makes itself heard—the folksong-like "Ging heut’ Morgen übers Feld" from the composer’s early song-cycle with orchestral accompaniment Lieder eines Fahrenden Gesellen. Over the next twenty minutes, Mahler develops his minimal material into a massive, life-affirming, major-key climax. The Second Movement is a ländler-scherzo, once again in a major key, with thrilling fanfares and animating waltz-rhythms. In complete contrast, the Third Movement unfolds as a funeral march based on a minor-key variant of the round-tune that American children know as "Frère Jacques". In German it is called "Bruder Martin". The high spirits of the First and Second Movements thus yield to a touching obsequy in the Adagio. The solemnities are broken up in the middle of the movement, however, by the intrusion of what sounds like a Klezmer-band crossing paths with the Christian procession, after which "Bruder Martin" returns.

The Finale is even longer than the First Movement; it is more complicated in its sequence of moods, starting with a reminiscence of the funeral march, passing through snatches of "Ging heut’ Morgen", and building, through many minor-key modulations to a horn-dominated major-key coda that, to borrow a phrase from Nietzsche on music, justifies existence—its own, the listener’s, the world’s. With references to material in Campbell, Johnston reminded us of the correspondences between the moods of Der Titan and the episodes of the hero-cycle, as manifested here, there, and elsewhere, in myth.

Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra told a different version of the same story, when we listened to it a week or so later. Here the music unfolds without the demarcations of separate movements, from the heroic C-Major affirmation of the opening fanfare (made famous in the Stanley Kubrick / Arthur C. Clarke film of 2001) to the impossibly slow, impossibly pianissimo coda: Zarathustra is a hero who, like a certain American General, never dies, but fades away into oneness with the cosmos. With Johnston’s help, the parallelism between the epoi and the Late-Romantic symphonic canvasses struck us as obvious. Who is Der Titan, after all? He is Prometheus—not the forever-bound Prometheus of Aeschylus, but the liberated Prometheus of Shelley, a favorite of all Romantics. On a bus-trip to Westwood Village near the UCLA campus with my friend Tom Cunningham, I acquired the Georg Solti performance of Mahler and the Otto Klemperer performance of Strauss and began repeated auditing of the discs—on my primitive record player—until they abraded into un-listenable crackling and popping. I later assembled the heterogeneous components of a stereo system with a proper turntable and made an effort to take care of my black vinyl.

Consider what Johnston had accomplished by his classroom strategy: he had gotten us to read, and to think about, serious literary material; he had gotten us to pay attention, for nearly an hour, to a challenging symphonic composition by a composer who, even in 1969, still seemed recondite to musicologists—and he had called our attention to parallel structures that assimilated one to the other. He had also folded time so that the nineteenth century A.D. met the eighth and the fifth centuries B.C. The pedagogy was not without its price for the pedagogue. Once an irate teacher from next door barged into the classroom to ask whether our mentor might not play "all that opry" at a lower decibel-level. Johnston nodded politely to his colleague and the volume came down. He convinced us because of his matter-of-fact presentation of the material; he proffered it as though no doubt could exist as to its appropriateness for us, and as though it was completely natural for us to be conversant with it. Diane Glasgow, a few years ahead of me at "Samohi", writes to Johnston in an affectionate open letter how "you were ahead of your time when you played classical music for us in class." Johnston, Glasgow says, "gave us the Mozart effect before that concept existed." In ignoring the usual assumptions about what high school students can do, Johnston "gave us freedom."

Freedom was what I heard in the distant trumpet-fanfares and soaring horn-calls in Mahler’s Titan. I heard it again in the massive C-Major chord that furnishes the climax of Scriabin’s Poem of Ecstasy. Johnston told us something about Scriabin, who combined composition with theosophical mysticism and planned vast musical rituals to be performed in a purpose-built amphitheater in the Himalayas. All this was before he died of blood poisoning, from a pimple on his upper lip, in 1915. So curious was I about Scriabin that I hunted out Faubion Bower’s two-volume biography in the Santa Monica Public Library, the first musicological book I ever read. I met other effective teachers during high school, but none as charismatic or as polymath as Johnston, all of whose English classes (he also taught German) I eventually took. I even owe to Johnston the most pleasant date I ever had prior to meeting my wife many years later in graduate school.

Regine Wood lived, with her family, on Point Dume, not far from the Bertonneaux. I knew her from junior high school and rode the bus with her when we matriculated from ninth grade and became sophomores at Samohi. Regine also made the lucky decision to take Johnston’s courses. She reacted as I did to the material, with intense curiosity. We often talked about Johnston’s courses on the way to Santa Monica in the morning or on the way home in the late afternoon. In my junior year (1971), I asked Regine out, proposing as our destination on a Saturday evening the Hollywood Bowl, where the "Mostly Mozart Marathon" was to be held. With student identification, you could get "rush" tickets for three dollars a seat.

The "Marathons" were a popular offering, beginning in the early evening and going on until well after midnight; they were organized around obvious themes ("Mozart") and involved chamber music and song, as well as the orchestra. Johnston had mentioned them as a good way to get to know a particular composer or musical period intimately. Both Regine and I were eager. You brought a picnic dinner and made an occasion of it. The lax rules at the bowl meant that well-behaved teenagers who smuggled in a bottle of wine were unlikely to be reprimanded—we indeed accompanied our roast chicken and green-beans-in-vinaigrette and fruit-for-dessert with a genteel rosé. The Bowl is one of those miracles of rare device, set in the hillsides of the Cahuenga Pass, the old Mission path that takes the pilgrim from Hollywood (then part of Rancho Las Feliz), through the mountains, to the San Fernando Valley. Hollywood Boulevard at Cahuenga is an obnoxious intersection of thoroughfares, loud, crass. You could see a strip-show on one corner, if you wanted, or pawn your watch on the other. By the time you have driven up the pass, parked your car in the venue lot, and made your way to your seat, you are in another world, isolated from the city’s hubbub, aware of the insect-noises of the night-ambiance and the sage-flavored breezes of the slopes. The atmosphere of the "Marathons" was casual. We had a box, close to the stage. Jack Brymer, long-time clarinetist of the London Philharmonic, performed in Mozart’s Quintet. A chorus sang parts of the Solemn Vespers. In the wonderful darkness, Lukas Foss led the orchestra in the G-Minor Symphony (No. 40). Heaven might have come down to earth, so sweet it was. The meal was perfect, the wine spicy. So this is civilized existence!

