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Music, freedom, revolution
So begins a recent Telegraph piece by the pianist Stephen Hough on a (then) forthcoming performance by Paul Lewis of Beethoven’s fifth piano concerto, The Emporer, which closed his series of Proms performances of all five concertos. “Rumination in freedom” has been part of our musical tradition for centuries. I would like to think that there is a reason for this, that our beguilement by, and openness to, the freedom of the emotions which these special passages afford has its roots in our psychology, and the roots runs deep. Where they ought to run, of course, is to a kind of permanent interest in standing against the external enforcement of rule and order. For that is our heritage as stubbornly independent and, I think, particularly northern Europeans, and its something that we, as nationalists thinking at the collective level, have to incorporate in our ideas and not attempt to disavow. Within the classical music canon, an inbuilt delight of these brushes with freedom is their tension with the formal structure they seek to break from. This is something I became aware the first time I really listened, many years ago, to Beethoven’s only violin concerto, the D major Op 61. I don’t remember the soloist - possible Itzhak Perlman - but I was instantly struck by the sense of wreckless, exultant gambling with life that pervades the last bars of the final movement. Up to that point, I don’t think I had ever really understood why sawing away at the wheel of fast transport maintained such a powerful grip on me. Beethoven explained that to me. The following video is of a concert given in Tokyo by the American violinist Joshua Bell. Here he is playing the final movement of the Beethoven concerto. The cadenza begins at 6.37. But in this case it only changes the dynamic so that the recapitulation can, at 8.13, start its dive away into sheer abandonment and exhilaration. Bell’s exertions testify to the violence of the exercise and remind us that when Beethoven wrote the piece in 1806, only two years after he completed the Eroica, this was revolutionary music ushering the era of the orderly and harmonious classical form into the past. Now, this glorious release of musical creativity to the emotions which was the Romantic Era was also a democratization of it. The patronage of kings and cardinals had gone the same way as the orderliness and social harmony they had lived by and sought to promulgate through the art they funded. But in taking a step back from that piper, the Western compositional genius became divided. The serious form, because it required a long musical education and an orchestra of perhaps sixty or seventy players and sixty or seventy salaries to be paid every month, could not disestablish itself. By the middle of the twentieth century it found itself beholden all across Europe to the de-vitalised, official culture of a new state Establishment. With the deaths of Rachmaninoff in 1943, Richard Strauss in 1949, Jean Sibelius in 1957 (though his final symphony was published three and a half decades earlier), Ralph Vaughan Williams in 1958, and Shostakovich in 1975 the Romantic Era slipped, finally, into history. Serious composition found that it had been cut adrift from the European imagination by the modernist’s successful war on harmony and tone during the first half of the century. No more bodies of work capable of moving that imagination have been produced since. For that to happen, a new and revitalising aesthetic must emerge. Meanwhile, out in the musical democracy, the European compositional genius still stirred. But it was defined by musical illiteracy, by fashion, by commerce, by the drug-culture, and by the dominance of the electric guitar, the synthesizing electronic keyboard and the drum kit. Nevertheless, in Britain in the years between the late-1960s and late-1970s ideas and creativity, complex time signatures and instrumentals, and demands upon the listener all became current. I have a simple theory why a seriousness that could speak to the emotions arose in Symphonic Prog while so-called serious music, foundering upon “isms” dear to the state Establishment, was incapable of attending to them. The urban generation born in Europe during and after the war, which gave idealism not to mention naivety to the 1960s, was raised in austerity and in keen awareness of the events of the war years. Not a few were fatherless. It is a sad fact that in the crucible of personal dislocation and loss, artists are born - a picture painted most accurately in this clip from the film Pink Floyd The Wall directed by Alan Parker (b.1944) and written more or less biographically by Floyd vocalist and bassist Roger Waters (b.1943). Comfortably Numb, morbid in that Pink Floyd way though it is, features not one but two of the modern equivalents of the cadenza, the guitar solo. They are played by David Gilmour (b.1946). Gilmour and Waters co-wrote the song. Rolling Stone rated the combined solos the fourth greatest guitar solo of all time. They are not the blues-based, pentatonic constructions that