[Prev][Next][Index][Thread]
No Subject
Date sent: Tue, 26 May 1998 12:36:26
From: { brad brace } <bbrace@wco.com>
To: infowar@aec.at
Subject: INFOWAR: Composer Webern was Double Agent for Nazis (fwd)
Sender: owner-infowar-en@aec.at
Precedence: bulk
Reply-To: infowar@aec.at
---------------------------------------------------------
ARS ELECTRONICA FESTIVAL 98
INFOWAR. information.macht.krieg
Linz, Austria, september 07 - 12
http://www.aec.at/infowar
---------------------------------------------------------
>Composer Webern was Double Agent for Nazis
>
>By Heinrich Kincaid
>
>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" overlayed 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."
>
The_12hr-ISBN-JPEG_Project <<<
> serial ftp://ftp.wco.com/users/bbrace <
> eccentric ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/bb/bbrace <
> continuous ftp://ftp.teleport.com/users/bbrace <
> hypermodern ftp://ftp.rdrop.com/pub/users/bbrace <
> imagery online ftp://ftp.pacifier.com/pub/users/bbrace <
Usenet-news: alt.binaries.pictures.12hr/ a.b.p.fine-art.misc
Mailing-list: listserv@netcom.com / subscribe 12hr-isbn-jpeg
Reverse Solidus: http://www.teleport.com/~bbrace/bbrace.html
{ brad brace } <<<< bbrace@netcom.com >>>> ~finger for pgp
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
You are subscribed to the English language version of INFOWAR
To (un)subscribe the English language version send mail to
infowar-en-request@aec.at (message text 'subscribe'/'unsubscribe')
To (un)subscribe the German language version of send mail to
infowar-dt-request@aec.at (message text 'subscribe'/'unsubscribe')
Send contributions to infowar@aec.at
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFOWAR] [subscribe]