III

Little can be gained by flogging the spiritually defunct horse of aggressively marketed commercial music, the sort of music that must be heavily sold to a manufactured audience trained to the lowest common denominator of aesthetic judgment precisely because, otherwise, no one would listen to it, much less buy it. Twenty years ago Allan Bloom analyzed rock-and-roll to its infantile-erotic "T" in The Closing of the American Mind. More recently Carson Holloway has revisited the topic in All Shook Up. Together they make the unavoidable case for commercial music as a degenerating, a de-civilizing influence on adolescents. Neither do I wish to identify an inclination to The Ring of the Nibelungs or to the tone poems of, say, Reinhold Glière with morality. Glière, incidentally, was a naturally socialist-realist composer of the Soviet period, and a student of Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov—who was a student of Rimsky-Korsakov. That is why I mention him. A certain Corporal Schickelgruber (a failed painter) and his now-and-then ally Iosef Djugashvili (a failed seminarian) both prided themselves on a cultivated musical taste; nor were their pretensions entirely pretentious. As Frederic Spotts shows in Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics, Hitler really did know a good deal about music; when Glière got his Stalin Prize for The Bronze Horseman, the decision descended from Stalin and it was by no means purely political. People who complain that Republican presidents of the United States care nothing for the arts are undoubtedly right; it is merely that the political bosses who have cared for the arts in the Twentieth Century are the kind under whose regimes no one in his right mind will want to have lived. So a knowledge of Beethoven does not make one a virtuous person.

On the other hand, virtuous people ought to be interested in music. This is because while good music will never turn a sinner into a saint, bad music, just as Plato argued, can contribute to the corruption of a basically good person. So, of course, can bad literature (think of pornography), or overindulgence in something perfectly acceptable in moderation—like wine, or the much-maligned weed of our never concluded, always-getting-worse drug-wars. Good music can, however, help an incipiently decent person—someone with a moral upbringing, just entering adolescence—be better.

Apart from the piece itself, what do we learn, say, from Mahler’s Titan Symphony? More cogently, what do we learn from it of a moral nature? Let first things come first. When those inchoate sounds of Der Titan’s First Movement tickle the ear, emerging from the non-existence of the previous silence, our awareness of the world suddenly alters. We suddenly attend a distinctive phenomenon that demands contemplation for itself apart from any quotidian annoyance. We must abstract ourselves from the mundane and focus narrowly on this emergent object of our concentrated attention. Gary Johnston had a phrase for this. He employed it while forecasting explanatorily what we would hear in a phonographic documentation of a live concert given in the early 1950s by Wilhelm Furtwängler leading the Berlin Philharmonic, which he was about to play for us. The recording included the audience sounds as the conductor came on stage and climbed on the podium, a shifting in seats, a hustle-bustle, and a whispering chatter. Without being able to see it, we knew when Furtwängler had reached his office and given the cue. The hubbub ceased. Said Johnston: "They’re in aesthetic time now, especially the conductor and his players." He suggested that aesthetic time resembled the "dream time" of the Aborigines, as described by Mircea Eliade in The Eternal Return, which we had been reading; or it resembled the paradoxical "eternal temporality" of the Heaven above the Heavens in which dwelt the Ideas, according to Plato, as mentioned again by Eliade. "Perhaps," said our teacher, "dream time and the eternal temporality are the same as the stillness of prayer, as invoked by the Medieval Christian mystics."

But back to Mahler: the extended tones with which Der Titan commences do not permit us to count the beats as we hear them so that, while we are aware of duration, we cannot measure it. How different such a time is from the time dominated by the ticking of the clock, or the impatient hiatus while we wait to be served, or the staccato downloading of a webpage on the computer screen. Both the descending fourth heard in the woodwind and the birdsong arabesque given to the clarinets hover so freely over the ground-tone that they fail to come to our aid by setting a countable measure. Only the advent of the "Ging heut’ Morgen" tune, in "easy" (the German calls it gemächlich) march-time at last enables us to get into the regular swing of things. Even then, it is not exactly an ordinary four-count cadence, for it never ceases to have its background in the measureless drone and it always shares the stage with the other motifs of the introduction. In addition to acquainting us with aesthetic time, Mahler’s symphony also gives us a basic lesson in pulse and the division of the pulse. The basic pulse is our own, the pulse that we feel when we touch our wrist. The music relates, then, to the physiological stratum of our being, but it reaches beyond the physiological into the non-corporeal—into the immaterial, I dare say, and the transcendental, and the divine.

The birdsong arabesques of the First Movement’s slow opening invite commentary: we recognize them immediately as avian in origin, but they are not the raw stuff of nature—Mahler has reworked his aural reminiscence of some feathered creature of the fields in the form of an immediately apprehensible motif. Before our ears, the maestro transforms nature into art. The twice-sounded fanfare, first on clarinets and then on trumpets, is initially distant, and then not so distant, but also not quite in the same close-up locale as the rest of the orchestra. A plastic space is thus added to the plastic time conjured up by the musical drone. Whereas we hear all of this with our ears, we understand it with our minds. I might borrow an explanation from Thomas de Quincey who claims, in his Confessions of an English Opium Eater, that music is mainly an intellectual rather than a sensory experience. In Kantian fashion, de Quincey argues that since the musical performance takes place in time, the aria or chorus is never present in toto to our auditory apprehension, but memory must intentionally preserve the successive instants of the performance and then assemble them as a non-temporal whole. Music requires the faculty of synthesis. De Quincey’s theory explains how, when we become familiar with a piece, we can understand the whole by recognizing any given bar. Memory fetches the missing context to the isolated fragment.

