Music—“just a sweet pressure of the air”1But for music to once again turn into air after two and half millennia of notes and six hundred years of sheet music, a media war was and is necessary.2 It was started by Wagner's furious host: Furious host, wild hunt, locally also known as the army of Wode or Wuotis, army of anger or rage, wild retinue, or simply wild huntsman, is according to German legend a host led by Wotan (hence the name) or a large retinue of ghosts, that, seldom seen and frequently heard, rushes through the air with terrible thunder. The legend, which reaches far back into antiquity, is based on the notion that the souls of the departed move through agitated air. To this day tradition links the wild hunt to the nightly thunder in densely wooded areas. . . . Instead of the ghostly animals that accompany the retinue of the wild huntsman, there sometimes appear warriors with drums, trumpets and flaming weapons on fiery horses led by Wotan, the supreme warlord, or by one of his surrogates, such as Emperor Charles in the Odenwald region, and it is believed this only happens when a war is about to break out.3Rarely seen but often heard, the furious host is, first, a pure world of hearing or a sonic spectacle, which, second, announces war.4 But a media-technological and physiological war, such as the one unleashed by Wagner, does not (contrary to the Imperial German system of concepts at work in this dictionary entry) limit Wotan to the status of a “supreme warlord,” in other words, a Prussian chief of the general staff like Counts Moltke or Schlieffen.To begin with, the soldiers of Wotan's furious host are ghosts (Gespenster), that is to say, spirits (Geister). Wotan, in turn, is in straightforward etymological terms fury (Wut). “Wotan, id est furor,” noted the pious Adam of Bremen around 1100 in his Deeds of Bishops of the Hamburg Church. Everything therefore boils down to the question what spirit and fury have to do with each other. The answer is known neither to the Holy Pentecostal Spirit nor to the German philosophy that led from Hegel and Gneisenau to Moltke and Schlieffen. Due to gaps in tradition and historical suppression, the solution, as in the case of Wotan, can only be found in etymology: spirit and fury have everything to do with each other because the word “spirit” used to signify fury. Anglo-Saxon gestan meant to “frighten,” the English word “ghastly” still means “dreadful,” and “aghast” still means angry. Behind these lexical meanings, however, lies the shadow of a long-lost practice.As is known, the Germanic tribes were a nomadic war machine. They did not march into battle under the command of a supreme warlord. Their courage and fury came from secret associations (Geheimbünde), that is to say, from initiation rituals. The warriors donned wolf or bear masks, thus turning into werewolves or berserkers, in order to transfer or feed back the fury of their animal masks into their own bodies, all with the possible assistance of drugs. That is precisely what the word Geist denotes. The warriors did not have spirit; rather, the spirit had them because spirit itself is—as with the shamans of Siberia—a technique of ecstasy (Eliade 1961: 385).When the Christian church, to whom this spirit must have been an abomination, set out to colonize the future Germany, its New Testament ran into translation problems. Only north of the Main River did the third person of the trinity, the Holy Breath of the Greeks, turn into a Holy Spirit. South German monks, by contrast, appeared to have been so fearful of a possible confusion with the old ecstatic techniques that they preferred wihum atum, that is, holy breath. Just as Wagner once called music “the breath of language” (Wagner 1966, 2:265).And Wagner did so because he rediscovered the spiritual technique of ecstasy. From February 2, 1843, until the uprising of May 1849, Wagner the Saxon was Royal Saxon Court conductor in Dresden. On Palm Sunday 1846 he had the honor of leading the Royal Orchestra in a performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony as part of the orchestra's only public performance that year. “The Ninth Symphony,” Wagner noted in his autobiography My Life, “thus became a point of honor to me in every respect” (Wagner 1983b: 329). He approached this point of honor with his usual technical precision: From the outset in this venture I had recognized that the possibility of obtaining a popular success with this symphony depended upon the application of the highest ideal standards in overcoming the extraordinary difficulties presented by the choral part. I saw that demands were made here that could only be met by a great and dedicated mass of singers. Thus the first prerequisite was to secure the services of as large a chorus possible; beyond the usual augmentation of our theater chorus with the rather feeble students of the Dreissig academy, I managed to overcome many difficulties to obtain the choir of the Kreuz School with its superb boys’ voices as well as the choir of the United Dresden Seminary, which was well trained in church singing. When these singers, more than three hundred strong, now assembled for our many rehearsals, I tried in my own peculiar way to inspire them for their task; I succeeded in proving to the basses, for example, that the famous passage “Seid