characterise rock and pop, which ultimately draw their influence from the Negro music of the American South. They do not ask the listener what that music asks, but something interior to us, something exclusively European. The decline of Prog Rock is often laid at the door of the over-ambition, over-indulgence and downright spiritual silliness of the 1973/4 Yes album, Topographic Oceans. The album was written by Jon Anderson (b.1944) and Steve Howe (b.1947). But I suspect that the real reason is that the generation shaped by the war and its aftermath was entering its thirties, and the record-buying public was a decade and more younger, and was detached from the aesthetic. “Ruminating in freedom” through a soaring guitar solo, just like a real European, was not part of the New Wave aesthetic. A short, punchy offering delivered with attack and with irony to counter the earnestness that had gone before was. But the story of ruminations on freedom in Western musical life does not end there. Prog was not quite dead. In 1991 the Swedish pianist and keyboard musician Pär Lindh, who had switched from rock music to classical music some years earlier, started The Swedish Art Rock Society. Out of this grew a second flowering of Symphonic Prog, this time across Scandinavia. It was, of course, not original in any way. Sweden was neutral in the war, and the creative impulses were missing. But the guitar solos played by Roine Stolt, for example, soar as high as any other. Lindh and Stolt were both born in the fifties, let it be said. Today there are new Prog bands comprised of musicians who were not yet born when Prog was at its height. The range of styles has opened out to include fusion and jazz derivatives. Some of the original Prog Rockers, straggle-haired and dessicated, still wearing the regulation tee-shirts and jeans and mostly now in their sixth decade, are still on tour. But I am not going to end with these. I am going to end with a separate development, dating from the 1990s, and known as nu-jazz. Some of it is interesting. The video below is Stardust Hotel by the ten-piece Norwegian band, Jaga Jazzist. The music is experimental. It is difficult and frequently cacophonous. It features the same complexity of time signatures and utterly free expression that marked Prog’s excursion from the pop and rock forms of the sixties. It is a re-finding of the European spirit, imperfect as yet, ecstatic, and proof that what is in the genes will always find its way out through culture. And if that caught your interest, try this one. Or this. I’m not entirely sure where the cadenzas are, though. Comments:2
Posted by Rechill on Wed, 08 Sep 2010 21:46 | # Though you may not agree with his politics and social commentary, Frank Zappa wrote some of the best music of the 20th century. 3
Posted by Gorboduc on Wed, 08 Sep 2010 23:59 | # Well. I won’t dispute in detail any of your musicological pronunciamentos, beyond saying that movement III is really a Rondo, which generally has only one them and that what is heard after the Cadenza (and who’s that by? Is it by Joachim? My old Boosey score doesn’t print one - Beethoven probably expected the soloist to supply his own extemporisation, but what happened at the first performance I’ve no idea - ) isn’t actually a recapitulation, but a coda generally based on the opening theme. Now just WHAT is the virtue of irregular time sigs.? They’re nothing new. Handel and Telemann both occasionally mixed 3/8 and 2/4, Handel used 5/8 to symbolise Orlando’s madness, and Shield, later in the 18th. cent, wrote some trios with fluent movements in 5/4 or 5/8. Quintuple time appears in the 14th. century, and it’s not hard to find it in the 16th and the 17th. Several English composers including Tye and Strogers used it, and there are even examples of pieces in 11/4, one by John Bull. Chopin used quintuple time, so did a few 19th. century Russians, so did Reicha, and back in the 18th. century several rural composers of English psalmody occasionally divided a bar of 4 crotchets into two dotted crotchets and a plain one, producing a Dave-Brubeck-like 1,2,3, 1,2,3, 1,2, [=8 quavers] pattern. Balfe, Victorian composer of I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls and the old drawing room war-horse Excelsior wrote a cello sonata with a 5/4 movement. Quite a few English folksongs have irregular sigs, but it’s been suggested that some of the 5/8’s are actually 6/8’s, hurriedly truncated, or that some transcribers, like Percy Grainger, took a singer’d rubato too seriously. So irregular time sigs are old hat. Even Pentangle got in on the act with the alternating 5/8 and 7/8 of Let’s get away! But WHY are they important? And WHY do you expect to find a re-invigoration of the European spirit through Jazz? This is generally taken to be a type of music negre in inspiration (e.g. Armstrong) and exploited by Jews (e.g.Goodman) The obviously NORDIC appearances of the lads in the video may mean nothing more than the indisputably Nordic appearances of that famous pair of dumbo parents from Norway here: Please could you say WHAT’s specifically healthy or happy or even NORDIC about the music in the video? About whether music benefited by being taken out of the domestic circle or the local orchestral society to be professionalised - well, that’s another question. IMHO, however, one of the best books about the meaning and content of English domestic music in the 16-th and 17th. centuries was written during WW II in very difficult circumstances by a Marxist Jew, Ernst Meyer:it’s called English Chamber Music and was published by the Communist firm Lawrence and Wishart in 1946. It’s a much better contribution to European culture than that of the Nordic Jazzists. Anyone who wants to dispute the book’s content as a result of its provenance had better have read it well first! 4
