The Eldritch Evola & Others

by James O'Meara

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  Wagner famously made the same charge of “unearned effects” against Meyerbeer in Part One of his Opera and Drama of 1851.

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  Malone Dies in Three Novels (NY: Grove Press, 1991), p. 174.

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  See “I’ll Have a White Rock, Please: Implicit Whiteness, Aryan Futurism, and the Godlike Genius of Scott Walker” in The Homo and the Negro and “Light Entertainment: The (Implicitly) White Music of Scott Walker,” chapter 12, below.

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  Another early Traditionalist, Marco Pallis, though also not averse to the charms of classical music—see his essay “The Metaphysics of Musical Counterpoint” in Studies in Comparative Religion, Vol. 10, No. 2. (Spring, 1976)—was a pioneer in the movement to promote authentic or historically accurate performances of the classical and pre-Bach repertoire, the effect of which was to free us from over a century of romantic—i.e., Judaic—nonsense about sweaty mystical conductors and swooning fiddle virtuosos, filling every performance with enough portamento for a klezmer band.

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  See Greg Johnson’s interview with me, reprinted in The Homo and the Negro.

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  And how appropriate, that my critics should be exactly the sort that, misinterpreting Nietzsche’s advice to “philosophize with a hammer,” by which he meant “the sounding out of idols . . . , which are here touched with a hammer as with a tuning fork: there are no idols that are older, more assured, more puffed-up—and none more hollow [than Wagner]”—proceed, basing themselves on an understanding of Norse mythology provided by Judaic comic books, to come to his defense, by dreaming of growing great beards and hurling Thor’s hammer at me . . . from their parents’ basements.

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  See, for example, Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth_Century Intellectual and Political Movements (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1998), ch. 2, regarding Boasian anthropology as a cult.

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  See Norman Lebrecht’s The Life and Death of Classical Music (New York: Doubleday, 2007).

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  Like Socrates, Evola was charged for “corrupting the youth,” and like Socrates in the Apology, Evola issued an Autodifesa (self-defense statement). For his part, Harry Partch observed that “the deliberate beguiling of youth into the academic ‘modern idiom’ is worse than an assault on the street. Both are malevolent, but the second is honest” (Gilmore, p. 259).

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  “You have to be black, homosexual and a woman to work at the BBC,” http://keighleyreality.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=genb

  &action=display&thread=418.

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  Brian Timothy Harlan, One Voice: A Reconciliation of Harry Partch’s Disparate Theories (USC PhD. Dissertation, 2007), p. 37. Harlan notes on p. 33 that in the 16th century “Pope Gregory XIII proposed a calendar reform that would immediately eliminate ten days from the year 1582. For many, the reaction to this temperament of time was similar to the reaction to the temperament of tone. In both cases it was viewed as being against the natural order, or against God’s plan.”

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  To behold all the wonders of sound otherwise available, consult, if you can find it, Daniélou ‘s Tableau Comparatif des Intervalles Musicaux (Publications de l’Institut français d’indologie, No. 8, 1958), which is “simply a massive table of musical intervals, nothing more. It has 3-limit, 5-limit, 7-limit, and possibly 11-limit ratios. It has ten times as many intervals as Partch’s and Helmholtz’s lists combined, including all 17 fifths of the Arabic system” (http://launch.groups. yahoo.com/group/tuning/message/43210).

  One thinks of the flat-footed way “natural” is invoked when human sexuality is discussed on the Right, even the so-called “alt-Right,” as if the customs of Judaic Bedouin imposed on the West were still regarded as self-evidently God-given. See The Origins and Role of Same-Sex Relations in Human Societies (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2009) by James Neill or Homosexuality and Civilization (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003) by Louis Crompton. As Daniélou points out in a different context, to posit opposing principles, including Male and Female, ipso facto evokes indefinite degrees in between, which Hindu mythology acknowledges with its pantheon of sexually various gods. See my discussion of this in “Homosexuality, ‘Traditionalism,’ and Really-Existing Tradition” in The Homo and the Negro.

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  http://www.kylegann.com/

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  Here, however, an immediate problem arises. Musicians, and especially so called “musicologists,” are apt to deny exactly this point, insisting on some mystical essence to their art. It’s as if painters insisted that colors had nothing to do with the spectrum. This kind of bourgeois romanticism is what led Partch to abandon musical “training” in favor of self-education via the public library, where happily he ran across Helmholtz’s On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music (New York: Longmans, Green, 1912) (downloadable from Google Books), a pioneering work that explains all this quite scientifically.

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  Whether the sounds are simultaneous or in sequence is irrelevant; in the first we have a chord, the method of choice in the West, in the other a mode, and the ear is required to make the mathematical connection by memory. Thus the seemingly endless melodies of Arab, Indian, or basically almost any “non-Western” music.

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  Or, just read Christopher Small’s Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1998), p. 128, where he kindly lays it all out for you.

