Saturday, October 10, 2009

Summer reading II: Noise

Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.

The end of the 19th century and its fin de siѐcle foreboding set the stage for all of the scandalous performances and “rioting audiences” with which the history of 20th century music unfolds. I had heard before in my own music history studies of the performances of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and Debussy’s Prélude à l’aprѐs-midi d’un faune as each roused a tonally lazy and satisfied bourgeoisie out of its collective conformity. Ross builds the story slowly and concentrates on the artistic and personal biographies of the major composers, inserting where necessary the descriptions and music theory to make the story comprehensible.

The main theme of the book is one of the rise of diverse conceptions of tonality, including atonality and its several versions, as part of serious music in a legacy of “art for art’s sake” that he implies has served the cause of serious music poorly over the century (I prefer the term “serious” to “classical” since I reserve the latter term for Mozart and Haydn and their contemporaries). To other versions of tonality that were explored, one would add those derived from Far Eastern and indigenous cultural traditions, and these emerged as western musicians discovered other musical systems.

I enjoyed reading about Berg, Schoenberg, and the arrival of so many later on in California and Los Angeles. The rise of minimalism and Philip Glass, one of my favorites, could have been more thoroughly explored. Finally, the end of the book ,with its rather superficial coverage of those “serious -music- or jazz-influenced “ musicians in the pop, rock, and folk categories, made me wish that at the outset he had covered only the fate of serious music rather strictly. However, he was right to include the evolution of jazz improvisation into its cool phase, and the ordered noise of John Cage. The impassioned narrative of how each successive set of composers try to take the musical trends to the next level, and the readable character of the book, both served, I’m sure, to win it the National Book Critics Circle Award for 2007.

What does twentieth century music say to us about that century and its violent upheavals, wars, and ideological shifts? It would be easy to speak of fragmentation and globalization; those are heard in the rise of percussion and the Babel of new instruments and tonalities as well as new amplification. But so much hatred is covered by the false sweet sounds; now in the twenty-first century we can hear sweet hymns of Christian fundamentalism and detect nothing of the insecurity and racial fears of a new right wing. Perhaps I am just an aging 1960’s person as I long for music that is not just angry and eager to shock; we need the music of peace at a deeper level. This may be where Philip Glass and his zen minimalism as well as the themes of Kundun and Satyagraha come in.

Postscript: A real benefit to the book is its web site audio files, and while some are very short (owing to permissions and the length of the book), for students it would be essential to listen to the excerpts; music survey courses of course include CDs and databases which provide more extensive coverage, but –this is, after all, free.

Summer reading I: Weimar

Weitz, Eric D. Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007.

Having thoroughly enjoyed my undergraduate encounter with a course entitled “Central Europe Since 1815, “ I entertained the possibility of moving on to this professor’s other excellent course, “The Culture of Europe between the Two World Wars. “ I read a good deal of the literature from the period out of interest and upon the recommendations of students who did take the course. This kind of cultural history, exploring all aspects of a period (however brief, in this case) in politics, arts, and technological innovation invites a real participation in its spirit and sometimes real concern that certain attitudes and dangerous tendencies may be surfacing in one’s own contemporary situation. Reading Weitz’s very readable and compelling history of what has long been regarded as a pivotal moment, one that could have been a golden moment in German history after a devastating war, does rekindle in one’s mind all the debates about the Allies’ treatment of Germany and of course, whether Nazism and the rise of Hitler could have been avoided.

Weitz covers the political situation in detail, and this was useful to me because this was my area of least knowledge; I know more about literary developments and about the art history of the period. He also emphasizes architecture and again, speaking selfishly, this helped me fill in some gaps about early modernism, one of my strong interests.

The subtitle “promise and tragedy” certainly employs the right key words to bring up the relevant ethos of the time. Glimmers of our current financial dilemma and our silence as an American people in the face of a war that went forward in violation of international law flash across the scene and make me feel uncomfortable. While the equation of Jews with internationalism etc. is born of an anti-Semitism that we left behind, one hopes, with Richard Nixon (who appropriated internationalism to himself, nonetheless, with better than expected results) , other aspects of nationalism, “nativism” and such ghosts of the Twenties of the Twentieth Century have ghostly cousins at present in the form of Sarah Palin’s McCarthyism of lies and distortions regarding modest attempts to reform and humanize our health care market. There is anger, and it is dangerous.

Where is the serious art to hold its image up to our collective face that we might see it for what it is? (see review of The Rest Is Noise for more reflection on this question).

Summer reading; back to August post, the follow-up

As I begin my fall list of "outside" reading (that is, not related to anything I'm writing at the moment)I realize that I need to enter my selection of top books I read this summer. These were my favorites or the more unusual offerings which made me think about issues or literary theory in a new way. So here come several posts under this heading!

