Joke: Serialism as Nazi Secret Code
Jeff Harrington
I got this in email. I *think* it's a joke! Don't flame the messenger...
:)
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Composer Webern was Double Agent for Nazis
By Heinrich Kincaid
(c) The Associated Press
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."
James H. Carr
Jeff Harrington wrote:
>
> I got this in email. I *think* it's a joke! Don't flame the messenger...
>
> :)
Hi Jeff-
It's not a flame, but maybe it wasn't a troll, either....
I know it's was supposed to be funny, but don't you think
you could do just a little fact checking to make the spoof more
convincing? ;-)
> Gunned down by an American soldier in occupied Berlin,
> 62 year old Anton
> Webern's death
Mittersill, Austria. Go visit sometime, if you haven't.
> 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.
Nope, a cigar, and on the front steps of his daughter's house.
No curfew. Rather a an Army MP sting operation that went very
wrong. Go read Moldenhauer, Webern was an innocent by-stander.
It's pretty sad.
>
> 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.
Silly physics, but worse history:
Trinity had already been tested and both A-Bombs dropped by
15 September 1945 when Webern was mistakenly shot by that
poor US Army cook, Pfc. Bell. The war was over.
The sad thing is Webern was a tired sick old man
who had lost his son and his home and all he owned in the war.
I wonder what we all lost with his passing.
I guess I'm not laughing, but your fake unattributed piece does
seem to represent the ultimate New Music know-nothing stance fairly
well. Send it to Bernard Holland, he'll believe it and the Times will
probably print it...oh, the possibilities....
BTW, ever see Hitchcock's "The Lady Vanishes?"
-Jim
Jeff Harrington
James H. Carr <jhc...@bluebonnet.stanford.edu> wrote:
: Jeff Harrington wrote:
:>
:> I got this in email. I *think* it's a joke! Don't flame the messenger...
:>
:> :)
: It's not a flame, but maybe it wasn't a troll, either....
: I know it's was supposed to be funny, but don't you think
: you could do just a little fact checking to make the spoof more
: convincing? ;-)
Hey, like I posted a musician friend emailed me this and I just thought it
might be a little funny or maybe interesting to folks. I, like most
people in the Internet biz get tons of these emailed and re-forwarded
jokes and binaries...
For me, I like to see what musicians are saying about music even if it's a
disgustingly rude and stupid joke (maybe even racist?).
: BTW, ever see Hitchcock's "The Lady Vanishes?"
I'm not sure... I saw "Gambit" last night.!
Jeff Harrington [ "Art does not make peace...that is not its business...]
je...@parnasse.com [ Art is peace." --Robert Lowell]
http://www.parnasse.com/jeff.htm --------->>[[ My Music ]]<<--------------]
http://www.parnasse.com/vrml.shtml ------->>[[ My Worlds ]]<<-------------]
Jeffrey Quick
In article <6ja7me$mj9$1...@nntp1.ba.best.com>, Jeff Harrington
<rus...@shell7.ba.best.com> wrote:
> I got this in email. I *think* it's a joke! Don't flame the messenger...
>
> :)
> Composer Webern was Double Agent for Nazis
>
> By Heinrich Kincaid
>
> (c) The Associated Press
I rather wonder what Associated Press would think of having its copyright
mark pirated to lend verisimilitude to such a spoof. Or contrarywise, if
this did originate with AP, how carefully do they check their facts?
Anyway, it doesn't address the more important issue of John Cage passing
atomic bomb information to the Russians. ;-) Or the hidden Quebec
separatist messages in Claude Vivier....
Samuel Vriezen
j...@po.cwru.edu (Jeffrey Quick):
>Anyway, it doesn't address the more important issue of John Cage passing
>atomic bomb information to the Russians. ;-) Or the hidden Quebec
>separatist messages in Claude Vivier....
But the article does explain my being given the Nobel Prize for
Physics which I had often been wondering at... someone must have
decoded my String Quartet...
Samuel