Group A, Post 4, Omelas and Wage Inequality by Carter Messner

For my final post, I'm going to be writing about the text "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" by Ursula K. Le Guin. This story I believe had the most impact on me, and I feel like the message of the story should be used as a societal norm for how we live our lives. This story is about a society that is perfect, and just like most stories about utopias, there is a dark secret that is revealed. The secret being that a young child is being tormented, and the only way for the society to stay perfect, is if the child is never treated kindly. The people in the town who have seen the kid are forced to decide for themselves if they can live in happiness knowing that there is someone in the worst conditions imaginable, or will they leave the town to go anywhere else. The ending of the story is the part that made me think about how our society, specifically the rich, treat others who are supposed to be equal with them, and if the system we have now is really for the good of all people. It ends by talking about the people who decide to leave, "But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.", which is powerful to me because these people are standing up for what they know is right, even if it might bring them harm. I would like to see more people stand up for the right things in this world because the pain of one should be enough the change the mind of a collective. 

We are living in a society that has an idea of an "American Dream", yet you are more like to have an "American Dream" story come out of Canada. That is because the United States, when compared to 24 other countries, "ranks 16th in the amount of intergenerational earnings mobility." (Corak). This means that children that grow up in poorer households are finding it harder to be able to move up out of this poverty, in other words they are unable to "pull themselves up by the bootstraps" as politicians like to say, and there is nothing the children can do about it. We have problem in this country where the poor keep on getting poorer and the rich keep getting richer, and unlike the people in Omelas who know that their privilege comes with the pain of another being, the rich in this country do not care about the children who go hungry every night, or the veterans that are living on the street who fought for this country. No, the rich buy politicians to do their bidding, knowing that the tax cuts promised for the middle-class and poor, are going right in the pockets of the billionaires. To tie it back together, I want the billionaires to be held accountable for buying our government and turning it into an Oligarchy. Just like the people of Omelas, the rich know that their corruption is hurting many people, but unlike the people of Omelas I guess they don’t have the morals to stop. I believe that if we act more like the ones who walk away from Omelas, to be able to not accept when other people are treated unfairly even though your life may be unaffected, is a good start to fixing the inequality in this country.jj

hCorak, Miles. "Economic Mobility". The Stanford Center of Poverty and Inequality. (2016) 
 ult/files/Pathways-SOTU-2016-Economic-Mobility-3.pdf

https://inequality.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/Pathways-SOTU-2016-Economic-Mobility-3.pdf

Group A, Post 3, Carter Messner - 2001: A Space Odyssey

2001: A Space Odyssey is a story I first read in high school, but I was left wondering many things about some of the objects in the story because the story didn't go into enough detail for me on the origins of the Monolith and how HAL was able to "murder" the crew members. So like any sensible teenager I decided to watch the movie to see if I could come to any conclusion with visual help. What I found out while researching is that many people believe HAL malfunctioned while I believe that HAL was deliberately doing things to get rid of the humans, but I will start where the movie begins with the Monolith.

The Monolith appears in the movie only a couple of times but the recurrences of it are at significant times in human development, first it appears when the first man like creatures use the first tool (bone used as a club), the second time is on the moon showing that man has now left the boundaries of their own planet, and the third is before David Bowman who was part of the two man crew on the same ship as HAL, is turned into the Star-Child, showing the change from a living creature to an extra dimensional being. Now, what I believe the reason for this Monolith being, is to be a watcher over the evolution of mankind and most likely other life in the universe, to follow and track the progress until it eventually becomes a being of higher dimensions. When I read the book, I thought of the Monolith gave the knowledge of using tools to man to start the evolutionary process. But, the movie never hinted to this idea, the Monolith has just been tracking the life on the planet waiting for a form to evolve to the ability of tool making. I also found it interesting that in the story it said that the Monolith looked to has been deliberately buried in the moon, showing that it knew that humans were going to go there someday.  

That story line is sort of a background story in the main plot of the movie. The crew members on the ship Discovery One, Dr. David Bowman and Dr. Frank Poole are on a mission to Jupiter after the discovery of the Monolith on the moon, and they have an AI computer, HAL 9000, helping them on the trip there. The computer eventually goes crazy and ends up trying the kill the crew members, in an article I found on the HAL malfunctions, it was said that "the crew gradually figures out the computer is malfunctioning and faced with the threat of disconnection and hence loss of control; HAL 9000 reasons that with the crew dead it can continue to operate while concealing its malfunction from mission support staff on Earth and sets about killing them." (Hinton), but again I interpreted it differently. Computers don’t typically malfunction, now I know that this is science fiction and basically anything can happen, but I don't believe the computer was having a psychotic breakdown. The computers purpose was the get the crew to Jupiter, but the computer had one problem that was keeping it from doing its' job, the humans who were trying to shut HAL down. The computer figures out that it can finish its job only if it can stop the humans from shutting it off, so the only logical answer is murder. This is my opinion, but I feel like an entertaining spin on the story to think about if you are going to check this movie out.  

