In seeming counterpoint to the curiously inconclusive G-20 summit in Seoul this week, there was a development in the curiously inconclusive posthumous political travails of the Korean violinist and composer Hong Yeong-hu, better known by his pen name, Hong Nan-p’a. Hong is popularly, if slightly inaccurately, considered the father of Western classical music in Korea; while others were working the vein before him, it was the success of Hong’s song “Garden Balsam” (Bongseonhwa), first written as a violin piece in 1919, that showed the viability of combining Korean-style melody with Western harmonies and instrumentation.

Hong’s career coincided with the Japanese military occupation of Korea, and, as a result, standard textbook encapsulations of his biography emphasize his patriotism, how his student years at the Tokyo Conservatory were cut short by his participation in the March 1st Movement for Korean independence, how “Garden Balsam” became an unofficial anthem of the Korean resistance, how, in 1937, he was arrested and jailed for six weeks, an ordeal usually cited as contributing to his death, in 1941, at the age of 44. So it was a little dissonant to read that, this week, Hong’s descendants dropped their lawsuit to keep him off of an official government list of pro-Japanese collaborators:

Accordingly, the composer, who has been exempt from the list under a temporary court order issued last November, will likely be put back on the “disgraced” register…. The court said more extensive inquiries should be carried out to confirm whether the composer actively cooperated with Japanese authorities during the colonial rule.

Hong’s alleged collaboration came in the last four years of his life, as the Japanese rather fiercely ramped up their imperial pressure across Korea; having suffered a recurrence of pleurisy during his prison stay, Hong apparently compromised with the colonial government, possibly in return for medical treatment. His accommodation included editing music publications and advising the government on cultural matters.

However, if you’re wondering about a ruling that puts a dead man on a “disgraced” list at the same time that it admits to needing more extensive inquiries, welcome to the somewhat strange world of the Korean Presidential Committee for the Inspection of Collaborations for Japanese Imperialism (PCIC). Given that Korea has spent two-thirds of the past century under either foreign occupation or military dictatorship, the country certainly has more than the usual number of skeletons in its closet, but the PCIC has always been as much about contemporary South Korean politics as a reckoning with the past. The first attempt to identify collaborators, just after World War II, was stymied by the Republic’s first president, Syngman Rhee. The effort was suddenly restarted under Roh Moo-hyun, who became president in 2003; while the move was, plausibly, long overdue, the Presidential Committee also allowed Roh to both stoke anti-Japanese sentiment (always a popular move in Korea) and, at the same time, tar those of his conservative opponents who came to power under a succession of Japanese-trained military leaders. As if to confirm the politicization of the investigation, the administration of Roh’s successor, the conservative Lee Myung-bak, has both tried to sideline the PCIC and has pretty well scrubbed any mention of its activities from Korean government websites. And there’s the danger of financial corruption as well—descendents of named collaborators can have land taken away if the government says that the land was originally illegally granted by the Japanese occupiers. The broad brush wielded by the PCIC and related bodies doesn’t seem to have brought Koreans any closer to coming to terms with their history.

Anyway, here’s Bongseonhwa (along with another Korean resistance song, Jun Su-rin’s “Imperial Ruins”), sung by the great Korean pop singer Cho Yong Pil, from his 2005 concert in Pyongyang:



Fun fact: Hong Nan-p’a lived in the United States from 1931 to 1933, studying at Chicago’s Sherwood Music School (now part of Columbia College). Had he stuck around until 1934, he could have been classmates with Phyllis Diller—demonstrating, once again, that the only force strong enough to reliably bring humanity together is coincidence.