Posted by Guessedworker on Thu, 09 Sep 2010 00:46 | # Gorb, We are pianists and not cat stranglers in our house. So I don’t have the benefit of a musical score for the Violin Concerto. My reading, then, is my own, and is as follows: A rondo is a return, and most complex symphonic movements in this form have two and, I’m pretty sure, more usually three returns. I’m not sure what you mean by “one”, which is impossible to my mind. There must be two parts at least, even for a single statement. On the “recapitulation”, I specifically wrote this about the final bars:
A recapitulation follows development/transition, which, again, is my reading of the actual form of the end of the movement. I don’t know how Beethoven marked the score. I am imposing my own analysis on what I hear - and only doing so in passing, without it being the point of the exercise. The point of the exercise is to interpret the emotional impact, about which I would say that it is not a question of expecting “to find a re-invigoration of the European spirit through Jazz?” Rather, it is a question of a re-finding (a philosophically important word for me) of the European spirit in all forms of our expression. Even jazz. That is what is remarkable about it. Surely this isn’t very difficult to understand. I do sometimes wish you would try to be constructive now and again. It must be singularly obvious even to you that I do not attack you for your need to god-think. I would like it if you would kindly extend a reciprocal courtesy to me. Thank you. 5
Posted by Gorboduc on Thu, 09 Sep 2010 02:12 | # GW; no hard feelings. It’s me age. I’m so old now I can’t remember my male menopause. I meant “one main theme” Sonata form employs two themes: that’s not really the case here. None of this really matters. What I’m anxious to discover is, why are musical details like complex time-sigs important? I could say, it’s important because it’s bi-tonal, or it continually modulates, or because it’s in C flat minor, but these are all details of construction, nothing more. I’m not being destructive: but I don’t think it’s useful to pile up information about technical details as a substitute for displaying beauty. I can do it: but it’s not worth anything. I will say that the Swedenborgske Rom track seems to display two simultaneous rhythms at the start: but this makes me think it was worked out on paper. How does your jazz video demonstrate anything European that isn’t similarly displayed by the dumbo parents? I remember years and years ago there was some pop group that used to perform in horned helmets and animal skins. My friends told me this made them Nordic in spirit and that therefore as a European I should go along. I thought the noise was awful, whatever the garb. Although I very much wanted a pair of furry boots. Give me Greig: Berwald is good, too. Percy Grainger seemed to have a thing about Nordic music as opposed to Teutonic strains. But I’m not sure how mere Northernness helps. Some pretty early European notated and harmonised music seems to come from the Orkneys: it makes use of parallel thirds, very euphonious, and not that usual in contemporary Europe. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIFTeh7lsRc Oh dear, Christianised Vikings. Sorry. But we wouldn’t have this little piece if it weren’t for the priests… I have heard stuff quite as good as the Nordic jazz videos at fairly moderate university Jazz Club evenings. I came across someone years ago who sometimes put on an evening of Wagner LPs for skinheads. “It was actually Mahler!” he’d say. What d’you think about Georgian folk-polyphony? This piece seems to be identical with a recording made in Georgia about 1953, which makes me doubt its genuinely traditional status: however, it goes with a bang, and the sharp dissonances here are a brilliant contrast to the sultry smudginess of the Nordic jazz track: This one is by contrast quiet and touching: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RM9GiwiSKT4&feature=related I think if you like trombones this is hard to beat: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ww4dkzl-BA&feature=related Anyway, Christmas, ahem YULE is on the way, and I’d like to offer this to you GW as a bit of good old Englishness: an 18th century carol, the sort of thing the quire took round the parish in Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CugcfrR83c8 Some of these make me sit up in the coffin in which I habitually (and morbidly) sleep. 6
