Program #111, July 4 2002: Harnessings of the sacred series, part IV: Anthems.

By focusing on anthems, nationalist music, and new musical discourses derived from them, this week's installment of the Harnessings of the sacred series was obviously intended to connect up with the Fourth of July holiday: what better time, for a program based in America, to think about ways music is used to evoke (or entrain) sacralized constructions of nationhood? Or ways to contest and expand upon them? But this was just the beginning of the field of connections I intended to make.

First, I tried to highlight the multivalent nature of nationhood as an imagined construct in various ways. The sacralization of some such visions, if ever it existed at all, faded quickly with the demise of the institutions that attempted to construct them (e.g., East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia), while others have persisted long after those institutions are gone (e.g., the Confederate States of America). In other situations, the most relevant music for sacralizing the nationalized polity is not formalized by state sanction -- Sibelius' Finlandia is not the Finnish national anthem, but for many it is a much greater musical realization of Finnish nationhood. And the particular visions of American nationhood given here connect back to the dystopian future America depicted in Ruders' The Handmaid's Tale, but differ quite a bit: LeBaron's work interrogates the nature of American involvements outside its borders, while Hendrix' (in)famous cover of the Star-Spangled Banner reminds us that it is possible -- even necessary -- to find ways to make sure that it remains our country, as opposed to simply following it as kind of a home-town team.

The centerpiece of the program, though, was Karlheinz Stockhausen's Hymnen, a true masterwork of twentieth-century music -- an extended musical dialogue (NOT a collage, Stockhausen emphatically reminds us) primarily based on snippets of national anthems and other music with nationalistic (e.g. The Battle Hymn of the Republic) and para-nationalistic (e.g. The Internationale) force, in most instances all heavily electronically transformed, and mixed together with a great variety of other sound samples. Stockhausen explains the ultimate purpose of this construction:

"National anthems are the most familiar music imaginable... they are "charged" with time, with history -- with past, present and future. They accentuate the subjectivity of peoples in a time when uniformity is all too often mistaken for universality. One must also make a clear distinction between subjectivity and interaction among subjective musical objects on the one hand and individualistic isolation and separation on the other... The composition of so many national anthems into a common musical temporal and spatial polyphony could make it possible to experience -- as musical vision -- the unity of peoples and nations in a harmonious human family."

Thus, this drive toward synthesis of a pan-human community both draws upon, and transcends, the sacralizations of nationhood -- making Hymnen an ideal fit for this series, and a good stepping-stone to Nemtin's realization of Scriabin's Preparation for the Final Mystery next week. It also represents the next portion of my backhanded examination of the work of Stockhausen (recall that his Stimmung was part of this series two weeks ago, during the sacredness and sexuality program), and my claim that his work runs against the twentieth-century grain in so many ways, however much it seeks to move in a contemporary idiom.

A proper examination of this claim -- or, really, any claim regarding Stockhausen -- would probably take multiple programs, not least because Stockhausen is so maddening in so many ways. His dirscursively egoless form of egoism, something that is not uncommon amongst visionary geniuses whose profoundest desire is to transcend; his extravagances such as placement of string quartet members in helicopters; his effortless talk about what he will be doing in his next life (or whatever other place than here he is focused on at the moment); the control he exerts over his publications and recordings, a sublime blend of loving protection and obsessive punctiliousness. Yet somehow we forgive him all of this, this avant-gardist who -- with his twenty-five-years-in-the-making cycle of operas Licht -- would top Wagner. We forgive him because, even if he serves imperialism, as Cornelius Cardew once famously charged, he has done so only as the most unintentional by-product of his ultimate desire to transcend. (One is reminded just a bit of the Eddie Jessup character from the film Altered States.) He would bring us grand mystical visions in an age that is forced to deny them, which is why we find it possible to mock and revile him so much -- and that he would dare to bring these visions, with some essentially indefatigable core of conviction, is why we nevertheless love him so.