Somewhere I read someone describing Bach’s music as spiritual medicine. I guess it depends what ails you, but I couldn’t agree more that his music is sometimes balm for the soul, and often, in the fugues and preludes of the Wohltemperiertes Kalvier, torture for the brain and fingers. On net, it rules!
Today’s oratorio is probably one of his most often played compositions, sending a message of hope with both text and music.
Since we need all the hope we can gather, this will serve us well over the holidays.
Wishing you peace and joy and enough rest to enter the next many months fortified so you can engage in what needs to be done to keep the darkness at bay.
Otherwise we’ll listen to Henryk Gorécki’s third symphony for an unspecified number of years….
Merry Christmas!
Photographs are European church doors admired across years of travel.
Tonight we light the second candle on the Chanukiah, the traditional candle holder for the festival of Hanukkah. Last night I was wondering what became of the children I photographed a full decade ago (with parental permission) during this time of year. They were participants at a Peace Camp organized by Grace Memorial Church, attended by Christian, Jewish and Muslim children. A Muslim friend of mine taught the little ones about the customary hijab and how to wear it. Sort of. It was such a fun exercise, with a piles of old headscarves flying though the hall.
It was about getting to know each other and finding commonalities among the differences, with the hope of raising a generation that can reach out to each other. Are they in college now? Do they feel compelled to take sides, are they able to build bridges and acknowledge human suffering on all sides? Will they bring a smidgen of peace to a world that has declared war on so many fronts? A world where children like these are killed by the thousands, accepted as collateral damage?
My hope is that they were immersed in families that strove for peace all year, given that they sent their children to these kind of encounters, providing their kids with a moral compass where true North is humanity.
Of course the story of Hanukkah is also one of war, an armed rebellion that purportedly generated a miracle for those who clung to their hopes. It is also a story that was told from very different perspectives with different conclusions. Here is a contemplation by Raphael Magarick, who teaches at the University of Illinois, Chicago.
“In part inspired by the polemics that surround Hannukah, this year, for the first time since childhood, I reread the two books of Maccabees. I realized, although few people who pontificate about Hannukah mention it, that our earliest records of this holiday are precisely, inescapably doubled: two texts, written by different authors around the same time, about sixty years after Judah Macabbeus lived, which have opposite perspectives on almost everything that matters to them.
One was originally written in Hebrew; one in Greek. One is pro-Hasmonean propaganda; one seems unexcited by, or even hostile to, the dynasty. One is composed of sober, matter-of-fact political and military history; the other is stuffed full of flashy, divine miracles. One views Seleucid Greece as the natural enemy of the Judeans; the other takes great pains to suggest the problem is just one, deviant ruler. One permits, and perhaps even requires, wars of self-defense to be fought on Shabbat; the other apparently implies the opposite. One makes a point of mocking people who observe God’s law and get killed for it; the other intensely valorizes martyrdom. One shows no interest in the afterlife; the other thinks you cannot understand the morality of our world without it. And so on.
The point, as I take it, is: we know of no version of Hannukah which was not infinitely contentious among the Jews who were celebrating it. There is no pure, original holiday to get back to. “One” holiday was not transformed into “something else” (say, a military holiday into a religious miracle), because the holiday always contained within it multitudes of contradictions. Difference and contest go all the way down. Whatever one thinks of a present-day desire for a singular Jewish community in ideological lockstep, it is not a desire that has anything to do with our earliest records of Hannukah.
Hannukah is truly, as the great Haredi thinker Rav Yitzchak Hutner wrote, the holiday that celebrates dispute and disagreement. Wishing everyone a happily disputatious Hannukah.”
—–
I fear we have gone far beyond disputation and reached an unbridgeable chasm in our views of what necessitates wars or constitutes justified self defense. Here is music by a 20th century Jewish composer focused on peace, Ernst Bloch – Nigun. And here is a contemporary album Nigunim by Pawel Szamburski. This music shines a light equal to the candles in the darkness.
“The time is out of joint; O cursed spite!/That ever I was born to set it right!” [I.V.211-2])” Shakespeare’s Hamlet after being visited by a ghost.
In the small rural village where I grew up, Martinmas was a big occasion. Celebrating the altruism of a religious figure, a knight who shared his bread and cut his velvet cape in half to help a freezing beggar, the catholic regions across Europe put up a big parade every mid-November. Dressed in our warmest clothes, we were allowed to line the streets to cheer on a fake St. Martin riding on a horse in the evening, a subsequent bonfire at the village’s edge with dramatic reenactment and dispersement of yeast dough baked into little bread men with dried currants for eyes and a clay pipe in their mouths. Have no idea why, but it is a detail stuck in memory.
It was exciting as well as eerie. Quite a few small kids were scared to death, between darkness and fire reflected in his silver helmet and a huge horse getting restless, neighing and bucking. It was also a time when the geese were butchered and prepared for a feast.
I was reminded of those occasions when listening to a song Geträumt hab ich vom Martinszug (I dreamt of the St. Martin’s Parade,) music by Katie Rich and Christian Schoppik, a pair of contemporary surrealist folklore musicians in Germany. Lately they have teamed up with another artist, Johannes Scholar, who is more known for his electroacoustic, ambient music, that combines electronic aesthetic and nostalgia for a lost future.
