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INFOWAR: RE: Composer Webern was Double Agent for Nazis (fwd) 

Date sent:        Wed, 27 May 1998 18:12:00
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ARS ELECTRONICA FESTIVAL 98
INFOWAR. information.macht.krieg
Linz, Austria, september 07 - 12
http://www.aec.at/infowar
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[Anton Webern died in Austria, not in Berlin.]

Quote from Pynchon, T., Gravity's Rainbow

Gustav is a composer.  For months he has been carrying on a raging debate
with Saeure over who is better, Beethoven or Rossini.  Saeure is for
Rossini.  "I'm not so much for Beethoven qua Beethoven," Gustav  argues,
"but as he represents the German dialectic, the incorporation of more and
more notes into the scale, culminating with dodecaphonic democracy, where
all notes get an equal hearing.  Beethoven was one of the architects of
musical freedom - he submitted to the demands of history, despite his
deafness.  While Rossini was retiring at the age of 36, womanizing and
getting fat, Beethoven was living a life filled with tragedy and grandeur."
"So?" is Saeure's customary answer to that one.  "Which would you rather
do?  The point is," cutting off Gustav's usually indignant scream, "a
person feels good listening to Rossini.  All you feel like listening to
Beethoven is going out and invading Poland.  Ode to Joy indeed. The man
didn't even have a sense of humor.  I tell you," shaking his skinny old
fist, "there is more of the Sublime in the snare-drum part to La Gazza
Ladra than in the whole Ninth Symphony.  With Rossini, the whole point is
that lovers always get together, isolation is overcome, and like it or not
that is the one great centripetal movement of the World. Through the
machineries of greed, pettiness, and the abuse of power, love occurs.  All
the shit is transmuted to gold.  The walls are breached, the balconies are
scaled - listen!" It was a night in early May, and the final bombardment of
Berlin was in progress.  Saeure had to shout his head off.  "The Italian
girl is in Algiers, the Barber's in the crockery, the magpie's stealing
everything in sight! The World is rushing together. . ' ."
This rainy morning, in the quiet, it seems that Gustav's German dialectic
has come to its end.  He has just had the word, all the way from Vienna
along some musicians' grapevine, that Anton Webern is dead. "Shot in May,
by the Americans.  Senseless, accidental if you in accidents - some mess
cook from North Carolina, some late draftee with a .45 he hardly knew how
to use, too late for WW II, but not for Webern.  The excuse for raiding the
house was that Webern's brother was in the black market.  Who isn't?  Do
you know what kind of myth that's going to make in a thousand years?  The
young barbarians coming in to murder the Last European, standing at the far
end of what'd been going on since Bach, an expansion of music's
polymorphous perversity till all notes were truly equal at last... Where
was there to go after Webern? It was the moment of maximum freedom. It all
had to come down. Another Goetterdaemmerung-"

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