When I was in fifth grade, my best friend was a kid named James. I'm not sure if I was his best friend, but we hung out often: I would bike over to his house of an afternoon and play with him (back before any of the kids my age had learned that you had to call playing together "hanging out" to be cool). Sometimes James and I would play in his backyard and his treehouse with his kid sister. More often, we would play video games. It was James who introduced me to Assassin's Creed and who reintroduced me to the Halo series by way of Halo 3. (An encounter several years earlier with the original Halo: Combat Evolved when I was way too young to handle its midpoint horror twist had left me mildly traumatized.)
More importantly for my life than any of that, however, is that James introduced me to a game called The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (the predecessor to 2011's wildly successful The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim). James and I haven't spoken in fifteen years, but to say that he transformed my life by introducing me to Oblivion would not be an exaggeration.
The first album I purchased was Jeremy Soule's soundtrack to Oblivion. When my sisters teamed up to buy me The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, I learned how to make hidden folders visible on Windows so I could locate Morrowind's music files (also composed by Jeremy Soule) where they had been installed on the family hard drive. The first two discs I burned (back when we still burned CDs) were the soundtracks to Oblivion and Morrowind.
They are still my favourite soundtracks of all time. Over the course of the last decade and a half, I've spent more hours than I could possibly count listening to them. I recently purchased a car with a CD player, and almost the first thing I did was fish out my old burned discs of Oblivion and Morrowind, which I've been listening to daily on my half-hour commute. I never tire of them, and even when I find other amazing scores, I keep coming back to these two soundtracks.
Naturally, I have also loved and admired Jeremy Soule for just as long as I've listened to his music.
Of course, the title should tell you that this doesn't exactly turn out a wholly happy story, but if you know anything about me, you know that sometimes I have to ramble to get to a particular point, so let's take a detour and talk briefly about memory.
I don't remember most of my childhood. I have very specific images of moments in my childhood, but I cannot conjure more than a static snapshot of much of anything before I was a teenager. I haven't spoken with any professionals about this phenomenon, but my layman's opinion is that it's the result of some relational trauma I experienced in middle school that resulted in an addiction to self-harm that I didn't manage to overcome until near the end of my time in college.
I also have had interpersonal conflict over the years with people who've told me that I am misremembering something. Due to my lack of most of my childhood memory, I have previously been especially vulnerable to such assertions because I've viewed my memory as flawed. If I remember someone saying something to me or doing something and they claim not to have said or done it, then surely (I tell myself) I must be the incorrect one.
Naturally, this has led me to be fascinated with the concept of memory. I read an article years ago about how researchers showed subjects pictures of their childhood and subsequently asked them to recall stories of growing up. The pictures included doctored photos of an invented hot air balloon ride that the subjects' families never went on, but the majority of subjects told stories about that hot air balloon ride, believing that it happened, even though the researchers made it up. The subjects invented a memory that didn't exist to explain the false photographic evidence they had been presented.
There are similar documented cases of suspects in criminal cases being bullied by police officers into believing they were guilty of a crime they did not commit. (This is one of the reasons torture is now generally considered an ineffective way to get accurate information from someone.)
These examples dovetail with the Mandela Effect, so named for the widespread false memory that Nelson Mandela had died when he was in fact still alive at the time. A similar occurrence of this effect is in people's false memory that the Berenstain Bears are in fact the Berenstein Bears. I myself am an example of someone who remembered the series as The Berenstein Bears, and I can hardly believe even now that it has always been The Berenstain Bears.
This question of reality and memory become especially interesting in the context of the internet. Kids and young adults are often cautioned that anything they say and do online is permanent, but this warning is not actually as true as the sages giving it believe. I frequent the social media site Reddit, where it is a frequent occurrence to see comments and users which have been deleted, their contribution permanently removed unless someone thought to take the time to screenshot them. I have previously visited detailed hobby blogs that have suddenly disappeared because the owner let their ownership of a website lapse or lost interest in maintaining their online presence.
One specific example is worth noting. Several years ago, there was an online piracy website called The Remuz RPG Archive. It retained a collection of thousands of bootleg tabletop roleplaying game products. When I was in college, I happily utilized it to get into a hobby that I could not otherwise afford to access in my cash-strapped state. It was taken down (presumably by outside intervention as a result of copyright violation), but after a bit of digging I uncovered a new version of the same site, rebranded and revamped as The Trove. It persisted for a couple years before it, too, was taken down. In its wake, an entire online community sprang up, doing their best to salvage the huge repository of files that were available on The Trove and the Remuz archive before it, which was only able to be accomplished by massive amounts of effort from numerous folks essentially crowd-sourcing information.
My feelings on content piracy have changed over the years, and I have since deleted or legitimately purchased what I once downloaded from those sites. The question of piracy aside, though, I share those examples because it demonstrates the transience of information online. Just a couple weeks ago, I read about a cryptocurrency trading website that had altered its terms of service to remove a misleading advertisement only after it had already collected large sums of money from investors based on that misleading advertisement and filed for bankruptcy. In an age where the public record can be altered by those who most stand to obfuscate the truth and where the internet can serve as a false witness for whoever has the ability to alter it, it's no surprise that conspiracy theories and utter falsehoods have come to have such a rabid following that it's now commonplace to hear people talk about "competing truth claims" and "alternate facts" and "doing your research" as if any old blog or mailing list can be just as authoritative as official government publications, peer-reviewed journals, or news media.