The trio performs as Freundliche Kreisel (Affable Spinning Tops, album in the link), mixing experimental and acoustic sounds with lyrics that could come from German Romanticism, fairy tales, mythology and plain folk song. Lots of ghosts, sinister scenarios and temporal disjunctions, on another compilation album, Specter Land, as well.
Obviously more accessible to German language speakers, but the feeling of the disquieting undertones, directly and indirectly hinted at in the words, are certainly conveyed when you listen to the music only. The female vocalist (intentionally?) sings like a child, projecting a halting naiveté and vulnerability, before she switches to urgent warnings. Wouldn’t exactly call it riveting music, but with repeat listening its unease gets under your skin, settling like an ear worm – the German word for a melody colonizing your brain – or like the talking ferret alluded to in the lyrics, that lives in the walls and becomes a haunting menace, perhaps a specter. Of interest.
In his 1993 book Specters of Marx, Jaques Derrida coined the term Hauntology in reference to Marx’ and Engels’ claim that “a specter is haunting Europe – the specter of communism.” Derrida’s concept embraced the idea of a return or persistence of elements from the social or cultural past, like a ghost, suggesting that Marxism haunted the Western world from beyond the grave. Hauntology has been applied to music as well, our culture’s affinity for a retro aesthetic and an emphasis on cultural memory found particularly in folk music.
For the musicians of Freundliche Kreisel it manifests, among others, in reverence to Friedrich Hölderlin (1770 – 1843) and Friedrich Alfred Schmid Noerr (1877 – 1969). Hölderlin was one of our finest lyrical poets who subsumed the form of classical Greek verse into the German language and tried to embrace a “spiritual renewal,” integrating Christian faith with the pantheon of Greek gods and all that implied. (He lived and died stricken with mental illness, no causality suggested, just a tragic figure.) Schmid Noerr also elevated the cultural contents of different systems, in particular Christianity’s effects on the Teutonic world. A philosopher and writer, he wove tales that bound historical figures to legend, the past forcibly infusing the present.
Despite his fervor for all things occult, mythical and Germanic, something he shared with the Nazi leadership of his time, he was active in the resistance and published, as late as 1939 and 1940 some radically anti-Nazi pamphlets and a draft of a new German constitution.
Which finally brings me to the specter I meant to write about from the get-go today, with your eyes presumably already glazing over: the return of social and cultural elements of the fascist past, a set of philosophical beliefs and linguistic usage that is reemerging into contemporary American and European discourse. A haunting presence.
Consider the historical situation in early 20th century Germany (I am summarizing a more detailed description from here, Eric Kurlander’s excellent book Hitler’s Monsters): modernity challenged traditional religious practices, with science and secularism progressing at a steady pace. The discarded spiritual worldview created a vacuum that was filled by new esoteric (and often science-hating) belief systems. Nazi leadership grafted onto these ideas of the supernatural, the occult, esoteric sciences and pagan religions. It allowed them to attract followers whose disenchantment in the wake of the industrialization of their world gave powerful incentive to cling to irrational ideas.
The content of these supernatural allusions were often racially tinged. Slavs were vampires, Jews were vermin, both trying to undermine the purity of German blood.
“The supernatural imaginary, which mixed science and occultism, history and mythology, also allowed Nazis to pick and choose the characteristics they would like to ascribe them to their enemy, comparing them to vampires, zombies, devils, and demons.”
Green light for dehumanization of those conveniently selected as out-groups that helped foster in-group cohesion among the electorate.
The rise of non-White races impelled people to adhere to a system of racial hierarchies, that assigned supremacy to White men and the history of Aryan or Nordic nations. Conspiracy theories to make sense of an increasingly complex world sprouted everywhere and were used by Nazi rhetoric for their emotional appeal.
“Firstly, the supernatural imaginary influenced Nazi geopolitical views, which manipulated archeology, folklore, and mythology for foreign policy purposes. Himmler and Rosenberg developed these arguments, based largely on folklore, mythology, and border science that for thousand of years the Nordic people were the dominant civilization in Europe and they had a right to reclaim that. Bad archeology, selective use of biology and anthropology, and mythology fueled a lot of ideas about the Eastern Europe and why Germans had a right, like the medieval Teutonic knights, to (re)conquer the East.” (Bolded by me.)
The steadfastly held belief that one group of people was elected to rule over others, biologically, historically and racially superior, helped set the ultimate catastrophe of fascism in motion. And that was before the advent of social media…here is a piece that lays out the implications of algorithms in shaping our understanding of realty.
I am including trees here because German oaks, birches, beeches and willows, as well as forests in general play such a major role in our mythology and fairy tales.
I don’t have to spell out, I presume, how this applies to our current situation. Am I seeing ghosts, drawing the devil on the wall? (The German idiom expresses that someone is being overly pessimistic or only focused on a worst-case scenario.)
You tell me. I certainly don’t seem to be the only one.
Photographs today of typical rural sights in Germany, from Lower Saxony, Saxony Anhalt, Schleswig Holstein and Hesse, with crumbling half-timbered houses offering refuge to all kinds of specters, ghosts and Poltergeists.
Less reading, more listening today. That is, if you’re inclined to follow me down the rabbit hole that opened up when I searched for sounds relevant to today’s images of the Pacific ocean at Malibu Beach, CA.