Posted by MOB on Thu, 09 Sep 2010 16:39 | # In response to this article, Music in the Third Reich, I posted the three URLs below (#4 is just an encore). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrD9drab2nY&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CDo6c6-Wt4&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9KZa8ZJUU8&feature=related (Bach) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-iuSgXKUcw (I like his style) MOB 7
Posted by Thunder on Thu, 09 Sep 2010 23:45 | # GW, Gorboduc, reading your interchanges is better entertainment than the television. I know that is not a huge recommendation but I would rather pour myself a Johnnie Walker Blue and read your retorts than any other bit of entertainment available weekday evenings. And it goes well with music too….cat stranglers, too old to remember male menopause…keep up the good work 8
Posted by Gorboduc on Fri, 10 Sep 2010 01:03 | # “... He was my sole, my boyhood’s friend: For those who like/dislike tradition here is a little video that I find strangely touching, about the recovery of a particular musical tradition just before it was too late. Of course traditions have to be distinguished from customs: when the context ‘s right I’ll post the story of the Victorian Irish bishop who recovered the site of an important Dark Age battle by knowing what to say to an old peasant woman. Please try this: it’s strangely heartening. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-eudv9FjNI&feature=related The tradition consists in the fact that the archive was preserved at all ... I’ve no idea where it is. As GK Chesterton said, if you want a wooden post to stay white it’s no good just leaving it white: you have to go out and repaint it every now and then. 9
Posted by Thunder on Fri, 10 Sep 2010 01:41 | # Gorboduc, Do you know the translation, or where I can get one of that piece (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-eudv9FjNI&feature=related)? I should have paid more attention in Latin class but I was sitting with Lorna Niemi and was distracted. It’s kind of like reading yours and GW’s interchanges. I like the way it sounds but I am not sure what it means. 10
Posted by Gorboduc on Fri, 10 Sep 2010 08:30 | # Thunder: A verse translation of it is given in the old pre-Vatican II Missals: Mother of Christ! hear thou thy people’s cry, I can’t see the composer’s name. This is handy and easy to memorise but doesn’t quite do justice to the text, attributed to Hermanus Contractus (Hermann the Lame) a monk of Reichenau Abbey who died in 1054. I’ve no idea what the plainsong at the start is, nor whether it’s related to the large scroll the girl is looking at: large choirbooks in that format were used into the 18th century, but were later largely dismembered, and the sheets sold off for framing as decorations. 11
Posted by Gorboduc on Fri, 10 Sep 2010 08:36 | # PS: part of my disagreement with GW is rooted in the fact that he calls for a new aesthetic - imho it would only be the old one with some things relabelled and disguised OR it would be so totally and agressively different, conceived in a spirit of reaction and NOT arising from the human experience, as not really to contact the deeper and truer layers of our psyche at all. I say, re-examine the OLD one: repaint the white post! 12
Posted by Jimmy Marr on Fri, 10 Sep 2010 20:26 | # Gorboduc, Here’s a recent celebration of musical freedom and the repainting of things OLD 13
Posted by MOB on Fri, 10 Sep 2010 21:41 | # Such feverish displays of erudition* are not required – Greg Sandow has everything (much more than just classical) covered in “Future of Classical Music.” Here’s the “First look at the book.” http://www.artsjournal.com/sandow/2009/09/unveilng_the_book.html Heather MacDonald is joyful in “Classical Music’s New Golden Age: Here are some quotes: Gustav Mahler added new parts for horns, trombones, and other instruments when he conducted Beethoven’s symphonies. Arnold Schoenberg explained his reorchestration of Handel’s Concerti Grossi, op. 6, as remedying an “insufficiency with respect to thematic invention and development [that] could satisfy no sincere contemporary of ours.” (violinist Itzhak Perlman maintains: “I’m certain Haydn and Mozart would have adored our modern approach to phrasing and vibrato”) or by a small period-instrument ensemble seeking to re-create earlier performance techniques. In a 1990 interview, violinist Pinchas Zuckerman called historical performance “asinine STUFF . . . a complete and absolute farce. Nobody wants to hear that stuff.” *Note: I looked for the right adjective to precede my own “displays of erudition” and found it here, on p. 77 of Satire-Critical Reintroduction: From the Amazon Product Description, it definitely appeals. http://www.amazon.com/Satire-Critical-Reintroduction-Dustin-Griffin/dp/0813108292 MOB 14
