Wugazi

Sure I'm a few days late to be in the know, but...

Wugazi • 13 Chambers by WUGAZI

K'naan: People Like Me

Somalia is having a severe famine, the global economy is in the poop-house, wars are raging as usual, and racial tensions are building even in quiet places such as Norway. I felt like simply putting up a performance by the Somali-Canadian musician K'naan.

Plato, the 'Secret' Pythagorean?

The claim that Plato embedded, in the structure of his dialogues, a musical substructure, has been making the rounds lately (even showing up on NPR; I first saw it here). On his website, Jay Kennedy writes that:

Plato used a consistent scheme of symbols to embed a musical structure in each genuine dialogue. In short, each dialogue was divided into twelve parts. At each twelfth, i.e., at 1/12, 2/12, etc., Plato inserted passages to mark the notes of a musical scale. This regular structure resembles a known Greek scale. According to Greek musical theory, some notes in such a scale are harmonious (if they form a small whole number ratio with the twelfth note) and the others are dissonant or neutral.  Plato's symbolic passages are correlated with the relative values of the musical notes. At more harmonious notes, Plato has passages about virtue, the forms, beauty, etc.; at the more dissonant notes, there are passages about vice, negation, shame, etc. This correlation is one kind of strong evidence that the structure is a musical scale. 

This, of course, has prompted not a few skeptical responses (see the comments on Leiter's blog). The most obvious being that, since we have no access to the original scrolls (contra the implication of NPR's shorthand), the author has to make several assumptions to get this thesis off the ground, which introduces a creeping sense of a vicious circle.

I think the second most obvious problem is that it doesn't strike me that Plato was all too secret about his affinities with Pythagoreanism, in like, you know, the Phaedo or the Timeaus.

Which makes Kennedy sound like he's overstated his case. What might be an interesting technique to reopen the 'spurious works' question becomes a technique to discover Plato's secret, positive doctrine, which in turn is crammed into a solution for an already false-dilemma'd-debate about science and religion (I suppose that the reader was expecting that I would take the discussion in this direction). Kennedy again:

Today we hear much of the culture wars between believers and atheists, between those who insist our world is imbued with meaning and value and those who argue for materialism and evolution. For Plato, music was mathematical and mathematics was musical. In particular, we hear musical notes harmonising with each other when their pitches form simple ratios. For him, the perception of this beauty in music was at once the perception of a beauty inherent in mathematics. Thus mathematics and the laws governing our universe were imbued with beauty and value: they were divine. Modern scientists don't ask where their fundamental laws come from; for Plato, the beauty and order inherent in mathematical law meant its source was divine (a Pythagorean version of modern deism). Plato may light a middle way through today's culture wars.  

I don't know exactly where to start with this, but telling people that a mathematical structure underlies the universe (imagine the looks on the faces of today's fundamentalist Christians...) isn't a solution to that debate, because the debate is about legitimating a social sense of normativity. The religious claim that normativity is derived from faith in some objective (though 'revealed' value), while the New Atheists claim that normativity can be derived from science. Despite their differences, both sides avoid granting that people make their own history in conditions that they have not chosen, that political praxis and social struggle enact as much normativity as we're going to get (see also this article by Ronald Aronson). As we know, and Jacques Ranciere never tires of reminding us, Plato wasn't too keen on that.

Nazim Hikmet: Marxist Turkish Poet Set to Music

In 2001 the famous Turkish pianist Fazil Say composed an orchestra piece titled "Nazim." Nazim Hikmet Ran was a Marxist Turkish poet that suffered much for his politics that he infused into his poetry. In 1938 he was arrested for inciting the Turkish military to revolt. Hikmet's sentence was twenty-eight years in prison. Turkish authorities stated that his poetry was inspiring subversion. By 1949 Pablo Picasso, Paul Robeson, and Jean-Paul Sartre, along with others, campaigned for Hikmet's release from prison. In 1950 Hikmet was set free. ( See Poems of Nazim Hikmet trans. Randy Blasing & Mutlu Konuk, New York: Persea Books, 2002, xiv,xv) Before his death Hikmet's life remained dangerous and turbulent while his poetry became more influential.

I have two clips from Say's "Nazim." The first is a powerful rendition of Hikmet's ability to have used art against US Imperialism and a corrupt Turkish state. The second video is from his internationally celebrated Kız Çocuğu (The Little Girl), otherwise known as "Hiroshima Child/Girl." This poem is about a dead girl after the atom-bomb that dropped on Hiroshima in Japan. The musical accompaniments Fazil Say uses make these powerful poems come to life.

Israel/Palestine Conflict in Music

Many Palestinian activists have made March 1st the start of "Israel Apartheid Week." Some critics of Israel's military occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem (along with horror regarding the siege of Gaza) are often uncomfortable referring to Israel as an Apartheid government. At times the South African Apartheid era is compared to what takes place within Israel against its non-Jewish citizens. However the comparison holds up, it is hard to argue that the Israeli government does not discriminate based on racial/ethnic/religious lines.

Interestingly, Israeli society produces cultural fusions that get played out in the conflict in unexpected ways. Israeli musicians consist of Jewish and Arab artists that can articulate their politcal concerns in Hebrew and Arabic. At times Jewish Israeli rappers use Arabic and Arab Israeli rappers use Hebrew. The Palestinian-Israeli hip hop artists from the group DAM grew up in Israel's town of Lod. DAM rapper Mahmoud Jreri addressed the irony of Israeli Arab life when he stated in an interview, "I speak better Hebrew than most Israelis and they [the Jewish Israeli right-wing] call to kick me out and we are native people." Jewish Israeli rapper Subliminal is known for ultra-nationalist lyrics and his total commitment to Jewish causes. He views Israel as a safe haven for Jews and feels they are under an existential threat from internal terrorism and hostile neighbors.

I am putting up two video's that are accompanied by English subtitles: One from DAM and the other from Subliminal. Both use a mixture of Hebrew and Arabic. DAM's piece is titled "Born Here" written in Hebrew and Subliminal's is "My Land/Country" writtin in Arabic. These songs are mainly in the Hebrew language.