On the first anniversary of the storming of the Washington Capitol, many assessments have been made on the state of the republic of the United States.

The watchdogs of democracy have not been encouraged by the situation across the Atlantic either.

Once set up as models for the transformation of autocracy into free societies, Poland and Hungary now appear as rogue states within the European Union, sanctioned by Brussels for their attacks on independent judicial systems and against individual rights. .

The immigrant crisis on the Polish-Belarusian border continues into the dead of winter. On the western outskirts, Britain has Brexited the EU. Refugees drown in the English Channel, with France and Britain blaming each other for the tragedy.

In the heart of Europe, Austria has been rocked by political corruption scandals. Its young right-wing and anti-immigrant ex-chancellor Sebastian Kurz has been dismissed twice. -The politician plans to waltz through the revolving door.

And then there is Covid. When the Austrian government imposed a new lockdown in November and announced the start of compulsory vaccinations in February, some 40,000 demonstrators marched to Vienna’s Heldenplatz (Heroes’ Square) in front of the former imperial palace, the Hofburg, with smoke bombs, horns, flags and placards calling for an end to “the fascist dictatorship”.

One doesn’t even get a quick glimpse of this busy backdrop while listening to the broadcast of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra’s annual New Years concert.

In 2021, the event was virtual, but this year the famous orchestra returned to its home in the classical temple of the Musikverein, its golden columns and caryatids festooned with flowers, for a live performance in front of a masked audience.

The government lifted the lockdown in December even as omicron gathered its forces.

The musicians and the conductor, the imperious Daniel Barenboim, were unmasked and even sang and whistled the nostalgic Night Reveler’s Waltz by Johann Michael Ziehrer, one of the most ingenious threats to the supremacy of the orchestra of the Strauss brothers.

The host of the show was Hugh Bonneville – Lord Grantham at Downtown Abbey. The pandemic confined his lordship to quarters – a very English living room equipped with a Christmas tree, a comfortable armchair, leather-bound volumes, crackling of fire in the hearth and fine engravings on the wall.

Dressed in a tailored blue wool suit, Bonneville was the epitome of wisdom, wit, and stability. This ersatz-aristo puts the class back in class.

The Musikverein is a stronghold of tradition even more robust than Downton Abbey.

The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra is predominantly made up of men (women were only admitted to the orchestra as “full” members in 1997, two years after Austria joined the ‘EU) and white.

Bonneville’s remarks between musical numbers were rich in some historical details, silent on others.

We have heard of the Strauss brothers’ orchestra on tour, but not of Johann Jnr’s early revolutionary sympathies, although his music later became not only a symbol, but a cultural bulwark of the Habsburg monarchy.

With a subtly raised eyebrow, Bonneville referred to music and dancing as “extramarital flirtation” sites.

The screenplay (by John Walker) explored the nuances of genre and class of the city’s famous masquerades.

With her own taste for flirtation, Bonneville described the underground adventures through the ballroom landscape of Empress Elisabeth, wife of Franz Joseph I, who ruled from the revolutionary year of 1848 until her death in 1916 in middle of the First World War.

This mustached ruler did not live long enough to witness the self-inflicted demise of the Habsburg monarchy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, considered by some to be a multicultural forerunner of the EU.

Bonneville failed to remind audiences, however, that the tradition of New Year’s concerts in Vienna began in 1939 as a fundraiser for the Nazi Party.

Barenboim turns 80 this year, and without the mutton chops he too is a longtime ruler of an international empire, with his kingdoms now reduced to his command of the Berlin State Opera.

At the helm of the Vienna Philharmonic on January 1 for the third time, Barenboim sometimes smiled, but his demeanor was hardly festive.

In the last of the three traditional recalls, the Mars Radetzky – this Habsburg monarchy theme song is now playing on a piano (and banjo) in a Montana living room on Netflix in the neo-western, Power of the Dog (with Benedict Cumberbatch) – audiences started clapping too soon.

The blatant maestro silenced them, holding them in check like a field marshal with saber raised, before giving the command and the ceremonial audience their pleasure in the chorus.

No one is better at playing the role of the stern general than Barenboim, a wicked and witty glint in his eyes as he thumbs his thumb at the great Viennese.

With the homebound viewer eager for a sightseeing excursion, the show took them to the nearby Spanish Riding School for a horse ballet of the Lipizzaner stallions prancing precisely to the tune of Josef Strauss Polka Nymphs; and in Schoennbrunn (the summer palace of the Habsburgs) for the Vienna State Ballet from the terrace to the floored ballroom.

The human choreography assumed various gender configurations that might have offended Kurz and his political allies, opposed as they are – along with their Polish and Hungarian counterparts – to same-sex marriage.