Posted by MOB on Fri, 10 Sep 2010 23:39 | # Because classical music has been my lifelong listening habit, primary just short of exclusive, it’s the trends and changes in classical music that interests me most and has the greatest potential for causing me stress just short of anguish. I don’t have to analyze what the trend is, especially classical radio where it’s more obvious. It’s all about more Jews and more atonality. Some of the frequent times that I now switch the dial, I feel actual cognitive dissonance in my brain. This is about more than simple preferences. This is, like everything else around us in America, displacement of one aspect of culture with another. (A station I listen to on the Internet had a Memorial Day special that featured all Jewish composers). Live performance programs always include a Western lure (Beethoven works best), and at least one that I can’t believe anyone actually enjoys sitting through—the Western lure is always last on the program. An unbiased friend lamented to me that he had, for the first time, left a Boston area classical concert angry recently – “90% of the program was Jewish!” Regarding Jazz: Most of the well-known classical stations of old have switched from Classical to Classical-&-Jazz. Jazz joined the violin decades ago as a Jewish icon invested with symbolic meaning; another Jewish bonding material. To see it in action, take a look at “Swing Kids” - (reviews call the characters German kids, but I’d say they’re Jews.) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwKf5rXSBHI&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoDOOWodMfI&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHCsThUMp9M&feature=related (Shane for Jews) http://www.netflix.com/Search?v1=Swing Kids&oq=swing k MOB 15
Posted by Gorboduc on Sat, 11 Sep 2010 00:17 | # Falsifying scores is actually an historically authentic practice. Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas was recomposed by some dullard not that long after the composer’s death, and it’s not that long ago that Handel’s Messiah was cleansed of all sorts of accretions whose addition began with Mozart. Anthony Grafton has shown that the Renaissance, until recently regarded as a period when ancient texts and learnings were purified of mediaeval corruptions, and were re-displayed in all their ancient purity, was also an age of shameless literary and historical forgery. http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/33/burnett_grafton.php This is a most interesting interview and touches on all sorts MR themes - especially authenticity and knowledge. 16
Posted by Gorboduc on Sat, 11 Sep 2010 01:06 | # MOB: the violin is a strange thing. The reference books suggest that it was perfected by Jewish musicians in the first half of the 16th.century. It didn’t win acceptance as a “polite” instrument in England for over another 100 years. It’s long been under suspicion as a Satanic instrument: John Wilson, 17th. century Professor of Musick at Oxford, lifted up the hem of the gown of a visiting virtuoso to see whether or not he was sporting a hoof, and there’s the well-known story of Tartini’s Devil’s Trill Sonata. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMI3A9ar-Xw&feature=related One of the country musicians in Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree seems to find something rakish and suggestive in the violin’s contours. But the Austrian Catholic 17th. cent. Biber used the violin (re-tuned) in his amazing Rosary Sonatas, one for each Mystery - God bless my soul, this one appears to be played by a Mr. Bismuth, but I don’t think it’s the same one - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdwKledgv_o&feature=related Unfortunately Youtube doesn’t have a version of Yiddle on your Fiddle (I kid you not -there is such a piece!) but never mind, here’s some more fiddling and a lively restatement of an old tradition - quite sexy too! 17
Posted by Metallist on Sat, 11 Sep 2010 19:41 | # This is interesting. I think that Europeans can achieve whatever they set their minds to, as long as they are given the freedom to do so unencumbered by greed, war and outside intervention. Most of the old farts on this weblog wont probably realise it, but Metal music is a great (and almost exclusive) gathering point for many of today’s white youth, kind of like a winter sports gathering. Power metal, when performed by a capable band, can infuse a soul into a crowd of passive spectators, almost possessing them for minutes with its over the top choruses delivered by charismatic frontmen, virtuoso guitar work in the vein of paganini and other great European composers, and a percussive rhythm that one can move their bodies to, unlike the sterile bullshit that the church has stuffed down our ears for centuries. One can almost see the youth yearn to return to their true roots, of blue skies, great forests, gathering around fires and respecting mother nature, which I see as the complete antithesis of what the American way of life is today - a wanton disrespect of nature, a capitalist and supermarket-driven mindset that is so entrenched that it has made its adherents mere hollow shells of real human beings, and an administration that will go to any lengths - even invade sovereign nations and bomb their lands - to acquire more resources so that the endless cycle of MONEY can go on. America today is an abomination, a nation of materialists with no redemption in sight. Europe, on the other hand, possesses a soul that can never be taken away. 18
