Some words are in order here about this compilation which puts together both phases of the Musicuratum project: the texts produced during its three-year run in Amsterdam, beginning in the summer of 2012, excepting only a few brief ephemeral notices, mainly technical remarks pertaining to the website itself or to the playlists offered on its channels elsewhere, along with those written from the middle of 2022 onwards in Madrid. Each of the two sets was already assembled into a pair of files in the PDF format, and offered in that form for perusal (from the website they may be downloaded at the reader’s convenience). So why have I undertaken to weld them together; and at this point long afterwards? – for how can I avoid the thought that a dubious quotient of self-display would suffuse the resulting anthology?
Setting to one side the substantive connections between the earlier and the later texts, though these linkages are a matter which to me, after having revisited all of them (though while compiling them I have refrained from making revisions to any), looks and sounds rather clear, since any such assessment most seemly would remain a prerogative of other readers – as a clarification, I’ll point to the most exterior form of the thing, this book’s graphic presentation. Here I’ve aimed at a visual profile along the lines of what at the website’s outset, years ago, I always hoped to achieve but never could, given my lack of expertise and also the vagaries of the computer technology. How many were the instances of frustration whenever it happened that some pleasing tuning of the website format (what in the jargon is called a “theme”), arrived at only with painstaking effort on my part which properly should have gone to the raison d’être of the whole undertaking, namely, music, vanished not even a week after its debut, overtaken by otherwise impalpable “improvements” of the sort that are made nearly continuously “in the background” to the systems’ code, and altering the way the website was displayed in the various Internet browsers. (Which, as a further irritant, can diverge just enough from one another that small visual differences become noticeable even to eyes not peeled for them.) Hard to forget the squandering those pursuits brought about; imagine then how satisfying it felt when the idea occurred to me some weeks ago to attempt in a less variable medium what the flux of the virtual realm could not give! Much of the earlier wastage might prove good for something, after all, and so what earlier soon came to seem akin to the proverbial perpetual re-rolling of a stone up a hill, could in the here and now be made other than it was, bringing about an unforeseen change if not actually a rectification of the time lost. A graphic plan which stood elusively beyond realisation on the screen, could take shape on the page. And, to a degree, retro-activity might possibly contribute to draw more to the fore elements of the design that back then were envisioned only inchoately; by an after-adjustment of memory rendering items explicit whose existence in the first conception had been at most latent. Hence, that which actually I had sought in vain to realise, now at last I recognised as having been what I did then want to do. Some fabulation enters into this moment of retrospective disclosure, granted, but some veracity too, and for what more could anyone really hope?
Be that as it may. – By a new analogue a long-standing intention could take tangible shape. The format in which this might be done, would be a virtual book: but of a rather unusual sort. Peculiar reading habits formed in the long encounter with websites of various grades of quality, demanded to be acknowledged somehow, since the first presentation of the texts on the computer screen I did not wish to efface entirely: hence, while opting for the quite common practice in the computer realm of white type on a black ground, which only rarely is granted a counterpart on the printed page, in addition the behaviours induced by very long vertical columns of text (sometimes so long that one positively begins to wait for the end), and most prominently the impatient (if not inattentive) scrolling up and down, were not simply to be disregarded. But what arrangement of stationary elements could possibly suggest, or better, indicate that restive freneticism? – Well, why not invert the usual order and place such bits as footnotes, incidental remarks, and references above the blocks of text under which they generally reside? Then some modicum of the nervous restlessness known from time spent on the computers and similar devices, might be, not conveyed via the virtual page – for I should very much like to see others extricated from such bad habits! – but rather, this a quite different aim, exhibited as such. If this operation in fact is possible, the seductive inclination the thing encompasses, will be identified in its own right, as a trait someone might find worthwhile to think about, at least a little, therewith neutering it as best one can.
