The preceding two posts constitute a slightly arch attempt to translate to two of my main fields of endeavor the ‘Vow of Chastity’ promulgated as part of the manifesto of Dogma 95, a movement started by the filmmakers Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg. In that year, the centenary of the motion picture, the filmmakers proposed a ‘rescue action’, a new discipline, in their field; a vanguard against the cosmetic, the superficial, the illusory – which they saw new technology putting within ever easier reach of ever more people – as well as against the ‘individual’ (for which I read ‘auteurial’) attitude on the part of the filmmaker: in short, as I understand it, against the overwrought and overreaching. Enough, they seemed to say, to focus on the moment, the interactions of the characters – possibly not even on something so grand as a ‘story’, let alone a ‘vision’. The ten-point Vow of Chastity, then, names constraints within which the filmmakers proposed to work. 

Though there is an extent to which my versions were extrapolated from directions already established rather than conjured ex nihilo as first principles – that is to say, there are probably many ways I could have mapped the categories of the original onto these other fields, and I chose mainly to name constraints under which I had already largely come to work – it’s remarkable how closely and thoroughly the format was able to capture my approach to both typography and the organ. In fact only the third item on each list – hand-pumped organ; hand-set type – is wholly outside the bounds within which I routinely operate (one must embrace the constraint of the means actually available). At the same time it is worth pointing out that any manifesto should be seen as a working document, a measure, a way to clarify one’s thinking. Very few, if any, so-called Dogma films ever actually met all the criteria; the analogue is true in my own work, and this is both realistic and, probably, healthy.

The impulses encapsulated in the Dogma Vow are not new. Theodor Adorno, for one, writing fifty years earlier and with a moral urgency prompted by the disaster of war, proposed a poverty of means, a ‘barbaric asceticism’ towards the barbarism entwined with, perhaps inherent in, ‘progress’, as a ‘pointer for intellectual production after the war’. He wrote of not merely an anti-glitz aesthetic, but something even more fundamental: a rejection, for example, of the formal or professional means (the printing press) of promulgating, it would seem, even his own work. 

If the printing press should merit rejection, then possibly its musical analogue, the organ (another mechanical, modular, repeatable system by which one attempts to get a text across and sometimes make it sing), the most elaborate and expensive musical instrument, can never embody a true poverty of means: it may even be the ultimate embodiment of ‘civilized’ (i.e. enmeshed in oppressive and exploitative power structures) music-making, and of ‘civilized’ concerns that extend well beyond music-making. Perhaps simple flutes and reeds of natural materials, blown by mouth – or the human voice alone – should be our musical media, sounding pure melody. The world may yet come to that, again, if there should be any breath left in it.

Yet the principles by which the classical organ operates are not so complicated, and its construction at the same time demands very significant discipline of design and execution. Composition for and interpretation at the organ also benefit from an economy of means; a focus on content, tools, and technique. The letterpress is even simpler, and its technics and constraints have much to teach the typographer and probably other workers. Perhaps even this discipline, this economy, this focus, is of some relevance in a world distracted and consumed.