First off I want to start talking about the Richard Wagner era and what was happening in Dresden 1848.
The main thing that was happening was a revolution. When the French Revolution swept through Europe under Napoleon, Napoleon exported the French Revolution to the rest of Europe. All of the laws that were put in place to protect Christians from exploitation were simply overturned and a new era began, and new laws were put in place, and one of the main principles was equality. Equality of all people. Everybody was the same, there were no differences, and the most significant group that this impacted was the Jews. Napoleon insisted on emancipating the Jews because he needed to invade Russia and needed their help in invading Russia and he set in motion forces that he couldn't have foreseen. A hundred years after the French Revolution, the Catholic magazine LA CIVILTA CATTOLICA did a three-part series on the Jewish Question and the summary of it was basically that any Christian country that abandons the laws that were put in place by Christian Kings will be ruled by Jews. Just a startling, stunning statement. The Catholic Church put its weight behind this; this was in the Official Journal of the Vatican, run by the Jesuits, and that summed up 100 years of the experience of revolution in Europe.
Wagner comes in the middle of this. Both Bishop von Ketteler and Friedrich Engles both agreed that the revolution of 1848 was a revolution against capitalism. It was what happened to the people after those laws protecting them were struck down with ruthless economic exploitation, and that's what led to the revolution. The potato famine contributed to it; it wasn't as bad in Europe as it was in Ireland, but it contributed to the to the famine, to the unrest, and Wagner suddenly finds himself up on a steeple directing fire against the Prussian army. His position becomes untenable, he's got to get out, so he basically heads out of town along with the Russian revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin, and goes to Switzerland. He goes into exile. He's wanted by the Prussian government. They put out wanted posters for him, but he escapes to Switzerland, and he goes into exile there.
At this point he starts to think through why did the Revolution fail? Or, is there a way that we can proceed even though it has failed? Is there some type of liberation we can still achieve? The first question Wagner answered by writing the Ring Trilogy. The Ring Trilogy beginning with Das Rheingold, which is about capitalism. It's one of the most brilliant expositions of capitalism that exists. It's like the mythic roots of capitalism. The Rhine maidens at the beginning of the opera (the first opera of the Ring cycle) are swimming - they're guarding the treasure there of Germany which is Das Rheingold, which lies at the bottom of the Rhine. Suddenly Alberich comes - and Alberich everyone knew at that time was a Jew. He was in many ways a representative of the Rothschild family because he what he did was basically privatize the gold just as the Rothschild family had privatized the gold of the Prince of Hesse-Kassel. He steals the gold, makes a ring out of it. The ring is basically the gold standard or capitalism, and this is how he rules the world with an iron rod.
That's Wagner's explanation of what what happened. His explanation of how to get out of it, or what possibilities were still left, turned out to be Tristan und Isolde; and you have here the the kind of weird combination of left-wing politics that protests against economic injustice (which is fine, that's a good idea) but at the same time sees the sexual order or sexual morality as a manifestation of economic exploitation -- that's the exact opposite! The left got that completely wrong, completely wrong! Morality is the only thing that protects weak people against the strong who want to impose their will on them. Morality is the only thing that protects them.
So Wagner is sitting there in Switzerland and comes up with a new vehicle for expressing sexual liberation, and it's basically his use of chromaticism (the chromatic scale, as opposed to the diatonic scale). If you want a really good demonstration of this you should listen to his opera Tannhauser, which is about the conflict going on in Wagner. It has one of those strongest melodies that Wagner came up with. The Pilgrim's Chorus is one of those melodies you hear the first time and you just stop dead in your tracks, and you think: that's great, that's a great piece of music - which is what happened to me when I heard it. You have this conflict, with Wagner hearing the Pilgrim's Chorus, that strong melody which is the pilgrims going into Rome. He's drawn to Christianity, which is the defender of melody, but at the same time he's drawn to the Venusberg, which is his basically his sexual fantasies; unlimited sexual liberation and the unlimited nature of it is expressed by chromaticism.
