House Music and Henry Adams

Henry Adams was well-known to Gilded Age America: a first-rate medieval historian, yet also an insufferable snob. Great-grandson of President John Adams, grandson of President John Quincy Adams, Henry Adams naturally thought of himself as presidential timber. As Adams writes in his masterful autobiography "The Education of Henry Adams":

The Irish gardener once said to the child: "You'll be thinkin' you'll be President too!" The casualty of the remark made so strong an impression on his mind that he never forgot it. He could not remember ever to have thought on the subject; to him, that there should be a doubt of his being President was a new idea.

Despite Adam's efforts, Gilded Age America turned its back on his leadership, preferring people whom Adams considered vastly-inferior beings, people like Ulysses Grant, Grover Cleveland, or (God forbid) Theodore Roosevelt. Adams became a querulous eccentric: FDR's generation quietly mocked Adams' vain pose before a rapidly-changing world.

Nevertheless, Adams saw some things more clearly than others, even as he lamented the frightening future taking shape before his eyes. He wrote eloquently of science's discoveries in establishing the unique character of his time. To Adams, the keening whine of the Electric Dynamo represented the incalculable power of the Industrial Age, just as the Cult of the Virgin Mary represented the incalculable power of the Medieval Age. Speaking of his own wonderment, Adams wrote:

No more relation could he discover between the steam and electric current than between the Cross and the cathedral. The forces were interchangeable if not reversible, but he could see only an absolute fiat in electricity as in faith.

Adams rarely wrote of the music of his day: he cited the influence of Wagner, but made allusions to the more-vital (and perhaps more-productive) anarchic artistic chaos of New York. Adams might have understood (even as he likely would have hated) the development of House Music, much as he might have understood (even as he likely would have hated) the development of the popular Jazz Music of his day.

House Music attempts to create a bridge between the Dynamo and the Virgin: music taking inspiration from industrial rhythms, yet also finding inspiration from the soaring religiously-inspired vocal arrangements of the late Middle Ages. Indeed, people sometimes call discotheques "Sonic Cathedrals". Dance Music reaches for a Grand Synthesis, and Adams, no slacker when it came to Hegel, would have understood the effort:

Adams proclaimed that in the last synthesis, order and anarchy were one, but that the unity was chaos. As anarchist, conservative and Christian, he had no motive or duty but to attain the end; and, to hasten it, he was bound to accelerate progress; to concentrate energy; to accumulate power; to multiply and intensify forces; to reduce friction, increase velocity and magnify momentum, partly because this was the mechanical law of the universe as science explained it; but partly also in order to get done with the present which artists and some others complained of; and finally - and chiefly - because a rigorous philosophy required it, in order to penetrate the beyond, and satisfy man's destiny by reaching the largest synthesis in its ultimate contradiction.

Henry Adams, whose critical inspiration lives on, unremarked, on dance floors all over the world!