By placing such seemingly minor items at the top of the page the overall design may suggest softly that their importance is actually greater than it might otherwise seem, and they do often constitute the actual starting-point of the writing to which at first glance mere attachments bind them, whether as adjuncts or disjecta. From such anchors the cloth of the text does then fall, though preferably it descends without too great a weight. (Certainly I hope the themes of thought in this compilation do not come across like a curtain or a veil.) Indeed the standard format of books could be extended, even augmented if practices common amongst today’s websites are taken, cautiously, as sources for renewing the bibliopossibilities. Thus from this assistance a finer if not deeper appreciation of the garments of a text might possibly occur to some readers: intuition in retrospect how sequentially its outfit has been put together, and perhaps too, yet more basically, how the threads it’s made of were spun. (À propos this notion of “clothing,” it is no aberrant metaphor, for the very terms may be heard to suggest that a naked text would be an impossibility, these being ni choses ni mots qui vont très bien ensemble.)
So the visual wrapping I’ve opted for with this compilation, a hybrid of a street placard and an art-catalogue, not without some acceptance of the one’s ephemerality and the other’s modishness, could perhaps prompt readers in another direction, by way of contrast, prompting them consider it under a more enduring aspect – at least those readers who do notice how contrary qualities can sometimes indicate one another.
Under this hybrid of design there’s no need to put a caption or a date: optically the graphic affiliations should be legible enough on their own. Suffice it to note that visual “references” higher, middle, and lower are mixed up, when for instance the colour palettes and fields of a few fine works of art are put together with the graphics of protest movements of decades past and the graphic elements of by now ancient album covers or other paraphernalia, in combinations evincing a bit of jostling and friction, deliberately so, yet (so I hope) without detracting from the main purpose. The overall Gestalt of these pages ought to remain conducive to the requirement of legibility. – From the several graphic missteps made during the first years of the website, I should like to have learned a thing or two. Whether in fact I have, being no more than an amateur in design, is not really for me to say.
Giving items such as footnotes, the sorts of things which often are left to the proverbial criticism of the mice, pride of place at the top of the page, an inversion of common practice and perhaps even suggestive of some revolt... – though minor and quite other than technology’s slave-uprising (ein Sklavenaufstand der Technik) for which already nearly a hundred years ago it was supposed warfare to come would furnish the occasion* – or aligning some kinds of text to the right-hand side, or certain other design choices, might prompt readers to consider anew their rapport with the text before them on the page; but it could simply prove tiresome instead to those essential organs, readers’ eyes, replicating in this one of the most unfortunate results of too prolonged an exposure to even the better-devised of today’s websites, rather than providing tired vision a chance to recuperate. Granted. Yet this possibility could itself be a starting-point for other reflections, precipitating the idea that some art-œuvres in times past which seem very much alive now, did envision a comparable dilemma and sought to offer a good answer to it. Here I think first and foremost of the paintings for which Mark Rothko is known, the entirely abstract vertical arrangements of rectangular fields of colour one above the other: in their sheer abstractness the canvases are indices of the blurry vision which eyes through overuse or misuse have inflicted on themselves, while also offering to the very same eyes something to look at that might give them, as it were, breathing-room enough that they could rest for a while and thereby recover a sharper capacity again. Of course these paintings cannot possibly guarantee that this refreshing of sight (in the cases where it is needful after the damage done to itself) will take place, nor even that this opportunity as such will not be overlooked and go unrecognised; but for those with whom this rapport is established, a visual interlude counteracts the habits which abet their self-depletion, and by this interruption permitting some convalescence to occur, an intermission of ἀποκατάστασις for weary eyes. – Guiding this offering is, it seems, an expectation that the partaking in it still could do them good.
* Walter Benjamin, “Theorien des deutschen Faschismus”
Why, having reflected on this quasi-medicinal dimension bodied forth by works of art on the wall, should not the pages of a book attempt something comparable, especially since readers are most unlikely to forget the condition into which organs of sight have cast themselves by lengthy stretches of time spent peering at computer screens?
Other reservations, however, come into play at just this point. Too narrow a focus on the disposition of elements on a page, hardly evades the suspicion that this is a pastime which has succeeded and thus substitutes for a broader and more adequate engagement with the larger questions of the day (prominent among them the current arrangements of political life). This suspicion, too, is by no means new, and actually a quite incisive example of the idea is more than a century old: just before the First World War it was addressed with some depth in a lesser-known essay by Karl Kraus, suggestively or by implication, as so often with him.