The website where I purchased Oblivion no longer exists. Online versions of the soundtrack are, for some reason, missing the final track of the copy that I purchased, which I listened to in my car yesterday. That song is in the game, so its exclusion from the current available recording is somewhat puzzling to me. When I purchased Oblivion, I purchased a soundtrack that was not by Jeremy Soule, but by the brothers Jeremy & Julian Soule. Morrowind was also listed as the product of the Soule brothers. Nowadays, Oblivion is listed on Spotify as composed by only Jeremy Soule. Morrowind's soundtrack isn't available at all.
Jeremy Soule's soundtrack for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim was released in 2011. Soule did not return to compose any music for either The Elder Scrolls Online or The Elder Scrolls: Blades, and he issued a statement in January 2019 that he had not been invited to return for the highly anticipated The Elder Scrolls VI (which does not yet have a release date).
In August 2019, Jeremy Soule was accused of sexual assault by multiple women he had worked with in his musical career. His social media accounts were subsequently deleted, and his website has shut down. He has been essentially silent since then.
I only recently learned of the sexual assault allegations and the fact that Soule defrauded over four thousand people of over $120,000 in 2013 for a symphony he never composed. My initial reaction was to try somehow to rationalise these events or excuse Soule for his misdeeds. But the more I thought about it, the more I came to the conclusion that I don't gain anything by trying to hold on to a positive image of Jeremy Soule. I've never met the man, nor do I interact with him in any way. I don't know him.
And that makes me wonder: why did I ever have a positive image of him? It has to be wrapped up in my love for his music. It has meant so much to me for so many years; is wrapped up in my most formative experiences for over half my life, including the only portions of my life that I have actual memories of (more than the snapshots I described above); is, in many ways, integral to my life. It's only natural that I would unwittingly expand that affection for the music that means so much to me onto the person who composed it. After all, this beautiful thing I love came from him, so surely he must also be beautiful, right?
In a perfect world, that would be true. I'm not a professional theologian, but the first thing I see Yahweh doing in Genesis at the beginning of the Bible is creating art. If humans are made as pictures of Yahweh, then there is something of the divine in our feeble, faulty, fleeting imitations of his awesome creativity. To create something beautiful is to be, in a small way, like Yahweh. Yahweh himself is beautiful, so those who are like Yahweh must also be beautiful. I would also argue, as an aside, that turning from the art to love the artist is the right thing to do. The art is just a thing. Though it is powerful and meaningful, it has no life. The artist is the picture of Yahweh. The artist lives. The artist matters. Even more so, to love the artist for their art is a microscopic version of loving Yahweh for his creation: worship.
But like I said, that's only in a perfect world. In this world, morally ugly people make aesthetically beautiful art. People who do not deserve admiration make admirable things. If I knew Jeremy Soule, I would be faced with the prospect of seeking to love him in the same way that Yahweh loves me despite my many sins and failings, seeing them all and acknowledging them as evil but embracing me nonetheless. However, I do not know Jeremy Soule. I have no relationship with him. I have only his music, which I love, and a desire to love him for that music even though he is a thief and allegedly a rapist.
Do his moral failings somehow taint his music? I don't think so. Instrumental music is about emotions and aesthetics, not about meanings or propositions. You can't communicate information or ideas through instrumental music. You could listen to a beautiful piece of instrumental music and never know that it was written by a mass murderer and never have the artist's chosen pastime detract from your enjoyment of that music.
I've seen people online state that they will never be able to enjoy Soule's music again because of the allegations against him. I've tried adopting that mindset, but I find myself unable to. A work of art has its own existence separate from its creator. Though the artist might have some ownership over it in a legal and economic sense, they cannot control it: it affects its audience in its own way, beyond the artist's will. Beautiful art is beautiful for its own sake. Soule's music is still beautiful to me, even if Soule himself has done wrong things, because the music is not the man, the music is the music.
This post has gone on far longer than I intended it to, but I'll leave you with one last thought before I end it. I think in my heart I imagined Jeremy Soule to be a good man because I selfishly want being an artist by itself to make someone a good person. I write music. I write poetry. I write stories. I'm an artist, and I think, deep down, I want being an artist to somehow make me transcendent. I want to have keener insight into human character than others have, a special grasp of the poignant and meaningful, a unique ability to touch the heart and guide the mind. I want to believe that the artists who make the art I love are somehow special, because that would mean that I can also be special because of my art.
That's not the way the world works. Transcendent art is made by rotten people. Incredible, wonderful people sometimes never amount to anything in society's short-sighted estimation. The truth of the matter is that we don't get our value from what we make or what we do. We get our value from being human, from being made by Yahweh and from being pictures of Yahweh: not by nature of our action but because it's who we are.
It's kind of bittersweet, I guess: I am special, which is what I want. But I'm not special because of what I do. I'm special because of how Yahweh made me, and so I don't deserve any credit for it. I guess that makes me kind of like the soundtracks I love: they're beautiful because Jeremy Soule made them beautiful, but they don't deserve any of the credit for his artistic choices, nor any of the blame for his life choices.
