{"id":99254,"date":"2020-04-02T08:31:24","date_gmt":"2020-04-02T08:31:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/?p=99254"},"modified":"2020-04-02T14:05:08","modified_gmt":"2020-04-02T14:05:08","slug":"3am-in-lockdown-16-joe-milutis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/3am-in-lockdown-16-joe-milutis\/","title":{"rendered":"3:AM in Lockdown 16: Joe Milutis"},"content":{"rendered":"

Music for Doing Nothing<\/strong>
\nBy Joe Milutis<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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A few days ago, Italian film composer Ennio Morricone announced<\/a> that he would not be composing or playing music during quarantine; the absolute value of music was to him meaningless during such a serious crisis and that he felt that Italians who sang on their balconies, while deserving of a little lightness, were perhaps only thinking of themselves.<\/p>\n

Americans have reacted similarly to the equivalent in celebrities singing, noblesse oblige, John Lennon’s \u201cImagine” from their compounds after only a week of lockdown (we can only \u201cimagine” what 18 months might bring). But perhaps we are all guilty of doing too much, of being unserious, balconistas<\/em> of the virus simply because we are unable to do nothing. Morricone’s statement is reminiscent of the old-school European mode of respect and modesty towards death, atrocity, and historical trauma, in the spirit of Adorno’s \u201ccan one write lyric poetry after Auschwitz?” But in this case, the unthinkable has not yet occurred. It is not \u201cafter” but \u201cbefore,” and what comes \u201cafter” depends on our ability to do a lot but also to do nothing at the same time<\/em>. Those of us who have the privilege of staying home are consequently caught between at least two modes of \u201cthinking only about oneself”: faced with the monstrosity of our irrepressible will-to-activity and the grotesque pleasures of impotent inactivity, we can with good conscience do neither. Perhaps a third form of thinking (or unthinking) is necessary, in the face of a virus that does not think and does not self; or rather, in its replication, it seeks its self in a way that makes a mockery of human self and selflessness at once.<\/p>\n

Morricone is not necessarily a composer of high modernist austerity and selflessness, however. Rather he is probably best known for his scores for the Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone, which somewhat garishly stylize the atrocities of the American Civil War. There is nothing in his career that suggests the priest-like or otherworldly, other than music’s innate tendency towards abstraction. And in one of the most famous scenes in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly<\/em>, his music is activated precisely at the moment when action is impossible. It becomes loquacious when speech stops, continuing when continuation is placed in doubt. In this scene, Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and Eli Wallach \u2014 the titular \u201cgood”, \u201cbad” and \u201cugly” \u2014 face off in a three-way duel.<\/p>\n