Categories like order should be scrutinized under the microscope so as to destroy the illusion of their unity. It is illuminating that after the collapse of the tonal schemata, which fell apart because they were unable to create the form which was their raison d'etre, music should stand in need of organizing powers so as not to lapse into chaos. But the fear of chaos is excessive, in music as in social psychology. It results in the same short-circuiting as is found in the schools of neo-Classicism and twelve-note technique, which in this respect are not all that far apart from each other. Order simply has be imposed on freedom, the latter must be reined in--so the argument goes-whereas the situation is rather that freedom should organize itself in such a way that it need bow to no alien yardstick which mutilates everything that strives to shape itself in freedom. Perhaps one day people will be astonished at music's failure to rejoice in its own freedom and at its short-sighted commitment to ideas that were disastrous philosophically, as well as in other respects. People will be astonished, in short, at music's masochism.

Adorno, Vers une musique informelle, p. 292-293

+ + +

The story of "Jazz" is synonymous with (among other things) the horrors of the night club. Go ask Frank Kofsky. Yet 40 (400?) years later, that relationship is just as intact as ever. True or False? What does that mean? Why the masochism? Aren't we evolved? Don't we drink soy milk?

Yet at the very same time, IF it is true if there were no musicians participating in the music industry, the music industry, with all its attendant madnesses would disappear THEN, well, uh...

"Why must Good run from Evil?" asked Wilhelm Reich.

Hands up, who remembers the Jazz Composers Guild? Why is it something we have to remember?

Speaking of remembering, The Adorno above dovetails nicely into this delightful section from Robert Anton Wilson's Wilhelm Reich in Hell.

SADE

A world without morals. Anarchy. That is what you mean?

(a music with out written notes, systems, etc...)

REICH

It is not anarchy. it is what every person with an ounce of sanity knows. Nobody is to blame for anything. We are all in the mess together, because our ancestors were mad and a mad society has passed on their repression from generation to generation.

SADE

And the things I did before I was brought here and cured? They were not Evil?

REICH

You enjoyed feeling Evil because it made you seem heroic. The humiliating truth, Marquis, is that you were merely ill.

SADE

And Hitler was merely ill?

REICH

That is the horror of the situation. We all know it by now, but we cannot remember. We repress it and go on blaming one another--we forget what we know, because remembering it means remembering that we are robots, too--that we have all been crippled in different ways by trying to live in the imaginary world of morals (chord changes) instead of the real world of nature (free improvisation).

SADE

So we just teach people to breath properly and relax their muscles and we will have Utopia?

REICH

No. I never said it was easy. I said it was almost impossible, but we had to try, if there was to be any chance of survival at all. Removing the Emotional Plague is just like removing bubonic plague. It will take decades of work all over the world by thousands of specialists. But if we don't try--

Computer whistles again.


REICH

We must understand that every moral idea is strictly a hallucination. It creates guilt, which creates muscular tension, which creates rage. That leads to further armoring, to hold the rage in. That leads to all the psychosomatic illnesses that orthodox medicine can't cure and to all the social pathologies around us...

+ + +

Trade "play changes" and "metric time" for morality, change "nature" for "free jazz", just like we've been doing all along, and you get the picture.

Do you get the picture? In the off chance you don't, we have 29 more pages in the Adorno to go.

Hut Hut Hike!