Posted by Martin Hutchinson on Fri, 21 Oct 2005 15:15 | #

England does NOT expect something other than the culture war from its national broadcaster, which has been a nest of Commie subversives since Guy Burgess worked for it in the 1940s.

It’s not as if modern classical music is remotely worth listening to anyway, because the modernist appartchiks retain a vicelike grip on the classical music establishment, and prevent anything one might want to listen to from being written. Other Conservatives have written that there’s been no classical music worth listening to since Puccini’s Nessun Dorma in 1926; I would say there’s been nothing worth listening to in the classical mainstream since Elgar wrote Pomp and Circumstance in 1901.

A sensible broadcasting company would have done a concert of music Nelson himself would have known and liked, including lots of Arne, Boyce (“Hearts of Oak”) and Handel.  You could add Pomp and Circumstance No. 1 (“Land of Hope and Glory”) at the end if you wanted to, ahistorical though that would be. NOT that Commie Jerusalem, though, even though Blake wrote it in 1804.

I wouldn’t mind if the BBC insisted on a black presenter for THAT concert!

Posted by Geoff Beck on Fri, 21 Oct 2005 16:00 | #

A few lessons that the respectable conservatives ought to know from history. (Of course another name for respectable conservative is ‘useful idiot’)

What is going on is a more refined form of red terrorism. The Judeo-Bolsheviks that are in charge of European societies no longer need to destroy a people by sending them to the Gulag (1930s) or shooting the elite class (i.e. Katyn Forest, 1940s) they simply wreck the culture: subvert the arts, and destroy the racial basis of a society.

They are in fact succeeding.

The Judeo-Bolsheviks have a power they didn’t have in 1919: the electronic media.

Posted by Svigor on Fri, 21 Oct 2005 16:53 | #

Nothing on earth can convince me that the decision to award the honour to a black woman was not taken in full knowledge of its political significance.  It is racism.

This is the kind of observation, the kind of truth that “reasonable” men cannot see.  One must join a side before that becomes possible.

That is most of our problem, right there in a nutshell, as Geoff has noted: the power of mass delusion.

Posted by Matt on Fri, 21 Oct 2005 17:38 | #

Svigor,

It is interesting you mention “join a side”.  It has been written in WN publications that it is difficult for the white man (and especially women) to see themselves as part of a white side because they have been brainwashed into thinking they can rise above their race.

Unfortunately, at the same time the idiots are convinced that “scientifically” race doesn’t exist.

As someone said yesterday on this board for most of these people to understand the truth “would be their undoing” insofar as how they view current reality/worldview.

This isn’t an easy task but all it will take to win a large percentage is a Jared Taylor to go mainstream and we could see those walls crash!!!

Posted by Geoff Beck on Fri, 21 Oct 2005 21:41 | #

Trafalgar, Nelson… this doesn’t quite go with the “cool Brittania” theme:

“May the Great God, whom I worship, grant to my country and for the benefit of Europe in general, a great and glorious Victory; and may no misconduct in any one tarnish it; and may humanity after Victory be the predominant feature of the British Fleet. For myself, individually, I commit my life to Him who made me, and may His blessing light upon my endeavors for serving my Country faithfully. To Him I resign myself and the just cause which is entrusted to me to defend. Amen. Amen. Amen.”

  —Horatio, Lord Nelson
  (20 October 1805, his prayer on the eve of the Battle of Trafalgar)

Posted by onetwothree on Fri, 21 Oct 2005 23:31 | #

nothing worth listening to in the classical mainstream since Elgar wrote Pomp and Circumstance in 1901

Is that worth listening to at all?  Here is the greatest piece of the 20th century, from 1934:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhapsody_on_a_Theme_of_Paganini

Posted by Mark Richardson on Sat, 22 Oct 2005 05:01 | #

I would say there’s been nothing worth listening to in the classical mainstream since Elgar wrote Pomp and Circumstance in 1901.