In the modern, compulsory-service era, there are plenty of examples of composers and musicians who also had military careers, but, in honor of Veterans’ Day, a composer-veteran from a time when the combination was fairly rare: Kryštof Harant. Born in 1564, Harant (full name: Kryštof Harant z Polžic a Bezdružic) was a minor Bohemian nobleman and actual Renaissance man whose military service came in the 1590s, soldiering for the Hapsburgs during their Long War against the Ottoman empire. The experience seems to have given Harant a taste for adventure, as he and his brother-in-law promptly embarked on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, a fairly dicey proposition for a pair of veterans of a religious war that was still going on. (The pair disguised themselves as monks from non-combatant lands.) Harant recorded the journey in a book, Cesta z Království Českého do Benátek, odtud do země Svaté (“Journey from Bohemia, by Way of Venice, to the Holy Land”), for which he himself provided some 50 woodcuts; the book also included a six-voice motet, Qui confidunt in Domino, which Harant composed in Jerusalem.

Harant became an advisor in the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, who had moved the seat of the empire to Prague; but, as the power of the tolerant, art-loving (and somewhat libertinistic) Rudolf declined, the court moved back to Vienna, and Harant retired to his castle to write music. Throughout the early 1600s, the rest of the Hapsburgs were driven by increasing Catholic, anti-Protestant zeal, a tendency that bode ill for the Reformation in Bohemia. By the time matters came to a head, Harant himself had converted—to a sect called neo-Utraquism, whose nominal sticking point with Rome was whether the laity could partake of communion wine or not, although the underlying power struggle was essentially that of Lutheranism.

When, following a series of political twists and turns, the Elector Palatine, Frederick V, was elected King of Bohemia, Harant became his Privy Councillor. An unfortunate promotion, as it turned out—Frederick’s ragtag forces were decisively defeated at the 1620 Battle of White Mountain by mercenaries sent by the new Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand II, a ruler who took his duty to defend the faith awfully seriously. Harant was one of 27 nobles subsequently beheaded in Prague’s Old Town Square on what Bohemian Protestants came to call the “Day of Blood,” June 21, 1621.

Harant was the most important Bohemian composer of his time, which means he was the most important Bohemian composer for a long time, as Bohemia essentially ceased to exist, completely subsumed into the Hapsburg empire. Harant’s music was old-fashioned for its day, contrapuntal and firmly within the old Franco-Flemish school; one of his few surviving works is a cantus firmus mass on a Marenzio madrigal that was already a century old when Harant used it. Only a few months before the Battle of White Mountain, one of Harant’s masses had been performed with great pomp and ceremony in Prague’s Catholic church of St. Jakub, not far from the square where Harant would be executed. Inter arma enim silent Musae.

Harant’s music has been recorded by the Prague Madrigalists, the Capella Rudolphina, and the Italian vocal ensemble Triaca Musicale; the latter has audio samples on their site.

Part of this week’s to-do list is some clearing of the briar-patch that is chapters 2 and 3 of the book, which gets into the heavyweights of German philosophy—Kant and Hegel. One of the habits I developed while poking around Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment European thought on this trek was that of looking at the course of 19th-century Western philosophy as successive claims on intellectual real estate, a kind of dance between incomplete zoning and squatting. The Romantics set up shop where Kant’s aesthetics ran out of steam, Marx colonized the materialistic no-man’s-land that Hegel tried to jump over with a leap of faith, &c. Nietzsche pretty much made an entire career out of going back and opening up all the boxes that previous philosophies had left discreetly closed. It explains his brio—the process is, in itself, kind of exhilarating.

Now, almost all of these revisionist vacuum-fillings had a musical parallel—the Romaniticization of Beethoven, the Schopenhauerization of Wagner, and so forth. In fact, I think there’s an interesting case to be made for music as the canary in the philosophical coal mine. Music—and the way we talk about music—has a kind of tendency, in this interpretation, to coalesce around the weak point(s) of whatever philosophical movement is currently taken for granted. At the very least, it’s a provocative source of leverage, kind of like Feuerbach’s old trick of reversing the subject and the object in Hegel—it doesn’t reveal the truth, but it gives you a hint where to look. Probably the last thinker to really effectively work the lever was Adorno, using the increasing commodification of music to unpack the ways in which the free market is a lot less free than we might like to think.

