jwilzewske

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

16 Sep 08

BBC Radio 5 Live Pods and Blogs

I was interviewed by Chris Vallance of the BBC last night about the Arizona Department of Corrections’ attempt to sabotage Jon’s Jail Journal by illegally blocking inmates from writing to me.

Below is the link for the podcast. To hear the interview scroll down to latest Pods and Blogs’ episode and click on download episode. (It’s the episode dated September 16th which starts out with the description: The continuing turmoil in the US markets and a new device that could let us hear every word on the football pitch.) My interview commences about five minutes into the show.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/podcasts/pods/

Email comments to writeinside@hotmail.com or post them below

Monday, September 15, 2008

Politics of Politics: Fretwork Recreates the Cosmopolitan Vision of England ca. 1600

Humanism believes in a far-reaching program that stands for the establishment throughout the world of democracy, peace, and a high standard of living on the foundations of a flourishing economic order, both national and international.”
— Corliss Lamont, Humanism Defined.

In 1540, Henry VIII requisitioned musicians from Italy to compose and perform at his court. Two families came—they were not only Italian but clandestine Jews (marranos, or nominally converted ‘New Christians’). The Lupo and the Bassano families thrived in England and served the monarchy for over a century. Yesterday, the ensemble Fretwork performed a program of their music, ‘Birds on Fire: Jewish Musicians in the English Court,’ at Wigmore Hall in London:

Augustine Bassano: Pavan and Galliard No. 1;
Heironymus Bassano: Fantasia No. 1 in 5 parts;
Joseph Lupo: Pavan in 5 parts;
Thomas Lupo: Two Fantasias in 6 parts; Pavan in 3 parts*; Fantasia for three trebles; Fantasy for three basses; Fantasia in 6 parts; Two Fantasias in 6 parts;
Van Wilder: Fantasia, con e senza pause (“Emmentaler vs. Gruyere”);
Duarte: Two Symphonies in 5 parts;
Salmone Rossi: Hashkivenu; Shir hamma’ a lot (Psalm 128);
Gough: Birds on Fire;
Various: A suite of dances from the Lumley Part Books: Desperada, Pavan and Gallyard, Seconda desperada, Pavan and Gallyard of Albarti, and Terza desperada.

[50-sec clip, Thomas Lupo, Fretwork Ensemble, ‘Pavan in 3 Parts’, 0.9MB MP3]

The program notes assert that these pieces illustrate the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the Tudor and Stuart courts, drawing upon the idioms of Franco-Flemish or Italian music. Although the Jews had been banished from the kingdom of England since 1290, the Italian-Jewish Bassano and Lupo families became composer dynasties, dominating English music between 1550 and 1650. But this program is, I think, far more than nominally ‘cosmopolitan.’ It is a story of international relations and the perennial pitfalls of international politics. More on that below...

Formed in 1986, the group consists of six players. Its repertoire consists primarily of music of the Renaissance period, in particular that of Elizabethan and Jacobean England, arrangements of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, plus contemporary music composed for them.

Fretwork

Richard Boothby
Richard Campbell
Wendy Gillespie
Asako Morikawa
Richard Tunnicliffe
Susanna Pell

with Jeremy Avis singing the Salmone Rossi Ebreo pieces, ‘Hashkivenu’ and ‘Shir hamma’ a lot’.

In 1997 Fretwork won the French Grand Prix du Disque for their recording ‘Lachrimae, or Seven Teares’ by John Dowland. Fretwork performed for the soundtracks of two Jim Jarmusch movies, ‘Coffee and Cigarettes’ (2003) and ‘Broken Flowers’ (2005). Their other film performances include ‘The Da Vinci Code’, ‘Kingdom of Heaven’, ‘The Crucible’, and ‘La Fille d’Artagnan’. Fretwork’s members’ versatility and musicianship are impressive. And last night the warmth of their playing delighted the Wigmore Hall audience of about 500.

The program was bookended with ‘Birds on Fire’, a three-part piece by Orlando Gough composed for Fretwork in 2001 and based on the novel by Aaron Appelfeld ‘Badenheim 1939.’ The novel is about a group of Jews at a spa outside of Vienna in the spring of 1939. With the Nazi regime’s actions the town gradually becomes a ghetto, and the musicians abandon Viennese schmalz and play klezmer tunes (‘Kandel’s Hora’ and ‘Odessa Bulgarish’) in secret. According to Gough’s program notes, they persuade themselves that the sinister changes around them are ‘improvements’, until summer turns to autumn, the food runs out, and they are reduced to eating absurd delicacies from the abandoned hotel pantry. “A pair of twins give a reading—their words were like birds on fire.”

Visiting England from the U.S. as I am, the Fretwork ‘Birds on Fire’ program was especially apropos and poignant. I imagined the precariousness of the Lupos and Bassanos in English society—this was a backdrop to my comprehending these compositions. The Tudor and Stuart courts—and the broader English society—were, I think, hardly congenial to the clandestine cosmopolitan views conveyed in these compositions. Parallels to today abound in them. To this day it is necessary to be clandestine. The recent postures of the U.S. bring into question whether the low-information voter can ever be persuaded to support a humanistic and cosmopolitan international relations: respect for reason, belief in the possibility of a democratic peace based on discourse rather than military might, the peaceful effect of trade, non-provocative defense policies; the obsolescence of conquest and universal respect for human rights.