Conditions in his day, he wrote – though where precisely? evidently far beyond the Vienna he knew best – had grown so aberrant and strange that for imaginative satire as one remembered it from earlier literary eras there was no longer any space, nor even need. Articles in the daily press, to the extent that they contained reportage, already were expressions of times that in effect satirised themselves to a superlative degree, with a humour which once heard and understood delivered the sharpest bite. What then was the task which remained for those authors who would have distinguished themselves as satirical inventors, had they lived in earlier periods? This most cutting of satirists’ answer? Let them devise a fitting graphic arrangement for the report about the day’s goings-on, that it could most efficaciously do its work vis-à-vis its readers. Only in this effort could the artistry of satire distinguish itself henceforth, and indeed as a minor mode of action. For, put into an efficacious format on the page, the style of satire would illustrate what the point of the endeavour still could be: by pointing out to the readers what they might do about the report it delivered to them, opening their eyes to it as needed, in those instances where they failed to see what they were reading was actually about. “Ihre höchste Stilleistung ist die graphische Anordnung,” he insisted. (At the end a play on words is featured, one quite difficult if not impossible to translate out of the German well; a small circumlocution may be unavoidable.) Satire’s highest achievement of style is its graphic arrangement, where this immediately legible arrangement is itself already an ordinance, that is, an encapsulated instruction concerning the actions to take in response to its report (Bericht). Hence satire ought to be an invitation, indeed a prelude to taking action. But the turn to the latter most often remained in abeyance! – indeed, how else but by long stretches of general inaction could conditions have devolved to the point they had reached, in that last year of peace? That was the problem in the face of which he, as satirist, virtually declared his own nullity.
If the art of satire ran headlong into the wall of the public’s great indifference, when all was said and done, this collision formed not the least part of the satire the times aimed inadvertently against themselves.
The enormity of this, in a word, objective satire, that is, satires on a great scale mounted not by individuals but by their circumstances against themselves, contre elles-mêmes – was an impasse met with by no means solely in the Vienna of those years, or in Berlin: it also beset Paris and London. In several locales, then, what remained for any satirist to do whose productions were as decidedly subjective, being of his own creation in the usual sense of the term? Nearly nothing, apart from relatively minor tinkering with the typography and the other graphic aspects in the presentation of a report (Bericht). Under current conditions, inventive satire has no further role to play, here below (die erfindende Satire hat hienieden nichts mehr zu suchen).* Implicit in its reliance on the German lexicon itself was that judgement’s unstated axiom: namely, so reduced has satire’s capacity gotten to rectify that which it in earlier periods would have satirised and now instead must do no more nor less than report on. Henceforth the satirist’s hopes had to centre on the possibility that when lent the right kind of graphic presentation, a report (Bericht) still might push some readers to the actions required for its correction or rectification (Berichtigung).
* Karl Kraus, “Blendwerk der Hölle”
At least for those who love language or the language on its own behalf, the nearness this one posits between the report, “der Bericht,” and the rectification, “die Berichtigung,” is thought-provoking in itself. Do the two things diverge further from one another in reality, while approaching one another more closely as concepts? If this is so, it is a curious item which calls attention to itself in its own right, as being itself a small piece of irony or even a miniature satire, an occurrence in any case deserving of further reflection.
Painstaking attention to the smaller, and especially the smallest elements of language in its graphic expression, could deliver sharper or the sharpest of satirical bites, vis-à-vis those very large things, the present circumstances. For example, such typographical things as the full stops, when the right sort of time is bestowed on them, might convey sotto voce some notion of how events seemingly so inexorable and inevitable might nonetheless be brought to . . . – or at least interrupted for a while. Wielded graphically with the finesse a consummate satirist could still muster, bits of punctuation may speak in the mode of disturbances they induce in otherwise automatic processes, setting them albeit slightly into disarray and disorder, each thus a little Švejk of the printed word which separately interject small satires on the page somewhat as their namesake would manage to do during roughly the same period, showing himself on his travels artfully/artlessly able to arrest the course of things, by his active passivity again and again putting it into check.