The logic of sonata structure springs from our synchronic fitting-together, our noesis, of the diachronic phenomenon of the musical performance: hence the importance of sonata’s recapitulation of the material after the exposition, as an aide mémoir. The custom of exposition repeats fell out of favor as recording became the main medium for serious music, but when people only heard a particular work once or twice in years of concert going, the repeats were an absolute necessity. Mahler extends this element of sonata-principle to the whole symphony, recalling material from earlier movements in the opening bars of the Finale, as Beethoven did in his Choral Symphony. Thus the Mahler symphony—which serves here as an exemplary instance in the genre of extended serious composition—helps reveal to us the subtle workings of our own mind. It even trains the mind in those workings, which, of course, we do not do naturally, just as we do not speak language naturally, but must learn it, too. There is one more thing. Beauty, which Der Titan boasts aplenty, is its own lesson: the gorgeousness of Mahler’s melodies rewards the attention we pay to his score in performance. This last brings us to the second question, what do we learn from serious music of a moral nature?

The word sublimation has somewhat fallen out of currency, but it is kernel of what I would like to discuss. Freudian psychology uses the term. The Freudian usage is not without its obvious import. More significant is the link between sublimation and the sublime. For Kant, as perhaps for de Quincey, the sublime is purely aesthetic; it has no ethical implication. In his oft cited, little understood monograph On the Sublime, however, the Second Century A.D. writer Longinus asserts a connection between sublimity, which he discusses primarily as a literary matter, and the health of the body politic. Longinus says to his addressee—Terentianus—that the sublime only appears in art when freedom is the condition of politics. But it is really a circular argument, although not a vicious one, as it is only by recognizing the sublime and taking their orientation from it that men properly arrange for their freedom. By "freedom" (eleutheria), Longinus means the self-control—in Greek, the autonomy—that makes for a sane republic whose constituents are so many balanced, as opposed to so many unbalanced, souls. A free soul has learned to fend off envy (philotimia), which turns men against each other by inciting their concupiscence for status and for things; it abjures whatever is base and tries to imitate the beautiful. The sublime puts us in our rightful place and shows us our true stature by establishing an absolute measure, against which we become aware of our mortal limitations. The sublime is a humbling experience.

Perhaps the Longinian sublime reflects the absorption of the Olympian godhead by Late-Antique neo-Platonism, which itself becomes a type of religion (ersatz religion) in the period. Perhaps the sublime is itself a decadent phenomenon. Yet I believe otherwise, as social-political decadence comes to light for Longinus precisely as an absence of the sublime. On the Sublime is really Plato’s musicology from The Republic applied by Longinus to the conditions of the Roman Empire. "We seem to be schooled from childhood in an equitable slavery, swaddled," Terentianus says, "from the tender infancy of our minds in servile ways and practices." "Perhaps it is not the world’s peace that corrupts great natures," Longinus answers, "but much rather this endless warfare that besets our hearts, yes, and the passions that garrison our lives in these days and make utter havoc of them." One source of that "havoc" is a pandering art, literary, musical, or any other, which titillates our grossest drives and does nothing to awaken our higher faculties. Gladiation was, after all, an aesthetic phenomenon, as is a strip-show or "gangsta rap", with its barked-out, repetitious vocabulary of female organs, rape, and male-on-male sexual domination. We no longer kill in the arena, but we incite to concupiscent frenzies just this side of the rapine and the homicidal. We stunt the soul. We do so mainly through commercial music.

When the lovely young woman, Regine, and I spent our long summertime soirée amidst other music-lovers at the Hollywood Bowl, or even when we bent our heads to our desks in Johnston’s classroom to attend Der Titan or The Poem of Ecstasy, we were submitting to a rule outside ourselves. We were putting aside the ego momentarily while we appreciated the achievement of Mozart or Mahler or Scriabin, which infinitely outbid anything that either of us might have done—although to appreciate Mozart or Mahler of Scriabin is to aspire toward a higher standard than one has so far satisfied. We were sitting in attentive stillness as we listened (this belongs to the bracketing of the ego), forgetting the external world as we participated in the noetic world of aesthetic time. We sat with one another in a moderately romantic situation, but the object of our mutual attention, which was also the object of mutual attention of many other people on the same occasion, chastely mediated our closeness. This would have been especially true at the Bowl, but it was also true in the classroom. The moment of maximum pleasure in a large-scale musical composition is always deferred. As Der Titan lasts fifty minutes or so in performance, it requires much patience for a novice to participate in the composer’s scheme. Recently, while teaching Rousseau’s sylvan Reveries in a college summer course, I thought it would be interesting for my students to listen to Berlioz’ Symphonie fantastique—not all at once, but in two or three installments. When I said, at the beginning of class, that we would take fifteen minutes to listen to the symphony’s slow middle movement, the Scène aux champs, the students groaned. The idea of sitting quietly while listening to a single span of slow music for a quarter of an hour pained them in advance. They require constant, passing stimulation; it must be something else every few minutes, and it ought to flash and have an invariant four-beat-to-a-bar pulse.

As for Regine and me—we were acquiring patience, respect, a sense of orderliness, a scheme for aesthetic discrimination, and knowledge of how to mediate our erotic attraction through worthy external objects of mutual interest; we were becoming aware of hierarchies of achievement and of how to relate to them non-invidiously. The requirements of musical attention thus implied both an ethics and, with respect to beauty, a criterion. These in turn implied the sublimation of the ego: restraint in manners, postponement of appetite, and an ability to meditate silently on significant objects. Our encounter with the sublime was formative.

