Today's Stories

June 13 / 15, 2008

Douglas Valentine:
McCain: War Hero or Go-To Collaborator?

June 12, 2008

Judith Levine
As Cranes Fall and People Die

Patrick Cockburn
Amid Iraqi Fury, U.S. Offers Concessions on Military Bases

Saul Landau
The Iraq War Becomes Suicidal

Christopher Brauchli
Bush Bling-Bling: Government by Crony

Norman Solomon
Deadly Diplomacy

Helen Redmond
Why Can't We All Get KennedyCare?

Laura Carlsen
No Rest for the Working Poor

Jeremy R. Hammond
Threats Against Iran Escalate

Anne Landman
Pinkwashing: Can Shopping Cure Breast Cancer?

Website of the Day
Fire in Watts

June 11, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
Why Oil Prices Are So High

Ralph Nader
Wall Street Gamblers

Joshua Frank
Why I Can't Support Barack Obama

Clifton Ross
Conversation in Miami: the Neoliberal Left and Socialism

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad
Whatever Happened to "Democracy Now?"

Stephen Lendman
Exposing Pentagon and CIA Corruption

Diane Farsetta
Talking Back to Bill O'Reilly

Ron Jacobs
The Sixties Painted Black

Deborah Rich
Hay Belly Nation: the FDA and the O-Word

Hop Wechsler
A Friend of Women? My Bill Clinton ... and Ours

Website of the Day
A New Path to the Waterfall

June 10, 2008

Alan Farago
John McCain and the Company He Keeps

James G. Abourezk
Deadly Fallout From Obama's Groveling Before Israel Lobby

Saree Makdisi
Banned in the U.S.A. (Almost)

Malini Johar Schueller
A Picture From Beirut

John Ross
Killing Foods, Killing People

Wajahat Ali
Rumi and Sufism

Peter Morici
Bernanke Aggravates Recession Risks

Jordan Flaherty
Inside Angola Prison, Louisiana's Last Slave Plantation

Gary Macfarlane
Collaboration on the Clearwater: Is It Legitimate?

Joanne Mariner
The Gitmo Trials: an Inglorious Start

Website of the Day
The End of the Clinton Machine?

June 9, 2008

Uri Avnery
No, I Can't: Obama, Israel and AIPAC

Nikolas Kozloff
McCain & the Republican Insitute: Promoting Iraqi Occupation for "a Million Years"

Allan Nairn
Drawing Your Last Breath Hungry

Dennis Loo
Threats on Iran and the "Batterer's Defense"

Harry Browne
Irish Euro Vote Comes Down to the Wire

C. Hand
U. S. Bid to Hike Iran's Gas Prices Seems Doomed

Peter Morici
An Unsustainable Trade Deficit

Kenneth Couesbouc
A Ripe Time for Inflation

Martha Rosenberg
The Inconvenient Senator Grassley

James L. Secor
Chinese Superstition or Unconscious Oracle?

Website of the Day
Pay Bo Diddley!

June 7 / 8, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Obama Goes Over the Top

Ishmael Reed
How Miles Davis Changed My Life

Jeffrey St. Clair
What a Miner's Life is Worth

Nikolas Kozloff
Meet the King the Beers: John McCain and Latin America

Dave Lindorff
The High Cost of a Single War-Like Remark: Oil Prices, Israel, Iran and the U.S.

Robert Fantina
When Truth is the Casualty

Conn Hallinan
Iran and Rumors of War

Neve Gordon
The Occupation and the Politics of Death

Tom Barry
The Deterrence Strategy of Homeland Security

Patrick Irelan
Raiding the Packing House

Tim Wise
Your Whiteness is Showing

David Ker Thomson
The Hard Question

Joshua Frank
"Socialist" Wins Republican Nomination in Montana

David Yearsley
Disaster Music

James T. Phillips
1968: Year of the Rat

Joe Allen
The Real Bobby Kennedy

P. Sainath
Making Life Brighter in Kondapur

David Macaray
Should Unions be More Democratic?

