kagablog

Dr Dali sat buckled into his pilot’s chair. He was wearing his Captain Nemo uniform and consulting various holographic schematics of the planet below. He had used the rocket thrusters affixed to the outer walls to take them out of their stationary orbit and into the area above one of the poles. Gradients flickered onscreen, tracking the massive structure as it crawled slowly through the glowing void. A green target light pulsed on one of the maps and a small counter ticked down the diminishing distance between it and the yellow blip of the flying temple. When the lights had aligned, Dr Dali pulled down the brass horn of the intercom.

“Are you in position?” he asked.

Taty perked up when she heard and leaned over to the button console intercom of the shower sphere.

“Aye aye Captain!” she shouted with enthusiasm.

She was in her spacesuit, minus helmet and gauntlets, hovering over the red button and waiting for the command to push it. The Doctor could have of course activated the mechanism from his control booth, but recognized that Taty would need to play some vital part in the rescue operation to avoid getting in the way. To avoid tantrums, he assigned her the role for which she had been rehearsing all month: that of button pusher. Needless to say, she was pleased as punch with her job description.

“Wait for my signal,” his voice boomed back commandingly.

“Roger!” she shouted excitedly.

Back in the command booth, he raised the heavily accessorized walkie-talkie to his cubist face and cleared his multi-form throat.

“Calling Number Nun,” he radioed.

Number Nun, who was adrift in a haunting seascape of shattered ice, received something of a fright at the sound of the strange voice in her head.

“Who is this?” she demanded. “What have you done with the girl?”

“This is Doctor Dali, perhaps you have heard of me? In any case, I can assure you that I have done nothing sinister to the young lady.”

“You are the one responsible for the destruction of all those sinners aren’t you?”

“Why, yes I am as a matter of fact.”

Number Nun nodded to herself, processing this information.

“A most effective purging,” she conceded.

“A compliment?”

“My morality circuitry is still in debate.”

“Well, I’ll just have to do something about that circuitry. Forgive my curtness, but the young lady has asked that I bring you aboard. Are you in favour?”

“Thank you for the invitation. That would be lovely, yes.”

“Top notch. Look over to your right would you…”

Number Nun turned her sensor sweep starboard and detected the enormous tube falling from the skies. It was some miles distant and fell like a great silver snake, crashing into the distant waters. She observed as it began to approach at great speed, trawling through the air like a badly scribbled ballpoint line. Icebergs battered against the machine, as its persistent grinding grew steadily louder. She zoomed in closer to find that the head was dragging some meters above the water, sucking up sea spray. Its suction tube hung too high to draw in water and the waves became distorted into vortices as it passed.

“I have your device in my sights,” she reported.

“As an Excelsior Missionary Model, I assume that you come equipped with standard retractable chest-mounted catch-line?” Dr Dali enquired.

“Of course.”

“Well then, fire your line when the suction device is within range and catch a ride up the tube. I have deactivated the post-atmospheric heating coils, so it should be a relatively smooth trip.”

Ice fractured between the glass breasts of Number Nun. A portal along her sternum opened as a tiny, transparent torpedo extruded, protected by a sliver of casing.

“See you on the other side Dr Dali,” she signed off, readying herself.

The pipe was by now almost upon her, towering into the turbulent sky like the trunk of some endless elephant. She fired her torpedo at the appropriate moment and watched as a glassy line unspooled from her inner core like a glistening spider’s web. It pierced the weathered, metal casing of the vacuum pump at an oblique angle and extruded grappling claws, which held fast. She locked the spool and was then instantly dredged from the surge. Seaweed trailed from her flying form like ragged wings, as she curved above the churning water, smacking through the tops of waves. The pulled in the line and managed to maneuver herself perfectly into the yawning mouth of the encrusted pipe. She disengaged the torpedo head as the powerful inrush caught her, sucking her quickly up the undulating subway to the sky. Above her the dark pipe receded like an endless, flexible train tunnel which whipped about with violent grace. She rode the artificial wind with a rather smug look upon her face, almost as if she had known all along that something like this would happen.

When Dr Dali was certain that the android Madonna was in the tube, he pulled down the tube and sent word to Taty.

“Alright, you can retract it,” he called. “I’ll keep the suction going till she’s aboard.”

Taty slammed the red button in triumph, knocking herself horizontal with the force of the blow.

“You can go meet her in the chamber I showed you on the map,” Dr Dali sad, signing off.

Taty squealed with delight, pulling on her helmet and gauntlets before launching herself up the corridor. She flustered maniacally through the lounge and control booth, rushing out of the airlock before the Doctor had time to turn. She purged the passage and entered the icicle blasted passages of the haunted castle in a fizz of joy. Light strips along her gauntlets, helm and chest console illuminated her like a deep-sea jellyfish, while she passed through the massive honeycomb of desolation, dodging tables, chairs and other weightless obstacles. When she finally emerged into the sunken lot, the pump site was gushing out a majestic plume of frozen air. This geyser fluffed out into the yawning, floodlit space in a ceaseless detonation of glittery vapour crystals. The pipe was evidently still in the process of clearing the atmosphere and frozen gasses gushed steadily, knocking about the weighty boulders of sea ice as though they were nothing more than soap bubbles. Taty soared down from the ceiling trap and swirled happily into the twinkling mist, searching this way and that for a sign of her long lost friend. The silver plume abruptly died as the pipe left the atmosphere, venting its last dregs of shimmering effluvium into the clutter of ice. When the torso of Number Nun eventually sailed from the hole, trailing fluid dynamics and frozen seaweed, Taty was waiting above like a candy coloured angel. She caught the limbless torso of the robot and hugged her helmet against the translucent collarbone as they both twirled into a spin, pin-balling off the various glacial masses. Number Nun scanned for frequency and all of a sudden could hear Taty crying out in her head.