Posted by danielj on Sat, 11 Sep 2010 21:06 | # Power metal, when performed by a capable band, can infuse a soul into a crowd of passive spectators, almost possessing them for minutes with its over the top choruses delivered by charismatic frontmen, virtuoso guitar work in the vein of paganini and other great European composers, and a percussive rhythm that one can move their bodies to, unlike the sterile bullshit that the church has stuffed down our ears for centuries. Paging Alex Kurtagic! America today is an abomination, a nation of materialists with no redemption in sight. Europe, on the other hand, possesses a soul that can never be taken away. Keep dreaming brah. 19
Posted by danielj on Sat, 11 Sep 2010 21:07 | # Metal is Jewish. No. Gangster rap, some punk rock, and nu-metal is Jewish, but not metal proper. 20
Posted by Guessedworker on Sat, 11 Sep 2010 21:10 | # Sorry, Daniel, that was my comment. Metal is a derivative of rock via hard rock, many of whose OTT proponents were cryptos. It is not a music that expresses the instinct for freedom which is so particular to Europeans. It is oppressive, and by its oppressiveness it owns. That is its power. 21
Posted by danielj on Sat, 11 Sep 2010 21:17 | # Sorry, Daniel, that was my comment. Metal is a derivative of rock and rock. Many of its OTT proponents were cryptos. It is not a music that expresses the instinct for freedom which is so particular to Europeans. It is oppressive, and by its oppressiveness it owns. That is its power. I’m sorry. We crossed wires. I’m saying that the genres I mentioned are literally ran and/or invented by Jews! http://www.jewcy.com/feature/2007-07-17/assimilation_and_its_discontents http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N.W.A#Post-Ice_Cube_.281989-1991.29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Heller Very interesting. 22
Posted by danielj on Sat, 11 Sep 2010 21:19 | # It is not a music that expresses the instinct for freedom which is so particular to Europeans. It is oppressive, and by its oppressiveness it owns. That is its power. Regarding punk rock: why are the lyrics generally so concerned with “freedom” (at least of the libertine variety) and the moral hypocrisy of the elite? If the music itself is oppressive why are the lyrical themes oriented around issues of self-control, self-sacrifice, etc.? Why the disconnect? 23
Posted by danielj on Sat, 11 Sep 2010 21:20 | # For the record, I don’t listen to any metal except a couple of math-core bands. (e.g. Dillinger Escape Plan) 24
Posted by Guessedworker on Sat, 11 Sep 2010 21:28 | # “If the music itself is oppressive why are the lyrical themes oriented around issues of self-control, self-sacrifice, etc.?” Punk was the first re-assertion of British youth culture since 1963. It was for the under-twenties. Its themes were of no intellectual or aesthetic significance, and its tonal and harmonic structure had no function beyond the aforementioned assertion. There is an argument that even this was better than silence. I do not adhere to it myself. 25
Posted by danielj on Sat, 11 Sep 2010 22:09 | # Its themes were of no intellectual or aesthetic significance, and its tonal and harmonic structure had no function beyond the aforementioned assertion. I don’t know. I think the Sex Pistols were important. They had moved past the initial punk phase, which was amalgamation of reggae, two-tone and whatnot and were doing something different and something that was culturally significant. And, since you are somebody who ascribed significance to Thatcher’s ridiculous Argentinian dust-up, I can’t see how you can deny that the Sex Pistols were just as significant. Regardless, there is pop punk and punk that I listen to that incorporates Buddhist, Burkean, Nietzschean and all kinds of other intellectually significant threads into itself. I think the reluctance of the older crowd to ascribe any merit to popular music is just a bit of the stodge factor. I’m not denying, by my love of proletarian sound, that classical music is moving, important and European but I do, like Winston in 1984, feel pretty good when I see a bunch of angry White boys getting riled up at a show. 26
Posted by Guessedworker on Sat, 11 Sep 2010 22:53 | # Daniel, It is possible to say something serious about certain parts of our recent collective musical output because, and only because, they are heir to a great train of music that says something serious about us. The youthful desire to speak to and for oneself, while understandable and a permanent feature of being young, is not of the same seriousness and, obviously, does not ascend to such artistic heights. It has another psychological root. This post is about human freedom, about psychology and, perhaps, sociobiology. It is not about culture in general - much too exclusive for that - and it is not about Gorb’s tradition - much too particular. 27
