Night thoughts on Bach's birthday: der Trinkleid von der Jammer der Erde

Adorno, in his famously difficult late work Aesthetic Theory, claims that time has moved on since Bach.

He regards any work of art as an almost violent rebuke to any other work of art, most especially to closely related works. He even believed this of Bach.

The Bach of Adorno's essay BACH RESCUED FROM HIS DEVOTEES is one who, like Mozart in the movie Amadeus, rebukes the second-rate simply by being himself.

The Art of Fugue "says" "I know very well that Johan Jacob Fux said, in his crummyass little treatise on fugueing, that there can be no chomaticism in der fugue. Vell, ha ha ha, vatch zis."

The Mahler of Das Lied von der Erde is necessarily informed by what has gone before, and "the drinking song of earthly sorrow" to be anything MORE, than, well, some drunk's pissing and moaning, has to start with a dissonant horn that both affirms and contradicts the self-confident *flugelhorns* of the third symphony of Beethoven.

In Aesthetic Theory Adorno hypothesizes whether we might be at a time in which human nature has so evolved, or devolved (Adorno refusing to accept any goddamn axioms about "unchanging human nature", being a Marxist who believed that human nature is the result of productive forces) that the making of ANY real art might itself be revolutionary terrorism.

Witness the hysteria in the US about the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Great Fear in the US, that some artist might plunge Christ into a vat of piss.

[Every year in America, the penalty for taggers increases so that IF some homeboy were to create an accurate copy of The Last Supper, then he would be, in all probability, railroaded to hard time without ceremony, not praised: for today, we have to treat everybody alike, don't we, especially when we are treating them like shit.]

Or the madness over the Mohammed cartoon that was complementary to the madness over publishing this stick of shitfire with a wick on it.

Or the fact that today fundamentalist Moslem sects insist that the call to prayers now be muttered in a monotone, for it is somehow feminine, and thereby offensive, to sing it in fancy form (the American Puritans pioneered the barbarism of killing the musicians).

In this context it is understandable that on the one hand we celebrate beautiful code while in fact and in my direct experience, the authors of that code were marginal people, and unpromotable. They had a nasty habit of making things run faster by using a binary search which made managers look bad.

Discussions of the timeless beauty of Bach make me very sad, because in my experience the discussants are trained, to the extent they are socialized (where my socialisation has been strangely deficient) to also believe that there is, as a sort of intellectual San Andreas Fault running through our lives, a necessary divide between the worlds of the Ninth Symphony and the B Minor Mass, and the practical world of reproduction.

This is because it used to be hoped that our task could be healing this division.

That's why the kids riot in France. Although Dominique de Villepin may have had a good idea, to allow French employers to hire kids and fire them at will, it might also be the case that these young whippersnappers have known NOTHING but the demand for American-style givebacks, coexisting uneasily with a flawed welfare state in stasis, the subtext of which is the same old same old: "you, who listen to Bach and look at the stars, probably aren't good enough to pull lattes at Starbucks for American tourists, but we'll give you a shot".

"You're moved to tears by the Ninth symphony, and you can play it on the piano? How nice. But, you aren't Juilliard material and no way will you be a classical superstar: all we want for Columbia records are good-looking classical musicians because Marketing has discovered that young women sell CDs. We, as a collective society, suggest instead you make a u-turn, and learn Visual Basic."

The above are simulacra of real conversations. I am pointing out that beauty today is Utopian: you can't, it seems, get there from here. I spent thirty years managing my instincts to work at the limit of my capabilities, because this was not wanted, in a world where so much is "ill done, and done to others harm", and I think, like my homeys in Neighbors for Peace, "another world is possible".