B.R. Gowani
Experience and the Two-for-One

Fred Gardner
What Happened (at the DA's Office)

Peter Harley
Technology to the Rescue? Kurzweil and the Human Machines

Michael Dickinson
Surrender the Bones of Geronimo!

Jen Roesch
Where are the Real Women in Sex and the City?

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Landau, and Buknatski

Website of the Day
Partying with the Waltons

June 6, 2008

Frank Barat
An Interview with Ilan Pappé and Noam Chomsky on the Future of Israel / Palestine

Patrick Cockburn
U.S. Extorts Iraq to Approve Military Deal

Gary Leupp
Cheney Enrages Iraqis Over Security Deal

James Abourezk
Name That Terrorist

Peter Morici
Recession Grips the Jobs Market

Faheem Hussain
What is NATO Doing in Afghanistan?

Andy Worthington
Guantánamo's Britons Go on Hunger Strike

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
How Will Musharraf Go? Impeachment or Safe Exit?

Dave Lindorff
Congress Needs to Defend Itself

Website of the Day
Backstage with Bo Diddley

June 5, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
Bush's Secret Deal Would Ensure Permanent U.S. Occupation of Iraq

Sharon Smith
Hillary's Wreckage

Nikolas Kozloff
Obama's Electoral Dilemma: Latinos or Reagan Democrats?

Linn Washington, Jr.
Police Brutality and Cover-Up in Philly

Omar Barghouti
60 Years of Nakba, 41 Years of Occupation ...

Scott Pellegrino
Jim Crow Radio: Bob Grant's Lifetime Achievement Award

John Walsh
Obama Woos AIPAC

Dan Bacher
The Parching of California

DC Larson
Nazi Rockers ... F-Off

Robert Jensen
Masculine, Feminine or Human?

Website of the Day
Ohio Cops Attack Long Walkers

June 4, 2008

Eric Walberg
Princess Patricia and the Taliban

Gary Leupp
Iran and EFPs: Chronology of a Lie

Ralph Nader
Disenfranchised Youth

Dave Lindorff
Of Whiners and Poor Losers

George Wuerthner
Farm Economics

Victor M. Rodriguez
The Puzzle of Race and Politics

Remi Kanazi
Why a Cultural Boycott of Israel is Needed

Stephane Luçon
Renault's Romanian Fairyland Suspended

Farzana Versey
The Tablighi Jamaat Movement

Laray Polk
The Militarization of Space

Website of the Day
Red State Rebels

June 3, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts /
Lawrence M. Stratton
Legislating Tyranny

Mike Whitney
The Withering Economy

Steve Early
San Juan Showdown

Manuel Otero
Why Hillary Won Puerto Rico: the View from the Colony

George Bisharat
The Hope of a Victimized People

Nikolas Kozloff
Obama's VP Quandry

Dan Bacher
Death on the Salmon Highway

Website of the Day
Censoring Bill Knott?

June 2, 2008

Uri Avnery
The Olmert Scandal

Nikolas Kozloff
Obama's Latino Problem Getting Worse

Allan J. Lichtman
Revisionist History: Bush, Borah and Hitler

Malini Johar Schueller
The Color of Randomness: Returning to the US From Beirut Via Syria

Robert Weissman
What's Driving Skyrocketing Oil Prices?

Peter Morici
Bailing Out Wall Street

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Don't Get Burned: How to Protect Yourself From Raytheon's Pain Gun

John Ross
Celebrating Catholic Fanaticism in Mexico

Ahmad Al-Akhras
Encounters with the Watch List

Website of the Day
Man on Earth

May 31 / June 1, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The Worst is Yet to Come

Jeffrey St. Clair
Arkansas Bloodsuckers

Gary Leupp
How McClellan Prettifies Bush

Stan Cox
Broken Agriculture

Rannie Amiri
Lebanon: the Domino That Wouldn't Fall

P. Sainath
A Guaranteed Day's Work--in the Fields, at 110 Degrees, for $2 a Day

Binoy Kampmark
Going Bankrupt in Vallejo

Robert Fantina
Bush, Rice and McClellan

Seth Sandronsky
Will There be Water Riots, as Sacramento Goes Dry?

Corporate Crime Reporter
Death Penalty for Bush?