umschlungen, Millionen” (“Be embraced, millions”) and especially the “Brüder, überm Sternenzelt, muss ein lieber Vater wohnen” (“Brothers, above the starry canopy, there must dwell a loving father”), could not possibly be sung in a normal way but had to be, as it were, proclaimed in highest ecstasy. I was so transported myself at this point that I think I really got everyone into quite a state, and I didnt’ stop until my own voice, which I previously had been able to hear through all the others, was no longer audible, and I could feel myself drowning in a warm sea of sound. (Wagner 1983b: 331 – 32)For the first time after a thousand years of Christianity, Wagner's Dresden notion of God and spirit was once again a technique of ecstasy. To begin with, everything was planned with technical precision to achieve a mass media effect. In order to make certain that the Ninth Symphony would be “a popular success” among its consumers, Wagner introduced mass media principles on the production side: three hundred singers were recruited for the embraced millions. But when this mass technology was put into effect during rehearsals, technology turned into ecstasy, especially for the technician himself. In order to have the basses sing as if possessed by a spirit that, paradoxically, happened to be the loving Christian father of Schiller and Beethoven, and “as it were, proclaim” rather than merely sing his name, Wagner led by good and equally mad example. Initially, his voice was still audible, yet in the end he did not hear himself anymore but felt his voice—just like Isolde during her last words—drowning in a sea of warm sound. It appears that in 1846 it was no longer necessary to don bear and wolf masks to turn into berserkers and werewolves, respectively. A new technology, the positive feedback of one's own voice, was sufficient to achieve ecstasy. Wagner's hearing-himself-singing, a musical parallel to the hearing-oneself-speaking Jacques Derrida exposed as the physiological basis for all the phantasms of the philosophy of consciousness, infected the other voices in such a way that a superhuman augmentation or amplification buried the one voice in sea of sound.In 1784 James Watt hit upon the technical principle of negative feedback. For the very first time it allowed for steam engines, which up until then were always on the verge of exploding, to be employed for industrial purposes. Watt simply added a flyball governor that reduced the boiler heat by the exact amount of heat that had set it and the whole machine in motion. In the Dresden of 1846, by contrast, Wagner appears to have been the first to hit upon the musical principle of positive feedback. An oscillating system whose output was increased by a factor of at least one (in the case of Beethoven, by three hundred) returned without any phase delay (because the Dresden transit time of sound amounted to less than a second) as input. As a result, the system keeps oscillating with an ever-increasing amplitude or volume. In certain unwelcome instances (as in the case of the furious host) engineers refer to the pertinent differential equations as wild oscillations. They are the basis for all electronic music since Stockhausen and for all the mass music of Stockhausen admirers John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and so on.This, then, is what has become of the phantasm of the “embraced millions,” that is, of democracy, as once dreamt up by the French Revolution and its honorary citizens Schiller and Beethoven. Evidently, the basic difference between democratic phantasms and real mass media effects is that the embraced millions were referred to as “brothers” and therefore as sons of a “dear father above the starry canopy,” whereas the ecstatic feedback system between Wagner and his choir or orchestra simply eliminates all transcendental references to heavens, fathers, or parliaments. It is nothing but elementary air.There used to be a music for the father above the starry canopy and his sons—or what theologians up to Hegel called the parish—but it was the exact opposite of Wagner's wild oscillations. Long before the third person of the trinity was called “breath” and the second was referred to as logos, that is, “spirit” or “word,” logos was defined in ways both crucial for and forgotten by the history of music. Among the Pythagoreans logos was ratio. The fundamental discovery that the string of a monochord, an experimental one-chord instrument, when shortened by half, oscillates twice as high or as an octave, provided a basis for a complete mathematization of music. From the age of Pythagoras on it allowed Europe to address and, starting with Guido of Arezzo, to commit it to paper. With their eagerness for whole numbers, the Pythagorean operated in twelfths. The octave was described as the ratio of 12:6, the fifth as 12:8, and the fourth as 8:6. (cf. Innis 73). And because that other Greek invention, the vowel alphabet, unlike ours also assigned numerical values to letters, numerical relationship or logoi could be expressed using letters. Eta : Wau would have indicated the fourth.When spirit is a mathematical proportion rather than a technique of ecstasy, a completely different concept of music arises. First, the tone interval excludes all vibrations that are made of pure tones rather than of pure noise like Wotan's