“Mother Superior!” she was shouting, clinging to the nun as though she were the raft of salvation itself.

“Oh Childbride,” Number Nun tut-tutted down at her with a smile. “No need for formalities.”

“I’m so happy now,” Taty sobbed, as they spun slower and slower, drifting through the sparkling fields and ice blocks, finally en-route to the moon.

Dr Dali was at his monitors, watching images of the pair turning in the mist. He switched camera angles, as though at the ballet, before finally losing interest. He flicked a switch and killed the engines of the suction device, steepling his white gloves in deep thought. He turned to Devoid who was playing with a bundle of wires.

“We have plenty of sex-droids down in storage which I can cannibalize for parts,” he mused rhetorically to the god. “Get some arms and legs for this nun.”

Devoid finally managed to un-snag the wires and a series of monitors went blank. It twittered to itself, clawing away at something else, utterly oblivious to the Doctor’s prattling. Dr Dali turned happily to the little god and regarded it with academic seriousness.

“Soon we will let you out my little friend,” he confided grandly. “Soon you will be fulfilling your great and sacred quest – all those centuries you waited in the dark! Soon it will all be over…”

Devoid fell off the table, fighting with a paper clip.

pyjamas are for sleeping in (and sex) NOT for work!

aryan kaganof

A U. of North Texas musicologist says that Jean Sibelius, shown here in 1934, was an active supporter of Nazism. Other scholars say the claim is overblown.

By Peter Monaghan

The composer Jean Sibelius is arguably as important to early 20th-century music as Ezra Pound was to literary modernism. Now, more than 50 years after the Finnish composer died, in 1957, at the age of 91, a musicologist in Texas is claiming that Sibelius was culpably entangled with Nazi Germany, and should join Pound, Richard Wagner, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline in the select group of artists who have been cast into anti-Semitic ignominy.

Sibelius’s associations with National Socialism amount to active support of Nazism and its propaganda efforts in Germany and the Nordic countries, says Timothy L. Jackson, a professor of music at the University of North Texas.

Other Sibelius experts say Jackson is making a Nazi out of a man who needed to deal with the Third Reich to earn his living, and who, along with most of the world, was perhaps too complacent about the rise of Hitler.

The role European composers may have played in laying the foundations for the grotesque ethos of Nazism has long been a contentious issue in musicological circles; the heat generated by such discussions relating to figures like Wagner suggests that the emerging dispute over Sibelius may significantly affect both the reception of his music and the way musical Romanticism is viewed in the history of 20th-century cultural life.

Jackson lays out his charges against Sibelius in a long essay in a book he has edited with three colleagues, Sibelius in the Old and New World: Aspects of His Music, Its Interpretation, and Reception, which Peter Lang Publishing Group is set to publish in the first half of next year. Jackson, a specialist in late Romantic composers such as Anton Bruckner, Richard Strauss, and Sibelius, previewed his arguments last month at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society, in Philadelphia. That has sparked a vibrant e-mail exchange among several Sibelius experts, much of which participants have shared with The Chronicle.

From Sibelius archives and other sources, Jackson has accumulated a mass of documents, letters, government papers, and newspaper reports to challenge the standard take on Sibelius: that he was a passive, apolitical observer of the rise of Nazism and its effects on Europe.

He says Sibelius’s early fascination with Finnish mythology and nationalism resonated with Nazism. And, as the Third Reich gained in strength, Sibelius enjoyed its financial arrangements for artists. For example, in 1933, when Joseph Goebbels was named minister of propaganda, Sibelius, already well established and 67 years old, began to profit from taxation and currency-exchange and currency-export preferences that Goebbels approved for artists.

Those were perks of cooperating with the “artist friendly” regime, Jackson suggests. But the Nazis were particularly well inclined toward Sibelius, he adds. For example, Sibelius in 1935 accepted a Goethe Medal that Adolf Hitler confirmed with his signature. From at least 1941, he drew a German pension that was worth half the average German annual income. In 1942, Third Reich officials approved the founding of the German Sibelius Society.

Nazi admiration of Sibelius has long led some music historians to view the composer with suspicion. Jackson is providing more fodder for that unease. He argues that, by going along with all the accolades, Sibelius was committing “a political act of considerable importance to Finland, if not Germany, with a huge propaganda significance.”

No single event more clearly illustrates Sibelius’s empathy with the Nazi ethos, Jackson believes, than his reneging on his promise to help a young, part-Jewish composer, Günther Raphael. In the years 1931 to 1936, Raphael implored Sibelius repeatedly, urgently, and obsequiously to help him to retain his teaching position in Germany at a time when Jewish artists were being dismissed from their posts.

Jackson insists that Sibelius could have joined the many prominent artists who asked Goebbels to protect favored Jewish colleagues. But he chose not to risk Goebbels’s disfavor.

And in mid-1942, says Jackson, when it still seemed that Germany might win the war, Sibelius agreed to be interviewed at his home in Finland by Anton Kloss, an SS war reporter who had most likely taken part in war atrocities. Surely, says Jackson, by that time Sibelius would have heard what the Nazis were doing throughout Europe.

