Echo Taps

The world seems a perfect conflagration today.

Maybe it's becuase I feel a bit feverish; influenza has made a big comeback here in temperate Northeast Texas.

Perhaps I'm still brooding over the last book I reviewed, Jared Diamond's Collapse. "Current events" as reported only tell us what we already know about the human race's past, its unchanging roil. But what is our future is already here, and we just do not recognize it?

Or maybe my mood is unduly influenced by my current listening selection: Alvin Curran's radio symphonia / commemoration of Kristallnacht, Crystal Psalms. The second movement has just begun, opening with the sound of jackhammers, breaking glass, choruses in anguish, and, now, a klezmer ensemble (accordion, clarinet, trumpet) playing piercing, echoing tones. Like musicians that have taken several blows to the head, they wobble around the mix wobbling around, and also suddenly able to make their instruments expresses how the world sounds to them in their pain and confusion. (Later, carrion birds will gather cackle greedily; another flock of tearing shards.)

So I am looking at Bagatellen "home", thinking to myself that I need to add new content to the site, keep the front page fresh. The virtue in doing and all that. I suppose I could write about the Harold Arlen centennial, I think to myself. I could get into how his life was so Jazz Singer-esque, how the enduring popularity of his blues-tinged songs contributes to the strange dialogue black and white Americans conduct through their shared, i.e., national, popular culture. About how Arlen was not the rah-rah vulgarian Irving Berlin was, or a perfume merchant like Gershwin, but an honest-to-goodness morose romantic -- someone who, though his most famous songs sported lyrics about rainbows and sunshine, preferred the darkness. Blah blah blah. It will be mentioned on the nightly network news, former Dukes of Hazzard star Tom Wopat has even recorded an Arlen tribute record in conjunction with this media event, who cares?

"Living with sound." I've said, maybe not publicly but at least in correspondence, that this is the subject I'm interested in exploring through Bagatellen. To the extent that there are days like today when I want to put music aside.

Well, at least mornings when I think that is what I want. Because here is a story, "ripped from the headlines", that says a great deal about the role of music in the here and now.

Stretched across 41 miles between two national cemeteries in rural western New York, hundreds of horn players will play a cascading arrangement of taps on Armed Forces Day on May 21

What "finality" does this tune really singal? Brief respite from the raging of conflict, even if you multiply that pause by miliions and millions ("If we have a bugler every 10th of a mile, or 410 buglers, the rate of sound traveling through the valley would be 60 miles an hour and last 41 minutes."), does not end the war. Is it that in death only is the veteran freed from his warrior's obligations? Is the sorrow the music is meant to inspire as well as express really less one associated with grief and more about remorse over the terrible actions soldiers are commanded to take upon themselves? Or is taps played more for the benefit of the survivors, the melody sweetening the bitterness of being left with their soldier's memories? Does the digital really have no place in our rituals? If this were a Dave Douglas initiative (see his Mountain Passages), would it be easier to accept the political overtones with which it resonates? Is honor so capable of controlling the fires that rage as soon as we open our hearts? American children may not say "I love you" to their parents every day, but they do make their Pledge of Allegiance without fail.

Is there stillness in mourning? I'm thinking, that, just as this slowly pealing version of taps would probably only be beautiful if you accidentally stumbled into it, say, on a country drive undertaken in search of other pleasures, if you had no idea what it meant or why it happened, similarly woe may quiet us only if it surprises us. Yet I also know that, for my own peace of mind, I can't keep relying on such stunning fortuities.

~ Joe Milazzo