Posted by Captainchaos on Sat, 11 Sep 2010 23:05 | # We need not guess which side of the divide of palingenesis vs. ontology as relates to revolutionary form Jonathan Bowden falls on: Robert E. Howard and the Heroic. I’m assuming if his position were other than it is his talk would have been entitled something more like “Bad Krauts and Moral Debasement”. On the other hand, “Good Krauts and Whipping the Kikes” would most likely be too explicit and crude. 28
Posted by Captainchaos on Sat, 11 Sep 2010 23:10 | # Link above does not work. Here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ucBGENZjnM&feature=PlayList&p=A1C8B8F59BE140ED&index=0&playnext=1 29
Posted by Metallist on Sat, 11 Sep 2010 23:44 | # To danielj - I’m not dreaming, bro….check this song out, and if you aren’t able to identify an undercurrent of yearning for a past that is now lost forever, you’re deluded http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBjv7NlMVFQ here’s a sampling of lyrics from that song -
The sort of power metal that I refer to is of the Scandinavian variety, not the commercial metal that rules the scene in America, but as a lover of all sounds heavy, I have to say that I admire many American bands, but the culture of pushing the boundaries of acceptability is one that I cannot identify with. But I wont go deep into dissecting the various genres of metal, as that is clearly beyond the purpose of this discussion that, for some reason, I’m drawn into. But I love the Dillinger Escape plan too, and if you like them, you must check out Meshuggah, which is a math metal band from my country. Do check out what Varg Vikernes has to say on various issues - http://www.burzum.org/eng/biography.shtml Many of the themes he touches upon are very relevant to what it means for Europeans to find their soul in today’s world, now that the ghost of christianity has passed us on. But I speak as a Scandinavian (a Swede, more precisely) who has been to a few concerts on the other side of the Atlantic, so maybe my understanding of the US (and the Anglo world) is slightly biased… 30
Posted by Guessedworker on Sat, 11 Sep 2010 23:59 | # Metallist, Can you distinguish between making an argument about one’s truth and a lived moment of it? The difference is key. Without it, you can never get past the inauthentic and invented, of which reactionary guff like Varg Vikernes is a good working example. If you can’t see what I am saying now, at least store away in your mind the possibility that there is something immeasurably more real and interesting than your Weltanshauung admits today. Later, perhaps, it will announce itself to you, and your present interests will die away. 31
Posted by How quickly things change on Sun, 12 Sep 2010 00:06 | # Posted by Captainchaos on October 21, 2008
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Posted by danielj on Sun, 12 Sep 2010 00:18 | # I’m not dreaming, bro….check this song out, and if you aren’t able to identify an undercurrent of yearning for a past that is now lost forever, you’re deluded I’m not denying that those are the themes of metal. I’m denying that the Continent is any better off than the Island or the States. The people you associate with might be better off, but they populace as a whole isn’t any healthier. We’ve all got the exact same disease. you must check out Meshuggah You know Meshuggah means crazy in Yiddish right? I intentionally didn’t mention them so I didn’t have to explain that metal proper really isn’t dominated by Jews. It is hard to do that when we muddy up the water with bands named in Yiddish. Many of the themes he touches upon are very relevant to what it means for Europeans to find their soul in today’s world, now that the ghost of christianity has passed us on. But I speak as a Scandinavian (a Swede, more precisely) who has been to a few concerts on the other side of the Atlantic, so maybe my understanding of the US (and the Anglo world) is slightly biased… I think the punk scene is more “authentic” here than the metal scene. However, there is no right wing scene at all other than that which surrounds the Hatebreed crowd and the neo-Nazi bands in Jersey and the former are neo-Con hacks where the latter are just silly. Later, perhaps, it will announce itself to you, and your present interests will die away. GW, do you not listen to any popular music? 33
Posted by Metallist on Sun, 12 Sep 2010 00:20 | #
I hope not! Mr. Guessedworker, I don’t completely understand you, maybe because my English isn’t as good as I would want it to be, but also because as an Engineer by profession, I do not have the luxury of basking in these ‘deep’ thoughts… You may be right, that Varg Vikernes is just a reactionary, someone who can be brushed aside because of his shady past…but I do not see anything ‘inauthentic’ or ‘invented’ in what i am saying, on the contrary I find the rest of the our world today is just that…or maybe you just don’t appreciate metal music! 34
Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 12 Sep 2010 00:23 | # GW, do you not listen to any popular music? Not for the last fifty years, no. 35
Posted by danielj on Sun, 12 Sep 2010 02:20 | # Not for the last fifty years, no. Well I can’t help it. I’m unabashed White trash. Despite the protest of the Narrator, I am what I am and proud of it. 36
