The Super Summary of World History - Alan Dale Daniel [141]
An event of total irrationality occurred in 1914, confirming the use of science and industry for death and chaos. An old invention, propaganda, using new moving pictures and clever words was convincing people to endure what they would never dream of in another place or time. Murder on a mass scale, war on an industrial scale, and irrationality on a titanic scale became everyday facts in World War I. Even the nickname shows the irrationality of it all: “The war to end all wars.” Not only would wars go on, they would grow in violence and senselessness.
Music was also predicting the chaos to come. In music, the Renaissance period gave way to the Baroque era followed by the Classical era of music that lasted from about 1730 to 1820. Romantic followed classical music, in vogue from approximately 1815 to 1910. The composers from the Classical and the Romantic periods of music are literally household names: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, and others. During the Classical age the symphonies became ever more complex and the musical instruments available to the composers expanded. The symphony’s complexities are astounding. The composers coordinated every aspect of dozens to perhaps a hundred instruments, which would all be playing at once, to create just the right sound. So many aspects of the music were involved it is difficult to understand how one person could have written a major symphony.
These symphonies enclosed literally hundreds of thousands of notes, and each nuance of each note was vitally important to the overall composition. An accomplished listener would instantly know something was wrong if even one note was left out or significantly changed. As time went forward, much of this complex harmony started to fade. When Stravinsky performed the “Rite of Spring” in 1913 in Paris, this idea of deep complex harmony was broken. Note the date, one year before the Great War when all harmony in the Western World would cease. The “Rite of Spring” is a brutal and disjointed work. At its first performance the complex and violent music, depicting a pagan fertility rite, drew boos because of the harmonic discord. Arguments followed and then a riot requiring the intervention of the Paris police to restore order.
Whether Stravinsky knew he was predicting the future or not he managed the feat with astounding accuracy. The classical world of music where each note enjoyed a distinct place was withering, eventually to be replaced by a world where no one note meant anything in relation to the other notes. People would soon fall into the category of meaningless, just as the notes in Stravinsky’s work became; however, at least the notes were there and recognizable. If a note were left out it might be hard to discern at certain points in the work, but a close listener would still know something changed and the piece was somehow out of sorts; accordingly, the notes still mattered, but they were not part of some grand harmonious universe where all fit together so nicely. One note might be moved or removed and not affect the whole as much as such a similar move or removal would influence a symphony of the classical age. If the analogy applies to the worth of the individual, the implication is clear: the individual was a part of the whole, but how important to the whole was open to interpretation. One person would not have a massive impact on the whole just as one note would not have a great impact on the whole of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring.” In the late twentieth century even that would be lost, and the individual note in a musical piece would disappear in importance just as the individual’s importance would disappear in a meaningless universe. In music, art, and literature chaos replaced harmony, disunity replaced unity, meaninglessness