In the midst of these peregrinations, the exotic of Johann Strauss Persian Mars celebrated the opening of a second front east of Austria’s centuries-old adversary, the Ottoman Empire.

The serpentine melody of the air is an unusual 19th century exoticism and even cites the Persian national anthem of yesteryear.

The music is so light and beautiful that, at least for Viennese on New Year’s Day, it refuses to be carried away by geopolitical gravity: wars and border clashes; refugees; bans on the burqa; anti-inflammatory vaccines; The Austrian internal defense of the fortress Europe.

Inevitably, Strauss’s sentimental fare traces the movements of Viennese dancers. Like history, they go round in circles, repeating their steps and their trajectories.

No ensemble is more convincing than this philharmonic by adding this phantom fourth beat to the triple beat of their national waltz.

Barenboim knows that this move cannot really be carried out, but is in the symphonic blood of the players.

The Blue Danube may now be dammed, but on New Years at the Musikverein in Vienna, it sinks and evaporates like champagne.

David Yearsley is a longtime CounterPunch contributor where this article first appeared. Her latest book is Sex, Death, and Minuets: Anna Magdalena Bach and Her Musical Notebooks. He can be contacted at [email protected].

“WWe can’t see it, “says a character from The Matrix Resurrections,” but we’re all trapped inside these weird, repeating loops. Little surprise, techno producer Marcel Dettmann was commissioned to write the music for this latest film in the franchise. It’s a natural fit. Its director, Lana Wachowski, goes clubbing at Berghain, the Berlin techno club where Dettmann resides and where, cut off from everyday life, people live surreal and liberating experiences. Techno continues to inspire the aesthetic of the franchise.

When the techno club first appeared in Detroit in the 1980s, African-American producers reimagined the deindustrialized city as a site of futuristic fantasies. Cybotron Techno City’s dystopian 1984 track was inspired by Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and the Tokyo of Yellow Magic Orchestra’s Technopolis track. “I extrapolated the need to interface the spirituality of human beings into the cybernetic matrix,” said Rik Davis of Cybotron (using the word “matrix” before the film’s existence), “between the brain, the soul and mechanisms of cyberspace “.

that’s to say that The Matrix character names (Neo, Trinity, Morpheus) all sound like techno producer nicknames (Function, DVS1, Cadency). Likewise, the fashion in the film is reminiscent of the stereotype of Berlin techno clubwear. “When they come into The Matrix, they create their character, that’s how they see themselves,” Matrix costume designer Kym Barrett said of the characters, with their PVC coats, chunky boots and their micro sunglasses (by Richard Walker).

Techno artist Jeff Mills talks the same way about shedding his human form through music. “I’m becoming the third person,” he told The Wire, comparing his productions to robotic probes of alien territory. Along with Mike Banks, Mills was co-founder of the Detroit Underground Resistance (UR) techno collective. UR sought to harness the power of techno anonymity to deprogram people of what they called the ‘dominant mental beam’: the false reality by which, through the media, we are conditioned to accept a false impression of who we are. “Everything you see may not be real,” sang UR on their 1998 album Interstellar Fugitives. “Maybe it is a mirage.”

The Matrix also rests on such a distinction between the apparent world and the real world. Co-creator Lilly Wachowski recently revealed that in the original script Switch was meant to be a trans character who in the Matrix was female and in the real world a male. Many trans and gay people experience this truth in underground party scenes, where the techno club is a safe environment to explore who they really are.

The most striking sequence of Matrix Reloaded takes place in an underground rave in Sion. In a cavernous space lit by open flames, hundreds of sweaty bodies dance to a techno song (Fluke’s Zion) mimed by drummers. The fashion is in soft toned tunics with bald heads, beaded cuffs and swinging dreadlocks. This scene evokes the exhilarating feeling of freedom one gets on a night out at an underground club, when the everyday world fades away. It shows the Matrix’s kinship with the bizarre techno marriage of the futuristic and the old.

Why techno? At its best, this is synthetic electronic music without any familiar characteristics – no melody, no harmony, no song structure – relayed in dark, streaky spaces. This means that it can give a momentary release of history and identity, including race, gender, and sexual constructs. In Berlin, through clubs like Berghain and promoters like Gegen, techno is empowering allies with queer countercultural movements. “Leave your digital surveillance device at home (or in the locker room),” said the blurb of a recent Gegen party. “Destroy your image of yourself. “

Simulacra and Simulation by French theorist Jean Baudrillard was one of three books the Wachowskis asked Keanu Reeves to read before filming The Matrix. “There is no longer any fiction,” he quipped. “[Science] fiction will no longer be a mirror turned towards the future, but a desperate re-hallucination of the past. From this perspective, films such as The Matrix Resurrections are futile attempts to rehash basic traditional myths for our rapidly dissolving world.

