"The music, in a sense, plays us."

The orchestra of the Janowska Camp in Lvov, Poland in 1943

"During the worst periods of despotism and tyranny, people could learn musical scores by heart. Even where music was forbidden, they could still commit it to memory. Music is very difficult to censor. Yes, it can by stopped. It can be suppressed. Musicians can be hunted and hounded and tortured. But still, it is there. And, always, its strange mystery remains. [  ] to remember the last concerts of that very ambiguous genius, Furtwängler. The lights went out regularly. And we have recordings where you hear the gunfire of the Russian artillery approaching Berlin. In Furtwängler's Beethoven and one Haydn recording at that time played in the dark, the people in the audience knowing they were doomed, knowing they are doomed - and to a horrible fate. And there are no greater recordings or readings of that music known to me than those. There is something in the music which is much stronger even than our greatest performers. The music, in a sense, plays us. We are played by it."

- George Steiner on the Mystery of Music

From ARSC: Sound Recording Reviews (pdf):

"Walter Gieseking was acutely aware of every sound his fingers and pedaling produced; he was a perfectionist of the highest order. The New Grove Dictionary accuses him of setting standards that have proved impossible to surpass in his definitive Debussy and Ravel series. His Beethoven concertos were just as notable. In this performance Arthur Rother expertly guides the Berlin Radio Orchestra. The dignified tone set by the first powerful E-Flat chord remains throughout the rest of the concerto. The epithet “Emperor" is well deserved. 

Tom Nulls liner notes point out that Napoleon’s conquest of Austria culminated while Beethoven composed this piece. As the artillery neared Beethoven covered his damaged ears with pillows while he took refuge in his brother’s cellar. Once the city had fallen though he stormed and ranted at Napoleon, and finished this concerto. 

How ironic and appropriate that booming anti-aircraft guns in the waning days of World War ll are perceptible in the background of this performance. Near the end of the first movemetns cadenza a faint “ta-toom... ka-thoom... brrrooom” faintly, yet distinctly sounds at a great distance, like some ghost timpani. Gieseking’s piano playing rolls right along, gently erasing all remembrance of the storms and stresses of war."

From blechmusik:

"In the cadenza and some quiet passages you can hear the artillery from outside the RRG-building (2´30"+, 5´40"+). For me this is just unbelievable, a historical document and an impressive testimonial against war.

Historic Stereo-Recording from 1944 with Walter Gieseking as soloist and Arthur Rother and the Großes Berliner Rundfunkorchester. 2009 we can celebrate the 65th anniversary of stereophonic tape recordings. So I thought it might be interesting to upload a few recordings that Mr. Helmut Krüger made at the RRG in Berlin in the early 40´s with the AEG-Telefunken K7 stereo tape recoder (Krüger was nicknamed by his radio colleagues Krüger-Krüger, in witty reference to his habit to record everything in stereo).

After the soviets brought the complete RGG-archive to Moscow in 1945 unfortunately from the hundreds of Stereo recordings only a handful found their way back to Berlin. And in a very bad condition.

The over 60 years old tape was transfered directly to digital equipment without any processing."

From Public Address: Nightingales/Bombs/Beethoven:

"Beethoven’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No 5 had been recorded by RRG in Berlin, as part of the on-going stereo experiments at the very end of 1944. Featuring the great German pianist Walter Gieseking, and the Großes Berliner Rundfunkorchester under Arthur Rother, the stereo taping had also unintentionally caught the sounds of the anti-aircraft batteries outside the RRG building during an allied air-raid. In the quiet passages of the Allegro movement, (2´30"+, 5´40"+ in the clip), the thumps of the anti-aircraft fire are clearly discernible. 

The combination of Beethoven and artillery in a stereo recording from the heart of the German Reich in the last days of the war is another profound historic and audio experience. Under fire, Gieseking and the Großes Berliner Rundfunkorchester prove themselves every bit as good as the well-regarded Berlin Philharmonic. The sound-engineering is crisp, even through the medium of Youtube. The bang of anti-aircraft batteries is an unrhythmic atmosphere. The counterpointing of human impulses, destruction and creation, is almost unique [sic]."

From Behold Media:

"Recording of Nightingale birdsong from a garden in Surrey, England on May 19th 1942 as 197 Wellington and Lancaster bombers fly overhead on a bombing raid to Germany."

Death is the Future: Quae caret ora cruore nostro?

War porn. Footage of training exercises with the paradoxically named Minigun. The predictable Carmina Burana [ thanks elberry ] and heavy metal. And similar to porn, the repeated loops of the "money shots". Extensions of time, slow motion ecstasy, the desire to approach zero, the still point. And the fury of axiomatic intangibility that lurks in the heart of all calculus. What cannot be possessed must be destroyed. With rage. With vengeance. One imagines Achilles in his helicopter, in his Wrath, in his Rage.

Then Hector said, as the life ebbed out of him, "I pray you by your life and knees, and by your parents, let not dogs devour me at the ships of the Achaeans, but accept the rich treasure of gold and bronze which my father and mother will offer you, and send my body home, that the Trojans and their wives may give me my dues of fire when I am dead."