These same qualities have appeared—and I have seen them perfected well ahead of anything that I had then done with them—in other, musical people whom I encountered. In my second or third year at college, I made the signal acquaintance of Reinhold Kieslich, then resident in Hawaii, but a Sudeten German by birth, once an Austrian subject, later a draftee in the Wehrmacht, but by profession a baritone in various German-language opera houses under the stage-name of Til Kentauri ("Til—as in the case of Til Eulenspiegel, the trickster-figure of medieval German folklore—of the Centaurs"); and latterly, before his induction, an assistant stage director at the Dresden State Opera. After settling with his wife in Hawaii post bellum, he taught Latin at a private school there. A widower of some years in the early 1970s, he was the doting uncle ("Uncle Til") of one of my mother’s friends, Betty Byron; he would fly to Southern California visit her several times a year. The Sudetenländer accent, quite different from the Austrian accent once you know it, settled a quiet, continental grace on Kieslich’s English. Part of Uncle Til’s musicality was his facility in languages: not only his native German and his adopted English but French, Italian, Russian, Czech, Greek, and Latin. Unusually for a Sudeten German, he had taken a degree (in philology) from the Czech-language Charles University in Prague. He and I immediately discovered a mutual interest in Swedish. He had learned it in the 1920s when he took his summer vacations there. I had been studying it for a year at UCLA. In Vogue Records on Westwood Boulevard just outside campus, I had bought a number of LPs of Scandinavian composers, including a recital of songs by Gösta Nystroem. Betty’s husband Bill had a state-of-the-art stereo system. One afternoon Uncle Til and I listened repeatedly to Nystroem’s Sånger vid havet ("Songs by the seaside"), in which he identified the French influence—especially of Debussy—that the composer had absorbed during his Paris sojourn just after World War One; he also remarked on the musicality of Swedish, with its many vowel-endings.

Uncle Til’s life was the stuff of Platonic and Longinian speculation. He said that he had observed European politics in the 1920s and 30s through the lens of The Republic. The degeneration of parliamentary politics under demagogic pressure, the spiritual disorder of the galvanized crowds, the loss of historical memory—all these derailments occurred as both Austria and Germany slumped towards chaos. He conceded that the National Socialists had exploited the Richard Wagner cult and had turned Bayreuth into a German shrine, but he denied that Wagner’s music had ever been the genuine music of the Third Reich—the attempt to expropriate it notwithstanding. The Nazis subsidized Wagner operas at Bayreuth and they subsidized Richard Strauss operas in Dresden; it bought for them, they thought, a high-cultural prestige, which, as they were really nothing but street hoodlums, they knew instinctively that they lacked. But their real music was in the mass-songs for soldiers and youth, in the military marches, and in the trivial "light music" that played constantly on radio. It was anti-Semitic choruses on the one hand and mindless entertainment music on the other. They insisted that the Horst Wessel Lied be played at symphonic concerts, so as to trump the genuine music by stealing the first place on the program. Those who refused, like Furtwängler, got into dangerous trouble. They banned endless music—not only the Jewish composers, but the non-conforming Aryans, like Hindemith, and, of course, jazz.

The story of Kieslich’s incorporation sous le drapeau in 1942 was particularly telling. He had been rehearsing the chorus for a Dresden production of Beethoven’s only opera, Fidelio. At the end of Act One, the disguised heroine, Leonora, persuades the jailer, Rocco, to let the prisoners out of the dungeon for a spell in the open air. As the prisoners emerge, blinking, into the sunlight, they sing: "Oh what joy, what joy in the free air to draw our breath with ease! Here, here alone is life, the cell is a tomb, a tomb." Judging their mien too casual, Kieslich told his singers that they should convey better the desperate happiness of the wretches to taste sunlight again, although only briefly. "Sing like you’re coming out of a concentration camp," he suggested. Everyone knew about concentration camps; everyone also knew that the regime forbade speaking of them. That night, the leather-jacketed men visited his rooms. One asked, "What do you really know about concentration camps?" "Nothing," he answered. "Would you like to know about them? It could be arranged." He thought his end had come. "Perhaps," the interrogator told him, "perhaps your language talents would be put to better use in the army." That was that. They put him through basic training (he was in his forties) and sent him, as a non-commissioned specialist, to Belgium to translate newspaper copy for the German censors. He established clandestine communications with the Belgian resistance, whose people vouched for him when the liberation came. Because of his clean bill of political health, Uncle Til became a prisoner-trustee under the Allied presence. He had his own jeep and could come and go more or less as he pleased. Later, as a civilian, he did simultaneous translation at the Nuremburg Trials. Dresden now lay in the Soviet Zone—in any case, the Staatsoper had been burnt out in the notorious bombing raid. He looked west.

Uncle Til loved Bach and Mozart above all other music. He had sung the part of Papageno in The Magic Flute in the 1920s. He signed his letters with his name—Reinhold—and with the little panpipe-signal that always identifies Papageno in Mozart’s opera. He read Goethe and Schiller and had an interest in mysticism. He sent me books that he thought might interest me—Evelyn Underhill’s study of the mystic tradition, a book of prose meditations by the German poet who went by the name of Bo Yin Ra, the Gateway paperback of Science, Politics, and Gnosticism by Eric Voegelin. He lived frugally, with little in the way of material possessions, but he did gratefully accept from his Malibu relatives a good stereo-set. He died in 1981. I still imagine him as engaged in the improbable activity of listening to Bach’s Art of the Fugue, in conductor-musicologist Hermann Scherchen’s chamber-orchestra arrangement, amidst the tropical fecundity of hibiscus and plantain in his ramshackle little island-style house on a lush hillside just beyond the grasping reach of ugly Honolulu’s tentacular sprawl.

IV

Uncle Til wrote to me regularly up until his death, which happened when he disembarked from the airliner after a long trip from Munich to Los Angeles in 1981. His heart had failed. By the time his grandniece got to him, he had expired. There is no lonelier death than one in the lifeless anonymity of an airport.