Such actions condemn Sibelius, he asserts, even though the composer did, in late 1943, denounce the Nazis’ “bad social prejudices”—quietly, in his diary.

More significant, Jackson says, is that Sibelius continued to take money from Nazi Germany throughout the war, even complaining that payments were not consistently arriving.

Jackson says he believes that Sibelius scholars have viewed Sibelius from a hagiographic rather than historical perspective that is all too common in biographies of great artists—and have, as a result, overlooked that he was less than a saint.

For other Sibelius specialists, however, it is Jackson’s perspective that is warped. In telephone interviews, as in their e-mail exchanges with the Texas music historian, they characterize his allegations as a cherry-picking smear campaign.

Consider the age and isolation of Sibelius by the time the war came—he had virtually stopped composing 20 years earlier—suggests one Finnish Sibelius authority, Vesa Sirén. “Keep in mind that we are talking about a bald-headed old man with shaky hands and a cataract in his eye who probably didn’t even know what the SS was,” says Sirén, a music journalist, author of a study of how Sibelius’s contemporaries viewed him, and the editor of the Sibelius estate’s official Web site.

Sirén, like Veijo Murtomäki, a professor of music history at the Sibelius Academy, in Helsinki, and a leading authority on the composer, praises Jackson for calling attention to facts of Sibelius’s life, such as the monetary value of the well-known favors that he received from Third Reich admirers. But Jackson’s claims are consistently overblown and out of context, Sirén and Murtomäki insist.

Take that 1942 interview with the SS reporter. Jackson says it was highly significant, because Sibelius was a recluse who rarely granted press interviews. “Total nonsense,” scoffs Sirén. Sibelius agreed to numerous interviews during the 1940s, often at the behest of the Finnish foreign ministry. “He said he wouldn’t want to see so many people in his home, but he would, if it was good for Finland,” says Sirén. “Sibelius was a great composer and also vain, a little bit childish. But he was also a patriot.”

Or consider Jackson’s characterization of Sibelius’s payments from Germany as being “on the Nazi payroll.” Says Sirén: “When the Nazis took over, the last thing on their mind was obeying international copyright laws.” Sibelius doggedly pursued his royalties—from Germany, where most were due, as well as from other countries. “We can argue that it would have been better that he said ‘I don’t want anything to do with Germany,’ but still, he was entitled to his copyright money,” she says.

And was Sibelius’s decision not to help Günther Raphael really proof of anti-Semitism? That claim, says Sirén, ignores that the composer received, and rejected, hundreds of such requests, and by the 1930s had had enough. In fact, says Sirén, Sibelius had given out so many recommendations, motivated by politeness rather than informed by their recipients’ qualifications, that “he now felt that he was in the middle of a nest of lies.”

Murtomäki, who with Jackson is one of the editors of a forthcoming collection of essays, Sibelius in the Old and New World, contends that the weakness in all his colleagues’ criticisms of Sibelius is that they ignore historical context.

One simple example: Jackson’s objection to Sibelius’s accepting the Goethe Medal, in 1935. Murtomäki asks: Why would Sibelius not accept such honors, given that he was at the time arguably the world’s most successful living classical composer, winning honors around the world?

Jackson also ignores the complexity of Finnish views of Germany, contends Murtomäki. He notes that at the beginning of the Third Reich, many Finns believed that Germany not only was improving the lot of its citizens but also was emerging as an effective foil to the Bolshevist threat. In 1939 the Soviet Union attacked and managed to annex part of Finland. So in 1941 Finland allied itself with Germany, hoping to stave off both Nazi and Soviet invasion. But in September 1944, it began the seven-month Lapland War against Germany.

With these turnabouts, Sibelius, too, suffered reversals: At times he was hailed as a standard-bearer of freedom; at others he was decried as a Nazi stooge trading on his Aryan birth. But throughout this vacillation, Sibelius valued his acclaim in Germany, the country that Finns considered a cultural mecca.

“Professor Jackson has some pieces of a puzzle at his hands, but the picture he is constructing with the pieces is rather strange for us who know better the cultural and political situation of Finland during the Third Reich,” says Murtomäki.

He allows that Jackson is doing a service to the history of Finnish cultural, scientific, and political relations with German colleagues during the Third Reich. But while Jackson insists that his evidence against Sibelius is more than circumstantial, Murtomäki is not so sure: “So, Sibelius was selfish and flattered by his fame in Germany and wanted the money. I am sorry for that. But it does not make him a Nazi or a great friend of any SS person or acts made by them. History is not that easy.”

this article first published in the chronicle of higher education

Nelson Mandela skryf op 27 Februarie 1975 die volgende brief vanuit sy tronksel op Robbeneiland aan Tafelberg-uitgewers:

PLEASE SUPPORT OUR YOUTH BY BUYING TICKETS FOR THEM TO ATTEND BLACK NOISE 22ND ANNIVERSARY AT THE BAXTER THEATRE. ALL FUNDS WILL FUND FREE ONGOING HEAL THE HOOD HIP HOP WORKSHOPS IN THEIR COMMUNITIES.