But I think it’s too pessimistic. The term Gilles Deleuze uses for certain post-realistic cinemas is “storytelling”. Pyrotechnic blockbusters notwithstanding, The Matrix is ​​a cinematic storytelling, harnessing our deep and hard-to-shake sense of the unreality of modern life and inventing new identities. Our post-industrial environment – work, cities, social networks, interiors, race, gender – can look like a collective dream that we aspire to be shocked about. For many, techno clubs have this power. “A world without rules or controls, without borders or borders”, in the words of Neo. “A world where anything is possible. “

It reminds me of my friend’s first night at Berghain, the underground power station turned techno club. At the first floor bar, a woman asked him if he wanted psilocybin mushrooms; he nodded and she said to follow her. As they walked along the strobe-lit dance floor, surrounded by dancing leather-clad bodies, he noticed the tattoo on his back shoulder: a white rabbit. Life imitating art – it was exactly like the scene in The Matrix precipitating Thomas Anderson’s transformation into Neo and his entry into a weirder new reality.

Falynn Baptiste always loved Christmas concerts when she grew up in the Cree Nation of Red Pheasant, 150 kilometers northwest of Saskatoon.

The Cree-Métis child, who was known for his powerful bagpipes, was only six when she donned a purple dress and sang her first solo – a Cree Christmas carol – at her school concert.

“People were like, ‘Oh Falynn, can you sing?’ and I was always excited and ready to take the stage and, not so much to be seen, but to share music and be heard, “she said.

Thirty-two years later, the recording artist took center stage in a long green dress and sang What child is this? in Cree with the Saskatoon Symphony Orchestra during their Christmas concert.

At that moment, Baptiste felt that she had come full circle.

“I am very, very proud,” she said. “Going maybe from a time when I was not proud of who I was to now… Showcasing our beautiful language is an accomplishment.”

Losing your identity

Baptiste, now 38, grew up surrounded by family members who spoke Cree as their mother tongue and could sing Cree church hymns. However, she learned English in school and lost interest in the traditional language as a teenager. She had to take the bus off the reserve to attend junior high school in the town of North Battleford, Saskatchewan.

“It was quite shocking. It was so clear as a 12 year old girl that ‘Okay whoever you are is wrong so we have to change who you are to fit in’,” he said. she declared.

She changed the way she spoke, acted, dressed and who she spent time with.

“I have spent a lot of my life trying to prove to others that I am not a First Nation, that I am not ‘Indian’,” she said.

Years later, as she struggled with her sense of identity in her late twenties, she realized that “my culture, my spirituality, my language, my family was the link for me. make me feel complete ”.

At 30, the teacher returned to the education program at the University of Saskatchewan to obtain a certificate in the Aboriginal language.

She has become a champion of the Cree language both on stage and in the classroom.

teacher and musician cry

Today, she teaches at the miyo machihowin academy – an Indigenous wellness program that integrates language and culture – at ED Feehan Catholic High School in Saskatoon.

One of her grade 12 students, Isabelle Robin, a teenager from Beardy’s Cree Nation and Okemasis, said learning about the dark history of residential schools motivated her to learn the language.

“I am learning for kids who have never learned their language and who weren’t allowed to learn or speak it,” Robin said.

Baptiste is excited to help Indigenous teens take pride in their culture at the time in their lives when she has lost her own connection.

“There’s almost a process of self-acceptance that has to take place. And when that happens, you can see the physical change, you can see the emotional change, you can see the spiritual change,” she said. declared. “[Students] hold a little higher. They walk a little more proudly down the hall. “

A Christmas cry

At home, Baptiste began working on Cree translations for Christmas carols that had not yet been translated. She enlisted the help of Solomon Ratt, a Cree language teacher at the First Nations University of Canada, to translate the lyrics into Cree, then Baptiste fine-tuned the lyrics to match the melody.

In 2020, she released an album titled A Christmas cry with eight songs such as Oh holy night, Silent night, and Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.

Earlier this year, she was going to produce an album of religious songs. But, she stopped the project after the discovery of unidentified remains in former denominational boarding schools in Canada.

“Now was not the time because we were all facing our realities… with struggles, loss and grief,” she said. “And so I stopped the project completely and thought, ‘No, now is not the time for that. “

She doesn’t feel the same about screaming Christmas carols.

Baptiste said Christmas is a time to celebrate Creator, community and culture.

And, as she did with the symphony orchestra behind her, a time to stand up straight.

As Baptiste told the crowd, “I wish you all a very, merry Christmas and blessings to all of you.”