Uncle Til often admonished me, when he thought I had done wrong, to alter my ways. He advised me strongly to do everything that I could to reconcile myself with the university after the administration dismissed me on a charge of general academic delinquency in 1976. He was right. I could see it clearly later. As I was stupid and adamant at the time, I did not act on Kieslich’s wise counsel. As unhappy as college had made me, with its pointless coursework and impersonal treatment of students, dropout life made me unhappier yet. Readers of Praesidium and its precursor Arcturus can revisit my imbroglii (assuming they are masochistic enough to do so) in "A Blast-Proof Bunker" and "The Seer of Solstice Canyon". I held dead-end jobs, drove a broken-down car, lived in wretched places, ate badly, drank too much beer, and chased girls without ever meaningfully catching up with them. The ones I did catch up with I ought not have. As I am writing about music, I should add that I was still passionate about it; music might have been the sole equilibrium in my tottering, delirious life. Every time I changed lodgings, I needed to deal with the logistical nightmare of carting my burdensome LPs to the new domicile. It meant four, five, or six car trips. I had to load the Rabbit lightly because the shocks were worn. Yet it was unthinkable not to bear the onus: Bruckner, Mahler, Strauss, Debussy, Ravel, Ives, Harris, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and all the others made up a kind of ordered bulwark against the disorderly craziness of my world. Although college had made me crazy, so much so that I turned my back on it, I retained fondness for some aspects of the Westwood campus. I made much use, in my spare hours, of the Arnold Schoenberg Library, where I read composer-biographies and music histories and made what I could out of the study-scores. Sometimes a reference in one of the musicological books sent me to the Research Library, to the philosophy or history section. When I read that Mahler took inspiration for his Third Symphony from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, I went off to read Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. When Wilfrid Mellers wrote that no listener could fully understand Ralph Vaughan Williams, the English symphonist, without knowledge of the Metaphysical poets, I went off to read the Metaphysical poets. When I had absorbed the poets, I sought clarification in T. S. Eliot’s comments on them.

On campus one day I met an acquaintance. He had been my supervisor when I worked in circulation in the College Library. He suggested that I apply for a position in the University Archives. It required no degree, which made it a possibility for me. The director of the Oral History Program wanted to collect spoken memoirs of people who had been active in the musical life of Southern California and he wanted to hire an interviewer for the project. My old supervisor and one or two other sympathizers vouched for me. Soon enough the Program dispatched me with a tape recorder to interview the first name on the preference list, the redoubtable conductor-musicologist-lexicographer Nicolas Slonimsky, whose Lexicon of Musical Invective had given me many a chuckle. I also knew Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Composers and Musicians, an absolutely indispensable resource for anyone with a serious interest in music, Music in Latin America, Music Since 1900, and the maximally erudite Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns. According to the entry under his own name in Baker’s, Slonimsky had authored the groundbreaking paper, "Sex and the Music-Librarian". "It was a very short paper," he winked. Slonimsky’s death will shake the musical world, Lawrence Weschler once wrote while the maestro still lived. No one else had been so robustly at the center of twentieth-century musical activity; no one else had chronicled that activity so copiously and precisely. When I sat down to talk with him in his ground floor Wilshire Boulevard apartment, he had just celebrated his eighty-fourth birthday; his demise would come sixteen years later, just shy of his twentieth completed lustrum.

Slonimsky liked to say, in his Russian accent, that he had been born in three different places and at three different times: first in Saint Petersburg, which later became Petrograd, and later again Leningrad; on 15 April, on 27 April, and on 28 April, 1894—due to the non-conformance of the Orthodox and Western calendars and to a turn-of-the-century adjustment in the former. It was the type of jest that he liked, and that he expressed as a composer in his fascinating "Derangements" (as he called them) of Bach, which he played for me on his upright piano in the room where we spoke. Make consistent mathematical alterations to a Bach fugue and you get a Debussy prelude, whole-tone scale and all; make another consistent alteration and you get atonal counterpoint on the model of Schoenberg. But the superannuated Wunderkind cleverness, turning baroque counterpoint into Impressionism or into Atonality by means of a logarithm, only barely concealed the resilient person, the genius, the pioneer, and the survivor.

Rimsky-Korsakov and the other Russians had awakened me musically. When Slonimsky applied for admission to the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, he underwent examination by none other than Rimsky’s successor in the directorship of that august institution, Alexander Glazunov. Rimsky, who sympathized with dissentients during the events of 1905, had tendered his resignation when the Czar put down the reformers, with the tacit agreement that his student should fill his office. Glazunov, arguably the most prominent living Russian composer in 1908, had given the fourteen-year-old Slonimsky the highest possible grade, a "Five Plus". When a fellow humbly confronted the white-haired, pixy-like polymath, who could not have been much more than five feet and two inches in height, he confronted a living, breathing heir of the Rimsky tradition, a student of the man whom Rimsky himself saw as his musical legatee. He humbly confronted someone who had survived the cauldron of the Communist revolution and the ensuing Civil War in Russia. In 1918, along with other more or less able-bodied males, Slonimsky obeyed a compulsory decree to shoulder arms under the hammer and sickle. In a field outside the city, he listened to a harangue about the inevitability of the Bolshevik triumph delivered by none other than Leon Trotsky. As revolutionary Petrograd descended into military executions of counter-revolutionaries and endemic famine, Slonimsky slipped away. He stole through Ukraine and Crimea to Turkey and then eventually, via France, to the United States. He arrived, in 1921, speaking no English. He learned the language by the unusual expedient of reading advertisements in magazines. The advertisements in Harper’s or Saturday Evening Post were far more verbal than they would later become. He played piano when he could, he gave lessons, and he gradually made himself fit for the new social environment. He even composed. His "Five Advertising Songs" began to appear on recital programs. One of them borrowed advertising copy for a laxative, which it wedded with the harmonic progressions and melodic outline of Rachmaninov’s C-Minor Prelude.