Chromaticism is basically equal tones with no differentiation, whereas the diatonic scale has gaps in it that give it a kind of drama; so with the diatonic scale you end up back where you started. Wagner perceived - this is part of his weirdness, but Wagner perceived melody as something tyrannical because you sort of end up back where you started. So to give an example of what melody is like: a melody basically is the plot of the music. I'm a rower. I row on the St. Joe River on a regular basis, and sometimes I get caught in storms and then rowing gets really dramatic. Melody is a little bit like starting off from the dock and everything's fine, and then suddenly the storm rolls in and I'm scared! It's thunder, it's lightning. I've got two oars out there that are basically great conductors of electricity. I'm in the middle of open water and if the lightning hits me I'm toast, it's over. So it builds up, you get this tension and suddenly the storm passes and you get back to the dock and you give a big sigh of relief. That's what melody is like. A great example of this would be Beethoven's Sixth Symphony, which is exactly what I just talked about: there's even a thunderstorm in the middle of Beethoven's Sixth Symphony. Melody arouses the emotions. It stimulates the emotions to the point where the emotions look as if they're going to get out of control and then it brings it back to where you started and everything's resolved, and you have this feeling of catharsis - the feeling you've been through something - and you feel better because you survived it, so it's like rowing through a thunderstorm. You're getting back to the dock. Now that's what melody is.
Now why Wagner perceived this as the enemy is anybody's guess I think the main reason is because of his unruly sexual passions and so as an alternative to this, which is one of the basic organizational principles of music, he provides this diatonic scale where you just keep sort of shifting from one mood to another, to another and you never get back to the dock! You just roll off forever, or you sail off forever. You lose sight of the coastline, and it's like stimulation upon stimulation. It's like unending sexual pleasure. That's what Tristan und Isolde is, and that became a hugely intoxicating piece of music that had - I would say - devastating consequences for all of Europe.
Theodor Adorno (née Wiesengrund), member of the Frankfurt School, was a crucial player in this regard, in terms of weaponizing music, but the first real convert was Nietzsche. Nietzsche was a 17 year old and got a hold of the piano score of Tristan und Isolde, played it and was completely swept away by the music. I mean completely swept away to the point - and this I think is true (I mean there's dispute about this) where he consecrated himself to sexual liberation (in a sort of demonic consecration), went out and deliberately infected himself with syphilis. Now this this was substantiated by Nietzsche's friend Peter Gast, who visited Nietzsche at the end of his life in the insane asylum, and Nietzsche told him this - but it became part of the legacy of Wagner through Thomas Mann in particular.
Thomas Mann talked about how his generation was completely swept away by Tristan und Isolde. They used to listen to it every year. It became like a kind of pilgrimage, going and listening to this, and it just had an intoxicating effect on an entire generation. His particular expression of it would be Death of Venice; where the writer, who is neurasthenic and goes to Venice for recuperation, falls in love with this polish teenager and the plague breaks out. "Is sex worth dying for?" It became an existential question during the AIDS crisis in the 1980's, when Michel Foucault answered "yes!" Michel Foucault was a disciple of Nietzsche. He said "yes, it's worth dying for", and lo and behold he died for it; died of AIDS after spending a lot of time in the bath houses in San Francisco. This is a crisis that precipitated in Europe and Nietzsche was the man who did it. So if you go to Death in Venice, there is this Dionysian festival there - it's taken right from Nietzsche. It's one of the most powerful passages in all of German literature as far as I'm concerned and he got it directly from Nietzsche, who basically took Wagner and he became the St. Paul of the Wagnerian gospel, spreading it, weaponizing it, and turning it into some type of philosophical construct.
The Pythagorean understanding of the relationship between their understanding of Logos involved a kind of musical understanding of the universe. This is in, by the way, the Merchant of Venice. Shakespeare had this notion - got this notion from the philosophical tradition that was available to him - and when Lorenzo runs off with Jessica, Jessica is the daughter of Shylock. She's a Jew. She's not a Christian. She is part of a religion that rejects Logos, rejected the Logos Incarnate, and rejects all Logos - and so she needs a little training, a little teaching and Lorenzo takes her outside and he points to the sky and he talks about the Music of the Spheres. He talks about the stars having some type of musical relationship to each other.
Basically what we're saying here is that there is a Logos - there is an order to the universe - and it's our duty as human beings to understand this order and to basically subordinate our lives to the Logos that the Creator put there for us. The Jew, because he is in rebellion against Logos, doesn't understand this, so Shylock is a man that doesn't hear music. He hates music because he hates Logos and he hates the order of the universe and he expressed, as Shakespeare puts an expression in his mouth, by having him reject music. Jessica needs tutoring in Logos, and that's why Lorenzo points to the sky and the order of the universe and calls it a kind of music. That's the Music of the Spheres. The universe is like a symphony. A symphony gives us some sense of the incredible complexity if the experience of Logos we call beauty.