Anthony DiMaggio
Gaming the Ghetto: Grand Theft Auto IV, Racist Media and the Concrete Jungle

Karl Grossman
A Half-Trillion for Nukes

Matt Reichel
From Vegas to the Heartland and Back Again

Paul Myron Hillier
Of Gas and God

Andy Worthington
Suicide at Guantánamo

David Yearsley
And the Winner is ... Wayne Shorter

Daniel Cassidy
Free Lunch

Charles Thomson
If Hitler Had Been a Hippy ...

Gary Corseri
A Dream Deferred: Activism and the Arts

Wajahat Ali
Sex and the City Through a Man's Eyes

Ron Jacobs
Robins Weep

Poets' Basement
McNeill and Davies

Website of the Day
Last Charge of the Light Horse

May 30, 2008

Bassam Aramin
Here's the Truth You've Been Running From

Andrew Cockburn
Petraeus' Iran Obsession

Saul Landau
How We Got Into This Mess

Nikolas Kozloff
Meet South America's New Secessionists

Robert Sandels
Turning Back the Clock on Cuba

Dave Lindorff
Talk is Cheap

Martha Rosenberg
Raiding Big Meat; Arresting the Wrong People

Harvey Wasserman
Lieberman & McCain: Linking Internet Censorship and Atomic Reactor Terror

Doug Giebel
A Plague on Both Your Houses (of Congress)

Shaun Harkin
The Trial of the Raytheon 9

Website of the Day
The Once and Future Environmental Movement

May 29, 2008

Jeffrey St. Clair
Bill Clinton and the Rich Women

Nikolas Kozloff
Puerto Rico, Obama and the Politics of Race

Col. Dan Smith
Deceiving the Dead

Karl Grossman
The Most Lucrative Incentive for Nuclear Power in the History of the United States

William S. Lind
Inside the Washington Game

Robert Weissman
What to do About the Price of Oil

Dave Lindorff
Why Puerto Rico Won't Matter

David Macaray
A Union Fable

Chris Genovali
Fear and Loathing in the Northern Rockies

Laura Carlsen
Mexico's Battle Over Oil

Website of the Day
Support Antiwar.com

May 28, 2008

Wajahat Ali
The Libertarian Dark Horse: An Exclusive Interview with Ron Paul

Ralph Nader
What's Really Driving the High Price of Oil?

Brian McKenna
Why I Want to Teach Anthropology at the Army War College

Corporate Crime Reporter
Why Vincent Bugliosi Wants to Prosecute George W. Bush for Murder

Brian Cloughley
The Attack on Damadola

Eric Walberg
Opium for the Masses from Afghanistan

Michael Dickinson
Raytheon's Pain Ray: Coming to a Protest Near You

Ijaz Khan
Opening Windows in Pakistan

Website of the Day
Older Than America

May 27, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
In Her Mind She's Killed Before: the Plot to Assassinate Ralph Nader

Greg Kafoury
Is Obama Turning (Further) Right?

Jean Bricmont
Western Delusions

Tim Wise
Farrakhan is not the Problem

Ricardo Alarcón
Puerto Rico's Turn

Stephen Soldz
APA Supports Psychologist Engagement in Bush Regime Interrogations

Andy Worthington
The Guantánamo 16

Alan Singer
Vapid, Stupid and Insulting: Chuck Schumer Speaks to the Graduates

Richard Neville
Storm in an A-Cup

Susie Day
Gone with the W

May 26, 2008

Uri Avnery
The Syrian Option

Bill Quigley
War Immemorial Day

Col. Dan Smith
Retreating from Hell: a Different Memorial Day

Cindy Sheehan
Why Memorial Day is a Double-Whammy for Me

Marjorie Cohn
Hillary's Assassination Politics: Her Last Shot?

Fred Gardner
Does the VA Care?