Within a few years Slonimsky merited the honor of becoming assistant to Serge Koussevitsky, director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. It was Slonimsky who re-barred the score of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring so that Koussevitsky, whom the composer’s irregular time signatures badly disgruntled, could conduct it, to great acclaim. With a chamber orchestra drawn from the regular Boston Symphony personnel, Slonimsky began to perform the newest American music by Charles Ives, Henry Cowell, Edgar Varèse, and Carl Ruggles. He gave premiere performances of now famous scores, such as Ives’ Three Places in New England and Varèse’s Ionisation. To beat time correctly in the middle movement of Three Places, which depicts two village bands passing each other while playing different tunes in different keys and in different meters, Slonimsky learned how to conduct so that the fourth beat in the right hand, in four-four meter, would coincide with the downbeat in the left hand, in cut meter. "Somebody said that my conducting was Evangelical because my right hand knew not what my left hand was doing." When Slonimsky demonstrated this disjoint stick-technique, the onlooker had the awed feeling that no Ankara dervish could excel him in exotic motor skills. Daringly, the intrepid maestro took this avant-garde repertory to Germany in 1934—a Russian-Jewish conductor, on an American passport, exhibiting the latest in entartete Musik to sell-out audiences in the concert hall of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. It was like taking bagels and cream cheese to the Reichskänzlerei; with State Department help, it was a stab at the nascent anti-Semitic regime.

Back home, Slonimsky’s association with "modern music" cost him his chance to head a major orchestra. He took over the Los Angeles Philharmonic for part of its Hollywood Bowl summer season in 1934, insisting that Ives, Ruggles, and Varèse appear on the program. The radio engineers (KFAC, no less) who broadcast the concert had made air-check discs that recorded the ill tempered boos and hisses from an audience that wanted… Tchaikovsky! The blue-haired burgesses and prigs on the Symphony board, made known their displeasure. What had been a tryout for the post of music director became a rejection. After that, the man lectured at universities, on literature as well as music, and wrote dictionaries and other books for his living.

Of Tchaikovsky, Slonimsky said something remarkable. I posed the (rather hackneyed) "desert island question". If you were stranded on a desert island, and could have the music of only one composer, whose would it be? Slonimsky told me that he would choose the Tchaikovsky symphonies. Far from being the non-rigorous sentimentalist that popular stories suggested, the spinner of obvious tunes, weak in his compositional structures, Tchaikovsky exercised absolute mastery of symphonic argument, of the details of orchestration, and of the assimilation of folk- into art-music. Stravinsky merely acted on Peter Ilyich’s lead.

Gary Johnston, Reinhold Kieslich, and Nicolas Slonimsky had in common their passage through and survival of the turmoil of the twentieth century. Johnston, as I have described elsewhere, had come to the United States as a war orphan from Germany: a nightmarish Reich of Allied bombing attacks and adolescent conscription into the Hitlerjugend. We students could only surmise what the conditions were that had made him. Kieslich, a generation older than Johnston, emerged from the same catastrophe. Slonimsky evaded the Lenin-Stalin nightmare by the skin of his teeth. He invoked his final image of Petrograd during an early interview: a starving horse dropping in the street and the starving citizens encircling it immediately with raised knives to claim a slice of still warm flesh. My complaints paled. I had authored my own neurotic problems. A heady presumption tainted the idea of interviewing such a person as Nicolas Slonimsky. How did I not strike him as unbearably impertinent? Redeeming the occasion consisted in understanding the presumptiveness of it. Salvation consisted again in the other person’s endowing the callow questioner with the loan of dignity, in the hope that he might repay it by assimilating it. The junior partner brings no real collateral to the transaction, but he must possess evident interests outside himself, and a curiosity beyond the confines of a narrow parochialism.

Looking back on the transcripts of the Slonimsky interviews, I see how he helped me to organize the mass of material I had assembled in preparation for speaking with him. He undertook a kindly collaboration with the bumbling aspirant. Uncle Til never did anything else. Like Socrates at the beginning of Protagoras, when the agitated Hippocrates comes banging at the teacher’s door before sunrise, he had always sought to calm me and to suggest the sources of order. As for Johnston, he was one of the few teachers I have known who understood the real object of instruction is the soul and that the soul is only nourished by the most exalted things. Slonimsky was a non-religious Jew and a materialist; Johnston was some kind of secular mystic; Uncle Til was a Quaker with an inclination to mysticism on the medieval Christian rather than on the Jungian or Theosophical model. Yet the passions of all three, even of the materialist, suggested a transcendent orientation. The composers whom Slonimsky had championed were all mystics and seers in their own way: Varèse an inveterate reader of Paracelsus, Ives of Emerson, and Ruggles of Blake. Galileo Galilei, as musical as he was astronomical, said that music mediates between reason and faith. Slonimsky, Johnston, and Kieslich were all—each in his peculiar manner—men of faith as well as men of learning and reason. Exposure to them had the effect, by stages, of reinforcing my own faith and my own reason and therefore of fostering an internal, a spiritual order that permitted me to reestablish myself on my own modest path.

This happened at a time when some of my dropout friends stumbled even further into decline, brought down by drugs or alcohol or sex or despair. In every case, the casualties succumbed also to an inability to rise from adolescence made perpetual by the seductions of commercial culture. They all owned as many bulky LPs as I did, but in a different genre. It is difficult to see what kind of faith commercial music might nurture, since it comes in three-minute bites, without any harmonic progress, and with a monotonous beat; it requires no postponement, points to nothing but itself and a few immediate urges, and celebrates a middle-school petulance, which, when it endures in a person chronologically adult, is ugly and intolerable. I am not saying anything so simple as that rock-and-roll did them over, as if it were a case of elementary causality; obviously it is more complicated than that. Say rather that, insofar as we choose the musical accompaniment to our follies, our delights, and our sorrows, what we choose signifies. Outside observers legitimately interpret our choices and judge their appropriateness to the events that they accompany. My intoxicated, lay-about friends were all cool, of course, and I was more pronouncedly than ever a nerd. But I could see that my mentors had probably been nerds, too, or the equivalent in their native contexts. It alleviated my nervousness. Probably my New Orleansian grandfather—the one in the old photograph with the violin—was a nerd, playing his scales while the other boys cut Huck Finn capers on the levee or ran like ragamuffins in the French Quarter. When our son was born, my wife and I agreed that we would rather raise a civilized nerd than a socialized barbarian. Young master Joseph was listening regularly to Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, and all the rest before he learned to talk. We taught him to read at home before we ever sent him off to school. In my forties, I held to my hard-won principles devoutly.