Achilles glared at him and answered, "Dog, talk not to me neither of knees nor parents; would that I could be as sure of being able to cut your flesh into pieces and eat it raw, for the ill have done me, as I am that nothing shall save you from the dogs- it shall not be, though they bring ten or twenty-fold ransom and weigh it out for me on the spot, with promise of yet more hereafter. Though Priam son of Dardanus should bid them offer me your weight in gold, even so your mother shall never lay you out and make lament over the son she bore, but dogs and vultures shall eat you utterly up."

Hector with his dying breath then said, "I know you what you are, and was sure that I should not move you, for your heart is hard as iron; look to it that I bring not heaven's anger upon you on the day when Paris and Phoebus Apollo, valiant though you be, shall slay you at the Scaean gates."

When he had thus said the shrouds of death enfolded him, whereon his soul went out of him and flew down to the house of Hades, lamenting its sad fate that it should en' youth and strength no longer. But Achilles said, speaking to the dead body, "Die; for my part I will accept my fate whensoever Jove and the other gods see fit to send it."

- Iliad, Book XXII, Butler trans.


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‘Anger’ is the first word of Western literature. ‘Sing, goddess, the wrath of Achilles’ is the opening prayer of Homer’s Iliad, but in the original Greek, the word mhˆnin, ‘wrath’ or ‘anger’, comes first, in the place of emphasis. The anger of Achilles is the central theme of our civilisation’s first and most powerful epic.

- Excuses for Madness, M.F. Burnyeat


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War is conducted by the blind justice of necessity - nemesis. Master becomes slave and slave becomes master; it is only a question of time, a time deprived of the future. "For those whose spirits have bent under the yoke of war, the relation between death and future is different than for other men. For other men death appears as a limit set to the future; for them, however, death is the future (...) Regularly, every morning, the soul castrates itself of aspiration, for thought cannot journey through time without meeting death on the way." (A...) Thus, thought is immobilized in the present. War turns people into living corpses (still living, living in the "still"). The unbearable, never-ending, and always-beginning pain presents them with the only possible vision of deliverance. It appears:

...in an extreme and tragic aspect, the aspect of destruction. Any other solution, more moderate, more reasonable in character, would expose the mind to suffering so naked, so violent that it could not be borne, even as memory. Terror, grief, exhaustion, slaughter, annihilation of comrades - is it credible that these things should not continually tear at the soul, if the intoxication of the force had not intervened to drown them? The idea that an unlimited effort should bring it only a limited profit or no profit at all is terribly painful (...) If the existence of the enemy has made a soul destroy in itself the nature put there, then the only remedy the soul can imagine is the destruction of the enemy. At the same time the death of dearly loved comrades arouses a spirit of somber emulation, a rivalry in death. (A...)

The passion of injured time is the desire for extermination and suicide. Here, moderation is foolishness. A realm beyond force does not exist.

- Simone Weil – Love and Language by Piotr Graczyk [ pdf ]

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Roof of the Rex, ground zero, men who looked like they'd been suckled by wolves, they could die right there and their jaws would work for another half-hour. This is where they asked you, 'Are you a Dove or a Hawk?' and 'Would you rather fight them here or in Pasadena?' Maybe we could beat them in Pasadena, I'd think, but I wouldn't say it, especially not here where they knew that I knew that they really weren't fighting anybody anywhere anyway, it made them pretty touchy. That night I listened while a colonel explained the war in terms of protein. We were a nation of high-protein, meat-eating hunters, while the other guy just ate rice and a few grungy fish heads. We were going to club him to death with our meat; what could you say except, 'Colonel, you're insane'? It was like turning up in the middle of some black looneytune where the Duck had all the lines. I only jumped in once, spontaneous as shock, during Tet when I heard a doctor bragging that he'd refused to allow wounded Vietnamese into his ward. 'But Jesus Christ,' I said, 'didn't you take the Hippocratic Oath?' but he was ready for me. 'Yeah,' he said, 'I took it in America.' Doomsday celebs, technomaniac projectionists; chemicals, gases, lasers, sonic-electric ballbreakers that were still on the boards; and for back-up, deep in all their hearts, there were always the Nukes, they loved to remind you that we had some, 'right here in-country.' Once I met a colonel who had a plan to shorten the war by dropping piranha into the paddies of the North. He was talking fish but his dreamy eyes were full of mega-death.

Michael Herr, Dispatches [ via ]


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It is well that war is so terrible;
else we would grow too fond of it.

--Robert E. Lee, U.S. general.
Said to another general during the battle of Fredericksburg (1862).

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I've seen horrors... horrors that you've seen. But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that... but you have no right to judge me. It's impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror. Horror has a face... and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies. I remember when I was with Special Forces. Seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate the children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for Polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn't see. We went back there and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember... I... I... I cried. I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn't know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it. I never want to forget. And then I realized... like I was shot... like I was shot with a diamond... a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought: My God... the genius of that. The genius. The will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we. Because they could stand that these were not monsters. These were men... trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love... but they had the strength... the strength... to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral... and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling... without passion... without judgment... without judgment. Because it's judgment that defeats us.

- Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, Apocalypse Now

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