Less than twenty years later – as per a rather well-known anecdote – Kraus was asked about his penchant for spending time on the seemingly most minute elements of written language, the marks of punctuation, at a moment when war was sweeping over the wider world, early on during Japan’s invasion of China, in 1932. He did not exactly agree with the reproach as such, and actually he turned it around. Carelessness with regard especially to what “everyone” is prone to disparage, the right of even these small marks each to the proper place, what another writer somewhat younger than he might perhaps have called “a room of its own,” when such neglect takes hold as a habit amongst too many, then a more percipient observer may well wonder how distant the worst events will be. That was in substance his rejoinder. Had those on whom an obligation in such matters rests always taken care that the punctuation marks are set where they ought to be, then Shanghai would not now be burning (hätten die Leute, die dazu verpflichtet sind, immer darauf geachtet, daß die Beistriche am richtigen Platz stehen, so würde Shanghai nicht brennen).* – Nearly a century later, his statement could be spun out in a number of directions; but not simply the remark alone, rather the whole exchange he thus capped off, does invite one to pause. About that conversation I simply wish to suggest that it too, in its backhanded admission of the relative powerlessness of subjective satire, reverberates with the objective kind which those times so often emitted against themselves.
* Ernst Krenek, paraphrasing Kraus, as quoted in Werner Kraft,
“Karl Kraus und die Sprache” (or Karl Kraus, ch. v, ii, 1)
– for their relations, consult Hans Weigel, Karl Kraus oder Die Macht der Ohnmacht,
esp. “Die Journaille,” and Jens Malte Fischer, “Der Unmusikalische und sein Komponist”
Peculiar compression of the horizons of one’s more active concerns! – a gradual narrowing of them down from the age’s large occurrences and their circumstances to the arrangements of the elements of written language as printed on the page, whereby one might even conclude that graphic design as such becomes weightier, having come to substitute for an earlier, more direct awareness of the events of political life, if not involvement in them. And yet, on further reflection, this transition does not appear to be so singular. Rather it is a concentration which seems to run parallel with the development in one foremost painter’s œuvre. For here I am moved to think of how the young Mondrian’s works, where the figures as represented already began to adumbrate geometric shapes, were soon enough succeeded by the paintings everyone knows wherein apart from the bold colours there are only arrangements of geometry. – Also with this paring-down of painterly means, an artist’s obsessive embrace of form in a progression towards the domain of graphic design, I do notice at work an objective satire launched upon themselves by the times. Thus in this connection, the very titles of his later paintings begin to exude a quite pointed sense of humour (which would be not entirely the artist’s own).
Rather closely linked to the gradual compression, in Piet Mondrian’s case, is the sheer regularity of the Netherlandish terrain, itself to a considerable degree the result of human effort along with very careful planning, all of it together a prime instance of concerted action over long stretches of historical time. Perhaps not simply figuratively speaking, in the background of his late canvases there is an idea or a recollection of the geometric arrangements of the Dutch landscape, the angularity of its built topography, the checkerboard of fields, brighter colours, and canals that is so noticeable throughout, especially when viewed from above, a vantage which can readily inspire reflections à la the Ruysdaels, in lines of poetry too that need not even be written in Dutch –
Braunes, braunes, braunes Wasser
fliesst quadratisch um die Wiesen
in Kanälen: Zaun und Straße;
stille liegt die Welt.*
Angular regularity in the country and its way of life one may well bewonder in its highest expressions, notably in the incomparable works of painting housed, at least for the time being, in the country’s numerous museums, for in the shape of those bodies of work it truly shows itself as unique. Yet the predilection for quasi-graphical arrangement also is marked in the inner embrace of both state and society, an inward inclination which (as it seems to me) is quite widespread there, whether or not people will admit to it. Query them, if only imaginarily, in a thought-experiment: what kind of mental image do those two concepts when heard directly call to mind? – and would they not probably reply, some geometric shape or set thereof. In other words, a more abstract or schematic distillate of the terrain itself, that composite built up so rationally, in allotments which they know like the back of their own hands. Then, from this inward agreement, there flows, indeed not very noisily, some acceptance of or at least acquiescence to the existence of regulations formal and informal, stemming from both the state and from society.