A cosmopolitan outlook has also though sometimes been associated in the past with an inclination toward ‘messianic’ interventionism. Thomas Walker (then at Rutgers, now at SUNY Albany) wrote an as-it-turns-out ‘premonitory’ paper on this back in 2000 (see link below).

So cosmopolitans may be sophisticated, world-wise, urbane, intrigued by other cultures, and extroverted—but they may be delusional as well. Radical humanists position themselves opposite realism’s fundamental conception of the international system as inherently anarchical. The idea of international anarchy simply provides justification and ‘cover’ for states to pursue selfish national interests to the detriment of international interests, especially those of developing countries. Regrettably, it’s the idea of the sovereign independent state pursuing its own interests that continues to dominate world politics.

An ‘emancipatory’ discourse on international politics, rather than a rationalizing one, ought to critically analyze the conservative stance of foundational International Relations (IR) theories such as realism (the politics of power) and international liberalism. In particular, such discourse ought to analyze their lack of theoretical focus on the oligarchic structure of IR. With regard to the global, anti-democratic nature of current IR, emancipatory discourses such as feminism and radical humanism differ, for example, on how to replace the present (oligarchic) structure with a fairer system.

Realist views embracing the concept of sovereignty (of the state) and opposing anarchy tend to argue for the “inevitability” of today’s world where a small grouping of states are dominant. According to realists, even a state’s external security is safeguarded by the anarchic politics, since it leaves the state free to defend its security either independently or by becoming a member of a multinational alliance. This conservative and pro-status quo ideology of IR runs counter to critics of the oligarchic structure of IR who see a potential for real change; that is, for international democracy where all are equal participants in a democratic world.

The “one world” liberal humanist call for the democratization and empowerment of the U.N. as a first step to toward democratization lacks real emancipatory potential if the unjust international world economic order is left in place. The scholar Jayantanuja Bandyopadhyaya typifies the humanist critique of the prevailing mode of IR–a pro-democratic ideology of IR. Bandyopadhyaya is Professor Emeritus of International Relations at Jadavpur University, Calcutta. Previously he was on the faculty at Columbia University and Professor of International Studies at the American University. The Asiatic Society conferred on him the Biman Bihary Majumdar Award (2006) for his contribution to Political Science and the West Bengal Bangla Academy awarded him the Manas Roy Choudhury Award (2006) for his contribution to Bengalie prose. He has been actively engaged in fighting fundamentalism in India.

T he [realist] paradigm of international anarchy is only an ideological camouflage for the rationalisation, legitimisation and perpetuation of this undemocratic and grossly unjust international sysytem.”
— Jayantanuja Bandyopadhyaya, World Government for International Democracy, p. 9.

What makes this perspective a humanistic one? I think it is especially the optimism that human beings possess the power to solve political problems by relying on reason and political will. It also encapsulates humanism’s stress on freedom and development (economic, political, cultural) of all humankind, regardless of nation, ethnicity or religion.

Listen to the music of the Lupos and Bassanos as rendered by Fretwork and you will hear these strains—a cosmopolitan IR stance embodied by Jewish musicians in England in the late 16^th and early 17^th Centuries. The use of democratic procedures and civil liberties throughout all areas of economic, political, and cultural life is still a feature in humanist discourse today, and the chamber music of the Lupos and the Bassanos contains discursive musical evidence of this. Such humanism today promotes an egalitarian socio-political program and a flourishing economic order. The radicalism of this humanist viewpoint is today positioned outside of liberal internationalism, which is critically viewed as being “blind” to imperialism and its own ethnocentrality. But in 1540, under the auspices of King Henry VIII and others after him, the compositions were not nearly so “blind”.

The virtually unlimited support extended to this oligarchic international system by those very states which proclaim democracy to be a universal principle of political organisation in human society is the most glaring paradox of international relations…The oligarchic international system brought into existence by the ruling classes of the militarily and economically powerful states does not, however, enjoy the support of all sections of world public opinion.”
— Jayantanuja Bandyopadhyaya, World Government for International Democracy, p. 22.

Radical humanist ideology shaped by emancipatory rhetoric is today more problematic than ever, particularly so during the reign of the neo-cons in the U.S. Fretwork’s ‘Birds on Fire’ program is historically-informed and commendable for its aesthetic beauty. But it is also apropos in yet more ways because of the relevance of the political context that gave rise to these pieces—relevance to species of IR today. ‘Birds on Fire’ would make an ideal program for fund-raising by IR organizations and NGOs concerned with the current situation in international politics.