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  As Patsy’s doctor suggests: “Just grab her by the scalp, shake her up and down a bit, and chop off the slack.” AbFab, Season One, “Hospital.”

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  As we will see, the ET System will swamp authentic White folk music, but during the so-called Folk Revival Pete Seeger hit the nail squarely on the head: “We were waist deep in the Big Muddy / And the big fool said to push on”(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waist_ Deep_in_the_Big_Muddy).

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  “In order to be able to play music that used complex chord progressions, the musicians of the time needed either to build keyboards with lots of split keys [to allow them to play either a G-sharp or an A-flat, for example, since those two notes did not have the same pitch] (which would have been impractical to play) or to have instruments built with compromise tuning systems that would sound good no matter what chord they played. That is, the tuning system would have to fudge a little here and there. One of the pitches would be raised slightly, another lowered slightly. In such a system, some of the chords would sound a little less pure than they had before, but none of them would sound too bad” (http://www.musicwords.net /musictech/justtutor/justtutor3.htm).

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  “A melody written in the key of C sounds the same as a melody written in the key of D, and so on. By the same token, every key sounds more or less the same, and the distinct characters of different modes are lost, along with their expressive potential” (http://musicmavericks.publicradio.org/features/essay_justintonation.html).

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  From the Season One’s episode 12, to be followed by one entitled, interestingly, “The Wheel.” I’ll accept the role of weaselly Campbell for the greater good, but although Bert professes not to care, there are interesting parallels between him and Partch. Men of roughly the same generation, both share the same eccentric personality, alternatively endearingly weird and infuriatingly rude, as well as a penchant for goatees. Above all, both are Japanophiles, without betraying the slightest “spiritual” interests. Bert concludes with “The Japanese have a saying. A man is whatever room he is in.”

  Having just compared the removal of the comma with circumcision, we can even note Bert’s own secret, known only to Roger and later Don, namely his “botched orchiectomy,” a point that we w
ill also learn links him with Partch.

  Even more importantly, Bert’s predilection for Ayn Rand will also link him to Partch. The parallels between Partch and that icon of the Right, Howard Roark, are I think striking. While Partch quit music school rather than being expelled like Roark, both clearly felt contempt for the triviality and irrelevance of their courses and instructors. Partch’s “kind of adolescent auto da fé” of his earlier, conventional works in a potbelly stove recalls the similar scene where Roark burns all the remaining work of his mentor, Henry Cameron. Both Roark and Partch then drop out of respectable society, supporting themselves with manual labor and even, in Partch’s case, riding the rails as a hobo. (A Mad Men episode earlier in Season One explored “The Hobo Code.”) Roark, however, is more like Wagner in his ability to combine individualism and idiosyncrasy with successfully seeking patronage. While Partch was fairly openly homosexual, Roark, though officially straight, has sometimes struck his readers as far more deeply and significantly involved with Gayle [!] Wynand than with Dominique. And while it’s quite easy to imagine Partch delivering the expelled Roark’s speech about standing at the front of no tradition, and with more justification—Roark’s work, at least as seen in the film, seems to easily fit the real-life International Style that goes so well with globalized Equal Temperament—Partch in fact realized, like the Traditionalists in religion, that what was needed was not an impossible, Promethean independence but rather a synoptic grasp of all available traditions, from the Greeks to the Plains Indians, so as to reach the principles behind them and then find a way to express them anew.

  Without drifting too far off the subject, one could also imagine Partch as a musical John Galt—Rand’s actual composer character is a recognizable pedestrian Romantic of the sort Partch would have despised, reflecting Rand’s own middlebrow tastes—who drops out of the system and wanders around, hobo-like, seeking converts to create a new musical utopia.

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  “That’s metaphysically absurd. How can I know what you hear?”—Firesign Theatre, Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers.

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  Daniélou, Music and the Power of Sound, p. 8.

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  “Harry Partch: America’s first Microtonal Composer” by Marcus Wolf, http://marcjwolf.com/articles/harry-partch-america-s-first-microtonal-composer/.

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  “You see? YOU SEE?? Your stupid minds! Stupid! STUPID!!!”—Plan Nine from Outer Space.

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  I discuss James and Guénon elsewhere in this volume in “The Corner at the Center of the World,” This was also Guénon’s fundamental objection to the New Agey notions of “reincarnation,” an argument accepted by Evola, Coomaraswamy, and others. The being, as he traverses the possibilities of manifestation at any particular degree, eventually exhausts them all and reaches the center but at the next higher degree, there being no reason for a repetition, within Infinite Possibilities, of possibilities that have already been realized. It should come as no surprise that reincarnation was a favorite doctrine of . . . Pythagoras. Thus do we see that not only are music and mathematics related, but all three, music, math, and metaphysics, are, as the Mediaevals would say, convertible.

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  Like spoken language before Babel, the music of different cultures was once mutually understandable, at least in principle; today, Westerners gape in incomprehension at funny “Oriental” sounding music; as we shall see, even Partch’s work would be called “Oriental-sounding.”

