Lydia Goehr, 2023 Music, Measure, Climate

CELSIUS 232.7. I am converting the title that the American writer Ray Bradbury gave to his novel from 1953—Fahrenheit 451: America to Europe. Bradbury wanted to know the temperature at which paper burns. With different protocols, the measure would change with the paper’s thickness and weight. Exactitude, however, was less Bradbury’s point than the politics and prediction that shapes the writing of science fiction. Politics and prediction are two themes for my own essay: why prediction assumes an urgency under social conditions of climate change, where one sort of change regards technology, another the movement between academic scholarship and writing for the newspapers (as we see on the original cover of Bradbury’s novel) 1; and a third sort of change regards the paradigm for a mode of musical composition set into an unrestful social pattern of production and reception.

Bradbury described a world on fire: book-burnings, then people. He allowed books to become personified so that a loss of knowledge on paper became a loss for the memory and the mind. Bradbury was neither the first nor the last to invoke a world ablaze: a “bonfire of vanities” from Florence when thousands of human artifacts were destroyed in the public square, and then, centuries later, a short story from 1844 by Nathaniel Hawthorne, who brought the bonfire under the rubric of “earth’s holocaust.” Bradbury’s dystopian novel, written at a high temperature, envisaged a world of the future consumed by every sort of consumption: a world reported by the headlines and mottos of the daily newspaper. Writing the future was for Bradbury to write the present in the shadow of the past: to write, that is, with warning signs in and out of time.

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