Fretwork website
Askonas-Holt Management Ltd
Wigmore Hall website
Pliable. Lone voices: Jewish composers. On An Overgrown Path blog, 23-JUL-2008.
Thomas Walker page at SUNY Albany
Walker T. The forgotten prophet: Tom Paine’s cosmopolitanism and international relations. Intl Studies Quart 2000; 44:51-72.
Fretwork. Birds on Fire: Jewish Music for Viols. (HarmoniaMundi, 2008.)
Archibugi D. The Global Commonwealth of Citizens: Toward Cosmopolitan Democracy. Princeton Univ, 2008.
Bandyopadhyaya J. World Government for International Democracy and Justice. Manuscript India, 2002.
Bandyopadhyaya J. IR and Global Equilibrium. Bagchi/JU, 1992.
Beck U, Cronin C. Cosmopolitan Vision. Polity, 2006.
Cabrera L. Political Theory of Global Justice: A Cosmopolitan Case for the World State. Routledge, 2006.
Games A. The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560-1660. Oxford Univ, 2008.
Moellendorf D. Cosmopolitan Justice. Press, 2002.
Walkowitz R. Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation. Columbia Univ, 2007.
Valerie Barber PR
Viola da Gamba Society U.K.
Henner Harders viols at ViolWerks.de
Lu-Mi Chinese viols (Wendy Gillespie) at LazarEarlyMusic.com

Sunday, September 14, 2008

14 Sep 08

Drugs (by T-Bone)

T-Bone - Radiating power and strength, this deeply-spiritual, massively-built African American towers over most inmates. He is a prison gladiator with more stab wounds than Julius Caesar. A good man to have on your side.

This is to the individual who said she or he needed help to stop using drugs.
Have you ever asked yourself why it’s called dope? Well, when I was growing up a lot of the OG’s used to say, “Look at those dopes over there doing poison just to feel dopey.”
I called it a “high,” but as I came to reflect on what I was doing, I realized the truth: dope does nothing for you at all! It causes you not to be real in all experiences in your life, from being awake to sex.
Once you allow yourself to become addicted to pot, coke, heroin, or any pill, it will take a spiritual rebirth to heal you, to reshape your thinking, and to rebuild your life.

The ancient Greeks called it pharmakia – the use of potions, powders, drugs, spells or enchantments! They understood it was and still is a spiritual battle.
There are some people who won’t accept this, but you must have a complete understanding of the truth before you listen to others.
When you become addicted, there is something evil inside you.

Have you ever heard anyone say that she or he is really cool when they’re not doing dope or high? Also, there is no such thing as recreational drug use, only dope use.

Now here are some hardcore facts.
You are killing yourself doing that poison, period! Stand up right now and make a choice, be a woman or a man, do the right thing for yourself! In other words, turn to God, he will help you! If not God, there are other ways to get help.
There are times when you have issues that cause you to hide behind dope. Fear and doubt has never helped anyone, neither has pain.
Don’t make excuses or rationalize what you’re doing. Keep it real and love yourself!
We all must grow up. Get a foundation and build on that foundation and grow.
Choose life and live free of the chains of fear and dope.
There are a lot of people going through the pain of drug and alcohol addiction who want to be able to talk to someone who once had the same problem. Find someone to talk to and let loose all of that unneeded pain and fear and doubt.

My foundation is God, and his love (that’s who he is) has strengthened me to turn away from drugs and the evil thinking that is associated with it. There will always be thoughts and the temptation of doing drugs and the evil that comes with it. But I turn to him for strength and guidance and he gives it to me through his spirit.

Be at peace and don’t worry, tomorrow is another beautiful day to live!

I hope this helps, and if not, let me know.

T-Bone

Email comments to writeinside@hotmail.com or post them below

Copyright © 2008 Shaun P. Attwood

Thursday, September 11, 2008

11 Sep 08

Link to the Sky News Interview

Last night, I was interviewed by Martin Stanford on Sky News. Going live to millions of viewers for the first time was nerve-racking. I was amped-up all night.

Due to a commercial break, I was unable to finish responding to Martin’s final question about why I was continuing the blog, so here’s the remainder of my answer:

The blog was a lifeline for me and a lifeline I promised to keep going for my friends in prison. I intend to do my utmost to keep that lifeline open and to keep their voices being heard on the Internet. Thank you for this opportunity to bring the plight of my friends in prison to a much wider audience.

Here’s the link to the video of the interview:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DTWVYOVk8g

Email comments to writeinside@hotmail.com or post them below

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Chamber Music and Principled Dissent: Cross-Over Art Music of Hanns Eisler

S omeone who knows *only* music understands not one thing about it. A composer with integrity knows that music is written by human beings for human beings and that music is a continuation of life, not something separated from it. A musician with integrity must be an activist in his or her society, and stand up and say loudly what is wrong in that society and try to fix it. It is not right to make pretty, docile music. I could well understand it when in 1933 Hitler put a price on my head and drove me out of Germany. He and his lying bandits were the evil of the period. In fact, I was proud to be driven out. There was honor in this! But today I feel heart-broken over being driven out of the U.S.—this beautiful country—in this ridiculous way, by these ridiculous people. [black-listed by McCarthy Committee]”
— Hanns Eisler, public statement before being expelled from the U.S. in 1948.

D uring his lifetime, Eisler, who was one of Schoenberg’s favorite pupils, created a massive body of work. But these songs—written to inspire and enlighten a world gone mad with alienation and rampant greed—are his most immediate and successful musical contributions. The seventeen individual songs on this album classify as ‘agitprop’; they are political, anti-Nazi, pro-worker, pacifist—but their stirring sentiments and clear-eyed melodic and rhythmic appeal make them art songs as well.”
— Stephany von Buchau, review of Sylvia Anders, D. Justus Noll, and Stephen Roans quartet CD, ‘Eisler: Nothing Quite Like Money’, in High Notes.

Mendacity cannot go unopposed.