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  Such as the famous Tristan Chord that Bryan Magee’s book takes its name from.

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  Wolf, “Harry Partch: America’s first Microtonal Composer.” As we’ll see, Partch will eschew abstraction in favor what he’ll call “corporeality,” and indeed devise his own intonation and instruments.

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  Musicking, p. 129; the allusion, of course, is to Baron Evola’s Ride the Tiger.

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  Quoted in http://alternativeright.com/altright-archive/main/ the-magazine/superpowers.

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  See Understanding Toscanini: How He Became an American Culture-God and Helped Create a New Audience for Old Music by Joseph Horowitz (New York: Knopf, 1987) and Sam Lipman’s hostile review in The New Criterion for May 1989. One might even draw a parallel to sports, where, as Steve Sailer has speculated, European Right-wing populism has survived by its roots in local football clubs, while American sport has been a top-down affair of national universities and big corporations; see “The Real Threat to British Elites,” http://takimag.com/article/the_real_threat_to_british_elites_steve_sailer%20/%20axzz2VLoEHu6Z.

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  This 19th-century Germanic migration is to be distinguished from the earlier migration of dissident Protestants such as the Amish and Mennonites, who not only isolated themselves from American (Englisher) culture, but also had already seceded from the degeneration of their own culture in the post-Buxtehude dégringolade, preserving earlier, truly Aryan folk musical systems. There is more Traditional Aryan spirit in an Amish harvest song than in the entire Ring Cycle. Or consider the music lovingly collected by Harry Smith and published as the multi-record set Anthology of American Folk Music, which kicked off the “folk revival” (“folk,” now there’s a word the Right should like!) by reintroducing recordings of popular musical styles that had disappeared when, due to the Depression, small record companies went bankrupt and only money-making urban “big bands” (broadcasting from atop swank hotels) or opera houses subsidized by robber barons could survive. One could say that the spirit of Bill Kauffman’s Ain’t My America. The Long, Noble History of Antiwar Conservatism and Middle-American Anti-Imperialism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008) at least chimes with Greil Marcus’s history of Dylan’s “invisible republic,” The Old, Weird America (revised paperback edition under that title) (New York: Picador, 2011). Indeed, the rule of the ET system over what used to be the people’s music is rather similar to the New Liberalism in which the PRISM system of surveillance is deemed A-OK because it’s been identified with . . . America, the country itself. Once more we see how ET/globalization/ Neo-con-Neo-Liberalism forms a nice tight circle.

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  Consider, giving credit where credit is due, Wagner’s famous evocation of the Rhine with only a series of figurations of the chord of E flat major

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  See especially Chapter One, “Metaphysical Correspondences.”

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  Cited by M. Courant, “Essai sur la musique classique des Chinois,” Dictionnaire du Conservatoire, pp. 206–7.

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  “The Limo,” http://www.seinfeldscripts.com/TheLimo.html.

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  As I’ve said in “I’ll Have a White Rock Please,” Varg Virkernes, than whom no one is whiter, more Activist, or more Metal, has shown us the way to what I call Blackened New Age. See the Homo and the Negro.

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  Cover blurb for Thomas McGeary, ed., Bitter Music: Collected Journals, Essays, Introductions, and Librettos (Champaign, Il.: University of Illinois Press, 2000).

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  Ironically, as Daniélou points out, it is precisely the equally tempered orthodoxy of today, in which even musicians—especially musicians—have never heard a truly consonant chord, which prevents us from appreciating exactly how revolutionary Wagner’s dissonances were. Or, indeed, any pre-20th Century music. Kyle Gann, after savaging ET, adds that: “Equal temperament—the bland, equal spacing of the 12 pitches of the octave—is pretty much a 20th-century phenomenon. It was known about in Europe as early as the early 17th century, and in China much earlier. But it wasn’t used, because the consensus was that it sounded awful: out of tune and characterless. During the 19th century (for reasons we’ll discuss later), keyboard tuning drifted closer and closer to equal temperament over the protest of many of the more sensitive musicians. Not until 1917 was a method devise
d for tuning exact equal temperament. [. . .] Nineteenth-century musicians used to argue about what colors the various keys represented; whether Eb major was gold, for example, and D major red. Twentieth-century musicians have dismissed such arguments as sentimental nonsense, but when you play 19th-century music in well temperament, you begin to hear the differences of color. Is it far-fetched to suggest that Mozart and Beethoven wrote keyboard music with certain key-colors in mind, and that we miss subtle but pervasive qualities in the music when we homogenize it into equal temperament? (http://www.kylegann.com/histune.html).

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  President John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address.

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  Tod Browning, Freaks.

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  Joan Osborne, “One of Us.”

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  “Partch projected his self-image through his works.” From the “Abstract” of the appropriately named dissertation, One Voice: A Reconciliation of Harry Partch’s Disparate Theories by Brian Timothy Harlan, available on Google Books.