Raymond J. Lawrence
Pain Pays: Getting Rich at NY Presbyterian Hospital

Harvey Wasserman
Mugging the Election System

Moncia Benderman
Truth Matters

David Rovics
In Praise of Utah Phillips

Website of the Day
Fox News Jokes About "Knocking Off" Osama and Obama

May 24 / 25, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Death-Wish Hillary Primes Manchurian Candidate

Jeffrey St. Clair
Yellowstone: How Sununu Shrank the Ecosystem

Barbara Rose Johnston
Dam Legacies, Damned Futures

Nikolas Kozloff
U.S. Fourth Fleet in Venezuelan Waters

Adriana Kojeve
The Environment and the 2008 Elections

Robert Fantina
Justice Department's Revelations on Torture

Dave Lindorff
Bush's War on Children in Iraq

David Yearsley
The War on Kitsch

Nelson P. Valdés
The Buying of "Democracy" Agents in Cuba

Kathleen M. Barry
Celebrating Ethnic Cleansing

John Ross
Mexico's Narco Opera Reaches for High Point

Allison Kilkenny
Apathy Doesn't Live in Bronx

Fred Gardner
Orangeburg, 1968

Elizabeth Schulte
Can the Whole World be Fed?

Daniel Gross
Remembering the Wendy's Massacre: the Dangerous Side of Retail Work

Christopher Brauchli
The Search for a Token Right-winger

Richard Rhames
A Nation of Sheep

Daniel Cassidy
My Mother

Poets' Basement
Davies, Klipschutz and Willson

Website of the Weekend
Happy Birthday, Bob

May 23, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
War Abroad, Poverty at Home

Alan Farago
The Radical Extremists of the Building Industry

Conn Hallinan
Ballots and Bullets: From Beirut to Bolivia

Mark Engler
The World After Bush

George Wuerthner
Cars and Cows: Living Large in America

Kamran Matin
The Kurds and American Neo-Imperialism

Sandy Boyer /
Shaun Harkin
The Long Incarceration of Pol Brennan

Robert Weitzel
A "Holey" Instrument of Peace in Iraq

Cindy Sheehan
An Uphill Battle

Liaquat Ali Khan
Pakistan's Futile Constitutional Amendment

Website of the Day
A Message from the Moral Compass of the McCain Campaign

May 22, 2008

Vijay Prashad
Racist Grammar

Joanne Mariner
A Military Commissions Cheat Sheet

Sharon Smith
60 Years of Apartheid

Jeff Birkenstein
Disaster Redux: Some Early Thoughts on the Earthquake in China

Brendan McQuade
From Obama to the PRTs in Iraq

Peter Morici
The Sorry State of the Banking Industry

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Restoration Boulevard

Dave Zirin
What I Want to Ask Mary Tillman

Ron Jacobs
CPR for the Antiwar Movement

Stephen Lendman
Immoral Hazard

Website of the Day
Hagee: God Sent Hitler to Drive the Jews to Israel

May 21, 2008

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Gothic Politics of Hillary Clinton

Nikolas Kozloff
U.S. Military Bases in South America

Alan Farago
Miami, Cuba and the Presidential Campaign

Dave Lindorff
Big John and the Scary, Scary Iran Threat

David Model
Genocide in Iraq?

Eric Walberg
Afghanistan: Who is the Enemy?

Franklin Lamb
Lebanon Gets a President

Kenneth Couesbouc
Tax Against Tyranny

Website of the Day
Child Labor and War-Affected Children: a Photo Essay

May 20, 2008

Ralph Nader
A Trip Inside Google

Uri Avnery
With Friends Like These

Patrick Irelan
The Empire and the Fleet

Ray McGovern
Come Out, Admiral Fallon, Wherever You Are

David Macaray
The UAW Strike Against American Axle

Chris Genovali
Big Oil on the Water: Skating Around the Tanker Issue

Ibrahim Fawal
Birmingham, Israel and the Nakba

Christopher Ketcham
Let Us Now Praise Famous Suicides

Andy Worthington
Guantánamo Trial Delayed

Martha Rosenberg
Merck is a Repeat Offender

Website of the Day
Defend the Students Who Pied Tom Friedman

May 19, 2008

Saul Landau
Cuba Will Live

Paul Craig Roberts
The Metamorphosis of the Conservative Movement

Brian McKenna
Brotherly Love in Philly's Badlands

Patrick Cockburn
City of the Dead: Mosul on Lockdown

B. R. Gowani
The Central Problem Pakistan Needs to Tackle

Dr. Trudy Bond
Psychologists and Torture: If Not Now, When?