Hanns Eisler (1898 - 1962) knew this. Eisler’s time with Schoenberg coincided almost exactly with the transition from atonal to twelve-tone music, and some of Eisler’s early compositions might be mistaken for Anton von Webern’s or Alban Berg’s.

But by the mid-1930s, Eisler became fed-up with the hermeticism and inaccessibility and elitism that typified the music of the Schoenberg School. Social responsibility and relevance were the moral justification for serious music, in Eisler’s view.

So he broke with Schoenberg, and Eisler’s new music—choral music, chamber music, music theater—came to be a fusion of atonal, jazz, cabaret and pop. Most of his pieces have political back-stories. These pieces (‘anthems’, ‘battle songs’) were intended to influence the feelings of performers and listeners, and to change their attitudes. The pieces were not merely entertainment. They didn’t behave nicely, re-upping for more of the ‘same’.

In 1942 Eisler moved to Hollywood, at that time also home to many well-known refugee artists. He continued his collaborations with Bertolt Brecht, wrote the music for a number of films, and taught at USC. In 1947, one of Eisler’s accusers was Richard Nixon, who testified that ‘the case of Hanns Eisler is perhaps the most important ever to have come before the Committee.’ A dossier with song texts which Eisler had set to music was brought as evidence against him. When the leading witness was asked why he was reading out so much material, the reply of the official was: ‘My purpose is to show that Mr. Eisler is the Karl Marx of communism in the musical field, and he is well aware of it.’

Eisler was nominally the first one of what was to become a very large number of artists and intellectuals who were blacklisted in the U.S. on account of real or alleged political views. An international support group came to his defense—including Thomas Mann and Charlie Chaplin—but to no avail, and in 1948 Eisler was deported from the U.S.

His film-score credits include:

Aktion J (1961)
Les Arrivistes (1960) [The Opportunists]
Geschwader Fledermaus (1958) [Bat Squadron]
The Crucible (1957) [Les Sorcières de Salem]
Katzengräben (1957) [Cat Ditch]
Bel Ami (1955)
Nuit et brouillard (1955) [Night and Fog]
Schicksal am Lenkrad (1954) [Fate at the Steering Wheel]
Frauenschicksale (1952) [Destinies of Women]
Das Leben unseres Präsidenten (1951) [Life of Our President]
Rat der Götter, Der (1950) [Council of the Gods]
Unser täglich Brot (1949) [Our Daily Bread]
Křížová trojka (1948) [Three Cross]
So Well Remembered (1947)
The Woman on the Beach (1947)
The Life of Galileo (1947)
A Scandal in Paris (1946)
Deadline at Dawn (1946)
The Spanish Main (1945)
Jealousy (1945)
None But the Lonely Heart (1944)
Hangmen Also Die (1943) [Lest We Forget]
The Forgotten Village (1941)
A Child Went Forth (1941)
Pete-Roleum and His Cousins (1939) [oil and political oligarchies in 1939!]
The 400 Million (1939)
Vie est à nous, La (1936) [The People of France]
Nieuwe gronden (1934) [New Earth]
Dans les rues (1933) [Song of the Streets]

What a great lot of these have to do with progressive themes and social justice!

So Hanns Eisler is fascinating for his having both embraced and dismissed Schoenberg and serialism—switching abruptly to accessible ‘pop’ idioms. It is not so much that he tried to ‘bridge’ the gap between classical and popular music. And it is not the case that he resorted to composing for musical theater and films simply to make a buck. He refused to conform (even though he did later return to a sort of variety of serialism that he felt was emotionally accessible and non-elitist). His String Quartet Op. 75 (1938) in two movements (Variationen, Finale) is an illustration of his principled idiosyncrasy.

The Op. 8 (1925) has lots of internal symmetry between pairs of trichords—pitch-class/set-theory, Allen Forte-style: [0,2,5] [0,3,7] [0,2,5] [0,3,7] for the No. 2, and [0,1,4] [0,1,2] [0,1,4] [0,1,2] for the No. 6. The String Quartet has [0,3,6] [0,1,3] [0,1,6] [0,1,2]—far less symmetry than Eisler’s earlier pieces; almost a rejection, as it were, of the symmetries he had previously found beautiful and meaningful.

Or was it? In the Op. 8 No. 2 row, is the third trichord not a subversion of the series initated by the first trichord? Is it not a private rebellion against the politics of the serial method, rankling from inside the method—a minor third and a whole tone within a perfect-fourth interval [0,2,5]? Aren’t the Variationen of the Streichquartett de facto subversions-by-permutation? Or even the Op. 8 No. 2’s second and fourth trichords—both triads but a whole tone apart, an equal amount of permutation in their reversal of major-third/minor-third intervals?

Rather than revealing a change of heart on Eisler’s part, as David Blake interprets things, it seems to me that these features illustrate a consistent and durable attitude toward free will and the human quest for meaning. Principled dissent! Agitprop!

Blake does explore (p. 109ff) Eisler’s election not to use transpositions or explore some combinations—he says these remain ‘latent’ in the works.

Yes, but their latency or absence is itself conspicuous, like white-space in paintings or sculptures or like un-pursued back-stories in novels. And that, I think, is the source of considerable beauty in Eisler’s writing:

he creates a humanistic architecture that demands freedom;
he devises ironical serialist edifices that demean doctrinaire serialism and other isms; and
he engineers musicocosmological worm-holes that enable us to escape political oppression and live to fight another day.

