Fear The Deafness Poem by gershon hepner

With our mouths we tend to hear
he words which with our ears we cannot speak;
take great care when you do, and fear
the deafness you may cause when you critique.

Inspired by Paul Celan’s expression “hearing our way in with our mouths, ” cited by Joshua Cohen in an article in Foreword, October 9,2009, reviewing “Night Music: Essays on Music 1928-1962, ” by Theodor W. Adornom translated by Wieland Hoban:
Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno was a philosopher only after he was a composer, as if the music he made in his youth required an entire system, and a later age, of interpretation. There was a method to this method, too. First he discarded European thought; then European thought, or the governments that gave it political sanction, discarded him. In 1938, Adorno left Frankfurt for New York, then for the Promised Land of Los Angeles, where he summered even in winter alongside his collaborator Max Horkheimer and peers Arnold Schoenberg and Thomas Mann. During the 1940s, before returning to the Reich, Wiesengrund was abbreviated to W.; Theodor became “Teddie” forever. For Adorno, second movements were always the more significant, their function to emotionally reveal what any preamble could only gesture at, or intellectually justify; he lived for development; he exposed his soul in mechanics. After the spikily clichéd “Bewegt” of his first piece for string quartet, Opus 2, the second piece, “Variationen, ” opens with a music of rare sensuousness — a voluble singing of strings….
A coda: The secrets revealed by Adorno at his most reckless, by Benjamin in mystical mode, and by a few other German-Jewish hierophants of Theory before it became Frenchified and just another requisite of the core curriculum were, perhaps, the only secrets of an openly barbaric century — not because they were, rather because their creators said they were. Any description of their evanescence can more effectively be elided, made concise, in music: the opening violin germ of Berg’s “Kammerkonzert, ” or Webern’s six quartet bagatelles that last no longer than three minutes; the soprano entrance of Schoenberg’s Second Quartet, or the piercing needle of his “Streichtrio.” Ernst Krenek. Stefan Wolpe. And we’ve confined ourselves to Mitteleuropa. As making any program notes on this music would be to write mere prose again or, at best, a punctuated poetry (Paul Celan’s “hearing our way in with our mouths”) , it would be better even to listen to silence, or — Adorno, hold your ears — to something genuinely pop.

10/15/09