I got to thinking about this again because, just for fun, I was reading some of Adorno’s student, Jürgen Habermas. (It is recognized that I have a funny sense of fun.) The fun of Habermas, for me, is that he embodies certain traits of the Frankfurt School in a kind of amplified, straight-to-the gut pop-music-ish way. The first is analysis; where the first generation of the Frankfurt School took aim at contemporary society, Habermas takes apart the whole of philosophical history. The book I picked up this week, Knowledge and Human Interests, bounces through Idealism, Positivism, Pragmatism, even a bit of psychoanalysis with the confidence of a chef walking through a market—that won’t work, that’s tasty, but then we’ll need this, but make sure it’s not that, and, oh yes, that can be lovely if you know what to do with it.

And then Habermas takes all his ingredients and comes up with something way more optimistic than I, at least, would be able to justify. This too is an amplification: the Frankfurt School was always more optimistic than their dour reputation might have indicated—they were Marxists, after all, so there was at least a lingering whiff of Utopia. But Adorno’s optimism, for example, was tempered by his suspicion of human nature, especially collectively; he believed that a better society was possible once one clearly saw the current society’s structure and mechanisms, but that was balanced by his pessimistic assessment of the political and corporate forces standing in the way of that vision. Habermas, though, with his program of “communicative rationality,” puts an awful lot of faith in the desire of human beings to interact with the common goal of logical understanding. Instead of searching for truth through self-reflection of phenomenological perception, Habermas thinks that it is in the very nature of communicative action that truth can be found, that our ways of communicating with each other will reveal universals. The mechanisms of civil society—for that is where we interact and communicate—at some level reach a consensus. Here’s how he puts it in his book Communication and the Evolution of Society:

In action oriented to reaching understanding, validity claims are ‘always already’ implicitly raised. These universal claims (to the comprehensibility of the symbolic expression, the truth of the propositional content, the truthfulness of the intentional expression, and the rightness of the speech act with respect to existing norms and values) are set in the general structures of possible communication. In these validity claims communication theory can locate a gentle, but obstinate, a never silent although seldom redeemed claim to reason, a claim that must be recognised de facto whenever and wherever there is to be consensual action.

Habermas is judiciously qualified in his description, but the key here is that first assumption—that civil society consists of “action oriented to reaching understanding”. If you find that a little too optimistic, then you’ve recapitulated the main criticism of communicative rationality—that, if history is any guide, the mechanisms of civil society are pretty easily turned towards creating and reinforcing power irregardless of justice or rationality.

Here’s the really fun thing. Given the question of which era or aspect of music might be, as is its wont, hanging around the weak points of communicative rationality, a plausible answer is: all of it. Music is, essentially, communicative irrationality, an art form that goes through all the public motions of civil discourse without saying anything. Or, rather, saying whatever each individual listener needs it to say—which is the equilibrium civil society always reverts to in the absence of exceptional coercion, positive or negative. In philosophical terms, you can almost imagine music hovering behind any utopian speculation, aping its movements, making goofy faces.

The Boston Globe has, in the past year, taken to running e-mail addresses for its reviewers, which means that there’s rarely a notice of mine that passes without a dissenting note, and rarely a dissenting note that doesn’t rehearse some variation on the phrase “I wonder if you went to the same concert that I did.” A venerable sarcasm; but, then again, there are numerous levels—epistemological, phenomenological, communicative—on which we actually didn’t go to the same concert. It’s why, like so many previous philosophies, music structurally demurs on communicative rationality. Utopias only work in music because we can each pick the utopia that best matches our nature. When it comes to civil society, you’re lucky if you can just get everyone to tune up.

Today in limited-quantity musically-themed beer: Dogfish Head Brewery’s Bitches Brew, honoring the 40th anniversary of the release of Miles Davis’s fusion-jazz classic.


It’s a beery interpretation of tej, Ethiopian mead; like that drink, it’s brewed with honey and gesho, an African shrub that lends a hop-like bitterness. The result? Wow, this is a toasty beer—a stout on steroids, all dark chocolate and roasted coffee overtones.