Cindy Sheehan
Whose War is It?

John Mohawk
The Warriors Who Turned to Peace

Remi Kanazi
When Free Speech Doesn't Come for Free

Robert Day
I Get a Horse

Website of the Day
Evolve or Die

Subscribe Online

The Musical Patriot

Music in the Rubble

By DAVID YEARSLEY

At the moment of the 1989 San Francisco Earthquake, I was not in front of my television watching the beginning of the World Series then taking place forty miles to the north on Highway 101. Instead, I was sitting at my clavichord in my apartment building in a desolate Silicon Valley township called Mountain View playing the Sarabande from Bach’s French Suite in D Minor.

Just as I reached the Sarabande’s first cadence—a cluster of hyperextended chromatic chords that suggest ugly contortion rather than the courtly elegance for which this, Louis XVI’s favorite dance form, was known—the great terrestrial rumbling from began.  You could heard the earthquake before you could feel it.

At least one self-styled post-modern critic, Lawrence Kramer, has heard in this cadence an existential confrontation with the self, and when the floor starting bouncing up and down and books came flying from the shelves, I was inclined to agree. I staggered to the doorway as I’d somewhere heard was the thing to do when the Big One came, and watched as my clavichord shucked and jived to the earth’s gyrations.

Was it a sign?  If so, a good or bad one? And from whom?  Bach? God? Is there a difference? Had my private performance of the Sarabande been moving enough to move the earth, or had it been so bad as to inspire the Deity’s wrath?  If any piece were powerful enough to do these things, it would certainly be the D Minor Sarabande.

It’s no coincidence that I now think of that trembling cadence as straddling a fault line, and in the end not quite managing to hold itself together against the tectonic forces it unleashes. Doubtless the millions of Giants and A’s fans invested the earthquake with significance of their own. Earthquakes and other natural cataclysms always clear great endless spaces for interpretation.

The most eager to fill this void have always been clerics. The pages of the Virtual Museum of the City of San Francisco tell us that later in October of 1989 the evangelist Virgi Rosamond took to Halladie Plaza with her bullhorn and turned to the biblical object lesson traditionally favored by Christian preachers: “Jesus said he would send earthquakes to Godless places.  This city’s wicked, like Sodom and Gomorrah, where men love men more than they love God.”  In my experience of the various Christian sects—observed from the cynical bench of the organist—God is gendered as male, except among Christian Scientists, a denomination founded by a woman and one which consequently prays to a “Father-Mother God.” So you see, Virgi, for a man to love God means he’s loving another male, albeit in a chaste way.  (Expressions of this male-male relationship are found in many Bach cantatas; these passages were duly excised by 19th-century editors eager to repress such associations.)

I don’t remember nor could I find now any jeremiads taking up the most obvious interpretative strategy with regard to the so-called Loma Prieta earthquake—that it was a sign that the National Pastime was itself evil, or at least that the players and owners were.  What if, as I had wrongly predicted, an earthquake had hit San Francisco the moment in August of 2007 when Barry Bonds his 756th home run? Now that would have been a real sign but not an unambiguous one. What would the cause of God’s displeasure have been:  steroids? Bonds himself? the juiced ball? chewing tobacco? the designated hitter, and therefore to be taken as a warning for Bonds to stay away from the American League to pad his numbers in his career’s twilight that never came?

It would be unfair to stigmatize Christianity alone for exploiting earthquakes for the purposes of moral judgment and eschatological fear-mongering. Sharon Stone’s now notorious comments about the recent Chinese earthquake demonstrate the remarkable adaptability of other religions, especially in the hands of mentally underfunded stars and starlets, at using natural cataclysm as a weapon of blame. “And then all this earthquake and all this stuff happened,” Stone told a swarm of microphones at Cannes last month, “And I thought, is that karma – when you’re not nice that the bad things happen to you?” In the longer Youtube excerpt of these red carpet blatherings, it was a pleasure to see Stone unhorsed by her lazy overuse of the word “nice,” as if the people killed in the Chinese earthquake had been punished for “not being nice.” (To be fair, though in Sharon Stone’s case one hardly wants to be, she goes on to relent a bit and follow the lead of her “good friend” the Dalai Lama in offering aid to the Chinese victims.)