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COST:- R 50= ± $7.14 per ticket

Hello

I am appealing to the local and international community to assist us with bringing more young people from the Cape Flats to experience different events. Climbing Table Mountain, Bus trips to each others communities to break the legacy of Apartheid of forced removals and adding the force needed to bring people back together, Badilisha Poetry, C.A.R.A and Anton Fransch Memorial Concerts, Cape Flats Uprising, Battle of the Year Africa, funding kids school funds at Sid G Rule and Lavender Hill High and visiting District Six Museum.

Last year people bought tickets and sponsored transport from the Cape Town, USA, Germany and Australia. Thuis event forms part of Its part of Project Breaking that fights Xenophobia or Afrophobia. By buying youth tickets you will also expose them to each other in new surroundings and change the view they have of themselves.

Thanks to you, we hosted trips:-

Some of last years kids benefiting from tickets

http://www.healthehood.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=42&Itemid=53

Up the Rock - Table Mountain http://www.facebook.com/inbox/?folder=[fb]messages&page=1&tid=1155279682319#!/album.php?aid=358753&id=502960719

Press Release

Black Noise Celebrates its 22nd Anniversary at the Baxter

Venue:- Baxter Theatre Concert Hall

Date:- 13th February 2010

Time:- 17H00 - 20H00 Hip Hop Dance Battles

20H00 - 23H00 Concert

Performances:- Vicky Sampson, Ernestine Deane, Emile YX?, DJ Angelo, Heal the Hood Junior B-boy Class from Eastridge Mitchells Plain and Black Noise Hip Hop Group.

Entry Fee:- R50 http://www.computicket.com/web/event/black_noise_22nd_anniversary/99395581/0/7310236

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Description:-

The dance battles will showcase breakdancer/ b-boy crews Knock-out battles, krumpers, poppers and new skool Hip Hop shows from the Cape Flats. Many of these groups have been influenced by Black Noise over the years. This event will launch a 10 leg Cape Flats Uprising Hip Hop Tour throughout the Western Cape of which all proceeds will go to the schools, Hip Hop Artists and Heal the Hood Project. Come support this historic event and legendary hip hop legacy of the Western Cape.

A conference on exile organized by musicologists is bound to raise some ambiguities. For a start the term exile exists under leaden skies after Edward Said : he conducted its most recent examination and concluded that using it to characterize anything short of mass political denationalizations like the Palestinian disaster is misleading and frivolous.

This also puts the topoi of literary exile off limits as voluntaristic and too imbued with creative transcendence to characterize the cruel political punishment meted out to the Palestinian people and others in their plight.

Biblical exile- despite its extremely rich theology of covenants, morality for life among strangers and vast pretext for prophecies and condemnations was too identified with Zionist Nationalists to illuminate other stories of exile without prejudice.

In sum Said was concerned with the way exile entered public opinion and wished to remove certain decoys between the public sense of culpability and the condition of ten million denationalized people whom he felt obliged to speak for.

Exile is neither creative nor allegorical, it has no distinct genres – or at least none adequate to serve as a voice to suffering collectively borne. It is not laden with promise or at least with no promise different to the promise of arbeit macht frei or the promise of self determination in homelands for the millions of south africans apartheid white supremacists denationalized between 1950 and 1988.

Said’s ultimatum -no metaphoric use of exile after the Palestinian disaster -has the same weight as Adorno’s more famous ‘all culture after Auschwitz is garbage’. Neither thinker wants to be thought of as placing the topics of exile or genocide off limits , merely highlighting inappropriate means by which to inquire into them.

Now since Adorno was a defining figure in musicology and the sociology of fascism and Said equally inaugural of postcolonial studies it would be expected that a conference on Friedrich Hartmann and exile in the then quasi colony of South Africa would be an enterprise laced between Adorno and Said. What occurred was something quite different. A concert of music by a former leader of the Austrian Fatherlands Front - a fascist organization- was played . This was the centerpiece of the conference which turned out to have been occasioned by the musicological effort of Timothy Jackson to rehabilitate the music of this controversial figure -Friedrich Hartmann-and to rehabilitate his political reputation.

Jackson , a Canadian professor working in Texas, argued that Hartmann had been relieved of his teaching post in Austria because his new Nazi overseer did not believe his sincere declarations that he would divorce his half Jewish wife in exchange for keeping job. Nor was Orel , the Nazi in question swayed by a student petition instigated by Hartmann approvingly describing him persecuting his Jewish students. Hartmann was at that time a voluntary leader of the Austrian Patriotic Front.

Hatmann lost his job and came to South Africa with his wife and child where he continued his career as an academic and composed the music which Jackson aired. Subsequently Hartmann returned to Austria.

Now this would be merely one of those sidelights on twentieth century music which illuminate the roads not taken by the renowned composers - except that this all took place in South Africa. Now few sensibilities are so far off the beaten track as to have not heard of the apartheid government, a white supremacist prolongation of colonial minority rule which hijacked South Africa between 1948 and 1994.

This regime imposed its racist separate development policy on over ninety percent of South Africans, denationalizing people and forcing them into bogus reserves called native homelands. This event stripped rights from , displaced and deracinated far more people then even the Palestinian disaster and counts as one of the largest sustained political harassments in history.

South Africa is still counting the cost of this political misadventure which only came to an end when the apartheid government capitulated in a civil war. Many people who took part in that war were forced into exile by state terror and assassination programs which they were not spared even far over South Africa’s borders. Some of these people were present when Jackson made his case for F. Hartmann being an exile too - a fascist exile ironically fleeing Nazi persecution to became a civil servant in the apartheid regime.