“Frelon Brun” was the opening track off of Davis’s Filles de Kilimanjaro, which came out the year before Bitches Brew. The album title was another drink reference, a nod to the Kilimanjaro African Coffee Company, in which Davis was an investor. (The company’s founder, Arthur “Buddy” Gist, later donated the trumpet Davis used to record Kind of Blue to the University of North Carolina-Greensboro.)

(Previously in musical beer: Monk, Zappa.)

So we had an election this week here in the United States which pundits are eagerly shaping into Larger Significances, but I don’t buy it. This is the third election cycle in a row driven by one emotion—throw the bums out—which rather implies to me an electorate driving around, hopelessly lost, but too stubborn to stop and ask for directions. And if you know that taxonomy of that cliché, you know that the choices basically boil down to comedy movie (e.g., the end of the British Empire), horror movie (e.g., the end of the Inca Empire), or comedy-horror movie (e.g., the end of the Roman Empire).

It’s appropriate that, in popular culture right now, the monsters du jour are those favorite allegories of hegemonic dissolution and concomitant alienation, zombies. The lively deceased turn up every time an empire collapses—all those seances and spirit mediums in Edwardian Britain, all those skeletal dances of death and mementi mori in the waning Dutch golden age. It’s so prevalent that I find myself wondering where, exactly, the late Romans hid their cache of zombie stories. (It’s fun to imagine that one of the literary casualties of the dark ages was a Catullan Nox Vivum Cadaverum.)

So that’s where we are—driving blind towards a possible dystopian rendezvous with brain-eaters. Now, based on all the zombie movies I’ve seen, the the one essential accessory you’re going to need is a shotgun. So might I suggest this beauty?


That’s an Ithaca Sousa Grade shotgun, the style based on a prototype made for John Philip Sousa himself in 1917. Sousa Grade guns—the highest-end model the Ithaca Gun Company offered—were available to the public at prices running from 500 to 700 pre-WWII dollars. The hand-engraved scrollwork was incredibly intricate and extensive. The inlays were all gold; in addition to the usual dogs-and-ducks hunting motifs, there was this fanciful addition on the underside of the trigger guard—


—a buxom mermaid, courtesy of Bill McGraw, Ithaca’s master engraver. Custom-ordered and hand-built, only a couple dozen Sousa Grade guns were ever made. As such, they’re expensive—not the most expensive antique shotguns out there, but expensive enough. This particularly lovely single-barreled example—


—was sold by the Maine-based James D. Julia auction house for $22,425 last spring.


Sousa wasn’t just a celebrity endorser, but was an avid trapshooter, the first president of the American Amateur Trapshooting Association (later absorbed into the current ATA), and an inductee into the Trapshooting Hall of Fame. In other words, the March King would have himself been a crack shot against a zombie horde. So if you come face-to-face with his rotting, reanimated corpse, I think he would appreciate the tribute of being dispatched with his own gun. It’s only fair.

It’s Halloween this weekend. I did a quick Google search for “karlheinz stockhausen mask” and nothing came up, so I made one. (Click to enlarge.)


While enjoying your resultant candy haul (which, if you want to be clever, you can separate into seven different categories and then eat by following the score to Plus-Minus), fire up the video-on-demand and take in The Mephisto Waltz, a 1971 bit of devilish goofiness (from the director of Gidget!) featuring Curt Jürgens as a dying concert pianist who becomes very interested in Alan Alda’s hands.



(The score is by Jerry Goldsmith, getting a nice avant-garde warm-up for his music for The Omen series.)

Here’s something interesting: the Detroit Symphony Orchestra’s Chief Operating Officer, Patricia Walker, talking (back in July, I’m guessing) about the importance of getting everybody on board when implementing organizational change.



Now, 20/20 hindsight and all that, certainly. Still, mentally replace every instance of the word “change” with “a salary cut of a third and a pension freeze” and it turns into a masterpiece of deadpan comedy.