furious host. Second, these pure tone intervals are split into consonant and dissonant (with the proviso that up until the Middle Ages the third was considered dissonant because its interval did not consist of simple whole numbers). Third, tones were conceived of as defined points emerging from a monochord; they were neither compound harmonic sounds emerging from real instruments or real voices, nor were they reverberations or echoes that (an effect preferred by Wagner) filled entire spaces.Writing hovered above music like God above his sons. Greek mathematics and the Greek vowel alphabet could not describe sound events more complex than the onetime plucking of a monochord. For this, the evidence is as indisputable as it is deceived. Studying intervals, the Greeks did not conclude that the octave vibrates twice as fast as the keynote; instead, they assumed that it propagates twice as fast through space. Their imprecise water clocks were unable to measure that speed, a variable of absolute temperature, is relatively constant. Likewise, they were unable to measure that the standard A vibrates at 440 Hertz per second, while its octave vibrates at 880 Hertz. It was only the modern watch, capable of subverting human perception thresholds, that enabled the French academicians Mersenne and Saveur to recognize the overtones in every real sound and for Fourier (soon after Wagner's birth) to devise the general mathematical formula for complex overtone mixtures (see Kittler 2018: 354). This new concept of vibration was the theoretical correlate of the practical reorganization of the large orchestra, which only starting in the nineteenth century was able to produce the spectrum of all possible timbres. The orchestra now received all the instrumental timbre required by the furious host under the leadership of Wotan or Wagner—namely, for the unleashing of war.Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung is the test run for all coming world wars. In order to hear this, you just need to free yourself from the pious notion, still nourished by the Greek-Christian logos, that the “ ‘idea’ of the Ring in simple words” is “that man emancipates himself from the blind identity with nature from which he springs; and then acquires power over nature only to succumb to her in the long run” (Adorno 1981: 137). This tautological philosophy implies, first, that you only take note of the first version of Wagner's Ring, in which the hero famously is called Siegfried rather than Wotan. Second, it presupposes that Siegfried descends from Mother Nature rather than from a female partisan named Sieglinde, who in turn descends from Wotan and a she-wolf, that is, from warrior masks. What Adorno labeled “man” is a tangled skein of commands. And if there is some “identity with nature” in this data flow of commands that happens to be “blind,” then only in the technical sense that Wagner—according to Nietzsche's insight—keeps composing the switch from, “radio play” to “drama,” from acoustic to optics and back to optics. Which is why the Ring contains audible spectacles devoid of any visibility (see Nietzsche 1997: 223).In Wagner, the end of the gods, which in a technical sense means the end of writing, is the beginning of sound effects. If nobody is in command of it, music remains noise. The Valkyrie begins with the element air: a musical storm more powerful than all humans and gods. As Isolde explains in act 1, scene 1 of Tristan und Isolde, this storm is the breath of the world, which ever and only since Wagner is allowed to drown out and extinguish all singing human voices by means of its sheer volume. In act 1 of Die Walküre, this world storm breath drives the future stormtrooper partisan Siegmund into Hunding's dwelling, where he collapses out of breath. In other words, Siegmund is no longer able to sing, if breathing is indeed the physiological and non-Pythagorean precondition of operatic song. This is how clear and incisively Wagner dramatizes the relationship between world breath and human breath as an either-or. Siegmund would have died had he not been found and saved by his sister Sieglinde, who has no idea that he is her brother: SIEGLINDESiegmund still doesn't move, so she steps still closer to get a look at him.He lies there tired outby the trials of his journey.Has he fainted?Is he very sick?She bends over him and listens intently.He's still breathing;his eyes are only closed.—The man has courage,even if he's collapsed with tiredness.(Wagner 2018: 153)Scenes in which one figure bends over another to determine by listening whether the other is merely asleep and breathing or dead and devoid of breath, occur in almost all of Wagner's music dramas. And with good reason. Just as the Rheingold prelude presents a materialist spectral-analytic derivation of instrumental music from its absolute origin in noise, these scenes of listening to returning breath present a materialist-physiological derivation of song from its absolute origin of noise called breath. Wagner's stormtrooper heroes are defined neither by Pythagorean ratios nor by heavenly angelic music whose message (and etymologically angels are nothing but messengers) up until the prologue of Goethe's Faust had consisted in the inaudible and incorporeal praise of the invisible God; they are defined by bare physiology.Under Sieglinde's