There's existence and there's essence. You can experience the existence but you can't comprehend it; and when it comes to essence you can comprehend it but you can't experience it; but when you experience it and comprehend it at the same time - that's a powerful experience, and we call that beauty. There's beauty in visual art, but there's also beauty in music, and I think the beauty in music comes with that resolution of emotion at the end. Let's take another example for music: Beethoven's fifth symphony is a revolutionary piece of music, and the revolutionary forces always seem as if they're on the verge of getting out of control and finally there's this kind of Promethean struggle and he finally brings it all back to that final chord and everything's resolved at the end and you feel happy - it feels like you've been through the war and you survived. That's beauty. That's the experience of beauty in music and that is precisely what Wagner challenged when he wrote Tristan und Isolde. He challenged that whole notion that there is an order to the melody, to the melodic line that you have to subordinate your ideas to. He broke with that. He said. "I'm going to have sexual liberation", "I'm going to have sex on my terms", "It's going to go on and on forever and I don't care what the consequences are", and he set a precedent that I said was deadly, I think, for Europe.
Music has this ability to go directly into the soul, bypassing the understanding, and arouse emotions. The simplest way of saying this is, what's the difference between a major chord in a minor chord? Well, there's a different emotion attached to them. A major chord is like a sunny day, a minor chord is different; it's brooding, it's not sunny and so on and so forth, so the music has the ability to arouse these emotions. The order comes in when you resolve this aroused emotion in some type of emotionally satisfying, logical way. That's when you come back to where you started. That's where you feel a sense of resolution, where you find that you touch the note again that you started off on and you feel as if you've been through something and you survived it. Aristotle talks about drama in this regard but it applies in many ways more to music than it does to drama. He calls it 'catharsis'. He says there's a sense of pity and fear that you get from watching a great man fall. I think the same feeling is, without content, without words, even more powerfully expressed in music when the emotions are aroused and resolved at the end. That's the order that I am talking about. It shows you that there's an order to the universe. It shows you how your soul corresponds to that order in the universe.
Wagner's choice of the word harmony in this context is both predictable and revolutionary at the same time. Wagner was of course writing as a musician at the time, but his use of the word harmony bespoke more than a simple professional interest. Harmony, even in Wagner's time, was still the concept that transcended the merely musical. Harmony was another word for order. The "Tranquillitas Ordinis" mentioned by Augustine was manifest in creation, in society and in the individual soul, in terms that were synonymous with terms musical. In addition to that, he also draws on the whole history of music in the West as associated with both external and internal order through the concept of harmony. "Each creature," wrote Goeth in a letter dated November 17, 1789, 'is nothing more than a shading of great harmony which one must study in its magnitude and entirety, otherwise each individual is nothing more than a dead letter.' According to both the ancients and their Christian followers, the order of creation was love bound together in units both mathematical and musical. Indeed, love, divine order, music and mathematics are simply four different ways of saying the same thing.
Harmony as a result had come to possess a cosmic meaning; that is, as a manifestation of the Music of the Spheres, a political manifestation as seen in a well-ordered state, and a psychological manifestation as seen in a well-ordered soul. In each instance, the most accurate depiction of that state of order is taken from the realm of music. Similarly, the church fathers were forced to employ musical vocabulary when attempting to talk about love and the world order based on that love; not because they lacked a scientific way of talking about these things, but because the underlying unity they perceived in the universe was essentially musical. St. John Chrysostom and his Praise of Friendship, "explains the cithara as love, the sounds produced by it as the words of friends, the musician who brings about the Harmonia and the Symphonia as power of love."
The Pythagoreans had taken the notion even further, attributing music to the ability to cure disease. Theofrastus, according to Spitzer, "states that Gaudi pains in the hip as well as snake bites are cured by playing the flute." The notion sounds slightly more than slightly absurd to modern ears. However, perhaps not as absurd as it might have twenty years ago. The Surgeon General announced recently that - of the top of ten causes of death - most were behavior-related and therefore avoidable. In an age when AIDS is one of the chief causes of death in New York City, the correspondence between the moral and the medical, the moral disorder in the former leading to physical sickness, does not seem as far-fetched as it might have not very long ago.