I came upon the field recordings of Sam Dunscombe, who mixes his music with environmental sounds collected across the world. If you click on the link, an album appears that has one track of forest noises and one of oceanic sounds.
The second one (O) is the one you want to listen to while perusing the photographs, oceanic sounds that calm (unless you cannot stop thinking about what a Tsunami or rising sea levels would do to the beach houses, or about the yellow line on the horizon that is light reflected in thick bands of pollution. (I know, can’t I just simply enjoy a sweet day at the beach? You know me.)
In any case, I read up on Dunscombe and encountered the musical concept of Just Intonation a phrase that sounded lovely. No worries, not trying to explain it, it’s too hard for my tired brain (here is an introduction, if you are curious.) Suffice it to say there is a community of researchers, composers and musicians who explore this specific way of notating music by giving pitches as fractions and focusing on pure, natural harmonics, and he is actively part of such a group in Berlin.
While trying to wrap my mind around it, I learned that this tuning system was used in medieval music that used melodies only, but proved impractical for polyphonic music that we’ve enjoyed for the last many centuries. Yet composers are aware of it, and that, in turn, led to a pointer that mentioned Benjamin Britten, who had written a piece that in its prologue and epilogue uses the horn’s natural harmonics. I had never heard this Serenade, and was bowled over while listening.
The Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, Op. 31 is not just musically riveting in its marriage of tenor and horn, but the lyrics of the song cycle are also timely: six poems, ranging from an anonymous 15th-century writer to poets from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, describe aspects of the night: from serene setting to the horrors emanating from the dark. Written in 1943 during World War II, with bombs raining down, the darkness of night took on a different weight, and the sinister feelings are conveyed to perfection. Once again I am struck by how words depict, while music expresses, making the layers that are indescribable felt nonetheless.
This music transcends into our own time of war, even for all of us who sit in the safety of our homes, and it should help to raise levels of empathy. Night invoking sleep, the final sleep brought by war to its victims, their souls in flight, in contrast to those who profit from it in so many ways in broad daylight, unimpeded.
Here is one of the poems Britten used. (I picked William Blake, since I had just reviewed his work in these pages a couple of weeks ago.)
Elegy
O Rose, thou art sick; The invisible worm That flies in the night, In the howling storm,
Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy; And his dark, secret love Does thy life destroy.
It’s dusk. My sons are tall. And one of them became a father this week, starting a new cycle of life. I feel like my heart is encapsulated in light, radiating awe and joy in view of natality, the miracle of birth and new beginnings.
I can’t help but think of how I have been influenced by Hannah Arendt’s writings in What is Freedom on the centrality of beginnings to human beings. In reference to Augustine’s City of God she conveys it is not just the beginning of that new life, but also the ability for each life to initiate something new.
“Man is free because he is a beginning. . . . ‘Initium ut esset, creatus est homo, ante quem nemo fuit.’ [So that beginnings would be, humans were created, before whom there was no one] In the birth of each man this initial beginning is reaffirmed, because in each instance something new comes into an already existing world. . . . Because he is a beginning, man can begin; to be human and to be free are one and the same. God created man in order to introduce into the world the faculty of beginning: freedom.“
In The Human Condition” she writes: “when we speak of birth, we speak not of the beginning of something, but of somebody, who is a beginner himself.” She later describes the possibility of action in this context, and the impact on community derived from plurality. But that has to wait for another day. Right now I can only marvel at birth itself and the existence of someone who has not been in this world but five days earlier. Let’s give that new human being some time to grow before she decides if she wants to participate in the lineage of activism.
I was listening to Arun Ghosh’s new album Seclused in Light when the news of the arrival of this child reached me. (Composed during lockdown, he invented the word as a mix between recluse and secluded.) So much in this music that I wish to be true for her life to come: a clear, melodious voice (his brilliant clarinet), often playful and surprising, sometimes insisting, never shrill. A steady, measured rhythm, never frenetic. An integration of traditions, both across continents and across time, making for a truly international fusion. A mix of spirituality, humor and joy, with an explicit embrace of nature and communal action, and an occasional stoic trait. And, importantly, all written in major keys, sad minor keys making but split second appearances. (Full album – hopefully – here. Two favorite tunes below.)
A life full of light.
A life filled with beauty, variability and resilience like the hellebores that bloom in my granddaughter’s month of birth (snow, cold, rain and all!)
Need a break from the tumult of this month, this year, from politics, war, pandemics? Never mind the nail biting over the run-off election in Georgia, as I write this?
I have just the thing – something to listen to that offers gorgeous, thoughtful music, surprising with the ease and elegance with which it fluctuates between traditional and experimental sound. The Water is the Shovel of the Shore provides at times a calming mix of folk tunes and natural sound and then it shifts to provocative ways to make you think about the historical implications of our relationship to water, the way it nourishes, punishes, bringing life as well as death.
OK, maybe not a break from politics, war and disease, after all, but time spent that fills you with beauty and, ultimately, hope for liberation from our burdens. The album is at its most effective if you reserve time to listen consciously, not just in the background. Even better with headphones, so many artistic subtleties otherwise hard to notice.