From Jackson’s account, which he never claimed was more than an initial assay, certain facts about Hartmann are not yet clear . These facts determine the status of Hartmann in both 20 c Austrian history ( both fascist and Nazi) and South African apartheid history. These facts will shape Hartmann’s reception in South Africa and the entire scholarly and aesthetic perspective imaginable towards him.

The role of these facts is best grasped via two divergent historical narratives. We do not yet have the information to choose between these narratives. They are as follows:

A) Friedrich Hartman sincerely believed that volunteering for a leadership position in the Austrian Fatherlands Front was a reasonable thing to do. Since antisemitism was not official policy of the Austrofascists he married a half Jewish woman. He felt pressured to lie in order to keep his job in Nazi Austria. These lies included declaring he was in the process of divorce from his wife and also petitioning students to vouch for his zealous persecution of Jewish students .

When these lies failed to prevent his dismissal he fled Nazi Austria for South Africa with his wife, presumably not divorced and settled into an academic position where, chastened by his experiences with fascism, he became apolitical and applied himself to composition , administration and teaching. Alarmed by the growing intolerance in apartheid South Africa and by xenophobic denials of opportunity to him in the musical world, he ended his exile and returned to Austria where he spent the rest of his life.

B) Friedrich Hartmann was a deeply sincere fascist. He joined the Austrofascist Fatherland’s Front because it was politically and institutionally dominant- dominant enough under Mussolini’s protection to actively persecute Nazis as well as communists in the Austrian opposition.

When it became clear that Hitler was in the ascendant, Hartmann decided to switch allegiance to the Nazi party as more appropriate to his convictions To achieve this he was prepared to abandon his wife and to persecute Jewish students. He sincerely wished for Nazi acceptance and was shocked when his former allegiance to the Vaterländische Front was, despite his sincere zeal , held against him and he was purged from his job. His fascist beliefs led him to chose South Africa as more promising frontier for his extreme rightist thinking, using his wife’s half Jewish status as a sweetener to his immigration bid he entered South Africa under the mask of political exile and joined over six hundred other fascist and Nazi diehards who were recruited by the sa nationalist government to man its upcoming state and academic takeover. When the South African government realized that it could achieve its white supremacist goals without retaining now unpopular neo Nazi ideologies , Hartmann found his role as fascist aesthetic and ideological exemplar undermined. Unable to endure the decline of explicit fascist thinking in the wily apartheid state- by then trying to construe itself as a democratic whites only republic- Hartmann went back to Austria where a strong neofascist movement had never declined and where he lived in hope of the return of the VF.

both scenarios are over etched, designed to convey the ideal-typical sketches which Max Weber believed were indispensable to the beginning of any historical or social investigation- ladders which, once climbed, can be thrown away in favor of more subtle hypotheses once the most parsimonious explanations are put in place.

The historical and aesthetic evaluation of Hartmann, which Tim Jackson has begun will not progress until scenario A can convincingly refute scenario B or vice versa.

It is likely that this evaluation exceeds the capacity and expertise of any one scholar. Judgment beyond musicology is required to understand the migrations between the VF and the Nazi party- the kind of judgment possessed by general historians of the era such as Michael Kater and his colleagues. The relation of Hartmann to fascist recruits into South African administration and universities needs to be investigated by historians of apartheid structures and of the fascist diaspora.

Why does any of this matter ? Because Hartmann’s music was presented in South Africa on the strength of narrative A. This narrative is based on anecdotal evidence which at the moment is insufficient to rule out the plausibility of narrative B.

If A turns out to be well supported in future then premiering Hartmanns music and theming a conference around his then proven exile will seem a commendable exercise in historical objectivity and insight.

If B turns out to be well supported then South Africa has unwittingly hosted the celebration of a fascist, an apartheid zealot and an unrepentant opportunist.

The present issue is simply whether the conference rooted in Hartmann’s exile and promoted alongside a premiere of his music should ever have gone ahead before the musicological, historical and South African political communities had an opportunity to adequately weigh the evidence for A or B. No single scholar, however gifted, can claim to represent consensus on a matter that they themselves have only recently brought to discussion I hope that the decision between A and B is not still simply seen as some scholarly stake because it is a political issue which at worst portrays South Africa today as a safe cultural harbor for neofascists.

Today we consider the merits and contributions of Leni Riefenstahl, Martin Heidegger, Gottfried Benn, Werner von Braun, Giuseppe Terragni, Richard Strauss, Herbert von Karajan, Paul de Man and many others only against a clear understanding of their involvement in fascism . It is only correct that a recently rediscovered composer who shares their provenance should be subject to equal deliberation and scrutiny. This has nothing to do with witch-hunting ; it has everything do with bringing appropriate collateral and contextual information to bear before putting a work of art into candidacy for our appreciation.

The denazification process around Heidegger did not turn on the high opinion in which he was held by peers- including Sartre- but around his role in the National Socialist state and institutions. The German people had a right to deliberate whether they wanted Heidegger’s ideas to re enter the public realm as authoritative opinion in a society recovering from Nazism. South Africa held a truth and reconciliation process to deal with apartheid crimes against humanity. Its statutes ought to apply to the process of rehabilitating Hartmann. Certainly no more unilateral construals of Hartmann or other apartheid era public figures as exiles or victims ought to be simply accepted at face value. What if , on further examination, Hartmann turns out to be Hartmann B?