That became the big issue during the 19th century because the 19th century was a century of revolution. Revolution had spread throughout Europe. "What are you rebelling against?" That becomes the question. It becomes a cosmic type of rebellion, with Wagner and Tristan und Isolde, because there's a sense in which we we all feel justified in rebelling against an unjust economic order. OK, we can all understand that. We're in a situation right now where we had our - in a sense - rebellion with the election of Donald Trump, a rebellion against the oligarchic control of the of the country. Their revolution was, however, a revolution against the order that God has created. If you do that you're spitting in the wind because what you're doing here is rebelling against Logos and we are creatures of Logos. Logos is the only thing that guarantees our freedom. We are only free to be what we are, and that is to be rational - so if you're liberating a human being from rationality you're enslaving them. It's just that simple. If you're liberating man from the moral order, you're enslaving him to his passions - and that's precisely what Huxley is talking about in Brave New World. He had access to all of the advanced theories of social engineering that were being discussed at Tavistock, and then back in the United States they'd gone to California, probably is an agent of Tavistock to work in in the United States.
At a certain point there were people who became conscious of all these elements and the potential they that they had for political control. In terms of the sexual realm, Wilhelm Reich was a crucial figure; his book the Mass Psychology of Fascism, which came out in 1933, became the bible for the use of sexual liberation as a form of political control. In terms of music, there's a break; it wasn't a direct tradition. There's a direct line of influence from Wagner to Schoenberg. Schoenberg's piece Verklarte Nacht is basically a smeared version of Tristan und Isolde. That's what his brother-in-law called it, and that's what it was - and this was Arnold Schoenberg on board with sexual liberation. Unfortunately Arnold Schoenberg's wife took it a little more seriously than he did and she actually had an affair with a painter in Vienna; and Schoenberg was so wounded by this that he not only repudiated Wagnerian Tristan und Isolde but he basically declared war on the music of the West. He reverted. He had been baptized as a Christian. He was a Lutheran living the life of the Bohemian in Vienna. At this point he repudiated Christianity and declared war on Christianity and his war took the form of atonality, first of all, and then twelve-tone music (which he basically stole from a man by the name of Matthias Hauer).
The problem here is that the music was just impossible to listen to. Everybody hated it. I forget the name of the guy in Paris. He said if we had to listen to one more piece by Schoenberg we all would have committed suicide, so it was with great relief that we welcomed the first Negro jazz band that showed up in Paris in 1919. At that point the the spirit of sexual liberation jumped from the classical tradition to jazz, to modern popular music. There's a direct line of connection between jazz and rock and roll. It was Negro music. The Blues became very popular, through folk music first and then it became kind of Rock and Roll-ified. When Muddy Waters ended up in Chicago, he was playing on a street corner - nobody could hear him so he amplified his instrument, and suddenly had what was proto rock-and-roll. Chuck Berry took it a step further - and if there's anybody who was the father of rock and roll it is Chuck Berry - Eric Clapton and all those English guys all were just amazed at what he did with the guitar; how he could use the guitar to just kind of dominate the whole piece of music, and they all became converts to Chuck Berry's style of playing the guitar, in a combination with Muddy Waters and the blues and so on and so forth.
At that point rock and roll took off it and became a white phenomenon, and also at that point I became part of the social engineering that was going on, largely through the drug culture. Jerry Garcia formed a band called the Grateful Dead. The Grateful Dead became an outlet for selling LSD on the West Coast. When you're dealing with LSD you're dealing with MKULTRA, you're dealing with the CIA. It's mentioned in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. They have the Feelies, there's pornography - which is a form of control, but there's also Soma. These people are all materialists. Basically, what they see as states of mind are really just chemical reactions, so why don't we just go directly to the chemicals? They thought at this point (in the 50's with MKULTRA) that they had some type of mind control drug. It's going to be able to take control of people's minds because it's all about control. That's basically the only thing they're interested in, is forms of control.
It turned out differently than they expected, and to understand those permutations it's good to talk about Timothy Leary. I mean everybody knows he was associated with LSD and with the CIA, but but at the end of his life he said "I never stopped being a member of the CIA." I think he got onto something, it got out of control, and then suddenly the CIA realized the potential they had for taking control of the youth movement. I think LSD failed for how they intended to use it. It was not a control drug. What it created was too unpredictable. It couldn't be used the way they wanted to use it; and so they switched to other drugs.
