Ergo: The Campus Voice of Reason. That was the name of our paper. Like all college students, we were more confident we were right than we should have been, but we stood apart from the crowd. As an organization, we were never “liberal” or “conservative” in the popular sense of the words. Our position was libertarian, strongly influenced by Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism. Ergo challenged university administrators, the campus left, politicians, and academics. My association with Ergo helped me to develop a framework of thought that I still go by. My views on what is important and how to achieve it have changed, and so have some of my conclusions, but my basic principles have changed very little.
Ergo came into being during a time called the “sixties,” which lasted from about 1965 to 1975. The founder was J. R. M. Seitz, who allegedly acquired all the parts necessary to build an Atlas missile (except the nuclear warhead) on the open market. It was the time of the Vietnam War and urban riots. It was a time of protests and violence. People marched and occupied buildings. Some thought that totalitarian Communist states were a great idea. Others just wanted the government to stop drafting people and sending them into an undeclared war on the other side of the globe. Once I was punched in the nose, and another time the sweater I was wearing was set on fire. I can’t count the number of times I was called a fascist. Interesting times.
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Upon hearing Mozart’s Singspiel The Abduction from the Seraglio, Emperor Joseph II is alleged to have said, “Too many notes.” The claim increased in popularity when Peter Schaffer put those words in his mouth in the travesty Amadeus. Quotations are tricky things, though. If I gratuitously claim someone said something, how do you know they didn’t? It’s the old issue of proving a negative.
The quotation, or something like it, has a source that long predates Schaffer. It’s the 1798 biography of Mozart by Franz Xaver Niemetschek. The full title is Leben des K.K. Kapellmeisters Wolfgang Gottlieb Mozart nach Originalquellen beschrieben (life of the music director Wolfgang Gottlieb Mozart, written based on original sources). The attribution given there is:
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Looking around the Internet and stores, the most obvious signs of Black History Month are ethnically targeted marketing. That’s what advertisers do, I guess. But the original idea was a good one: call attention to people whom older histories tended to ignore.
Writers might get some ideas from looking at black historical figures they admire. Let me just list three:
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My latest article for Liberty Fund’s Online Library of Liberty, “The Peasants’ War and Martin Luther,” is now online. Marxist claims have largely dominated historical discussions of the Peasants’ War, but it was a revolt in defense of property rights, not against them. Its Twelve Articles contain ideas that appeared in the United States’ Declaration of Independence.
I’m the kind of person who always needs to have a project or two going. Things have been slow in that department lately, and FAWM is still about six weeks away. The two novels I wrote were enjoyable to do, but fiction isn’t my strongest point. The research I did for them has proven fruitful, though. I thought about writing a book on the Protestant Reformation and its effect on the emergence of personal freedom. I can’t claim to be a professional historian, though, and the readership would undoubtedly be small.
But I can write songs. The idea I’ve developed is a song cycle which combines music and history while connecting to my novels. Hans Lorenz is Thomas and Frieda’s son in The Magic Battery and Spells of War. He’s a small child and isn’t developed much as a character, but he has strong musical abilities. In this cycle, the adult Hans is the singer of songs which could get him into bad trouble for the ideas they expressed; but doing that runs in his family. (His father was on trial for his life, his mother’s book was burned, and his grandmother was killed in prison, accused of witchcraft.)
The first song, which I’ve put up on SoundCloud, is “Deva Prison.” It presents history which most listeners won’t know, so it’s followed by a short talk by “Hans” to his audience about the facts behind the song. This is a pattern which I plan to follow in other songs in the cycle.
A fact that might get a few people more interested: Dávid Ferenc, the subject of the song, was the founder of Unitarianism.
If I achieve my goal, this cycle will present some important history which isn’t familiar to most modern audiences in an entertaining way. Let me know what you think.
This post is a signal boost for Ada Palmer’s very interesting John Nuveen Lecture on censorship at the University of Chicago Divinity School. A lot of you reading this blog may know her better from her songs and the group Sassafrass, but she’s amazingly knowledgeable about a lot of things.
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Two articles which I wrote for Liberty Fund are up in their Banned Books Week series, which runs all through October. My articles are on Caron de Beaumarchais’s two well-known “Figaro” plays, both of which got him in trouble with the censors.
Take a look at the rest of the articles if you have time; there’s a lot of interesting material.
Liberty Fund is running a month-long series of articles in honor of Banned Books Week. One of my contributions is now online, on “Beaumarchais and The Barber of Seville.”
My article on The Marriage of Figaro should show up later this month.
The second edition of Tomorrow’s Songs Today, my history of filk music, is now available as a free download. A new chapter covers events since 2015, and the appendices have been updated to list conventions and awards up to the present. The existing chapters have been lightly revised. Many links that broke over the past eight years are fixed.