This is another example of the book being better than the movie, but only because of how slow moving the story line in the movie is. The graphics in this movie are still pretty good since the movie is now 50 years old, it is a classic for any science fiction movie lovers.  

Hinton, Russell. "Movies in mind – 2001: A Space Odyssey", Australian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 01/2018, Volume 52, Issue 1. January 10, 2018. 

Post 2, Group A, -The Fear of Death in Sleep by Eric Whitacre, Carter Messner

The fear of death in Sleep by Eric Whitacre 

The song Sleep by Eric Whitacre is a choral piece of music that is both audibly beautiful and lyrically powerful, and I believe the combination of both of those factors gives this music a deeper meaning than what you experience by just listening. The poem itself isn't very reminiscent of death, it alone could represent a child's fear of the dark or protecting your child from the world, which is what my choral director in high school believed the whole song to be about. But I feel like the chords of the song add a different meaning. 

The composer Eric Whitacre is well known throughout the choral world, and his music influenced me a lot in my decision to come to the Conservatory. His music is sometimes criticized because of his access use of dissonance at seemingly random times. This is a meme I found today that today that shows this. 

  

But in Sleep, I feel like the use is necessary in portraying a deeper message in the music. For those who may not know, dissonance is the sound created when two notes are sing/played that are not harmonious which each other, imagine what a toddler would do while sitting at a piano for the first time, they just slam their hands down and hit keys. I think it is fun to do in a choir, and the chords in Sleep are a great example of using this element of music correctly. As said in an article in the Choral Journal, "Despite their lavish harmonies, the voice leading of individual voice parts is relatively simple. The pitch content of most voice parts consists of stepwise motion and triadic outline. It is the combination and intersection of simple voice parts that creates the frequently dense harmonic language exhibited in this repertoire.". The dense harmonic language tells a story by itself, of someone longing for more as the music builds to a climax, and then they breakthrough to the other side of this fear in an explosion of angelic singing, and then you add text.  

The text added to the harmonies shows the full picture of what I feel this song is about. The first hint of this is in the beginning about a minute in with the text "With closing eyes and resting head I know that sleep is coming soon.". The chord on soon is very ominous, it is made of 2 clashing sets of notes, making is seem like the sleep coming soon is not desirable. The next set finishes with the words "a thousand pictures fill my head", and this I can only interpret as the person is living old cherished memories of their life that is slowly fading, and the chords here are uncharacteristically normal for Whitacre, major chords with no dissonance, maybe this could be to share that the person's life was happy. The text which occurs during the rise of the piece, "What dreams may come, both dark and deep", is about the person thinking about the afterlife and what is coming for them. The "dreams" represent the two different paths of the afterlife, heaven or hell, and which is the person going to. The male voices are singing "dark and deep", representing hell with the notes being very low and moving down harmonically. The female voices are singing the text "Of flying wings and soaring leap", above the male parts which represents heaven and the angels calling which is very clear if you listen to the music. This section builds on itself until it reaches a tipping point, and at this point there are no lyrics, just singing on the same syllable of "Ah", and at this I interpret it as being that the person has died and has gone to heaven and is listening to an angelic chorus greeting him. The ending of the piece is calm and simple, repeating the word "sleep" again and again, until it eventually fades out and the person is at rest. 

The song has more to it than just this, I didn’t have room to talk about the middle section of the piece, but it too has great text painting. I believe that music has the power to tell a story that gives more meaning than a poem can do alone, and I believe the poetry has the power to be more influential when it is set to music. This song in my opinion proves this to be so. The fear of death can be seen in the song, and when you listen to the song thinking from the perspective of death, I feel that it adds something deeper to it.

Here Is a link to a video of the song with the music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLSRVE3t17E 

Larson, A. (2006). Textual density in the choral music of eric whitacre. Choral Journal, 47(6), 22-33. Retrieved from http://proxy.library.umkc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.proxy.library.umkc.edu/docview/1033633?accountid=14589