Ernst Helmuth Flammer: The Tower of Babel

The Tower of Babel

Oratorio in 8 parts (1981/82)
for 3 orchestral groups, 3 choirs, 2 vocal solos (soprano and baritone), speaker, quadrophonic tape and live electronics,
based on texts by Friedrich Schiller, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Wagner, Niccolò Machiavelli and Kurt Tucholsky

For composing in the time-critical subject

»Nothing sensual is sublime, and the more the market
degrades the music to childish fun,
all the more emphatically does she push for her maturity
through spiritualization.«
Immanuel Kant

I.
A subject that is critical of the times only has a supposed topicality understood in the sense of a concept of the present that refers to the immediate moment. Rather, it is relevant at the times and in the places where and whenever conditions are to be found that are similar to the conditions described in this subject or - in the drama - dealt with.

Actuality understood in this way is omnipresent in relation to space and time. If it is really so, then a meta-level of the current is reached, whose philosophical and artistic dimension, according to Hegel, is generally reflected in the spiritual content of philosophical and musical thinking and artistic activity. Musical thinking is by its nature non-conceptual.

II.
The stereotypical objection that by looking at the concept of topicality in a generalized way, one only wants to avoid »taking a position« in social or political terms does not stand up, because artistic activity must not be confused with agitation. Taking a position with artistic means does not mean intervening in concrete daily political events. The artist takes a position solely with the selection and then the development of his subject with his artistic means, with the topicality of his topic related to the moment because he picks it up.

Giving that topicality a meta-level means treating the topic with artistic means in a generalizing and at the same time binding manner. An implicit ambiguity that results from the relationship between music and text is indeed generalizing, but it is omnipresent in its quality of the general and is therefore universally binding to a higher degree. This generally binding nature was lacking if every means of expression was assigned and allocated to a clear purpose. Such an assignment would be closer to a concrete political event or situation, but more political demonstration, more agitation than artistic expression. It requires being very specific and highly binding for the moment in describing a particular momentary situation.

However, with the implicit ambiguity and the associated symbol-forming general validity, the question becomes more urgent, more concrete, more topical, affects us all and thus more binding. The instant liability is therefore very close to the general non-binding nature. The lack of parable and symbolic character results in the loss of meaningfulness, more extensively the content of music and text, that unspeakable and unfathomable that is actually artistic. The art character would be seriously endangered. Therefore, agitprop and so-called "engaged music" lie in the border area of ​​the artistic.

III.
Art cannot agitate, least of all of all arts disembodied music in its non-conceptual nature. It learns its semantics from the context in which it is placed. Art music cannot be political in the sense of "political action through music" without exposing oneself to the danger of the trivial in the sense of misunderstood general understanding, for example via colloquial musical idioms. That would mean nothing else than pandering to every listener in a striking manner, without prompting and stimulating them to reflect.

Theodor W. Adorno chose a vivid image for this, that of the message in a bottle, that message preserved in a small, inconspicuous container. Resting on the seabed, it waits to be washed up somewhere (beach) like flotsam and thus find its recipient who understands. This is intended to show how long the path from absorbing to understanding, to comprehending a work subject can be. It will always be a minority that picks up these signals. It will mean a lot for a musician to start a conversation with these few, even if it's only one. The desire to be able to do this with the majority will probably remain a dream. Sending out flotsam like this is a great blessing for every artist.

IV. What is the purpose of the Tower of Babel?
“Dante first of all explains of his own accord that the one work of building the tower required the diverse activities of man, commanding, designing, cutting stones, transporting them, etc. The heavenly punishment now took the workers, who were so different, with one language understanding of the whole of the gigantic work. From now on, only the specialists within their narrow circle understood each other. The more brilliantly they carried out their speciality, the rougher, the more barbaric their language became. A word that resonates to the modern day... The law of confusion of tongues is powerful. The specialism to overcome this has become the concern of new specialists«, writes the art historian Martin Gosebruch (cf.: Epoch styles - historical fact and change of the scientific concept, journal for art history 44, 1981, p. 9).

One may add that this task is usually left to so-called commissions of experts, set up for this purpose, and is thus relegated to bureaucratic levels and thus to the back burner. In the field of music, such experts are the scientific educators who are supposed to convey the subject of music "didactically" and "curricularly" to our stunted ability to speak. But don't they achieve exactly the opposite with their scientific gibberish, their numerous new creations of empty phrases? To overcome the confusion of language and the resulting speechlessness, they administer new confusion of language as a new medicine!