After decades of equivocation few who examine all the facts doubt that Heidegger was a sincere Nazi. Somehow it became possible to imagine Germanys best philosopher and Nazism as compatible- a perception that eluded earlier generations.

Has Nazism become more subtle? Has Heidegger simply slipped out of contemporaneity in being well enough understood and settled more obviously in his era?

When a significant piece of thought, art or music is put into candidacy for our appreciation, it is vital that its provenance be disclosed and understood for this alone confers its identity. This is obvious in those far from rare cases when a painting long attributed to a famous name is revealed as a fake (despite remaining physically identical to itself , it becomes a different work overnight ) The great Viennese architect Adolph Loos stands today under consideration as a pedophile.

Perhaps everybody who knew Loos knew this fact about him. Perhaps only today has pedophilia become sufficiently established as a violating criminal occurrence to begin attracting some sense of heinousness to Loos? The recent arrest of Roman Polanski has brought underage sex and the power to evade answerability for it into public debate . Nobody can argue that the answer to these questions is irrelevant to our relationship to Loos. Nowadays he has to be great despite his vice- a complex case to argue, not viceless because he is great.

Hartmann’s actual stance on Nazism and his role in the apartheid state makes a nonnegotiable difference to how we consider his music. Riefenstahl’s lifelong denial of the extent of her Nazi involvement is a salient fact in how we experience her films . Her achievement would be different- not better or worse but different (as all historical differences picked out by counter factual conditional sentences are) if she had even once seriously been puzzled by her former self. If Tim Jackson wishes to attain historical justice for Hartmann, pre empting reliable consensus by presenting Hartmanns music as the music of a victim is not a useful way to do this.

Another strand at the exile conference that struck me as interesting but exposed to misunderstanding is the movement to meticulously reconstruct the worlds and idioms of Afrikaans composers of the mid twentieth century. Flowing from the very innovative Stephanus Muller a new kind of archival awareness and biographic detail has entered the musicology of the nationalist and apartheid period: it certainly achieves, in that scholar, a tremendous suggestiveness and adventurousness - as in his examination of Arnold van Wyk via the counterfactual setting of a vast roman a clef. Esme Berman and Karel Nel’s extraordinary Alexis Preller monograph and exhibition is of a piece with this fine grained contextual , document and biographic based inquiry, a final dispensing with the thin, allusive generalities that have stalled South African art writing for decades.

But before this kind of study can reveal the fine grain of musical cultures – the way Baxandall , Podro and Alpers revealed the filigree of period visual cultures, the issue of the cultural policies and academic framework of the apartheid state needs to be addressed. This is not from some wish to put an obligatory political ball and chain on this scholarship but to augment its strength and consequences. It is hard to imagine a contemporary study of reniassance painting without an understanding of mercantile capitalism or a study of Thoreau which ignored agribusiness or the civil war. The danger in South Africa is that apartheid is so central to post 1948 scholarship that it has become a kind of premiss, a background noise to be acknowledged with regret. In recent South African memory, apartheid was the ether in which the spectrum bathed- capitalism, politics, rights, culture.

Ironically it regained some of this former pervasiveness after 1994- the study of apartheid seems always to be either completed or to be somebody else’s problem.

Since 1964, at least , the frame of art and music study has been the elaboration of a world- an art world through which works achieve stable identity or value or a music world such as the ones elaborated in recent ethnographic studies of IRCAM or the attempts to see Darmstadt and die Reihe as a discursive formation. There is - following the extraordinary work of Mary Douglas, Bruno Latour, David Bloor or Ian Hacking, no way in which even the study of logic,probability or polynomials can evade the methods by which groups achieve cohesion and consensus. The synthetic moderne whites only civil society is a veritable Mont Blanc on the horizon of worldmaking - of contrivances of cohesiveness- its reach into education and patronage was subtle and filled with paradoxical effects. The school of Muller- as I like to imagine it, is as close to a genealogical perspective as SA scholarship has yet come. It is a phenomenon to be strongly supported and encouraged for its subject matter as well as the methodological and stylistic sophistication it brings; nonetheless it stands in the same danger as Tim Jackson’s far more conventional dealings with Hartmann- in all these excavations of the personal and the contingent a dimension for analysis of power and the state needs to be reserved Not as a concession to South Africa’s perennial Marxism – which like its expressionism missed its moment and lingers on as a ghost- but as an analysis of public life, patronage, civil society and consensus building that can only honor music by illuminating the seductive matrix in which it made its way.

jean-pierre de la porte

PERSONAL INFORMATION: She is an only daughter amongst two brothers of Mr. and Mrs. Van Rooy. Values God and Family first in her life. Enjoys writing, reading and socializing. Has a passion for the spoken word, thus poetry and singing. She is gifted in writing and also has a degree in Psychology and Linguistics. Also known for and described as a social activist and youth development worker. Thus actively involved in the development processes within her community. She claims her inspiration comes from God, her parents, family and self. MUSICAL BACKGROUND: Started writing her first piece at the age of 12 with the intention to simply expressing herself and release some of the frustrations that she has to deal with in her community/ life. This first writing, ‘Life’s No Metaphor’ then developed into a song and was complimented and a stunner every time she performed it. From that time already, she was doing choruses for her late brother ‘Devious’ (1977-2004), who is also her biggest influence. She also performed at small & big family, friends, community, Government & corporate events. From 2001, she moved on to performing at bigger and more recognized events and local city as well as international festivals. Her music entails social content, controversial /tabooed issues and is about empowerment and real experiences + strength and motivation. She describes her music genre as a fusion of African/ soul / jazz / hip hop/ R&B. ASPIRATIONS: To contribute to positive change in our countries current state regarding the Music industry and Youth empowerment. To be successful and inspire upcoming artists & musicians. Also to grow immensely and continuously in her musical talents and self. HIGHLIGHTS: She was nominated to represent South Africa In The Netherlands, Amsterdam for the B-Connected, MusicMayDay festival, 21 & 22 May 2006, and had unforgettable experiences to bring back home (positively). Also her music can be found on sale: (top 20 shelve) at the African Music Store(+online @musicrecommenders.com) in Long street, CPT, Armchair Music store(+online) in Observatory & Downstairs Music store in Cpt. 11 Feb 2007, she finally launched her 1st Music Video & Cd Single ‘Life’s No Metaphor’ , it was phenomenal.