In terms of volume (in both senses), ours is the most music-filled, if not the most musical, age ever. Recording and broadcasting have propagated music—increasingly indifferent as to what kind—since the turn of the last century. Before the 1950s, however, the purveyors of commercial culture assumed that middle class people had adult interests and could understand civilized references, including those to music. Leopold Stokowski and Arturo Toscanini were celebrities. When Bugs Bunny goes onstage at the Hollywood Bowl and raises his hands, sans baton, to lead the orchestra, the director of the cartoon expects that movie audiences will "get" the allusion. Stokowski famously conducted sans baton. The Bugs-and-Elmer Fudd conflict can assimilate to the plot of Wagner’s Ring and be comprehensible to the same audience because many of the moviegoers listened with some regularity to broadcasts of the NBC Symphony and of the Metropolitan Opera’s Saturday afternoon performances. When Elmer belts out "Kill the wabbit! Kill the wabbit!" to Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries, the humor comes from a collision of contexts and it works because the audience knows both contexts. In the Stokowski vehicle, One Hundred Men and a Girl, the random cab driver agrees to carry Deanna Durbin to Carnegie Hall despite her not having the fare because he admires Stokowski and knows of her association with the extravagant maestro. The cab driver is any one of us—ordinary people taking advantage of the matinee who enjoy the movies but who also cultivate higher taste, at least on weekends. After World War Two, producers of commercial culture ceased making such assumptions about their customers, no doubt because the critical mass of their customers no longer invested in refined diversion. The lamented Los Angeles classical music radio station KFAC broadcast on both AM and FM: the AM signal could be picked up on car radios and on the old radio-sets that many older people still owned in the 1960s, without FM reception. The cynically engineered dissolution of the station in 1989 was motivated by greed for the AM frequency above all. The liquidators immediately began broadcasting commercial music.

A recurring item in the news in the 1990s concerned the problem that masses of teenagers posed to the businesses that rent space in malls; obnoxious kids scare away adult customers, so the merchants lose business. How to solve the problem? Play classical music over the speaker system—Haydn and Boccherini repel the kids the way sunlight repels vampires. Were they not a captive audience, my summer course students would have fled the room when I asked them to put their heads down on their desks and listen to one of the five movements of Berlioz’ Symphonie fantastique, a musical tableau so vivid that only someone artificially deprived of his imagination could not conjure up the cinematographic pictures of a thunderstorm in the lonely fields that it evokes.

"If the doors of perception were cleansed," prophesied William Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, "every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite"; and this is because "man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thru’ narrow chinks of his cavern." We reflexively think of "the doors of perception" in ocular terms, as though they involved only the eyes, but Blake almost always speaks in the plural of the senses. The bard is not only for Blake the one who sees but also the one who hears—hears the singing of angels and the harmonies of the celestial spheres. Blake knew, too, that neither seer nor hearer springs effortlessly into being, but rather struggles his way through tribulation and catastrophe to the dearly purchased competency of seeing or hearing without mediation. I think of the tremendous anguish that Beethoven expresses in his "Heiligenstadt Testament"—Beethoven, who went on hearing long after his ears succumbed to deafness and who, from his deafness, taught us the proper way to listen as we walk beyond the distractions of civic life in the spiritual recreation of park and field. Blake seems to invoke Plato’s cave, where we have, in his terms, closed ourselves up, and where man "sees all things thru’ narrow chinks of his cavern." How will those doors of our perception be cleansed when a brutal half-music coupled with brutal imagery is the predominant medium of musical instruction, exhorting us ceaselessly to lower our preferences to the degree-zero of thumping titillation? What subtleties shall we learn to perceive when there is no deliberate training in the eroticism of the subtle or in the sweet teasing of the eye or the gentle tickling of the ear? An individual might be lucky enough to benefit by the charity of magic helpers, but civilization cannot sustain itself on the hope that a critical nucleus of individuals will meet up providentially with similar mentor-benefactors. The disintegration of the musical paideia runs in parallel with the disintegration of the literary paideia. I thank God for my luck—for Uncle Dave and Uncle Til and Gary Johnston and all the rest—while at the same time I know that the number of the lucky grows yearly smaller and smaller.

Three Short Essays on Taste and Technology

by

Mark Wegierski

Mr. Wegierski is a Canadian journalist (based in Toronto) who has generously contributed to recent issues of Praesidium. The following three pieces, in particular, while extremely perceptive, have not (he informs us) succeeded in finding a home among various outlets of a more general audience. We entirely agree that there is a palpable resistance throughout the news media and the literate public to addressing the range of grave issues outlined here. Indeed, one should constantly bear in mind while reading the essays that their matter is considered off limits in most newsrooms.

In the New Millennium: Five Internet Visions from a Technoskeptic

With the advance of the computer/electronics revolution, and especially of the Internet, five main outlooks upon the effects of these technological advances have emerged.