The Detroit Symphony owes much of its prestige to half of the auto-building Dodge brothers, John and Horace. It was Horace, the more mechanically-inclined of the two—and a decent enough amateur musician, by all accounts—that elevated the DSO into a first-class ensemble by making a hefty contribution to the group when Ossip Gabrilowitsch was hired as music director, and leading the fund-raising for Orchestra Hall, which Gabrilowitsch had stipulated as a condition of his accepting the job.

The Symphony was what finally smoothed the way into Detroit high society for Horace. Prior to that, the brothers were repeatedly blackballed—they were hard-drinking brawlers who didn’t much care what other people thought of them. (Their first major success was in manufacturing parts for Henry Ford’s assembly line. John Dodge was asked why the brothers abandoned that lucrative work to make their own cars. “Think of all those Ford owners who will someday want an automobile,” he snarked.) By the time the brothers suddenly died in 1920—both from complications of the influenza then raging world-wide, although Horace’s condition was precipitously undermined by John’s death—such was their renown that none other than Victor Herbert paid tribute with “The Dodge Brothers March.” The Dodge Brothers company distributed both the sheet music and, according to one source, 100,000 recordings of the piece.


It’s a lot of fun, actually. Here’s the first couple of strains:

http://www.matthewguerrieri.com/sounds/player.swf

The brothers may have maintained their salt-of-the-earth ways, but they still spent money like water. Horace Dodge had a particular penchant for yachts; his final commissioned vessel, the Delphine, was big enough to be appropriated as a flagship during World War II. The Delphine was restored a few years back and is currently for sale. The asking price? 38 million Euros.

From time to time until the book comes out, this space will feature bits and pieces that were too esoteric, tangential, or just plain odd to make it into the final version.

An article in a 1918 issue of Sunset magazine reported the opinion of one Professor Arthur Conradi that the World War I anthem “Over There” owed its popularity to the same factors that made Beethoven’s Fifth a hit:

The great German—the Germans were great in his day—heard a rapping on the door. It suggested the tap of the hand of Fate, and he wrote his deathless symphony. George M. Cohan took a bugle call, a three-note idea, like the rat-a-tat-tat on the door, and in the cold analytical view of a serious musician has written a war song that will live forever.¹

That the comparison necessitates the elimination of one-fourth of Beethoven’s actual motive went unmentioned.

1. Robin Baily, “Songs Our Soldiers Sing.” Sunset, vol. 40, no. 5 (May, 1918), p. 23.

There’s a new gang on the block, and they’re called the Boston Composer’s Coalition, and their inaugural concerts are this weekend—and you can watch them online for free. Shows are tonight at 7:00 EST (hey, that’s just about now, isn’t it) and tomorrow at 1:30 EST. If you’re reading this right now, let’s face it, your Saturday night is not turning out as exciting as it could be, so click on over. These concerts feature works composed especially for the ensemble The Fourth Wall, made up of—wait for it—flute, trombone, and percussion. Awesome.

Now, maybe you’re like me, and you like to make your entertainment decisions based on the cleverness of the logos involved:


Well played, my friends, well played.

Full disclosure: some of them actually are my friends.

News from there and here:

There’s a Facebook campaign going to make John Cage’s 4’33” this year’s Christmas #1 single in the UK. Question of the day: on how many different axes would this have made Theodor Adorno’s head spin?

This looks like fun: music-cognition popularizer Daniel Levitin is joining the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony for an evening called “Beethoven and Your Brain,” which will use a live performance of Beethoven’s Fifth to illustrate concepts in the neuroscience of music.

You will find out what is going on in the mind of the conductor, the musicians, and the audience (you!) in this interactive presentation. With live audience surveys using the latest technology, this will be a Beethoven experience that you will never forget!

Am I the only one thinking of this?


More specifically: am I the only one thinking of that as a possible selling point?

Coming to Australia later this month: music to put budgies to sleep by!

Finally, R.I.P., Ari Up, leader of The Slits, creators of what just might be my favorite cover version ever: