RHIZOME_RAW:

[Max Herman]

Thank you thank you friend.


>From: "+   lo_y.  +" <loy at myrealbox.com>
>Reply-To: "+   lo_y.  +" <loy at myrealbox.com>
>To: list at rhizome.org, syndicate at anart.no
>Subject: RHIZOME_RAW: Date: Fri, 06 Sep 2002 22:27:09 +0200
>
>( " iknewit " )
>
>"
>
>BERLIN, GERMANY (AP) - Recent admissions by an ex-Nazi official living in 
>Argentina have confirmed what some musicologists have suspected for years: 
>that early twentieth century German composer Anton Webern and his 
>colleagues devised the so-called "serial" technique of music to encrypt 
>messages to Nazi spies living in the United States and Britain.
>
>In what can surely be considered the most brazen instance of Art Imitating 
>Espionage to date, avant garde composers of the Hitler years working in 
>conjunction with designers of the Nazi Enigma code were bamboozling 
>unsuspecting audiences with their atonal thunderings while at the same time 
>passing critical scientific data back and forth between nations.
>
>"This calls into question the entire Second Viennese School of music," 
>announced minimalist composer John Adams from his home in the Adirondack 
>Mountains. "Ever since I first encountered compositions by Arnold Schonberg 
>I wondered what the hell anyone ever heard in it. Now I know."
>
>Gunned down by an American soldier in occupied Berlin, 62 year old Anton 
>Webern's death was until now considered a tragic loss to the musical world. 
>At the time the U.S. Army reported that the killing was "a mistake", and 
>that in stepping onto the street at night to smoke a cigarette Webern was 
>violating a strict curfew rule.
>
>It is now known that Webern was using music to shuttle Werner Heisenberg's 
>discoveries in atomic energy to German spy Klaus Fuchs working on the 
>Manhattan atom bomb project in New Mexico. Due to the secret nature of the 
>project, which was still underway after the invasion of Berlin, Army 
>officials at the time were unable to describe the true reason for Webern's 
>murder.
>
>Hans Scherbius, a Nazi party official who worked with Minister of 
>Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, admitted at age eighty-seven that the Nazis 
>secretly were behind the twelve-tone technique of composition, which was 
>officially reviled to give it the outlaw status it needed to remain outside 
>of the larger public purview.
>
>"These pieces were nothing more than cipher for encoding messages," he 
>chuckled during an interview on his balcony in Buenos Aires. "It was only 
>because it was 'naughty' and difficult that elite audiences accepted it, 
>even championed it."
>
>Physicist Edward Teller, who kept a 9-foot Steinway piano in his apartment 
>at the Los Alamos laboratory, was the unwitting deliverer of Heisenburg's 
>data to Fuchs, who eagerly attended parties thrown by Teller, an 
>enthusiastic booster of Webern's music.
>
>Arnold Schonberg, the older musician who first devised the serial technique 
>at the request of the Weimar government of Germany, composed in America to 
>deliver bomb data stolen by Fuchs back to the Nazis, who worked feverishly 
>to design their own atomic weapons.
>
>As an example, Scherbius showed Associated Press reporters the score of 
>Webern's Opus 30 "Variations for Orchestra" overlaid with a cardboard 
>template. The notes formed a mathematical grid that deciphered into German 
>a comparison between the neutron release cross-sections of uranium isotopes 
>235 and 238.
>
>Schonberg responded with a collection of songs for soprano and woodwinds 
>that encrypted the chemical makeup of the polonium-beryllium initiator at 
>the core of the Trinity explosion.
>
>And in Japan, Toru Takemitsu took time out from his own neo-romanticism to 
>transmit data via music of his nation's progress with the atom.
>
>"The most curious thing about it," says composer Philip Glass in New York 
>City, "is that musicians continued to write twelve-tone music after the 
>war, even though they had no idea why it was really invented. Indeed, there 
>are guys who are churning out serialism to this day."
>
>Unlike the diatonic music, which is based on scales that have been agreed 
>upon by listeners throughout the world for all of history, twelve-tone 
>music treats each note of the chromatic scale with equal importance, and 
>contains a built-in mathematical refusal to form chords that are pleasing 
>by traditional standards. Known also as serialism, the style has never been 
>accepted outside of an elite cadre of musicians, who believe it is the only 
>fresh and valid direction for post-Wagnerian classical music to go.
>
>"Even if this is really true," states conductor Pierre Boulez, a composer 
>who continues to utilize serial techniques, "the music has been vindicated 
>by music critics for decades now. I see no reason to suddenly invalidate an 
>art form just because of some funny business at its inception."
>
>"
>
>( " http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/weekly/aa062998.htm " )
>
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