Martin, that would mean leaving out The Lark Ascending by Vaughan Williams (1921).

Posted by Mark Richardson on Sat, 22 Oct 2005 05:11 | #

Two other early twentieth century pieces I wouldn’t overlook:

In Trutina from Orff’s Carmina Burana (1937).

Suite in G for Organ and Strings by Respighi (1914).

Posted by Guessedworker on Sat, 22 Oct 2005 11:54 | #

Pure subjectivity of course, but my vote for the greatest - not latest - work of serious 20th century music goes to Jean Sibelius’ one-movement 7th Symphony in C Major, Op.105. 

The writer on that link, btw, does not “get” Sibelius’ intentions.  In that he is not alone.  I have heard a well-known Finnish conductor describe the piece as “nationalistic”.

Sibelius was plainly drawing from his own life and his domestic life to a create a musical portrait of the life of Man, from the tenderness of most early infancy to a final crescendo of hope on death.  He composed it in 1927.  For the next thirty years until his death he published nothing.  It was and is the most profound silence in musical history.

Posted by Svigor on Sat, 22 Oct 2005 20:12 | #

You guys should put together a classical music list for philistines like me.

Posted by Martin Hutchinson on Sun, 23 Oct 2005 02:00 | #

Interesting that even though you have more catholic tastes than I do, none of you goes later than 1937. Sort of proves the point; the great tradition of new classical music was dying by 1900 and dead by 1950—one is simply arguing about when the last breath was taken. I must try the Sibelius and the Rachmaninoff; Vaughan Williams, Respighi and Orff I fear leave me cold. I like some of Richard Strauss and Walton, though, to be fair.

Also for you classical music fans; the leitmotif (fragment of music played whenever a character appears), as used now in many TV series and most video games is always thought to have been invented by Wagner.  It wasn’t; the first use was by Heinrich Marschner, in his wonderful 1826 Der Vampyr—Marschner taught it to Wagner, who studied under him.  Since Marschner is obscure (Der Vampyr was first produced in Bratislava) and the first leitmotif was for a British vampire, an intrinsically funny concept if ever I heard one (Transylvanians were the maids in Bratislava, not spooky at all!) Marschner’s never got the credit he’s due.

Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 23 Oct 2005 09:31 | #

Martin,

If you buy the Sibelius I strongly urge you to seek out one of Sir Colin Davies two Sibelius-cycle recordings.

I bought the 5th/7th Symphony LP when I was 23, after hearing Davies conduct it with the Boston in 1974.  I’ve heard many interpretations of the 7th since though none with Davies’ subtle insights.  Some are little more than conductorial vandalism and annoy me intensely.  Davies may be a dreadful liberal but he is a very good psychologist.

The key to the piece is the thrice-repeated theme on brass.  Davies knows what it is: a clarion call of self-realisation and purpose arising out of a sea of preoccupations and cares, and still makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up after all these years.

I agree about Richard Strauss, incidentally.  His Tod und Verklärung Op.24 covers similar ground to Sibelius’ 7th - the latter part of it anyway.  But the piece is written on a large, impersonal scale and has an externality, a showiness that would never have satisfied Sibelius’ purposes.

Still, Strauss does, I think, represent the end of the line for serious composition.  But ... the line can be begun again because, as I have noted before, the educational infrastructure is still in place in the form of the conservatoires.  It is something other than musical education, something in modernity itself which inhibits the flow of great musical composition.

Posted by George Wilkins on Sun, 23 Oct 2005 18:13 | #

If nothing on earth can convince guessworker that the decision to award the commission for the BBC Trafalgar Day composition to a black woman was an act of political significance and racism, perhaps I can convince a few others with a more open mind.

Errollyn Wallen is a customer at my bookshop, a neighbour of mine, and a well-known composer. Four years ago I decided to make a personal contribution to the memory of Lord Nelson, and, as I am a former music teacher, I decided to commission a piece for the bicentenary of Trafalgar. I am familiar with Errollyn’s music, and agree with the general opinion that she is one of England’s outstanding composers.