For all its vacuous Panglossian diction (the best of possible worlds is a “nice” one), Stone’s remarks take their place in an august tradition of earthquake hermeneutics.  A massive collection of such interpretations survives from the aftermath of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, an event which killed at least 30,000 people, but by some estimates as many as 90,000—a third of the city’s population.  Now estimated at 9.0 on the Richter scale, the earthquake was followed by a huge tidal wave that swept into the harbor and through the city. Those areas spared by the tsunami were ravaged by fires.

Clerics were almost unanimous in their belief that the cataclysm had been an act of divine retribution. But such unforgiving attitudes among the avanlanche of English-language sermons preached in the earthquake’s aftermath usually sidestepped the unsettling fact that the death toll had been so high because the disaster hit on the morning of November 1st, All Saint’s Day, when the populace was gathered in Lisbon’s churches. It would take a truly sadistic God to wait for His people to gather in His churches and then crush them in their numbers.

It is no coincidence, then, that Voltaire has his ridiculously optimistic title character in Candide, which appeared in 1759, and Candide’s tutor Pangloss wash ashore in Lisbon just as the earthquake hits. Leonard Bernstein has campy fun with the carnage in his musical, Candide. Few among the Avery Fish Hall audience at the most recent revival (to be seen on the excellent 2005 DVD of the live performance from Image Entertainment) would have known that the Lisbon earthquake still counts as the most devastating of all European natural disasters.  Evoked with a quick “Boom” from the the Candide chorus, the earthquake then inspires a string of goofy Broadway antics and tuneful one-liners about the auto-de-fé that follows and that claims Pangloss after the Grand Inquisitor (a caricature of Donald Trump in the 2005 production) briskly hands down the death sentence with the words: “You’re fired.” 

But if, as so many clerics across Europe and in the Americas maintained, the Lisbon earthquake counted as retribution, what was it retribution for?  That the calamity struck at moment of religious observation was not a problem for rabidly anti-Catholic preachers in England.  Perhaps the grimmest of the many sermons and pamphlets printed after the Lisbon quake in England and its Colonies that I’ve been perusing recently is attributed to an anonymous “Clergyman at London” and takes the form of A Letter to the Remaining Disconsolate Inhabitants of Lisbon. After the title, one expects expressions of true sympathy but gets something rather different: “Yes, I will call ye Brethren for we are all Children of the same Almighty Father, and were, once, Members of the same Church.  That we are now divided was your Fault, and, heaven be praised!” The earthquake is seen as encouragement to “depart from the Iniquity” of Rome. The anonymous writer goes on to chronicle the destruction that swallows up whole families, and then urges the Portugese to “Cast your Eyes upon that Holy Inquisition, and tell me, whether ye ought not to bless the Omnipotent for his Mercy, in having so long suspended his visible Judgment over a City, where the Tyrants of that inhuman Court were suffered to reign?” It is therefore just that Godly wrath be meted out not on the Inquisitor (he survived the quake), but on the people of the cit, few of whom would have been too pleased to receive a summons from the Inquistion. Though uttered in Riveriera decolletage rather than austere clerical robes and collar, Sharon Stone’s unkempt pronouncements about the China quake are no less severe or venerable as those of the “Clergyman at London.”

It is the refusal to blame the victims that makes Georg Philipp Telemann’s Donnerode (Thunder Ode) the most powerful and lasting musical commemoration of the Lisbon earthquake.  Of the two commercial recordings of the piece available, the 1995 CD with Hermann Max and Rheinische Kantorei (on the Capriccio label) is the one to have, not only because of the strenth and subtlety of the soloists, and emotional range and declamatory precision of the chorus, but specifically for Hermann Max’s reading of the penultimate section of the framing movement of the piece, “How great is Thy name.” This sprawling movement is heard at the opening and close of part 1 and again at the end of Part 2 of the cantata. It is an exaltant succession of choruses and solo numbers arrayed in a majestic, earthquake-proof architecture.

