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epitome of incomprehensibility
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Another question from ten_years_ago (eleven, actually): how did I get a "second reader" from the history department for my master's thesis?
My project was about Ezra Pound's 1937 Guide to Kulchur, a book that's hard to categorize: art criticism, maybe? in contemporary terms, creative nonfiction? But it also showed the beliefs that led to actions he'd eventually get in trouble for (the_case_of_ezra_pound).
I started my research by looking at how Pound connected writing and music (my application for the MA degree said I was interested in how early 20th-century writers mixed literature and music, though I didn't focus on Pound yet).
That led to me asking about the "Great Bass" theory presented in Kulchur: basically, Pound thought that the rhythm of a piece of music acted as sort of a bass note, since pitch is a series of vibrations.
It's intriguing, but it doesn't work: air movement is only perceived as pitch if it's faster than about twenty vibrations a second. There's a threshold where we can hear either, I think around 16-20 Hz, which is why some low organ pipes seem to vibrate and lend to the general atmosphere. But someone drumming at, say, two or three beats a second won't affect the pitch of a piece. Let alone a song being a certain tempo - the hearer may perceive the "beat" as a pattern that shapes the music, but it may not always be actually present as physical sound.
...So far this all seems kind of far away from history, right? More like literature and music theory. A bit of acoustic physics and auditory perception.
But in Guide to Kulchur, Pound also praised Benito Mussolini and fascism, stressing that a strong leader would make art flourish properly. Sort of like how having the right "Great Bass" would make a piece of music better, the overtones complementing the bass tone (which, as said above, works for actual bass notes, but not for anything that's perceptible as rhythm).
This was odd to me, because I'd absorbed the idea that totalitarian governments tend to hate art, that art would be potentially subversive and present a real or imagined challenge to dictatorships.
Or that they just wouldn't give a damn about art. Which seemed to be Mussolini's attitude towards some of Pound's Cantos - Pound and Mussolini did meet once! The dictator said the verses were "diverting"; Pound was very proud, but it seems that the guy just did the 1930ish equivalent of "okay, that's cool, moving on."
...So anyway, with that in mind, I steered my project more towards how Pound used his artistic theory to justify fascism.
Maybe my underlying warning with this was that any kind of art form can potentially be used to justify oppressive politics - it doesn't have to be an aesthetic of sameness and dullness or an explicit appeal to tradition. At the same time, it appears that some kind of fundamental basis (bass?) is often appealed to - but I'm not sure if this would always apply.
Anyway, that's why my supervisor (English department) decided someone from the history department should be my second reader!
And she (the history prof) was very helpful in pointing out connections and suggesting reading material - I don't think I would have ever read Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism otherwise. Mind you, the prof had a couple of criticisms of it (which I meant to write about in "ideology" but got twice sidetracked).
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