WHAT WE FOUND ON EUROPA
Ichigo Scracci
One of the perks of being a full professor at a well endowed university is that you get to travel.
Guest lectureships, commencement addresses, and, if you're adept at formulating proposals,
fully funded fieldwork. And so this Spring, thanks to a fortuitous convergence of interests on
the part of NASA and the Ofterdingen Gesellschaft, I found myself blasting off in a space
ship to investigate Europa, one of Jupiter's (or is it Saturns's? - hell, I'm not driving the thing)
spectacular moons, accompanied by a couple of Russian scientists, a Buddhist monk, a chimp
named Bonanzza (his spelling) and a shiny golden robot who liked to be called Rob, and whose
main task was ship's cook.
Now Europa, as everyone knows, is thought to possess, beneath its frozen surface, a hot,
bubbly core. This has led to unbridled speculation on the possible existence of life: blind,
grotesque, gigantic worms, or delicate, fibrous algae, or even men like us (in character if not in
appearance), inquisitive, tool - making, bent on discovering the nature of their world, the riddle
of existence - yes, even prone to expressing such hopes in some unimaginable music.
Limits of space constrain me ...no, that's not true: this is cyberspace...well then, limits of
time...but again, not really: I've got all summer and nothing to do but man the barbecue grill...
The truth is that, regrettably, we live in an age of specialization, so it's limits of expertise that
constrain me to focus mainly on the musical aspects of our journey, though some discussion of
Europa's history, religious traditions and philosophical systems will be necessary to an
appreciation of its musical practices.
So what did we find? A frozen terrain, a noxious atmosphere and a howling wind. Wisconsin.
Occasionally we were startled by the eruption of geysers spewing lava that would freeze in mid
- air forming dark, fantastic tree - shapes.
- And that was all - according to the official report. No mention of the exotic musical
instruments, including those hollowed - out unicorn horns, nor of the ancient manuscripts with
their elegant hieroglyphs perfectly preserved in ice, no, not a word about the ritualistic
performances I was fortunate to capture surreptitiously on tape, when those wiggly fellows with
the large, round eyes came crawling out of the crevices one night and began to sing to the
mother - planet. Instead there's this nonsense about hallucinations, nervous disorders, erratic
behavior, space sickness. Alas, professional jealousy knows no bounds. Even faithful Rob
the robot was turned against me: I had my revenge on his tin head one night, executing an
elaborate Balinese rhythm with a pair of wooden mallets.
Turning my back on all such sceptics, I present below, with only the briefest commentary, four
musicological treasures from Europa:
1. Spiritual Flowers
Poetry for the ear and for the eye, composed in the Language of Wonder and Delight,
wherein sound and significance, color and form, are merged to transcend the limits of rational
thought, manifesting an ecstatic world-view rooted in emotion. Reality is presented as "multiple -
subjective," such that each class of being, from the elemental forces that sustain us to the
elusive angels above, is seen in a great chain of interdependence, with the more advanced form
serving what lies below as self-sacrificing god. (Coming soon.)
2. Ceremony of Mythical Beasts
Ritual song and dance. Magical names are intoned, and then subjected to playful variation that
serves to coax powerful forces out of hiding. The monsters - symbols of the many selves within
us - dance into a frenzy and bestow upon the participants gifts of strength, wisdom and
immortality. (Coming soon.)
3. Memory
The performance I recorded is of an instrument like nothing on earth. The player sits upon a
rotating stool surrounded by flexible metallic rings of various sizes, placed at various angles.
Each ring represents a particular octave space in the harmonic series (a natural phenomenon,
as valid on Europa as on Earth). Spinning and reaching, seeming actually to dance in the act
of playing, the performer accesses the tones found in the first six octave of the series. Here at
last is the interiority, here the worlds within worlds that Schubert sought, where each new level
of inwardness reveals a richer secret nectar; here as well are the paradigms of Plato, whom we've
chased among the shadows of temperament all these centuries.
4. A Beating of Angels' Wings
A single octave space is contains 128 pitches - the contents of the seventh octave of the
harmonic series. Previously unimagined harmonies arise, alongside familiar triads - but these are
pure (untempered) and the ways in which they relate to one another are unique.
Toward the end of the performance a distinct honking noise will be noticed, the source of
which I was unable to ascertain in the nocturnal gloom. This has led some (unimaginative,
mean-spirited, bald-headed, pot-bellied) pseudo-scholars (modern Pharisees: "whitened
sepulchres" as the Bible has it) to impute the sound to one of those old geezers who
occasionally stumbles into a free event at a music conservatory, hoping to hear some Brahms,
annoyed to discover he's trapped in a composer's concert, and who commences, at a certain
point, absent-mindedly blowing his nose into a gigantic hankie, his fortissimo B flat clashing
with the delicate microtones emanating from the stage... (The music for this also is coming
soon!)
From which it follows inevitably that ancient Europan music is thought by such people to be
but the fabrication of a single human - admittedly a human of unusually poignant utopian
proclivities, perhaps bearing witness to the evolution of his thought and style - a single man, I
say, whose valiant efforts to construct an "alternate modernism" that would restore mankind's
place in the scheme of the universe have been met with indifference, incomprehension and
boredom, and who, therefore, in a desperate effort to rejuvenate his career has transformed
his pathetic little concert-tapes into some gigantic, bogus sci-fi fiasco (from which it also follows
that said artist might be none other than me - support for such (outrageous, unsupportable)
allegations coming from such disparate fields as linguistics (where some have found in my
(cultivated, idiosyncratic) style certain affinities with the work of one Peter Ceniti who, being the
former editor in chief and founder of this Ofterdingen Gesellschaft, and who, having
disappeared some time ago, is believed by some to have "melted" into his characters - that is,
the other members of the Gesellschaft, and archeology (where the "Europa stones" I offered
a number of museums for a very reasonable price were rejected on unspecified grounds).
But why would one re-write history? As an act of self-justification? Or because we find reality
insufficient to our dreams, a story written by someone else? In that case I might be Peter Ceniti
after all, though whose story he might be telling is a question whose answer could be sought for
endless ages from the myriad circling stars to the bottomless, dark depths of Europa's oceans.