Before the return to the rousing trumpets and drums of the opening section of this movement Telemann inserts a duet between and tenor and bass. The pair effuses in parallel thirds about the incalculable magnitude of the heavens. The singers’ moonlit colloquy is punctuated by an emphatic choral statement: “Lord, Thy heralds, the stars.” At the close of this communal utterance, Hermann Max retreats from the sublimity of the sentiment, into an ethereal ritardando and diminuendo, like the scattering dust of an exploded supernova.  The passage ranks as one of the great moments in the revival of 18th-century choral masterpieces.

Indeed, the Donnerode was one of the most popular vocal works of the 18th-century. Composed in 1755, and performed in both church services and public concerts in Hamburg, where Telemann was the Director of Music, the Donnerode continued to be performed across North Germany after Telemann’s death in 1767. Like other European cities, Hamburg ordered a day of fasting in March of 1756 and sent  at least two ships with relief supplies to Lisbon, and Telemann’s music was a crucial part of the civic response to the catastrophe.

The text of the Donnerode is a versification of the 8th, 29th, and 45th Psalms. As a whole the poetry and music revel in the vast incomprehensibility of nature, its beauty as well as its potential for terror. God has created the natural world and continues to be active in it.  The duet for two basses in Part 1 of the Donnerode finally relents and gives the audience the thrill of the earthquake with the quaking male voices buffeted by trembling timpani. But even this staging of personal terror is transformed to a chastened admiration of God’s power in upward-striving suspensions between the voices above the continuing tremors of strings and drums.

The static stars and dynamic earth are all God’s creations; his interventions in the natural world, most dramatically in the form of earthquakes, seem to be depicted not as direct acts of retribution, but merely as awe-inspiring facts of the universe. The beauty of Telemann’s music, from its evocations of the fragile beauty of “cool dew” to the terrifying scenes of “uprooted cedars,” embraces all that nature has to offer.  That we hear in all this the antecedents of a kind of deep ecology that would turn very dark indeed two German centuries later, should not poison Telemann’s achievement as an interpreter of nature.

But just as God threatens to detach himself from the day-to-day workings of the natural world, we learn in a late chorus, so with solo episodes, that “Thy scepter is a just scepter.” After the regal announcement of trumpets and timpani of the soprano sings the text accompanied by an exuberant solo violin; the bright clarity of the music suggests neither compulsion nor violence, but exuberant personal acceptance. Choral acclamations embrace thee individual expressions of the soprano and the tenor who follows her lead. The sublime power of events is experienced both individually and corporately.

In the fissures of the Lisbon earthquake Telemann’s Donnerode creates a new aesthetic category: the musical sublime. He does no use it to pass judgment but rather to bear witness to the sheer power of the universe God has created. Telemann’s sublime is dedicated not to moral posturing or to the facile representation of castrophe and destruction, but rather to a view that music should be above and beyond the events it assuages.

What rises from the ashes and rubble of destruction is not fear and condemnation, but updrafts of irrepressible human music. Though it is suffused with Christian optimism for an afterlife, this music is not to be confused with Panglossian dogmatism; rather, what we hear in it—even shrouded in religious imagery—is the sound of the individual in society ready to take matters into his hands, to rebuild in a world neither he nor those around him can control.

CounterPunch reader Chris Beckwith passes on this link to this recent collection of early 20th-century disaster and murder ballads.

David Yearsley teaches at Cornell University. A long-time contributor to the Anderson Valley Advertiser, he is author of Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint His latest CD, “All Your Cares Beguile: Songs and Sonatas from Baroque London”, has just been released by Musica Omni. He can be reached at dgy2@cornell.edu  

Now Available from CounterPunch Books!

Born Under a Bad Sky:
Notes from the Dark Side
of the Earth
By Jeffrey St. Clair

Buy End Times Now!

Click Here to Buy!

Click Here to Buy!

Click Here to Order!

Humanitarian Imperialism
By Jean Bricmont