Errollyn immersed herself in the Nelson story, she read the history, went with my wife and me to the 2003 Trafalgar Night Dinner at Greenwich, met enthusiastic collectors, and visited HMS Victory and the Nelson museums. No other composer is likely to have spent the time to study the subject at such length, and the resulting composition is a brilliant reflection of her thoughts and intentions.

The BBC only entered the picture this year, when it became apparent that a performance would only be possible with their help. There was no “incorrigible, painfully ‘correct’ wrong-headedness” involved: the BBC had no say in the choosing of the composer, and had not planned a commission for the anniversary.

My wife and I came to this country from Australia 15 years ago, and we feel honoured to be associated with Errollyn’s tribute to Nelson and British Seamen.

Posted by Geoff Beck on Sun, 23 Oct 2005 18:45 | #

> . I am familiar with Errollyn’s music, and agree with the general opinion that she is one of England’s outstanding composers.

Of that I am sure you are correct. But is your comment considered praise or is it a comment on decline.

Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 23 Oct 2005 19:02 | #

George,

Thank you for those words and I am pleased that you should take the trouble to offer them.

I will not dispute the talent of the lady in question.  It is not important.  I certainly dispute that she is capable of immersing herself in our English hearts, of course, for extanct sociobiological reasons.  Mozart wrote Rondo a la Turca but he did not claim to express the core of Turkishness or to speak as a Turk.  It is a question of where one necessarily stands and what one can do from there.  The first circumscribes the second.  Were it not so, for example, there would be no human biodiversity.

As regards the BBC, in its senior editorial roles it employs intelligent people capable of critical thought.  Some question of whether a woman of African or part-African descent is appropriate for a deeply English occasion - we are the English, btw, black people living here are <u>not</u> - must have arisen in a BBC brain cell somewhere.  Either perfect race blindness or political correctness or deliberate malice must have answered that thought, no?

I accept, of course, that these are not pleasant conclusions to draw.  But it is not us who engineered the circumstances through which they arise.  We are being forced out of our cities by unwanted aliens.  We are the victims.

If you cannot see that, George, then I ask you to open your mind.

Posted by George Wilkins on Sun, 23 Oct 2005 20:56 | #

Guessedworker,

Just a brief word about Mozart: his Piano Sonata No. 11’s last movement is correctly called Rono alla Turca, and was written to be played in the style which imitates the sound of the Turkish Janissary bands, but I’m sure he could have expressed the core of any country he wanted to, and what about Dvo?ák’s “New World” symphony?

Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 23 Oct 2005 21:55 | #

George,

But Dvorak wrote majestically of his homeland, and from a totally nationalistic foundation - as did Sibelius, Smetana and Dohnanyi, among many others.

The New World Symphony stands closer to - but not quite with - Fingals Cave, Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy, Haydn’s London Symphony etc.  There are scores of fine works evocative of place.  That is not the point.  They are not claiming “Our Fingals Cave”, “Our Scottish Fantasy”, “Our London Symphany” - never mind “Our English Heart”, which is a large step closer to the denial of all that the English uniquely are.

Btw, I mentioned that The New World is not quite one of these.  America is not the ancient homeland of European Man.  Its liberal establishment, actually, is desperately keen on the Proposition Nation.  America, apparently, is an idea into which anybody can buy.  And yet ... on the occasion of the Last Night of the Proms in 2001 Leonard Slatkin insisted upon “America’s hymn of mouring”, Barbour’s Adagio.

England, of course, is in no way an idea - despite Anthony Smith’s attempts to intellectualise it as such.  The Blair government speaks of detached and deracinated, Smithian civic values but the English people are flesh and blood - an extended family with a common genetic interest.

Either we cleave to this truth or we will be lost under an endless wave of Third World peoples.  There is no comfortable place between.  It’s going to become a battle for survival if we are to survive.

So, I really mean no offence to your friend.  But I particularise for my own people since I want them to survive.