hands Siegmund gradually begins to regain his breath. Siegmund recognizes his sister and, aided by her cunning, finds the sword the equally cunning Wotan has left for his future, albeit unconscious partisan. Finally, he fully recovers his breath—and he, the hero, needs this breath in order to unconsciously live up to Wotan's definition of a hero. After all, if it is the law of stormtroopers to violate all written laws, they are left with nothing but murder and incest.No wonder, then, that the sibling incest is triggered by the breath of a spring wind that drowns out all hostile winter storms. But since Wagner's leitmotif technique applies to his texts as well, the media-technological effects of this wind can also be derived from a passage in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg: BECKMESSER(invisible, from the Marker's dais, but very loud)Now begin!WALTHER“Now begin!”So cried the spring through the land:Loud echoed her command.And through the forest flying,Scarce reached its farthest bound,When distant glens replyingGave back a mighty sound.The woods ere longAre filled with songAnd sweetly sounding voices;Now loud and clearThe sound draws near;The tumult swellsLike pealing bells,And every creature rejoices!All heardSpring's wordAnd answered to her call,New life she'd given all,Raised on highThe tender song of spring!(Wagner 1983a: 64)Time and again, Wagner's sound effects put into practice the technique of ecstasy already on display in his Beethoven performance. Also and precisely because a professional command by Mastersinger Beckmesser sets the feedback loop in motion, the ideal Wagner singer has to overhear (i.e., reinterpret) the command: neither Beckmesser nor Wotan but spring itself orders both song and incest. Springtime calls out into the woods just as the Beethoven conductor Wagner calls out into the choir; the subsequent technological effects are surround sound and reverberations that, rather than petering out at the margins of their acoustic reach, result in many amplifying and echo effects. “And through the forest flying, / Scarce reached its farthest bound, / When distant glens replying/ Gave back a mighty sound.” The output emitted by the ecstatic wood (or by the ecstatic Beethoven choir) is the input it received in the shape of the spring calling, which subsequently enhances the amplitude of the total sound until everything is out of control. Amplifiers with positive feedback go into a tizzy, amplified siblings like Siegmund and Sieglinde, who recognize each other by means of reflections and echoes, sleep with each other. Wagner's orchestral dynamics are, just like his sexual acts, simple threshold curves of air.The ecstasy of Wotan's heroes, that is to say their spirit, turns out to be Wotan's spirit. The god is forced to rescind his command to Brünnhilde to help Siegmund fight Sieglinde's husband and instead orders the exact opposite. Empirical commanders as well are subject to the law of command. (To command, Nietzsche writes, means first and foremost to command oneself.) The logos as contract stands above all transgressions. As a result, Siegmund and Sieglinde have to flee until she faints, thereby inverting the opening constellation: it is no longer Sieglinde who listens to the breathing of the fugitive Siegmund, it is Siegmund who is forced to listen to his sister: “He listens intently to her breathing and convinces himself that she is still alive.” (Wagner 2018: 247) .But human life and breath count for nothing in the face of the dark thunder clouds in which Wotan approaches in a great lightshow of thunder and lightning to bring about Siegmund's destruction—as in the Bayreuth premier of 1876, in which a magic lantern projected the actor as a mere phantom (cf. Ranke 49). Mortals cannot withstand such media effects. Siegmund dies while Brünnhilde commits an act of insubordination by rescuing Sieglinde together with the recently conceived Siegfried.What triumphs over all human voices in Wagner is an inhuman storm or world breath, as at the beginning and at the end of Die Walküre. Only when filled with this breath do the figures of musical drama possess spirit, that is, ecstasy and song. This is more than a general metaphysical matter on the level of Arthur Schopenhauer's philosophy of music, it relates to media theory. The inhuman world breath is, quite simply, Wagner's orchestra, as it arises from Bayreuth's darkened orchestra pit to fill the space with sound. Wagner compared the orchestra pit to the misty vapors of the oracle in Delphi, but he could just as well have pointed to the future—that is, to the trenches of the First World War.Rather than decoding Wotan as a “puzzle made up of rebel and god, mythology and bourgeois society” (Adorno 1981: 133) or, even worse, as a “fake German revolutionary” such as “Marx had satirized” (134), the lord of the world has to be recognized as the lord of the world, just as the sword maiden has to be recognized as his favorite daughter. In the final lead-up to world domination all the terrors of the nomadic beginning, reappearing as if from the realm of the dead, are once again put to use. You only need to replace the cavalry with tanks in order to recognize the truth of a statement by Carl Schmitt (2017: 76): “The dead ride fast. And if they become motorized, they move even faster.” The dead that