And in the department of “How could this be?”: it is again music that usually does not draw me in, namely one based in folk songs and rooted in British, Scottish, Irish and in this instance Guyanese tradition, beautifully sung both in chorus and solos. (The other was Simmerdim, reviewed here earlier.) The answer to that question is easy: the music goes way beyond tradition and explores and integrates progressive approaches to communicating with sound. It is thematically digging deep into our relationship with water, and artistically varied enough to satisfy my everlasting hunger for intellectual stimulation that does not come at the expense of emotional connection. The album serves both. Come to think of it, it feeds bits of my soul as well, given that it reminds me of formative times spent in England while still young and links to my collage work since 2019 which focussed on ships and water in climate change and pandemic contexts. (All images today are from the various series, using my photographs of ships, landscapes and paintings to be combined into photomontages, printed on German etching paper.)
The nine-person folk ensemble Shovel Dance Collective has made a splash on the scene after only a few years of existence, as evidenced in the glowing music reviews found everywhere. Much to be learned for us uninitiated, from the fact that folk tunes have no fixed composers and thus are open to reinterpretation across centuries, to the fact that love and loss seemed to be always anchored as a dyad in traditional folk songs.
I didn’t need the insights from the reviews, though, to be reminded that labor in all of its nuances and burdens was a traditional topic in folk music. Related to water you have the sea shanties, of course, easing the strenuous work load on merchant marine and war ships (thus extracting more labor, in the end), but the music also reminds of the dangers of industrial work, in harbors, oil rigs, and the likes.
And water’s gruesome role in the perishing of human beings exemplifies what this album manages to pull off: showing that exploitation, violent oppression, denial of rights to anyone outside the ruling class are not relegated to history, as captured in traditional song. An estimated 2 million slaves perished during the Atlantic passage. (I will never get over the fact that cargo insurance did not cover ill slaves or those killed by disease while covering drowned slaves – leading to throwing sick ones alive into the ocean for profit even from their death (Ref.) Maybe a small number of all killed overall, but showing the extent of the profit motive in the barbarism of slavery. )
Not just the past. Of today’s refugees crossing the Mediterranean, 25.313 have died since 2014 and, closer to home, over 800 have perished this year alone by drowning in the Rio Grande or the opposite – lack of water leading to heat death in their approach to the US border.) There is an unbroken chain of themes that these musicians bring to the fore in contemporary fashion, enduring content in marvelously adapted form.
The link between history and our present times is amplified by the various sound scapes recorded from rivers, harbor activity and other sources that firmly anchor the music by Alex Mckenzie, Daniel S. Evans, Fidelma Hanrahan, Jacken Elswyth, Joshua Barfoot, Mataio Austin Dean, Nick Granata, Oliver Hamilton and Tom Hardwick-Allan.
Integrating real life sound into music, or creating compositions made up entirely of that kind of sound, has been around for almost 80 years now, with the French broadcast technician Pierre Schaeffer recognized as the father of this musique concrète movement. Here is one of his extraordinary compositions using but train sounds,étude aux chemins de fer. Water was a preferred sound then already – here is one of my favorites, Hugh Le Caine’s Dripsody (for tape) from 1955. Most of us were likely more familiar with the inclusion of extraneous sounds in the realm of more commercial pop music. Remember the traffic noises appearing in the 1966 Loving Spoonful’s Summer in the City? Or the extraneous sounds so dominant in many albums by Frank Zappa, We’re Only In It For The Money, Lumpy Gravy to Uncle Meat included, way before he hooked up with Pierre Boulez, the French composer who is seen as one of Pierre Schaeffer’s successors? (For the fun of it, and I know I’m getting sidelined here, but since I am a fan: Here is Zappa’s Cough Drop commercial using musique concrète. )
Back to he Shovel Dance Collective. The immutable sounds of nature juxtaposed with the arrival of modern aural landscapes, from junkyard work next to Dartford Creek, or rigging and reeds at Erith Marina, to tourists feeding gulls, ferry noises east from London Bridge, and clergy of Southwark Cathedral and St Magnus the Martyr blessing the Thames capture continuity and change, with music as a mode that embraces both, water the vehicle to ferry that idea across, having us gently float on the stream of evolution.
As my regular readers know, I have become interested in acoustic ecology recently, given what I learned about Sonic Mapping, Sonic Spectres, Sound Analogies and Sound Variations. This album adds beauty to it all. For me, an awesome find.
There are days when the universe throws a gift into your lap, or has it flutter into your inbox, as the case may be.
Last week I had one of those days. A new acquaintance sent me a link to his website of photographs taken in the 1960s, capturing everything from agricultural workers, navy wives, political figures, to some of the great musical artists of the times. Maybe I reacted so strongly because it was a stroll down memory lane, but I think my appreciation was equally if not more driven by the quality of the portraiture across the board – mastery of candid shots.
Here is the link to the Steve Rees’ site Music and Mayhem, so you can see for yourself. I recommend you look at all of the subcategories in the header bar, much to explore.
I figured I’ll pick some of Rees’ musicians’ portraits and match them with songs that comment on the events of last week, which turned out to be a pretty momentous ones both here and in Ukraine.
Let’s start with the prediction business, prognoses, manipulations and wishful thinking around the Midterm Elections in the U.S. November 8th turned out to be a surprise, defying many voices and many agendas. What better fit than Jefferson Airplane‘s White Rabbit. Remember? “Logic and proportion have fallen softly dead…. “
Signe Anderson (left), Jorma Kaukonen (center) and Paul Kantner (right) at the Monterey Jazz Festival, 1966
One pill makes you larger And one pill makes you small, And the ones that mother gives you Don’t do anything at all. Go ask Alice When she’s ten feet tall.
