[107110] in Cypherpunks
Serialism
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (ash@autoloop.com)
Fri Jan 1 18:09:23 1999
From: ash@autoloop.com
Date: Fri, 1 Jan 1999 17:52:30 -0500 (EST)
To: spooth@qth.net, cryptography@c2.net, cypherpunks@toad.com
Reply-To: ash@autoloop.com
SERIALISM EXPOSED!
Composer Webern was Double Agent for Nazis
By Heinrich Kincaid
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 music 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 Schonberg 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
musical world. At the time the us Army reported that the killing was
"a mistake", and that in stepping onto the street at night to smoke a
cigarette Webern was violating a strict curfew rule.
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 Joseph Goebbels, admitted at age eighty-seven that the
Nazis secretly were 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 Schonberg, 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.
Schonberg 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."
