amusin': Musical Spies (attn:Monz)

In a message dated 2004:01:15 08:40:17 PM, "letucepry" writes:

>Hahahahahaha!!!!LoL, thank you immensely Dina....does
>this make Stockhausen/Xenakis/Boulez the Axis of
>Evil??? Hahahahaha!!! Beware, Ma++ Ingalls has
>exhaustive instructions on how to build weapons of
>Mass destruction...
>
>Caution, this story may have been created by the
>current Nazis in order to try to encroach upon your
>personal freedoms...perhaps they're too afraid of your
>atonal music giving information to
>terrorists...perhaps they're planning a crack down on
>freewheeling Bay Area types (did John Walker play
>atonal music? Of course he did, I have the tapes of
>his third grade recital to prove it...). We may all
>soon have the Gropanator and his jack booted thugs
>kicking down our doors...

In a message dated 2004:01:15 08:49:38 PM, "dnaemerson" writes:

>But Ron L may be right, can the Homeland Security Posse be far
>behind....? Watch yr backs, friends.

Was ist mit dem Flamewar? Entschuldigen Sie mein schlechtes Deutsch

Amusing, but this is an obvious hoax.
Details: http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/weekly/aa062998.htm

"Avant-garde composers like Webern and Schoenberg are easy targets for

such criticism. Their more challenging works have long been considered

unlistenable by some, and the question "Is it really music?" has

frequently been posed. It's but a small comedic leap to the suggestion

that their methods were invented for some nefarious, non-musical

purpose – say, transmitting scientific data to Nazi spies."

In a message dated 2004:01:15 08:43:21 PM, "newgrange" writes:

>This is an ancient hoax.
>
>http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/weekly/aa062998.htm
>http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/weekly/aa070398.htm
>
>Really heinous site that Juniper Hills thing ... the background music
>was especially ... unfortunate.

Musical Spies
http://www.juniperhills.net/news.html

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 composition 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 Schoenberg 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
music world. At the time, the U.S. Army reported that the killing was
"a mistake", and that by stepping out onto his veranda at night to
smoke a cigarette Webern was violating a strict curfew law.

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 Josef Goebbels, admitted at age eighty-eight that the Nazis
were secretly 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 Schoenberg, 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.

Schoenberg 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."

P.S.
Fühlen Sie sich besser?

In a message dated 2004:01:15 09:02:37 PM, "pgsaxopacbell" writes:

>I was thrown out of the Schoenberg Institute at USC by Schoenberg's son
>(maybe it was his grandson...can't remember) for playing improvised music
>in the performance gallery there. (I'm not joking!). Roberto Miranda, Horace
>Tapscott, Sunship and I were rehearsing for a concert there later that
>night. He walked in and started screaming like a maniac at us:...."you
>can NOT PLAY THIS MUSIC HERE!!!!!!!! This hall is dedicated to the music of
>my father, and this music does not belong here!" Of course, I heard the
Brahms
>String Sextet and the works of other composers there as well, but I guess
>that wasn't a problem.
>
>They eventually moved the Institute back to Vienna (it was last year, I
>think, maybe the year before), now the building is the Thelonious Monk
>Institute.....ha HA! I suppose you could say that we had the final word
>on that one. Still, I found that Institute to be a great resource, and it's
>a drag that the students there no longer have access to all the papers and
>scores....there was also a nice model of his workshop there.

---|-----|--------|-------------|---------------------|
Hanuman Zhang, musical mad scientist: "Nah, I don't wanna take over the
world, just the sound spectrum to make it my home."

"...Then out to the flaming stars...
From then, eventually unshackle time,
and traverse galaxies..." - Lou Harrison