And if you go chasing rabbits And you know you’re going to fall, Tell ’em a hookah smoking caterpillar Has given you the call. Call Alice When she was just small.
When the men on the chessboard Get up and tell you where to go And you’ve just had some kind of mushroom And your mind is moving low. Go ask Alice I think she’ll know.
When logic and proportion Have fallen softly dead, And the White Knight is talking backwards And the Red Queen’s “off with her head!” Remember what the dormouse said: “Feed your head. Feed your head. Feed your head”
Of course all these predictions were accompanied by endless requests for donations – I stopped counting how many folks asked for money in the run up to the election. Time to answer with the Grateful Dead in Build to Last
Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Ron McKernan, Jerry Garcia at the Human Be-In 1967
There are times when you get hit upon Try hard but you can’t give Other times you’d gladly part With what you need to live
Don’t waste your breath to save your face When you have done your best And even more is asked of you Fate will decide the rest
In the end, November 8th produced some serious tears – of rage, I guess, and narcissistic insult. Cry Baby, by Janis Joplin comes to mind, although, if up to me, they can all stay out in the cold…
Janis Joplin at Monterey Pops (With Big Brother and the Holding Company.)
Then there was the takeover at Twitter, reminding us of Big Mama Thornton‘sDown Home Shakedown. Of course it will end in tears, his hopefully – as hound dogs deserve it.
Big Mama Thornton at Monterey Jazz Festival 1966
And here is Eric Burdon, with the classic “Got to get out of this place.” It was the song played throughout the Vietnam years for soldiers yearning to make it out alive. I am sure the cannon fodder in the current war feels no different. May the retreat from Kherson be the beginning of the end of the invasion.
Eric Burdon at Monterey Pops.
I’ll leave you with an album that was one of the earliest ones I bought Eric Burdon’s War. (Frank Zappa’s Burnt Weeny Sandwiches was the first ever.) I’ll be humming right along.
I am besotted, yes, besotted with a recently released music album, Simmerdim – Curlew sounds. Simmerdim is the name for the twilight of endless summer evenings in the Shetlands – and (Eurasian) curlews are wading birds that live and shout their plaintive, distinctive cries in those regions, a species at the brink of extinction.
Photograph from RPBS
Why am I so enchanted? Let me count the ways.
For one, it is the strangest mix of music and bird sounds, a compilation of various international artists linked to diverse musical styles. I knew of none of them other than David Rothenberg whose experimental jazz is on my regular listening list. All the others are traditional folk musicians (who I usually never listen to), Indian tabla, electronic music or styles I can’t define. In other words, the music stretches my brain.
More importantly, it stretches my heart. The music is joyful, funny, sweet at times, funky at others, and tells stories. And, of course, there is an entire separate CD of multiple recordings of curlew sounds in locations across Great Britain, including Orkney as well as five locations where the RSPB is prioritizing work to save breeding pairs – Geltsdale and Hadrian’s Wall in England, Conwy Valley in Wales, Insh Marshes in Scotland and Loch Erne Lowlands and Antrim Plateau, both in Northern Ireland.
Most importantly, the entire effort of putting this album together was in pursuit of helping a bird species close to the brink of extinction, the Eurasian Curlew. Of the eight known species of curlews, two are presumed extinct already, and of the remaining six, three – the Eurasian, the Bristle-thighed and the Far Eastern – are at risk of extinction. All the proceeds from the album (you can buy it anywhere if you don’t want to listen to it for free on Spotify or YouTube, for $13 or so) go to the preservation efforts of the Royal Protection Society of Birds. There are people actively engaged in doing something about environmental threats, and not just waving their hands in the air…
I have seen curlews a few times in my life, in Scotland, in Virginia, and at the Malheur preserve in Eastern Oregon. Never once photographed, though. Most distinct about them is their long, curved beak (15 cm!) – it gives the genus its name, Numenius, “of the new moon,” alluding to the crescent shape. They also have a neat trick for their eggs – they are pointy, and arranged in the ground nests like a 4 leaf clover, point inwards, round side outwards, allowing for thighs fitting, so the mother bird can cover them all when she sits on them.
They have made appearances in literature and poetry, addressed by writers like W.B. Yeats, Dylan Thomas and Ted Hughes (details here.) Their distinct calls gave the curlew its common names in most languages (Ref.): Dutch wulp, Italian chiurlo, French courlis, and so on to the English curlew, which is reflected in a number of its dialectal folknames too: cawdy mawdy, courlie, whaup, wailer, whistler, whitterick. Leave it to us Germans to name it according to location instead: Brachvogel – literally translated as bird of the wastelands….
One song on the album introduced me to a myth, perhaps not written by someone famous, but preserved in folklore across the British Isles.
Thoughts around that myth are the ultimate reason why I got so sucked into this music, I believe. Here is the story: An abbot named St. Beuno helped establish Christianity across Wales in the 7th century. (He also replaced severed heads, but that’s a story for another day.) According to legend he was sailing off the coast of Wales and dropped his prayer book, with all of his annotations and thoughts connecting him to what he valued most, into the water. A curlew flew up, dove after the book and rescued it, bringing it safely to shore to dry out.