Eisler insists on an emotional integrity that, as he saw it, serialism threatened. He deviates deliberately from a literal ordering and prefers intuitive permutations of the tone-row. If we perform it or listen to it, we perceive this directly. You don’t need an advanced degree in music theory to figure it out. And we can only imagine that this was Eisler’s deep intention, a pre-compositional and editorial mantra: create inherent radical liberty, where expressive freedom takes precedence over the tyranny of the tone-row.

The obsessiveness of some serialists, versus the iconoclasm of Eisler? Oh, but Eisler did indulge in a sort of meta-obsession. He is not an anarchist. He has his own detailed methods and values. The Streichquartett series is built from motivic ideas and is an ‘organic’ expressive space, in a way that’s reflected in how the piece progresses. But these series are not casual, ‘throw-down’ explorations. They are [obsessively] calculated so as to be precisely suited to [suitable for] the subsequent contrapuntal variations. The architecture for variation is itself the result of variation. Eisler draws and re-draws the architectural plans; surveys the building site; digs the holes for the piers and foundation; and begins constructing his building from the ground up, so to say.

But wait! He has architected the thing with provisions that anticipate the demolition of the building 50 years later, with provisions that facilitate the deconstruction and reclamation of the land, and its re-use for subsequent construction, for subsequent societies.

Wait again! He has architected the thing with provisions anticipating the return to a verdant naturalism. The departure from strict serialism reflected Hanns’s belief that innate and spontaneous motives will eventual prevail; reflected his deep mistrust of any ‘system’. Poetic license is not merely ‘taken’; according to Hanns Eisler, it must be taken, to produce anything of aesthetic value.

Not all Eisler’s music is challenging or ‘in-your-face’ political. In fact, some of his piano parts have an almost Schubertian tenderness. Other of his pieces are ironical or over-the-top comical. Some are combinations of all of these things.

[50-sec clip, Sylvia Anders, D. Justus Noll, Stephen Roane Quartet, There’s Nothing Quite Like Money, ‘Abortion Is Illegal’, 1.9MB MP3]

Sadly, Eisler’s communist leanings have caused his music to be long neglected in the West, although the Vogler Quartett and others have added his works to their repertoire. There is much to be admired in Eisler’s compositions, and I hope more ensembles choose to perform these works. In the current political season in the U.S., Eisler’s music feels like ‘relief’—like a much-needed antidote to the relentless neoconservative, theocratic onslaught that is upon us; like an inspiring call to ‘mindfulness’ in this terrible era of the proudly ignorant ‘low-information’ voter.

E lias Canetti asked me how I got on with my father. When I pointed out that Hanns had been already dead for a dozen years, Canetti answered that he did in fact know this, but nevertheless wanted to learn from me how I got on with my father. ‘Very well,’ I replied. Canetti then assured me that the relationship with my father ‘would be still better in the future’ [than it has been thus far], a remark which seemed to me extremely odd, aggressive, and troubling... During my childhood, I saw my father rarely and at irregular intervals. My parents’ separation and divorce, which from my point of view occurred relatively early, was partly to blame for this, but above all it was due to events of the time. The meetings in Vienna are particularly clear in my memory—visits together to the Café Museum where my father met his friends, members of the Schoenberg circle... Because my mother was a singer and pianist I spent a significant part of my childhood amongst a circle of musicians, whose specialized language was familiar to me from an early age. My father was for a long time perceptible to me primarily through his ‘reflection’, through impressions I have of the people who were his friends... I often reflect on life in a musical family: the frequent chamber music [played by my parents friends, in public concerts and in the household of my childhood] signifies for me the ‘submerged’ world of childhood, the essence of childhood.”
— Georg Eisler, quoted in Blake’s biography of Hanns Eisler, p. 73.

10 Sept 08

Sky News

I'm scheduled to appear live on the main Sky News TV station tonight (7:15pm UK time, 11:15am in Arizona).

Sky News has millions of viewers and can be watched on the Internet:

http://news.sky.com/skynews/

http://news.sky.com/skynews/Sky-Live-TV

Thank you for all of the emails of support since the Arizona Department of Corrections tried to sabotage Jon’s Jail Journal by banning prisoners from writing to me. It is my hope that this publicity will help the plight of my friends inside.

This isn't the first time the Arizona Department of Corrections has blocked prisoners from the Internet. I just found this article online:

Arizona was the first and only state to erect a total blockade between its inmate population and the Internet -- and the first state to get trounced in court for trying to keep prisoners offline. The Arizona Legislature was stirred to act on the issue by the anguish and outrage of the widow of a murder victim, who came across a Web page on a pen pal site in which Beau Greene, her husband's killer, portrayed himself as a kindly lover of cats.

The result was a law enacted in 2000 that threatened to strip privileges and possibly lengthen the prison sentence of any inmate in Arizona who gained access to the Internet by any means, or for that matter, merely "corresponds or attempts to correspond with a communication service provider or remote computing service." It would even be illegal, the law brashly declared, if any other person accessed a prisoner Web service "at the inmate's request."

Prison authorities in Arizona asserted that the law not only protected the rights of victims, it also reduced a security risk and a growing administrative burden.
"Inmates used to have two or three pen pals," a spokesman for the department complained. "Now they can run it up into the hundreds," thanks to the growing number of Web-based pen pal services for prisoners.