blaq pearl’s myspace page is here

when a cocaine dawn starts crumbling
and the heat of Africa snows

only fucking you
can make it all melt

away.

Our next door neighbour is from Nova Scotia. I thought I could hear it when she talked, the way she said somewheres, as in, if you’ve got somewheres else to be, the way she said down home about her hometown. Where you from, I finally asked her this morning. Bridgewater, she said, you know, Lunenburg County. No shit, I said. Beautiful up there. She nodded.

My mom is crazy about the South Shore. She always wanted to get rich and have a cottage up on Mahone Bay. Gorgeous. Yeah, she said, it really is. Boring though, when you’re a teenager.

Yeah, I hear that, I said. I’m from the Valley, from Kentville, in King’s County. Oh I know Kentville, she said. I love the Apple Blossom Festival. You sound like a tourist, I teased her. What are you, a fan of the parade or something? I always hated that stuff growing up, so cheesy. She slapped my arm, but gently. Yeah, but it’s fun. The Valley is beautiful in the fall. Yeah, I guess so, I said.

Holy Shit, you know, I think you’re the first person I’ve met out here from home. She smiled. You too.

She had the longest eyelashes I’d ever seen. She kind of looked like she was from the country. She was curvy, with big blue eyes and blond hair. She had big breasts and wore a tight shirt and jean shirts that looked like cut offs, all ripped and worn. She kind of looked like a sexy farmer’s daughter or something, the kind of girl I never would’ve looked at twice growing up, who suddenly seemed so hot to me right then. I leaned in towards her. She had shiny lip glossy lips.

I gotta go soon, she said. My husband is picking me up soon.

Husband? My voice actually squeaked a little as I said the word.

Yeah. I met him when I was living out west, in Calgary. He’s from Ontario. He wanted to try our luck in an even bigger city. I hate it here.

I sighed. Me too, I find myself saying. I really hate it here sometimes too.

Is the girl you live with, the one with the flowing skirts, your wife?

I shuddered. No, God, no, I said, before I could stop myself.

She laughed. She touched the side of my face with her rough fingers. You’ll meet the right person someday, she said.

Yeah, I said to her, thanks. Nice talking to you.

The thing is, I do love Nicki. But can you really love someone you’re always fighting with, that’s always infuriating you, and driving you crazy?

I want to tell her about my past so badly, want to tell her what happened, how the beat the shit out of a guy I barely knew, how I broke his back and put him in a chair, and ruined his life. I want to tell her how I wake up sweating at night about it, ten years later. I want to tell her how badly I want it to be ok, how I want the guy to forgive me, even though he shouldn’t, how I want to forgive myself most of all.

I want to tell her how I can’t travel with her, like she wants. She talks about travel all the time, and I can’t leave the country. Sometimes, when things are good, I want to take her back home with me,

to see my town, and the other towns around it. I want to show her where I came from, how beautiful it is. I want to show her everything, and really tell her the stuff that matters about me.

I miss Nova Scotia really bad sometimes, the open spaces, the pines and spruces, the ocean.

I miss seeing apples in the fall, rows of trees with tiny flashes of red and yellow peeking through leaves. I miss the glacial beauty in winter- frozen streams and brooks with ice frozen in cracked ovals that looks like agate. Even the animals are in your face in Toronto- the raccoons are huge and aggressive, totally not afraid of you. They look you in the eye and hiss, like they know they’re the ones in control. It’s fucked up, I’ve never seen anything like it. The squirrels are big and black or grey, and mangy.

I miss camping and seeing water everywhere I look and knowing where I’m going all the time, when I drive.

There’s things I love about Toronto-the way everything is open twenty four hours, the way if there’s anything you want in the world, you can find it, the way you can just grab a cab or buy a cd or dvd or jewellery or clothes or anything off the street, from some vendor who’s always there, the way everything is cheaper here. In so many ways, life is easier and more exciting.

But if I’m honest, what I like the most about Toronto is the anonymity. I love the way people don’t know me here, I love the fact that I can walk down the street or into my building or onto the subway with no one hassling me, or thinking I’m being rude for not making eye contact or saying hi. I like that I do whatever I feel like doing here- that I can be whoever I want, and no one really cares.

That’s the hardest part about being with Nicki- she always wants to know what I think or feel about everything- she wants to know me, things about me that I don’t feel comfortable or just don’t feel like sharing. I want to be with her, but I want to be able to take my space when I feel like it. She doesn’t know it, but I’m doing it to protect her. I know her, and there’s no way she’d be able to deal with what I’d have to tell her. She doesn’t know it, but I’m doing it for her own good, for both of our good.