The Saint was so grateful that he blessed the curlew and said they should always be protected – going against the tide of popular belief that declared the curlew as a harbinger of doom. Their night cries were thought to portend bad luck, death, and in one instance, connection to the end of the world. Legend had it that if you see 6 curlews fly together and a seventh finally joined them, the world is done. These myths of the seven whistlers, by the way, lasted well into the 19th century, with lurid details varying by county, some including the assumptions that these birds harbored the souls of wandering Jews….
So this “malevolent” avian is doing a good deed, after all, and is recognized by the local bigwig, the Bishop, the Saint. Doom and dread, goodness and healing all wrapped in one. What does that imply? For me, in this moment where dread rules (see diagram on the right,) considering the direction this world in general and this country in particular is moving, it reminds me to recognize the other, more positive possibilities as well. It’s not about saving the world, or saving a bird, or by mysterious coincidence saving a Christian prayer book or equivalent religious paraphernalia – the legend is just a powerful reminder that there are options to revise one’s thinking, or refocus on aspects that are currently out of focus. Choose your perspective. Only way not to loose it, if you ask me.
The poem below was written this year in obvious response to what’s lurking. Volodymyr Dibrovar is a scholar at Harvard’s Ukrainian Research interview, historian Timothy Snyder was the translator. Dibrovar is a writer, translator and literary critic, a laureate of the Mykola Lukash Award in Translation for his translation of Samuel Beckett’s “Watt” (1991) and the Ukrainian BBC Book of the Year Award for his novel “The Andriivskyi Descent” (2007.)
I am posting it not to feed the increasing depression I see rising in myself and many around me, but because I think it speaks to something larger than the horrors of war alone. The sulphur fumes of a desire to annihilate born out of contempt and clinging to power are spreading everywhere, nationally and internationally. I write this after the Hungarian and before the French election this weekend, and cannot but wonder why fascism is even allowed at the doorstep, much less across it.
My photomontages today were work commissioned byThe North Coast Chorale in Astoria for a 2016 concert performance of Karl Jenkins’ The Armed Man – a mass for peace (which in turn was dedicated to the victims of the Kosovo conflict.) The music uses the structure of a catholic mass, but is filled with diverse, surprising and moving texts from all kinds of sources.
As it unfolds it brings the listener closer and closer to the devastation wrought by war, the emotional emptiness and trauma that comes with loss and being a victim as much as with being part of the perpetrating forces. It ends with appeals to hope, with a belief that we can and must pursue peace and that memory of the suffering must be kept alive to avoid repetition of warfare.
Look!
The barrier between us and the netherworld. We don’t usually see it. Why should we pay attention? Our cares are heavy enough already.
But something has happened.
Do you see?
The membrane is broken, a miasma of lies and hatred flows out. It drains will and reason from the weak. Even the strong are in shock.
It seems to defy the laws of physics
It is what it is, look out.
Toxic, not to be touched, not yet named. And that’s our problem.
What is unnamed escapes unpunished.
Where’s our word for spasmodic contempt and blinding annihilation?
For a lie so thick it absorbs every truth?
Search. To name is to know.
That is the only rule.
Of our only game.
Volodymyr Dibrova, (2022) Translated by Timothy Snyder.
***
Дивися!
Ось той невидимий кордон, який захищає нас від потойбічного світу. Тому ж ми його і не бачимо. Нащо він нам? Ми й без нього ледве даємо собі раду.
Але щось сталося.
Бачиш?
Загата розірвана, і з рани цебенить суміш ненависті та брехні. В слабаків вона відбирає розум і волю. Сильних вкидає у шок.
За законами фізики такого не може бути.
Але так є.
Обережно!
Це – дуже токсична субстанція. Її не можна торкатися. Тому вона й досі не має назви. І в цьому проблема.
Усе, що не названо, вислизає й лишається непокараним.
Де ж нам знайти влучне слово для корчів ненависті та бажання нищити все на своєму шляху?
Або для брехні, настільки щільної, що її не можна розчинити ніякою правдою?
“Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark. Nobody knows what is going to happen to him from one moment to the next, or how one will bear it. This is irreducible. And it’s true of everybody. Now, it is true that the nature of society is to create, among its citizens, an illusion of safety; but it is also absolutely true that the safety is always necessarily an illusion. Artists are here to disturb the peace.” – James Baldwin “An interview with James Baldwin” (1961), in Conversations with James Baldwin.
It seemed counterintuitive, no, odd, really, that my first reaction to a piece of gorgeous, intense, riveting music were thoughts about visibility. After all, what we perceive is more likely associated with visual media, film in particular, and yet here I was surrounded by sound, listening to the orchestra dress rehearsal of The Central Park Five, Portland Opera‘s upcoming production.
Left to right: Donovan Singletary as Antron McCray, Bernard Holcomb as Kevin Richardson,Victor Ryan Robertson as Raymond Santana, Aubrey Allicock as Yusef Salaam, Nathan Granner as Kharey/Korey Wise.
Maybe it’s not so odd after all, when you consider that truly good art makes things visible that are otherwise hidden beneath the mere consideration of images or words. Maybe it is the emotional reaction that music in particular can stir up that connects you to what lies invisible under the surface of narratives. This might be particularly true for stories that you intellectually witnessed in your own time, and thus think you have a grasp on, until art opens up a different dimension previously foreclosed, disturbing the peace. That said, the video projections, the lighting and two opera stages on top of each other, echoing separate worlds and power hierarchies, visually helped intensify the emotions.
