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inane annals
Filibuster
by Louis J Goldford | 05 Feb 2008, 1:02

Concert music today has adopted a wide variety of social themes which permeate the contemporary repertoire. Composers have more recently allowed their work to adopt a utilitarian value; a new function which is most characteristic of music in the last 100 years. From Charles Ives' songs in 1917 addressing the mixed patriotism of war or Varèse's concern with technology, to Kagel's depiction of Argentinian social injustice or Adams' "CNN operas" demystifying recent historical events, concert music, on a level with pop art as well as contemporary literature and visual art, now shares a role in bringing itself closer to the everyday business and politics of life.

Of petals, ripe-blown and silkily smooth is a vocal work depicting censorship, inspired by The Language Police, a book by former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch. The piece's central themes include censorship in educational publishing and the media's contributing role. While drawing on a variety of textual and visual sources, the work also demonstrates how the methods of modern music can be used to send mixed signals. At times cynical, at times euphoric, and in many places concerned with the kitsch elements of sound, the music is at all times on the verge of becoming propaganda itself. The work takes the form of a cantata for chorus and chamber orchestra, featuring a quintet of vocal soloists, electronics, and an installation by video artist Josh DiCarlo.

Arranged into 9 movements which explore the various aspects and consequences of sanctioned censorship, the work guides the listener through a collage of sounds, often 'soundbytes,' aimed at triggering the ear. Small excerpts of familiar texts interact with media sounds and pieces of identifiable broadcasts to create the atmosphere of a great meeting between the authors and social critics who addressed the topic, and who across the barrier of time, might have held a salon to discuss among each other. The last of these movements, Filibuster, is a choral setting of banned words alone, compiled from Ravitch's "List of Banned Words and Usages," gathered from lobbyists of school board reading lists.

After identifying how censorship now restricts what students are learning, and after exploring how it is mirrored in literature as well as in primary sources from events as catastrophic as the Holocaust, the work reaches its dramatic height in Filibuster. So much of the piece has been concerned with a series of texts associated with the late 1960s and 1970s. Music certainly had an identity at that time too, as the minimalist style began to crystalize. Even the text-sound format of Charles Amirkhanian's early tape pieces (which provided a guide for the work's penultimate movement, The Iron Cage) were coming into their own at that time. The chorus celebrates this musical culture with a cyclic cry for justice in this final movement.

The fearfully jagged 7/4 rhythm is a deliberate reference to the dies irae theme of Britten's War Requiem. These driving pulses suggest the day of wrath but are an undercurrent to support the individual words, which at times come into juxtaposition with one another to create mixed signals. When the basses first enter, for instance, they are singing two words with perfectly equal iambic weight, "able" and "bodied." The tenors soon join them but begin to intone "Adam" and "Eve," the latter being one syllable and, occupying the same musical space, a natural stress. When the two lines mix, the result is any combination of "Able-Adam," "Eve-bodied," or, "Able-Eve," and, "Adam-bodied," creating layers of mixed gender bias, the stress drawn to "Eve" and suggesting bias in the female direction.

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IX. Fillibuster (from the libretto) [mp3]

(Diane Ravitch, "A List of Banned Words and Usages," Appendix 1)

Able-bodied
Adam, Eve
Inconvenienced
Oriental
Provider
Fellow worker
Addiction
Mother Russia
Holding bows and arrows
Tilted heads, little shrugs
Man and Wife
Old wives' tales
Mentally ill
Playing with hair, playing house

Exemplary upper-class people of bygone days
Sophisticated
Flirtatious gestures

Native Americans in shacks, on reservations, with outdoor water tanks,
in bleak landscapes, with totem poles, in teepees
Chinese people who love to gamble, who are cruel
Mother comforting children... hot milk at bedtime
Inscrutable
Situation ethics rather than an absolute standard of behavior

Ball, chain
Junk bonds
Unemployment
Poor nutrition
Religion
Christmas
Easter
Condoms
Stealing
Cancer
Smoking
Leading the blind
Abnormal
Halloween
Fellowship
Brotherhood

Yacht
Regatta
Pagan
Divorce
Pop
Birth defect
Normal
Typhoons
Beast
Huts
Creature
Subgroup

the deaf
swarms
God
Yes-men
Hordes
Myth
Jungle
You and your wife
Swift as a deer
Roaming the land

That was a manly act of courage.
Girls are sugar and spice and everything nice.

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