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), 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.

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Ernst von Siemens was many things – including a catalyst for the arts. By establishing the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation in 1972, he made projects and careers possible – far beyond his own lifetime. The grandson of company founder Werner von Siemens, Ernst was born on 9 April 1903, just southwest of London in Coombe House, Kingston Hill. He spent his childhood and youth on the family estate, the Heinenhof in Potsdam, surrounded by ten acres of parkland and two lakes. As idyllic as this might sound, Ernst von Siemens was but 15 years old when Germany and its allies lost the First World War. Just a few months earlier, he had received his school report from the Real-Gymnasium in Potsdam which read: “Behaviour: good; attention and diligence: sufficient; Obersekunda exam [11th grade].”
After graduating from high school, Ernst von Siemens went to Munich to study “a technical subject,” as stipulated by his father Carl Friedrich. He opted for physics. Ernst von Siemens was diligent: Just five years later, he wrote his dissertation on spectral measurements. At the same time, he contracted polio – the consequences of which he would suffer for the rest of his life, but he did not let this get him down. Two years later, at the age of 26, Ernst von Siemens took his first step into professional life, naturally in the family business. As the years went by, the passionate mountaineer and hiker also continued his professional ascent: In 1941, he finally became general representative of the company – in the middle of World War II, i.e. at the most difficult time imaginable.

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The last fifty years have likely been some of the most creatively rich and diverse in musical history. There are many reasons for this: an expansion and increase in institutions and organisations (including the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation) devoted to music’s funding and creation; the rapid growth of the recording industry; the proliferation and cross-pollination of musical genres; the gradual (yet still incomplete) entry of artists of all ethnicities, genders and social classes into the concert hall; and the spread of aesthetics, technology and teaching around the world thanks to study grants, mass and online media, and affordable international travel. Rather than attempt – inadequately – to describe that diversity, this essay will take a partial approach. Its guide will be Manuel Castells’ seminal book The Information Age, and particularly its first volume, The Rise of the Network Society.

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“New Music” is nervous. Starting with its orthography: 
why this anxious “N” and “M”? – Seth Brodsky

Paul Bekker begins his famous 1919 lecture on Neue Musik with an alarming observation: in all artistic areas there is progress with “very remarkable new developments in terms of the style and direction of artistic creation” at every turn, “only in music one notices little or almost nothing of this direct, shared experience of the present, and the outside observer easily comes to the conclusion that there is nothing new in musical production, in an objectively serious sense”. Actually, Bekker contends, the reality is quite different: he does find contemporary developments capable of competing with those in visual art, architecture, literature and theatre, only they have not yet entered the general public’s consciousness in the same way and are largely ignored by the music industry…

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notes on music

°

music is music
the rest is noise
no, is, e
no   sé

°
notations
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– not –––––––
–––––––––––– not –––––––––––––––––––––––––­
––––––––––––––––––––––– no –––––––––––––––­
––– no –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– no

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