GG: War paragraph

[Mary Jo Watts <mwatts@rci.rutgers.edu>]

It occurs to me that I should supply the 2 paragraphs following the
one I quoted from _Music and Technology_.  My Gulf War analogy will
make more sense (I hope.)  Glenn Gould:


		"I believe in 'the intrusion' of technology becausse
	essentially, that intrusion imposes upon art a notion of morality
	which transcends the idea of art itself.  And before, as in the case
	of 'morality,' I use some other old-fashioned words, let me explain
	what I mean by that one.  Morality, it seems to me, has never been on
	the side of the carnivore-- at least not when alternative life-styles
	are available.  And evolution, which is really the biological
	rejection of inadequate moral systems-- and particularly the evolution
	of man in response to his technology-- has been anticarnivorous to the
	extent that, step by step, it has enabled him to operate at increasing
	distance from, to be increasingly out of touch with, his animal
	response to confrontation.
		A war, for instance, engaged in by computer-aimed missiles
	is a slightly better, slightly less objectional war than one fought by
	clubs or spears.  Not much better, and unquestionably more
	destructive, statistacally, but better to the extent, at least, that,
	all things being equal, the adrenal response of the participants (we
	had better forget about by-standers or the argument collapses) is less
	engaged by it.  Well, Margaret Mead, if I read her rightly,
	disapproves of that distancing factor, of that sense of disengagement
	from biological limitation.  But I do believe in it, and recordings,
	though they're rarely understood as such, are one of the very best
	metaphors we have for it (p. 355)."


It seems GG is really trying to expand the French Canadian theologan,
Jean Le Moyne's, idea of "the charity of the machine."  There are some
serious spiritual issues at hand for GG in his notions of technology
that I think are intricately tied to his performances of music.  I
would venture to say that, on some level, he played the piano as a
medium to convey these ideas.  Is he a serious thinker to be contended
with (at least as seriously as Marshall McLuhan is being taken these
days!) or a piano player that had to justify his playing to himself and
the world (like Schoenberg and his intricate 12-tone system)?  Is he both?

As for the "dissecting and analytical" abilities of the WWW-- I'm
thinking in terms of film, and film theory where the "shots," the
montage (or editing) and the framing all "dissect" the image.  There
is certainly a moral difference between the grammar of Hollywood
cinema and, say, Luis Bunuel's films!  I *think* this is what GG's
getting at.  I'm afraid that in its current state the WWW *is*
passive, "eye and ear candy." Could there be an intellectual
WWW compliment to GG's Bach, which (most of us) find to be
penetrating, analytical, dissecting (the counterpoint), etc...?  Are
people passive to bad news because of the commercial incentive the
stations have to frame and edit their stories in the journalistic
equivalent to Hollywood film?  Why does GG think that art is not
inevitably benign?  

<grappling>

-Mary Jo