On top stage: Hannah Ludwig as the Assistant District Attorney, Johnathan McCullough as The Masque (he plays numerous white characters across the opera.)On Bottom stage, left to right: Aubrey Allicock as Yusef Salaam, Nathan Granner as Kharey/Korey Wise, Bernard Holcomb as Kevin Richardson, Donovan Singletary as Antron McCray.
The Pulitzer Prize winning opera composed by Anthony Davis (Libretto by Richard Wesley, conducted by Kazem Abdullah,stage directed by Nataki Garrett) recounts the horrifying 1989 tale of innocent youths (aged 14-16) accused and convicted of beating and raping a woman in New York’s Central Park, after they falsely confessed but then recanted, with no physical evidence connecting them to the crime. The story focusses on the many aspects that led to this outcome, with lasting damage done to the defendants despite the eventual vacating of the verdict, when DNA evidence and the confession by the true perpetrator exonerated them. The case made salient the racial inequities in our criminal justice system. The $40 million settlement with the state of New York did not buy back the time lost and sorrow inflicted on kids (and their families and communities) as young as 14 years of age, spending years incarcerated (the one 16 year-old 13 years in adult prison!) for a crime they did not commit.
For me, the music captured the tension inherent in an adversarial system built into the criminal courts, the racism both structural and individually applied that so often erupts in cases of violence against white women. It also echoed the preconceived assumptions about crime-prone black youth, and the career ramifications for police and DAs as well as aspiring politicians like a former president who involved himself in fashioning public opinion in what turned out to be a stepping stone to an election campaign.
Christian Sanders as Donald Trump
The music conveyed the fear, the paralysis, the disbelief of the victims of procedural malfeasance. For me, it made the legal and social injustice of this case visible at a gut level, allowing us for a short while to walk in the defendants’ shoes.
Others at OregonArtsWatch, who know much more about music than I do, will write about the Portland Opera production in coming weeks. What I want to do today instead, is to make visible, from my perspective as a former lawyer and psychologist, how this is not an isolated case, however brilliantly captured by Davis and the musicians who moved me so. Let’s look at both the myths surrounding false confessions and the general processes that can create them in ways they affect criminal trials every single day.
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I believe that many of us share deep concerns about our legal system. The U.S. has 5% of the world’s population, but 20% of the world’s prisoners, a huge number especially when we consider the horrific circumstances that define incarceration (Ref.). In addition, black Americans are incarcerated 5 times the rate of white Americans (Ref.). Blacks constitute roughly 14% of the U.S. population, while in some states they constitute over half of the prison populations. You have to worry about what these numbers mean.
Moreover, there is no question that the legal system routinely makes horrible mistakes, including getting the basic facts wrong, as the Innocence Project has proven with the high numbers of DNA exonerations they have brought about. Specifically, scholars talk about myths, that pervade and erode the legal system. One example includes the so-called sexual assault myth – the idea that the prevalent form of sexual assault involves a stranger leaping out of the darkness. The reality is instead that sexual assaults are vastly more likely from someone you know. Given that the American legal system counts on the common sense of jury members to reach a sensible verdict, we have a problem if some common sense beliefs are mistaken and rely on myths: it can have tragic consequences in the legal system and elsewhere.
Left to right:Elliott Paige as Antron’s Father, Babatunde Akinboboye as Raymond’s Father, Ibidunni Ojikutuas Antron’s Mother, Jazmine Olwalia as Sharonne Salaam.
A different set of myths concerns confession evidence, starting with the widely held belief that false confessions are quite rare. And here the common sense appeal is powerful. After all, why would someone confess to a crime, and invite punishment, for something they didn’t do? As a related myth people assume a false confession would only be produced by someone who is mentally ill or attention-seeking, or someone who has been physically coerced (yelled at, threatened, beaten) by the police. (Ref.)
All texts are photographs of the supertext panels that displayed the words that were sung. Surtitles were written and produced by Ethan Cope Richter.
There is no doubt though that these myths are myths. For example a national database of exoneration cases shows us that 13% of the cases involve confessions we now know to be false (another take by the Innocence Project that relies on DNA evidence only, claims the rate may be as high as 1 in 4.) The numbers get worse, much worse, if we zoom in for a closer look. In the same database, among exonerated juveniles, 36% involved confessions we now know were false, and if you look at the youngest juveniles in this data set (12-15 years old) 57% confessed to a crime they did not commit. These were, of course, the ages of 4 of the Central Park Five. Kids this age are less mature, more impulsive than older ones, they are more gullible, and they don’t always think about long-term consequences.
***
How is it possible that there are so many false confessions? Let’s look at the interrogation process. Police have become remarkably skilled in what scientists call “psychological coercion” (note not physical coercion). This process involves many specific levers, often used in a back and forth combination, but there are three overarching themes. First, no matter how many times the suspect denies the crime, these denials are refused, ignored, or rejected, or even sneered at. The message to the suspect therefore is that not confessing is not an option. To drive this point home, this process can stretch out over two or four or ten hours, leaving the exhausted suspect too tired to resist, and eager to do anything to escape the interrogation room. To up the pressure, police do most of the talking, set the agenda for topics of conversation, decide when breaks are happening and in classic settings – small room, no windows, no clock, no distractions, uncomfortable chair – they keep at it to maximize confrontation.