are approaching as wild huntsmen can be given a name, passed down by Wagner himself: On the other hand my inclination to busy myself with music grew stronger and stronger, and I now sought to master my favorite pieces by transcribing them. I remember my mother's hesitation when she first had to give me money to buy music paper, on which I copied Lützows Jagd by Weber as my first piece of transcription. (Wagner 1983b: 29)That is how precisely Wagner's “Ride of the Valkyries” remembers the origin of modern partisan warfare in the Landsturm edict of Frederick William III.5 Lützow's wild audacious hunt was the only successful volunteer cavalry unit during the so-called Wars of Liberation; the so-called poet Theodor Körner wrote verses about it and died on the battlefield. Lützows Jagd, Körner's most famous poem, was set to music by Carl Maria von Weber in 1814, when Körner already lay buried in Wöblin.Which raises the question why the wild hunt had to be set to music and why the score had to be copied time and again, be it by the child or the musical dramatist Wagner. The answer is provided by Siegfried, Wotan's prototypical partisan. Already when trying to speak with the birds in the forest, Siegfried follows the maxim to “ignore the words, / and attend to the tune” (Wagner 2018: 445). In other words, in order to understand the voices of nature Siegfried must discard all meaning and only attend to melody or score. Voices have to yield to Wagner's orchestra. There is a subtle reasoning behind this: in line with Wotan's paradoxical definition, a partisan should not listen to articulated commands but to elementary forces like earth, fire, and storm, that is, to immediate combat conditions. Otherwise, Fricka would still be able to prove to her husband, as she did in the case of Siegfried, that the alleged individual initiative is nothing but a ruse of the commanding Wotan. What Adorno described as resuccumbing to nature is the tactical precondition for world wars.The liquidation of articulated speech, that is, of the entire Pythagorean link-up of logos and music, as well as vowel alphabet and tone interval, proceeds in two steps from the third to the fourth evening of the tetralogy, from Siegfried to Götterdämmerung.Whether he is in the presence of birds or beloved women, Siegfried sticks to his motto not to listen but rather to focus on the musical sound spectrum. Brünnhilde has just explained to her lover that she alone dared to think Wotan's great thought to act as the mother of the orphaned child of an officer of the Legion of Honor, but confronted with her laborious historical recapitulation, Siegfried responds: What you sweetly singsounds like a miracle,But to me its meaning is murky(tenderly)In the brilliance of your eyesI see light;in the waft of your breathI feel warmth;in the singing of your voiceI hear sweetness:—But what you tell me in song,I'm amazed to say I don't grasp.I cannot relate to thingsthat aren't there,if all I can seeAnd feel is you!—(Wagner 2018: 521 – 23)Siegfried's purely musical, purely physiological and purely sexual ears cancel logos itself, which in this case happens to be the entire psychotechnique or strategy employed by Wotan and his female unconscious to recruit partisans. The obvious and paradoxical result is that Siegfried himself turns into one of those preprogrammed partisans. He wages Wotan's final struggle, which at the conclusion of Götterdämmerung Brünnhilde only needs to continue in order to bring about Wotan's desired true end. The end simply consists in dissolving Wotan and the gods—optically in Charles Babbage's theatrical stage fire, and acoustically in unfiltered white noise.Brünnhilde's finale, which in April 1945 also became the finale of the Third Reich, consists of the elimination of all distance between signal and noise.6 She sends a final message to the absent Wotan: All, all,I know all things,—all freedom has now become mine.Also I hearyour ravens’ whispers;This instant I send them both homewith their news, awaited in fear,Rest, rest, you god!7This “uninhibited lullaby” (Adorno 1973: 136) mocks all mythology. According to legend two ravens were perched on Wotan's shoulders, Hugin and Munin (or Thought and Memory), who every day brought tidings from the dominated world (as angels did elsewhere). But the message Brünnhilde sends her dying god and father no longer has anything to do with the functions of thought and memory, that is, with articulated speech. To hear the ravens’ rustle is to receive the message. Under high-tech conditions that no longer allow for any gods, emission and transmission, message and noise coincide; Wagner's Ring ends in the very noise with which it began.And what starts now is the history or posthistory of our media wars. Gravity's Rainbow, the quintessential novel of World War II, begins with a noise that is the only message. “A screaming comes across the sky,” runs the novel's first line. It is the screaming of the V-2, the first liquid-propellant rocket in the history of war, which from September 1944 to March 1945 descended on London and Antwerp. A world of dirt and rain, storm and concrete, just like this evening, and in Wagner: “Far away, through the rain, comes the crackblast of another German rocket. The third today. They hunt the sky like Wuotan and his mad army” (Pynchon 1987: 72).