The tradition of using drugs to control populations goes back to the English (to Huxley's ancestors), in particular, the opium wars in China. England had a balance of payments deficit with the Chinese because they loved tea so much, and they didn't want to use gold to pay for it. So they basically started growing opium in India and then selling it to the Chinese, enslaving the Chinese to addiction. This had a devastating effect on Chinese self-confidence which has lasted to this day. Mao Zedong was in many ways the revenge that China took on the West for addicting it to opium. Opium is much more suited to control than LSD, and that's why it is still in use today. I think the only rational explanation for America's presence in Afghanistan is to secure opium production.
We now have a heroin epidemic in Middle America, and it's in combination with the other opiates, prescription opiates like Oxycontin. The target population seems to be what Hillary Clinton would call the deplorables. The people who voted for Donald Trump are the people now where most Oxycontin prescriptions are being written and where most of the heroin is being consumed, so it's hard not to see this as a form of control - and a much more effective form of control than LSD could ever be. The other thing we need to talk about in this regard would be the selective serotonin receptor inhibitors like Prozac and Zoloft, which would be not so much to exterminate the population (which is pretty much what heroin does) but to control the population. Enormous amounts of those drugs were prescribed to people to keep them working and keep them at their jobs in the system, while at the same time calming them down and making them docile. I think that's the key word here: docile. Not inoperative. Not dysfunctional, but docile.
There's a documentary called Berkeley in the 60's, and at the beginning of this is the Free Speech Movement. In the beginning you have guys who have short hair and sort of button-down shirts, and they're talking about Thomas Aquinas and Thomas Jefferson, and they've got these rational arguments. By the end of the documentary everybody is completely stoned, they're all sexually debauched, and they don't have a clue what happened to them. Clearly what happened here is that there was a genuine protest against the draft, for example - against the Vietnam War - that got co-opted by sex drugs and rock and roll. I don't see any other explanation, and it's so clear I don't understand why they don't see it. Because all they were talking about at the end is: "I ruined my life. I'm now 67 years old, I don't have any children. I don't have anything. Nothing. My life went up in smoke. But I'm free!"
The Magic Flute is a Masonic opera. It's basically about liberation, the liberation that the Enlightenment is going to bring. The Queen of the Night is the Catholic Church - she's the villain. Sarastro is the hero. It's like the hope of the Enlightenment. All we need is the light of Reason (as we define it in our truncated way) as if the church hasn't been promoting reason all these centuries, and everything will be fine. The companion piece to this was the aria in Tristan und Isolde "Nacht der Liebe". So we went from wanting the sunshine of reason, to wanting the night to come down so that nobody will see that I'm screwing my neighbor's wife.
I'm currently at work on a piece on the Cincinnati ballet and the whole city of Cincinnati, and how art was used as a weapon in the culture wars in Cincinnati. The crucial moment came in 1990 with the Mapplethorpe exhibit. Robert Mapplethorpe was a homosexual who produced a number of obscene paintings. The paintings were put on trial and the jury acquitted the museum director because the museum director kept saying they were art. Well, once you put art into the picture all the normal caveats are all suspended. So it turns out that the CIA was involved in modern art as well. They were promoting Jackson Pollock and Abstract Expressionism beginning in the late forties all the way through the 50's as a way of countering Socialist Realism, the Soviet Union's official style of art. Our style? We were free, so we could just drip paintings on canvas. You didn't have to say within the lines, that shows that we were free.
Love, unlike mere sexual gratification, implies the activity of conscious agents. That's the difference between human beings and animals when it comes to sexuality. Animals don't choose to have sex. Salmon reproduce when certain biological chemical reactions go off. They turn around, they start swimming upstream, they mate and then they die. The whole point of human sexual activity is to include the choice of the person, and the ancients understood this. The myth of Amor and Psyche plays a crucial role in explaining this. Amor is a god who just wants to have sex in the dark. Psyche, which means soul, turns on the light and destroys animal sexuality because light brings consciousness to it and so Amor flees. It looks as if that's the end of that relationship. It is the end of a certain type of sexuality. It's the beginning of human sexuality, which is based on choice; of freedom and Logos, in other words understanding who the person is and then choosing that person as the vehicle of your sexuality. So what we saw with Dionysus is a reversion to the primitive; to the old notion of personless sexuality which found its expression musically in Dionysian festivals like Woodstock and then ultimately, I would say, in the bathhouses of San Francisco and New York where we had completely anonymous sex.
Transcribed from Interview
That is a lot to take in, in one reading. I think I would have preferred it in a few parts.
I agree. It's a massive brain dump, which is why I transcribed it. It was difficult to follow listening. Now I can review it at my leisure.
Thank you, very enlightening.