Corporate Net: Huge conglomerates like AOL Time Warner, Disney, DreamWorks, and Microsoft have all the resources to move into offering what are considered the best kinds of products on the Net. They have the capital to hire the most creative people, and to market their own entertainment products there. Thus, the Internet will just be another facet of increasing the social and cultural dominance of sports-industries, the Hollywood entertainment complex, rock and rap music and videos, electronic games, the fashion-industry, and, of course, the "pornucopia"—together constituting the "carnival culture". There will also be sprinklings of maudlin sentimentalism here and there. All this will only accentuate currently existing trends towards consumptionism, consumerism, and commodity-fetishism, driven by advertising increasingly utilizing postmodern tropes (such as transgression and drastic incongruity). In the end, these transnational corporation tendencies are likely to lead to a world like that portrayed in Ridley Scott’s dark-future film, Blade Runner (based on Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), in Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange (filmed by Stanley Kubrick), or to the antiseptic and soulless Brave New World of Aldous Huxley.

Nerd Net: The Net does not really offer untold wealth and power to most of its participants. Rather, it often proffers to techno-nerds, wildly enraptured by the science-fictional writings of cyberpunk guru William Gibson (author of Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Virtual Light, Idoru, All Tomorrow’s Parties, and Pattern Recognition, among other works) an illusion of mastery. While professionally they may sometimes be the persons who write extensive computer code and carry out critical support functions for computer systems—which could be seen as the backbone of the New Economy—culturally and recreationally they typically play in their elaborate MUSH (Multi-User Shared Hallucination) environments, and interminably surf the Net, looking for "neat sites" and for various "kicks". The hacker elite among them feels itself flexing its muscles when it implants computer viruses, or breaks into less or more important data banks. One might well ask how much meaningful social change does this generate? The old computer cliché of Garbage In—Garbage Out (GIGO) might well be invoked. If the computer user is indeed the typical, rootless, flat-souled product of the current-day North American consumption-culture and education system, no amount of neat software and "information"—or writing computer code—is going to improve him or her. Indeed, it is only those who are real personalities—real "persons of spirit"—to begin with, who might start to have an impact. Only then might Gibson’s vision—in terms of the critical importance of so-called "netrunners", though hopefully not in terms of a polluted, corporation-run world—begin to have some substance. The geeks must finally transcend their own geekhood—and help save humanity from the encroaching techno-dystopia.

Rightwing Net: According to some persons, the Net is teeming with all kinds of right-wing ideas that have been suppressed in North America’s public and managerial cultures. Alternative right-wing communities and lobby-groups can form on the Net. The economic transformations being brought about by "the electronic cottage" are also interpreted by some as having a conservatizing edge. People will increasingly "cocoon" around their family home, and not have the need to go to the big office towers downtown, thus starving the inner-cities of their last major source of tax-revenue. Eventually, this may polarize population centres into inner-cities which receive an absolute minimum of welfare, and a suburban and rural North America that doesn’t give a damn about the inner-cities and no longer has any reason to commute downtown.

In the U.S. Presidential election of 2000, the rural-urban split was extremely pronounced. George W. Bush won a substantially larger number of U.S. counties than Al Gore, whose support was concentrated in the coastal and urban areas. In terms of the popular vote, however, Al Gore was slightly ahead. There is clearly a struggle between the hinterland and the megalopolis. If physical distances and mutual remoteness are a hindrance to the political mobilization of the hinterland, it might be effectively linked electronically and triumph over the megalopolis.

The final result may be a scenario suggested in some sci-fi movies, notably, Escape from New York, which portrays New York as a walled-off penal colony for most of America’s prison population. (Escape from Los Angeles was the 1990s sequel.) In the recent Dark Angel and Freedom television series, a military government was portrayed as having taken over. Although techno-Republicans like Newt Gingrich and George Gilder talk in terms of the opportunities of the electronic world, one of the foremost opportunities it may offer is for the middle-classes to forever escape entanglements with the inner-cities.

New Age Net: In this interpretation, the Net is indeed central to the future of humankind. It is in fact the place where a new planetary consciousness is being born. Young people all over the world are forging links which are, despite the heavy corporate presence on the Net, independent of the transnationals. All kinds of revolutionary new ideas about the total malleability of human nature are being put into practice in the electronic realm, where we can literally be whoever (or whatever) we want to be—a world without boundaries. Symptomatic of this trend is the fact that LSD guru Timothy Leary acclaimed "virtual reality" (VR) as the best new high and the key to transforming evolutionary consciousness. The Net, in this interpretation, will finally translate the world-transforming ideas of the new social movements that arose in the Sixties into a concrete, worldwide reality.

Further beyond could be the idea that the electronic realm constitutes the next stage of human evolution—i.e., that humans will eventually be "uploading" their consciousness into electronic form—and thereby possibly achieving near-immortality. The experience of such an electronic realm, which many have thought could be of human consciousness totally willing its own reality, may be the ultimate dream for humankind—of "a mind forever voyaging"—although some might see it as rather nightmarish.

The dark-future movie, The Matrix, pessimistically extrapolated a combination of malevolent Artificial Intelligence (AI) and virtual reality as leading to the enslavement of humanity. The theme of machines vs. humanity was also prominently raised by the Terminator movies.

Fragmentation Net: The dislocations engendered by the Internet and the electronization of the world will constitute a profoundly trying time in human history. No outlook will be able to triumph fully: instead, we will see the hyper-fragmentation of society. The Internet might well reinforce persons with every possible "kink" who would otherwise find themselves marginalized in their physical communities. While this might encourage eclectic philosophical debate, it could just as easily encourage "communities" forming around the most bestial and depraved kinds of interests. It would also practically mean the end of any kind of "common culture" in North America. Many believe a certain amount of commonality is needed for the upholding of ethical standards (which are already very tenuous today), as well as for the continuation of some degree of real democracy and meaningful political participation. The Mad Max/Road Warrior movies may point to what could be the final result of massive ethical and social breakdown.

Indeed, the obsession with technology, cyberspace, and the resultant social hyper-fragmentation—the swallowing up of common public and social concern by a realm of images and illusions—might well result in North American civilization’s being unable to deal with many, rather more concrete local and planet-wide social and environmental questions, including increasing disparities between rich and poor, overpopulation, mass migrations, the crisis of public and social morality, the anomie of a rootless existence, and global ecological collapse.