Posted by Jimmy Marr on Sun, 12 Sep 2010 04:10 | # Fifty years! Jesus GW, I thought your unpopularity was a recent phenomenon. 37
Posted by John on Sun, 12 Sep 2010 08:44 | # What about bluegrass? Too lowbrow? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YW-w0KgE-8s or outlaw country? 38
Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 12 Sep 2010 10:59 | # Jimmy, I was exaggerating. It’s nearer forty. 39
Posted by Gorboduc on Sun, 12 Sep 2010 22:48 | # Metallist: Last word from an old fart. I can’t see the SLIGHTEST connection between blue skies and pine forests and a respect for mother nature and your favourite genre, heavy/black/death (whatever) metal. The music is TOTALLY dependent on modern technology and hi-wattage power supplies. My enjoyment of a pine-forest or a blue sky is spoiled if some bozo lets his mobile ring: farewell nature (in the outdoors sense) and I am plunged into a crowded rail terminus, a busy motorway, a slaughterhouse, a steel rolling mill, or some other vile abode of pandemonic din and stench. I put up a video featuring an amplified violin: the music would have been posible without the electronics. (Yes, I know that we’re discussing the matter via an electronic medium but I’m discussing performance as the important thing, not recording and proliferation.) I find it surprising that folk festivals need to advertise some events as “acoustic” (a ridiculous word for “natural” or “organic”: ALL folk music should be “acoustic” otherwise it immediately loses its quality of naturalness and enrols itself as a mechanised commercial product. You should be able to carry your music with you, and be able to produce it anywhere. Who mentioned The Sex Pistols? Did they think Maclaren was a a Scot? he was Jewish. I already have a soul, thanks very much, so I don’t need an artificial and inharmonious one to be summoned into me (WHERE from, I hardly like to think) but its aesthetic faculties need feeding from time to time: this nourishes me. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOUc-EuS6rE&feature=related Its composer William Lawes was killed in the Civil War at the siege of Chester fighting on the Royalist side. 40
Posted by Gorboduc on Sun, 12 Sep 2010 22:59 | # Well of course a mobile’s chime doesn’t QUITE do all tha, thank God. It’s the heavy metal noise that does that. Something’s got lost, but I’m too tired to sort it out. One more listen to the Lawes, Ovaltine and bed. 41
Posted by Gorboduc on Sun, 12 Sep 2010 23:05 | # Just a brief PS while the dog fetches my slippers: Lawes was NOT on the side of The English Revolution, although some of his music (not particularly this piece which I chose for its noble style) IS regarded as highly innovative. Those who killed him, were revolutionaries (in the accepted sense of the word) they also delighted in wrecking church organs. Unwittingly they did help English chamber music, because, in Roger North’s words “many preferred to stay at home and fiddle than go abroad[out-of-doors] and be knock’d on the head.” 42
Posted by danielj on Mon, 13 Sep 2010 04:02 | # Who mentioned The Sex Pistols? Did they think Maclaren was a a Scot? he was Jewish. I did. No. I didn’t think of him at all. I was stating that they were culturally significant. Pop music is here to stay and it can peacefully coexist with classical music (I’ve got a cello and an electric guitar). Orwell knew it and it filled him with hope, Bradbury knew it and it filled him with despair (he pretty much predicted the mp3 player) and only time will tell if it can be bent to our purposes. 43
Posted by GoyAmongYou on Mon, 20 Sep 2010 10:56 | #
LOL, cut the skinheads some slack; Mahler is but a Jewified Anton Bruckner (he called him “his forerunner” in classic chutzpatic fashion). I never cared about Mahler, even before knowing that the guy was jewish, or even before I started caring about such things. I always found him over-gesticulatory, manneristic and Byzantine; I guess my aesthetic instincts were always in the right place. 44
Posted by Herman Martin on Sat, 03 Mar 2012 15:38 | # What? Mahler, Sex Pistols and Scandi nu jazz in the same thread? Thing is, all these things now live side by side. We don’t have to choose between them. Post a comment:
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Posted by Notus Wind on Wed, 08 Sep 2010 20:52 | #
It’s interesting to see how you go on to identify this trait in forms of [Western] musical expression that otherwise seem to have nothing in common. I very much appreciate connections of this sort.
At the risk of having this thread run too far afield, here’s another.
To the bedevilment of the great and good, we can see the same phenomenon playing itself out in a small town American preacher’s desire to burn a few copies of the Qur’an. The Rev. Terry Jones has been roundly denounced by administration heads, military generals, and even the Vatican. Mr. Jones response to all this, “We are still determined to it, yes.” It’s a reminder that there are still some things - some traits - that even our liberal system can’t contain.