* from a poem in Hannah Arendt’s letter to Heinrich Blücher,
written on a visit to the Netherlands, October 9, 1956
Surroundings like theirs, will tend to preclude the consistent espousal of the notion that both the society and the state represent necessary evils – and this in the best conceivable case! Recognition that these two entities are powers whose reach anyone does well to minimise as far as possible: in Dutch environs it cannot really find a berth. Earnest anarchism, even in the ameliorated dosage of that very awareness of what a monster the society and the state each is, one hardly can imagine sustaining itself well in a locale like the Netherlands. Quickly it would lapse into the type of skeptical attitude which, in a minor paradox, someone might maintain with quixotic tenacity. On the other hand, found there all too often, alas, are the loquacities of loose talk about “anti-authoritarianism” and other postures of radicality in words alone, the verbal games, of poor ludic quality, indulged in by mediocrities who deem themselves smart when, for example, they play off society against the state or the reverse. – Annoying they can be, but such pastimes go beyond the merely innocuous, for instead they appear as though they are, well, designed to shift concern away from the times’ great problem, the melding step by step of the worst bits of society and of the state into formations that, should the advance towards them continue, soon will inundate all life, in wave after wave of total rule, and even if such a thing ever then recedes, the waters left behind will be all the lower and murkier (um so seichter und trüber wird das Wasser), hardly more than the mire of new bureaucracies (der Schlamm einer neuen Bürokratie).* – Prospects like these would, in a better case, serve to concentrate more minds today; but the very fact that conditions have progressed so far as they have, already should help dispel people’s fantasies on this point.
* Franz Kafka, an apocryphal statement,
as quoted in Gustav Janouch, Gespräche mit Kafka
How unserious, dishonest, hypocritical those mere talkers show themselves to be, anyone may perceive rather distinctly and clearly during emergencies, like the one with which the current decade began so badly. Then, suddenly and not seldom from one day to the next, they who earlier had deemed themselves “anti-authoritarian” did heed and adhere to the directives of authority, and often with a vengeance, over against those who would not “fall into line.” But since I’ve addressed such matters a number of times throughout the second part of this book, here I shall not detour into them. Much more worrisome to notice is the strange, or better: too-taut, over-strained tone instilled into the objective satires that, albeit inadvertently, arise amidst and against such an overall set of conditions. Listening hard to it, I rather fear that such quavering satiricality is like a mere death-rattle, and the brittle laughter which it may still provoke, that terrible thing, risus mortis. – Perhaps finally it will be nature alone who laughs at humanity’s feeble moments of humour, to vary slightly one of Mauthner’s darker jokes about the misuses of language (“die Natur kann darüber nur lachen wie über jeden anderen Missbrauch der Sprache”).*
* Fritz Mauthner, Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache, vol. iii, Sprache und Logik, viii
Or perhaps the relative powerlessness of satire does itself constitute a satire upon the reigning conditions to which it is related... Yet no further here shall I spin out the general idea that the turn to graphic design, given how tempting that pursuit can be, whether on the screen or intended for the page, amounts actually to a retreat, even a self-sequestration of the satirical spirit, subjective and/or objective. What actually would it do, once gone into the midst of the elements of typography, even amidst the interstices of the different sorts of marks and the innumerable letters themselves? For all those at least with their small virtual altercations do seem from time to time as though they are awaiting the storm (ze wachten op de storm) –
Uit dode krullen, schreven, lijnen, halen
Ontstaan – geen mens die weet waaraan het ligt –
Schermutselingen tussen de vocalen.
De consonanten brommen mee, ontsticht.
Pas dan ontpopt zich iets als een bericht.
Een S.O.S. uit een ver paradijs.
– A dire message whose arrival ought to awaken spectators or auditors who have dozed off. –
De voorhang scheurt. Je schrikt van het gezicht.*
Perhaps later an opportune moment will come for drawing out this challenging line of thought. The present text cannot be the place for it.
* Gerrit Komrij, “Schrijfrecept”
Instead this introductory text needs a winding up. Music itself has I’m afraid been conspicuous by its absence; and indeed for quite a while now I have found it tempting to keep it at a distance from the nullity of the present, tending more to outline the place which works of music might take amidst today’s circumstances than to describe them or even to tell stories about their correlates in experience. There still remain a great number of zeroes, as it were, which I should like to clear away as best I can, as a preliminary, before once more immersing myself headfirst in the musical element. – But who can say if in all the delay some satire has not been active too?
Musicuratum
March 2026
Madrid