It’s better this way, trust me. In every way, it’s easier.

Dear Colleagues,

There are a few points that I would like to address in the comments by professors Lucia and Muller.

Prof. Lucia writes: “hartmann was sympathetic to national socialism and tried (unsuccessfully it seems) to divorce his half-jewish wife in order to retain a high position at the vienna hochschule before he was somehow forced to leave and without too much hassle found his way to sa, where he was immediately appointed as lecturer at rhodes university.”

This is not what I said; I thought my report was more complicated and nuanced than that. What I attempted to demonstrate from the documents was that it SEEMED that Hartmann was planning to divorce his putatively half-Jewish wife in order to retain his position. But Orel had his doubts about Hartmann’s sincerity; furthermore, he - Hartmann - had not provided any proof of having done so. Orel also suspected that Hartmann was NOT truly sympathetic to National Socialism because he had volunteered for a leadership position in the Patriotic Front, which Orel probably rightly claimed showed Hartmann’s true political orientation: Hartmann was an Austro-Fascist, but not a Nazi. As Michael Haas observed, the Austro-fascists were trying to resist German Nazism and retain Austria’s independence. Orel also believed that Hartmann was lying about his intention to divorce his wife and join the Party. Obviously, the new Nazi-controlled Education Ministry also suspected Hartmann of dissimulation, otherwise he might not have been dismissed.

My larger point is that the documents show the lengths to which a person MIGHT go to hold onto his position and avoid exile. In such extreme situations, angels are few and far between. My point was that Hartmann was certainly not lily-white. But in being a shade of gray, he was no exception, certainly among artists and musicians, who, as I suggested, have been all too willing to serve any master, regardless of the circumstances, as long as they could retain their prestige, power, and income. The claim that “Hartmann was sympathetic to National Socialism” is a stretch; better to say that he /appears /to have tried to accommodate with it in order save his job and livelihood. In connection with the Hartmann case, I also mentioned Hindemith and Sibelius. A careful review of the documents shows that Hindemith too wiggled and squirmed mightily in the hope that he might be able to stay in Germany. In retrospect, Hindemith was fortunate that Hitler simply hated him personally and he was kicked out. And, Sibelius, even though by 1943 he was fully aware of the criminal anti-Semitism of the Nazi regime, continued to take its money and collaborate in various ways right up to the bitter end.

Hartmann was infinitely fortunate that Prof. Smeath-Thomas of Rhodes University decided to hire him. In Hartmann’s case, no commission composed of Afrikaners or of ex-Nazis or others was involved: Hartmann was hired by Smeath-Jones, the Master of Rhodes University, who saved his career and possibly his life and that of his wife and daughter. Smeath-Jones deserves further investigation. A chemist, he remained at the University of Liverpool after he had obtained his Bachelor of Science degree in 1908 and worked his way up through the ranks until in 1919 he was awarded his Doctorate and appointed Senior Lecturer in Analytical Chemistry. He was appointed Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Cape Town in 1923 and held the post until 1938 when he was elected to the Mastership of Rhodes University College, Grahamstown. Thus, Smeath Jones must have come into contact with and hired Hartmann soon after he became Master.

Unfortunately, our knowledge of Hartmann’s biography is still too sketchy to allow a detailed correlation of the life with the music. After the conference, I spent a morning in the archives of the University of Capetown. I discovered that the beautiful fair copy of “Grahamstown Mass,” the great song of atonement and thanksgiving that Hartmann completed shortly after his arrival in South Africa in the summer of 1939, is dedicated to his wife and daughter (the pencil draft bears no dedication). Was this composition somehow connected with Hartmann’s earlier thoughts of abandoning them to save his career? And then another curious fact: among Hartmann’s large-scale works, the “Grahamstown Mass” was the only one never to be performed. Is this because the forces required were simply too large, or were the biographical associations just too painful?

Regarding the affair that seems to be behind “The Song of the Four Winds,” again I learned only after the conference the following: Hartmann did have an affair with his teacher Franz Schmidt’s daughter Emma, apparently a great beauty, who died from complications of childbirth in 1932 (whose child?). Apparently, Schmidt experienced a spiritual and physical breakdown after her death, but achieved an artistic revival in his Fourth Symphony of 1933 (which he inscribed as “Requiem for my Daughter”) and, especially, in his oratorio “The Seven Seals.” Surely, Hartmann must have heard Schmidt’s Fourth Symphony, premiered in Vienna in 1934. Was he present at the premiere of Schmidt’s oratorio on 15 June 1938? This would have taken place not long after the events described in Orel’s report, which is dated March 31, 1938, i.e., during the very difficult period when Hartmann was desperately trying to leave Austria. Is this affair referred to in “The Song of the Four Winds,” or is it a later affair in South Africa? If it is the earlier affair, are there also musical connections between “The Song of the Four Winds” and the related pieces by Schmidt - in addition to those discussed with Joseph Marx (Hartmann’s other composition teacher), Mahler, Puccini, and Bruckner?

I would be in favor of a publication arising out of the conference. I found the level of the presentations high, and the diverse yet related topics fascinating. People will, of course, have the opportunity to refine and expand their presentations, and perhaps the organizers can contribute an introduction addressing some of the excellent points raised by our colleagues.

Best wishes,

Tim Jackson, Ph.D.
Professor of Music Theory
College of Music
University of North Texas