The wilier inmates use one of a dozen or more sites such as Prison Pen Pals or Outlaws Online to garner more than mail, officials added. They coax money out of people on false pretenses and lure them into intense but duplicitous personal relationships.
Numerous lonely hearted women initially drawn in by a Web page have flocked from as far away as Belgium and Australia to Florence, Ariz., and its cluster of prisons, officials said. One of them once went so far as to obtain a gun and vehicle that was used in an escape attempt. While inmates can perpetrate scams through the regular mail, it is much easier via the Internet, the department and its lawyers maintained in defense of the law.

Judge Earl Carroll of the U.S. District Court in Phoenix wasn't buying it. In May 2003 he declared the Arizona law unconstitutional. Abusive Web postings that taunt victims, promote crime or attempt to defraud others can be stopped with existing regulations that prohibit inmates from sending or receiving that sort of material through the regular mail, the judge noted.

David Fathi, senior staff counsel for the ACLU National Prison Project, represented the plaintiffs in the lawsuit that toppled the Arizona law -- the Canadian coalition, a pen pal Web service and a Los Angeles-based organization called Stop Prisoner Rape.
"We argued that any legitimate interest that the prison system had in keeping inmates off the Internet was already covered by regulating the prisoners' incoming and outgoing mail," Fathi said. "The state doesn't have a legitimate interest in preventing someone from Canada, Sweden or New York from posting material on their Web site."

Besides stopping the occasional abusive posting, the Arizona law shut off Web writing that served an important public purpose, the ACLU noted, citing Stop Prisoner Rape as a case in point. On its Web site, the group, which advocates for changes in the law to address a little-noticed problem, publishes "survivor stories" written by victims of prison rapes. The group aims to "change public attitudes about sexual assault behind bars and put a human face on the issue instead of allowing it to be trivialized and made into a joke," said Alex Coolman, communications coordinator for the advocacy group.

No other state has followed in Arizona's footsteps and attempted an all-out prohibition on Internet access by inmates. "They have wisely realized that is not constitutionally permissible to prevent free people from putting material on their Web site," Fathi said.

Email comments to writeinside@hotmail.com or post them below

Monday, September 8, 2008

We Are Genetically Wired for Music, But Not Just Six Songs

T he strength of any piece of music is how well it can simultaneously invoke memory schemas but still surprise us with clever twists and turns that foil our expectations.”
— Daniel Levitin, Chatauqua Institution interview, 16-AUG-2007.

I think that is a mistake. There are more ways in which we reflectively meta-surprise ourselves than the number of ways that music directly surprises us. In fact, many of the pieces that are most-loved are ones that intrigue us by causing us to (re-)experience and rehearse emotions that we treasure. Have a look at David Huron’s new book (link below) for detailed empirical data and discussion of surprise and meta-surprise in music. The key is the prosodic stimuli that we experience with the music, and how the particular prosody of a piece satisfies a listener’s hunger or unmet need. Our need—and consequently our interpretation of the music—differs from time to time, from place to place, from culture to culture. What the pieces in Well-Tempered Clavier mean to me evolves with each passing decade of my life, and with each performance. The same is true of how I perceive the song ‘I Love the Mountains’.”
— DSM.

One World or None? The astonishment at Daniel Levitin’s simplistic, reductionistic “Six Songs” meme! So it was that I began reading Levitin’s new book with this chip on my shoulder: ‘How like an ex-rock-producer-turned-academic to reduce everything to neat marketing and packaging!’

S cience should make everything [out to be] as simple as possible but not simpler [than is possible or factual].”
— Albert Einstein.

But the book stayed; it stayed in my hands until I had finished the last page. So I now put up this CMT blog post to enthusiastically recommend that you read it, too.

Daniel Levitin argues in ‘The World in Six Songs’ that all music can be classified into one of six thematic categories:

friendship,
joy,
comfort,
knowledge,
ritual, and
love.

The motives for composing and performing may be more diverse than these categories, but, according to Levitin, all music is socially ‘normative’ (prescriptive, or reinforcing of social norms) and the reception of each piece by individual listeners and by society as a whole is associated with one of these categories.

T he right question, after due consideration of music’s diversity, is whether there is a set of functions music performs in human relations. And how might these different functions have influenced the evolution of human emotion, reason, and spirit across distinct intellectual and cultural histories? What role did the musical brain have in shaping human nature?”
— Daniel Levitin, The World in Six Songs, p. 7.

Q uoting the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, [Stanford professor James Ferguson] persuaded me that the right question to ask, in trying to understand music’s universality, is not what all musics have in common, but how they differ... It is in the particulars—the nuances, the overwhelming variety of ways we express ourselves—that one can come to understand best what it means to be a musical human.”
— Daniel Levitin, The World in Six Songs, p. 7.

Twenty years ago Alexander Ringer (Professor Emeritus, Univ Illinois Urbana-Champaign) examined the question of whether there is one music ‘world’ or many. And Francois Fetis and Alexander Ellis had ‘classified the human races according to their musical systems’ 100 years before that. Levitin’s new book knowingly caters to current social ‘political correctness’ fixations, but, in my view, scholarship is not advanced by uncritical illustration.