The second broad theme involves multiple efforts toward minimizing the cost of confessing in the eyes of the suspect. This includes offering the suspect a variety of excuses, “You were drunk, you were under stress, you just ran with the crowd, they asked for it!” and with these excuses the suspect might think s/he is confessing to something that is understandable and not so blameworthy. Often this minimizing is established via presenting a contrast: “We know you are not a terrible person; you’re just a guy who made a mistake.” The police also puff up whatever evidence they have (including utterly false claim about the evidence which they are allowed to make since they are legally allowed to lie in interrogations). The message to the suspect here is that they are likely to be convicted with or without a confession, so that confession costs them nothing.
The third major goal involves a package of strategies that suggest benefits from confessing. Police are not allowed to promise leniency, but they are wonderfully skillful at hinting at leniency along the lines of “How do you think the prosecutor is going to react when she sees that you stonewalled us? And how do you think she would react if you were open and took ownership of what you had done?” Interrogators also suggest psychological benefit from a confession once they have determined the defendant’s allegiances: they lean on religion, if they think you’re religious. They stress the aspects of healing of closure for the assault victim if they think you have some loyalty to the victim. They point at the responsibility towards the community if they believe you have strong links there.
Do these levers work every time? Surely not, but they work often enough that false confessions do happen and that is profoundly troubling because a confession of almost any sort virtually guarantees a conviction.
Johnathan McCullough as The Masque, Hannah Ludwig as the Assistant District Attorney
***
Why do police engage in these tactics? For one, and the data are clear on that, because they do result in factually true confessions a large percentage of the time. But many interrogators also deny the possibility that false ones are happening at all or are happening with regularity, or they are willing to tolerate this error. Secondly, police are explicitly trained to do interrogations in this way with many training programs across the country based on what is called the Reid Technique which instructs in the above-listed application of tools: coercion, situational control, minimizing the cost and maximizing the potential benefits of confessions in their communications to suspects. Even if officers have not had formal training, they learn about these tools from colleagues who had and so continue in this vein.
Police understand that their interrogation techniques are confrontational, often a determined push to confirm their suspicions by alternating carrots and sticks, and even coercive. Police believe, though, that we are all protected by two safeguards. As it turns out, both of the safeguards turn out to be hollow. One safeguard relies on the idea that police can figure out before the interrogation who is guilty and who is not, and therefore they aggressively push for confessions only with presumed guilty suspects. There is, unfortunately, overwhelming evidence, that most police officers when trying to decide who is lying to them and who is not, perform at a level only marginally better than a coin toss. This guarantees that they will use coercive techniques with people that they have wrongly decided are liars.
The other supposed safeguard comes after the interrogation, when police seek further evidence that will corroborate, or perhaps undermine, the confession. Here we run into a problem called confirmation bias, with the essential notion being that, once you have a confession, it biases what other evidence you look for and how you interpret what you encounter. The result? A false confession can invite the collection of further evidence that seems to support it, so that bad evidence leads to more bad evidence.
Babatunde Akinboboye as Matias Reyes, left, Nathan Granner as Kharey/Korey Wise, right.
What can be done about this, especially given how these issues interweave with strong patterns of racial bias? That bias manifests itself in some officers’ willingness to assume a black suspect is likely guilty and proceed accordingly in the interrogation. That bias is also evident in the power dynamic of an interrogation, with a police officer relying on social distribution of power to bully a black youth. There is also a tendency for interrogators (as well as teachers and school administrators) to bear in mind that a white kid is a kid, while failing to make the same crucial adjustments when interacting with a young person of color. Black girls are seen as more adult than white girls at almost all stages of development. Black boys are constantly judged to be older than they are (adultification) and, importantly, the older they seem, the more we consider them culpable. (Ref.) Finally, given the economic inequities in our country, a white suspect is far more likely to have decently paid legal representation compared to the resources available to POC.
Where does this leave us? Here, the importance of art. Narratives and documentaries can inform. Art can move, often in a lasting way. Will it move police officers to change their practices? Perhaps not. Will it shift legislatives votes? Likely not. But we’re at a place in which ordinary citizens can have extraordinary power. In a criminal trial, jury verdicts must be unanimous. (Ironically, this has been true in 48 states for years; it is only recently true in Oregon and Louisiana). On a jury, a single citizen empowered by this production, remembering his or her reaction to the music and the story it conveyed, introduced to reality rather than clinging to myth, can hold firm and may be the stalwart obstacle to decisions resting on false beliefs and leading to catastrophically wrong verdicts. Portland Opera’s choice of a timely and important piece of contemporary music, beautifully staged and performed, might have long lasting consequences and not just providing us with a riveting night at the opera. Art empowering justice
I started with a James Baldwin quote, so let me also end with one:
“Well, if one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goesto the unprotected—those, precisely, who need the law’s protection most!—and listens to their testimony. Ask any Mexican, any Puerto Rican, any black man, any poor person—ask the wretched how they fare in the halls of justice, and then you will know, not whether or not the country is just, but whether or not it has any love for justice, or any concept of it. It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.” – James Baldwin – No Name in the Street.
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Portland Opera presents:
The Central Park Five
Composed by Anthony Davis Libretto by Richard Wesley