That is one side of my understanding of the topicality of the »Tower of Babel« topic. The other is that of the confusion of the individual through permanent sensory overload - also composed into my work - and thus his total disorientation in a cold, materialistic environment. The confusion in the form of disorientation will take another upswing with the new cable media (1980), today with digitization and continue their destructive, current work. Man experiences his environment more and more only mediated, as the word "medium" says.

In the shadow of all this, and this is the third page of those confusions and aberrations, specialists, obsessed with megalomania, devise large-scale technological projects, such as nuclear power plants, nuclear weapons, which will enslave man because he will be unable to master that technology and its consequences . The tower will be built, but it will never be finished...

A collective refusal by those responsible around the world to think through the consequences of such actions, and further for the consequences themselves, makes the topic »Tower of Babel« topical across all social systems and orders. While in the past the threat to mankind from his own megalomania was limited to certain cultural groups, today it is global and therefore existential for mankind. Confusion of language gives rise to particular egotism, an obstacle that seems almost insurmountable in forcing our politicians to deal with the core questions that this topic raises ontologically.

V.
From the point of view of the existential and all-encompassing topicality of the “Tower of Babel” topic, it would be inconsistent not to strive for a meta-level artistically in favor of a superficial topical topic of daily politics, not to approach the problem in a generalizing way and yet in a generally binding way by creating a symbolism. I tried this in my work. The musical language means in their plurality, which seem to be unrelated to each other in the sense of language confusion, not understanding each other, all have a common compositional germ cell, both harmonically in two corresponding rows and chords derived from them, as well as rhythmically and in their form of expression .

The multiplicity of chord and musical language means derived from the series increases more and more in the course of the work. In the opposite process, their individual expressive power gradually decreases in favor of ready-made musical statements (composed speechlessness). The compositional material goes through a process of industrialization on the way to its processual destruction (musical language atrophy). The multiplicity of means of expression is integrated into an epic concept in the sense of describing and illuminating the subject from the most varied of perspectives (implicit ambiguity).

While a number of authors wrote about the end of serial music for trend and fashion reasons, the question of meaning and content was always neatly omitted, the treatment of which would have revealed such discussions as fashionable loquacity. Serial working methods are used in Tower of Babel parallel to a process of splitting the text into syllables and their semantic-ambiguous assignments in order to make the ambiguity of diverse layers of meaning implied in the text not necessarily fully understandable at the moment of listening, but to make it tangible.

The most appropriate compositional procedure for the selective, broken treatment of the text is the strictly serial treatment of rhythm, dynamics and harmony as the equivalent of sterilized speechlessness. The emphatic listening impression conveyed to the listener has its deeper musical expressive content, which is artistically intended, but which unbiased listening prohibits from verbalizing.

The electronic music in Tower of Babel is closely related to the subject, their use is not unrelated, their purpose is not merely the playful and entertaining use of a medium that is new to many, as is often the case with abstract work titles such as »Workshop 27« or other seemingly arbitrary titles.

The fact that the choice of means obeys an order inherent in the music and the text as well as the subject, and this is obvious and musically justifiable, makes them binding and not arbitrary. The content of a musical work justifies its use, its topicality in hindsight. They do not derive their justification from themselves, but from the context in which they stand. Seen in this way, serial thinking and other compositional methods that were hastily declared dead are becoming more and more topical, even if they seem to have lost their topicality as a musical end in themselves. The Tower of Babel So by no means does he want to push technical compositional innovation forward, at best he occasionally placed compositional means in new contexts at the time.

The text, from Schiller's idealistic thinking via Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Wagner to Machiavelli's philosophy of violence, follows a conception of a spiritual Tower of Babel. The harsh juxtaposition of such different minds as Schiller and Nietzsche can also be understood as a piece of composed confusion of language. On the other hand, there is music that, in its deliberate discrepancy, even distance from the text, invites you to make your own interpretations independently of the text. Certainly the sound of individual musical language idioms will provide text interpretations in the work passages of the historically conditioned general comprehensibility described above, as intended by the composer. But these places are just islands in the factory. The text is sometimes set to music, i.e. illustrated, sometimes treated with comments, distanced from the music. The constant change of such dramaturgical means gives them the desired ability to speak, the stubborn retention of a means would be dull and schematic.

The Oratory The Tower of Babel was a composition commissioned for the 25th anniversary of the »Days of New Music Hanover«, 1983. The oratorio is dedicated to all those who had to lose their lives in the fight for freedom and justice and a humane coexistence; all the fearless who go their way upright and straightforward, accepting serious personal disadvantages; for Klaus Bernbacher.

Ernest Helmuth Flammer
(Freiburg, January 2, 1983, rev. Munich, April 7, 2020)

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