I don’t like the idea of this at all. How can you tell the story of the world in six songs? Who does this guy think he is telling me what these six songs should be? [A few hours later: ] Hmmm... this is interesting. I think I could come up with six songs to tell the story of the world.”
— Willie Nelson.

Levitin’s new book is not scholarly ethnomusicology—it is a humanistic tract written for a popular audience. What I mean to say is that, insofar as comparative musicology tends to reveal in musical terms relatively synoptic and superficial features of human evolution, Levitin’s reduction of music to “six songs” should be considered a kind of ‘historiography’ at best and as a kind of "Voyager spacecraft Golden Record" at worst. The record placed on-board Voyager, which was launched in 1977 and departed the solar system into deep space in 2004, contained material selected for NASA by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan of Cornell University.

Golden Record on Voyager spacecraft, 1977

W hy is music so important to us as human beings? What is it about us that seeks music? For many people, music is a way of expressing, sharing, or experiencing emotions that we use as an alternative to language. Music does things that language can’t. As an art form, it allows us to express emotions and ideas over time, as opposed to painting, which does this over space. Why do songs evoke many emotions, that can make us laugh and cry? Because that is the job of music! It is made to do that. Music captures the dynamics of human emotion, their changing nature, the complexity of feeling happy and sad at the same time. When it’s composed well, it can do this better than language, and that’s probably the reason why we, as a species, still have both.”
— Daniel Levitin, interview on Voice of America, 20-AUG-2008.

Prof. Sagan and colleagues assembled 115 images and a variety of natural sounds, such as those made by surf, wind, and thunder, and animal sounds, including the songs of birds and whales. To this were added several dozen musical selections from different cultures and timeperiods, plus spoken greetings in fifty-five languages. The first movement of Bach’s Brandenburg concerto No. 2, the Prelude and Fugue in C No. 1 from WTC Book 2, and the gavotte from Partita No. 3 in E for violin were on the disc. Louis Armstrong’s ‘Melancholy Blues’ and Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and String Quartet No. 13 Op. 130 were on it. Chuck Berry’s ‘Johnny B. Goode’ and the Bulgarian ‘Izlel je Delyo Hajdutin’ were on it. In all, an eclectic 90-min housemix of the past 500 years of music.

The diversity of human feeling and musical expression was not about to be adequately captured on one Golden Record, any more than the tremendous diversity of round musical “pegs” will fit into Levitin’s six square “holes”.

A sign is something which stands for something to somebody. It addresses one or more somebodies. It carries an association with a particular meaning and generally with one or more other signs. It can even create other signs. The sign stands for something: its object. In Peirce’s notion of semiotics, the sign creates in the perceiver’s mind a more developed sign (called an ‘interpretant’). Each of these in turn generates its own chain of interpretants. ‘I Love the Mountains’ (ILTM) generates a litany of its own interpretants. So does Bach’s BWV 862.

In music, pitch, timbre, intensity, or chord progressions may act as signs. Popular music especially trades on these. But all music since time immemorial has also done so. In fact, after reading Levitin’s book (and its mention on p. 108 of how prevalent ‘I-vi-ii-V⁷’ progressions are) I went looking for examples in Baroque music. They’re not difficult to find. Open up Bach’s ‘Well-Tempered Clavier’, for example. Have a look in Book 1 at BWV 862. The chord progression ‘I-vi-ii-V⁷’ is nominally the second most common chord progression in music, ever.

Here we have the little-known duet by J.S. and son C.P.E. Bach, in 1722:

J.S. & C.P.E. Bach, ‘Ich liebe die ganze Welt’, WTC Buch 1, No. 17, BWV 862, Fugue in A-flat

Pieces with I-vi-ii-V⁷ progression:

I Love the Mountains
Blue Moon
Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man
Savin’ All My Love
Try To Remember
Chopin’s Nocturne in E-flat
Bach’s Fugue in A-flat
Millions more…

A hit song is actually somewhat formulaic—the repetitiveness, the rousing section that leads us to that ever-so-hooky thing that we call a chorus—those things seem to happen over and over in hit songs, whether we like to admit it or not. It’s not necessarily a good song from a musical standpoint, one that uses ‘The Chord That Stops The Planet From Rotating On Its Axis’. I think one of the most difficult things to give students a grasp of is an idea of the dire simplicity of most of the music in a song.”
— Jon Aldrich, Berklee College of Music.

[Video was first aired on 15-APR-2008 during the Discovery Channel’s season premiere of “Deadliest Catch” program; went ‘viral’ after that. Arrangment by composer Brian Chapman (Beacon Street Studios, Los Angeles); Creative Director: Glenn Cole; CD/Designer: Bryan Rowles; CD/Copywriter: Jason Norcross; Agency: 72andSunny; Agency Executive Producer: Sam Baerwald; Agency Producer: Angelo Ferrugia; Production Company: Outsider; Director: James Rouse; Director of Photography: Max Goldman; Producer: Jeremy Barrett; Editorial Company: Mad River Post; Editor: Lucas Eskin; Producer (Editorial): Ann Kirk; VFX Artist: Alex Kolansinski; VFX Producer: Helena Lee; Producer (Music): Adrea Lavezzoli]

It never gets old, huh?
Nope.
Kinda makes you wanna... break into song?
Yup.