Friday, October 02, 2009

The Free and the Brave under a director's lens

Last night at Georgetown Law the the library sponsored the first in a series of screenings of films under the series heading "Law at the Movies." The series has been organized by my colleague Kumar Jayasuriya and sponsored by the Friends of the Law Library. Last night's inaugural film was introduced by two of the faculty who have joined an informal group interested in providing law students with some encounters between law and the film medium. Our first offering was John Ford's Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962).

I recalled almost nothing of the film after seeing it on television at some point in my much earlier life. Television negates any real experience of many films, but even more so back in the days when cropped versions were built around commercial advertising. So this was a treat for me, and I reflect upon it in connection with my continuing media studies (and a new project I'll announce soon via this blog).

Naomi Mezey of our faculty pointed out many features of the largest, zoomed out facets of the film: the juxtaposition of "talk and force" as well as the feminizing of the Jimmy Stewart character, the young lawyer Ransom Stoddard during his rocky start in the dusty town of Shinbone, rendered more/less "wide open" as a territory settlement by having a comic non-entity for a federal marshal. The John Wayne character, Tom Doniphon, was the kind of ambivalent hero that she described well: we watch as he and Ransom compete, in the minds of the audience, for first and second chair in this orchestration of philosophical tunes. Randy Barnett agreed generally with her remarks, which included some mention of how the coming of law, government, and civilization to this partly Hobbesian world had "costs" that are alluded to in the name of the horrific outlaw Liberty Valance and in the world of the ranchers, of which Tom is one (though he is interestingly neutral on issues that they represent in the film).

I agree partly with these remarks and offer just a few observations of my own. A student in the audience before the show stated that the film was shown in a European philosophy class, and indeed John Ford has inspired many European filmmakers artistically and in the themes of some of his many historic and great films. True, there is much here to spark further discussion of Plato and Hobbes, to name only two.

But for me a film is often foremost about the time in which it was made, in this case, 1962. Tom Doniphon represents in so many ways the plain integrity of the American myth of the West, the anti-intellectual American who still controls most of our culture, but who has a point about knowing when to back up words with action. And a handgun, of course. But who knew, in the continuing struggle of a post-war world living in an almost continuous post-colonial state of perceived emergency, that the path to be steered carefully between tribalism and the rule of law leads to suburbia? (Yes, Tom's life and plans are centered on that first house, no mortgage!) That must have been most comforting to audiences in 1962; but three cheers for Ford when the sole black resident of the town (albeit a servant) is encouraged to step up to the lunch counter- in this case, the saloon bar.

So while the town is busy becoming consumers, and the ranchers are busy becoming producers who resent regulation (don't fence me in), the deeper issue of the bully/victim is explored in the encounter between Ransom and Liberty Valance. Long before our recent school shootings, it may have become clear to some that every victim is a bully and every bully, a victim- well, perhaps. Psychopaths are an exception, as in this case. The sheer brutality of Valance and the disturbing mix of distant outrage but near tolerance of his torture techniques on the part of the townfolk, even if we consider it a tolerance engendered by fear, is done wonderfully by Ford and at time when the myth of the West was always one of sanitized violence. The silver-tipped whip hints at what most of Hollywood then would not show: that terrorism was a very real part of living in and settling the American West, even leaving aside native peoples. (The Mexicans in the film are left to be picturesque and benign, not yet a threat).

Fear of the Other and also the need to build a state solution to random, private violence indeed has a trade-off in the film as Ransom learns that government is also a tool of the tribes. He also learns that he was paradoxically both brave and a coward. So was Tom: mostly selfless in his love for Hallie, he still got his best, safest shot while Valance was distracted by Ransom in his momentary role as decoy.
Let's face it: none of us is perfectly brave or perfectly free. We are only as free as the least free person in our community, local or global.

As a final footnote it is interesting to look at the names of the characters and the principals of the film. Director John Martin Feeney (John Ford) and actor John Wayne (Marion Morrison) left the traces of Irish tribe in their birth names aside for the commodification of Hollywood, though Ford may have recanted somewhat later on. And that odd Doniphon, which sounds like Donovan: even the massive Wikipedia reveals only one other of note: Alexander William Doniphan, a soldier in the Mexican-American war who was lawyer and author of a legal code (the Kearny code) that was to have been used in an annexed Mexico and New Mexico, a kind of hybrid code, "an amalgam of Mexican, Texan and Coahuilan statutes" [with some Livingston Code of Louisiana, Missouri law mixed in](Roger D. Launius, Alexander William Doniphon, Portrait of a Missouri Moderate, 1997)at 115. But I digress- fulfilling here the codex theme of the blog as well as asking, in the end, whether we can leave the little house and garden of our minds and embrace the Other, at least by the study of comparative law? (Okay, like Ransom, I am forever the nerd).

So here is a paradoxically joyful "ouch" as we embrace John Ford's violent, beautiful film, a real "cactus rose."