I love the moun-tains, I love the clear blue skies;
I love big bridg-es, I love when great whites fly--
I love the whole world, and all its sights and sounds.
Boom-Dee-Ah-Dah, Boom-Dee-Ah-Dah, Boom-Dee-Ah-Dah, Boom-Dee-Ah-Dah.

I love the o-cean, I love real dir-ty things;
I love to go fast, I love e-gyp-tian kings--
I love the whole world, and all its cra-zi-ness.
Boom-Dee-Ah-Dah, Boom-Dee-Ah-Dah, Boom-Dee-Ah-Dah, Boom-Dee-Ah-Dah.

I love tor-na-does, I love a-rach-a-nids;
I love hot mag-ma, I love the gi-ant squids--
I love the whole world, it’s such a brill-iant place.
Boom-Dee-Ah-Dah, Boom-Dee-Ah-Dah, Boom-Dee-Aht-Tah, Boom-Dee-Ah-Dah.

[50-sec clip, Brian Chapman et al., DiscoveryChannel ad, ILTWW, 0.8MB MP3]

Notice the circle of 5^ths movement in this series of chords. The ‘Circle of 5ths’ describes chord movement downward by 5^ths (or upward by 4^ths). The strong resolution of the dominant V⁷ chord to the tonic I chord is known, oddly enough, as ‘dominant resolution’.

In chamber musc and other classical music genres, ‘dominant resolution’ is called an ‘authentic cadence’. Every time we change chords:

The root moves down a fifth, or one string.
The seventh always slides down one fret, to become the third of the next chord.
The third of the previous chord stays where it is, but becomes the seventh of the next chord.

[50-sec clip, CrewsNelson, ILTM, 0.9MB MP3]

In the right hand of a guitar, each note moves to the pitchwise-closest note in the next chord. That’s basic ‘voice-leading’, and the ‘I-vi-ii-V⁷’ progression voice-leads well—it is physiologically convenient to sing and play, reliably and with minimal risk of mistakes, and, consequently, is likely to sound good—which is why this pattern has been so prevalent in western music over the centuries. MIDI sequencers can execute horribly complex patterns that might sound good, and MIDI sequencers can execute them with no performance risk. But our ears and minds have evolved over the millennia to prefer singability/playability. We love dire simplicity, as Jon Aldrich calls it.

Somehow ‘major scale’ = ‘happy expressivity’ / ‘minor scale’ = ‘melancholic expressivity’ became a social norm—at least in western music. That led to a bias toward the ‘harmonic minor’ harmonizations. Listen to just about any piece of music in a minor key and you will hear progressions like I-iv-V⁷-I / I-vi-ii-V⁷ / I-vi-IV-V⁷. Success breeds success. But the sound of the harmonic minor scale played in a melodic context was unpopular. So the Dorian and Aeloian came together with the addition of a raised 7^th (leading-tone), and this union begat the melodic minor scale. The raised 6^th and 7^th on the way up sounded ‘right’ in a melodic context and didn’t impair the harmonization.

[50-sec clip, DSM, midi euphonium (Garitan), ILTM, 0.7MB MP3]

[50-sec clip, Orange Sherbet, ILTM, 2.2MB MP3]

[50-sec clip, Cedarmont Kids, ILTM, 2.1MB MP3]

As Frank Zappa put it in ‘The Real Frank Zappa Book’, this progression is the ultimate in formulaic ‘bad caucasian music’. While it may have originally been interesting 500 years ago or more, it has by now been so overused by every composer and songwriter that it’s become a musical cliché. ‘I-vi-ii-V’ progressions—the only way these can be used effectively to create new music is to subvert the cliché. Which you can see that Bach did in BWV 862 if you carefully analyze it, measure by measure.

In the end, Levitin’s new book is highly enjoyable, well worth the read. If you’re looking for penetrating comparative musicological scholarship, this is not your book; but, if you’ve read other of Levitin’s writings, you would never have thought that it would be anything other than what it is: an expansive, highly-readable, inspirational book-length essay. Successful record-producer and marketer that he is, Levitin concludes abruptly with a surprising ‘Love is the fulfillment of the Law’ passage that is patterned along the lines of Romans 13:8-10 or Galatians 5:14. What the!?

I t is the love of our existence that is the highest love of all—the love of humanity with all our flaws; all our destructiveness; all our petty fears, gossip, and rivalries. A love of the goodness that we sometimes show under the most difficult stresses—of the heroism of doing the right thing even when no one can see us doing it; of being honest when there is nothing to gain by it; of loving those whom others might find unlovable. It is all this, and our capacity to write about it—to celebrate it in music—that makes us [sentient creatures with moral standing].”
— Daniel Levitin, The World in Six Songs, p. 289.

I won’t hazard to guess how comparative anthropologists will receive this book. But Levitin’s writing succeeds as brilliant, popularistic music commentary in much the same way as, say, Rob Kapilow or Bruce Adolphe succeeds. It’s fine. It’s fun. And it propels ordinary readers to think about why music works—about why they respond to it as they do.

Just the same, what about ILTM? Isn’t this song simultaneously a member of all six of Levitin’s categories? And why exactly is it that I like Brian Chapman’s Discovery Channel ad so, so much? The reason has nothing do with any of Levitin’s six categories. Boom-de-yada.