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Posted on 10/11/2003 12:01:44 PM PDT by cornelis
. . .the Right monitors its content for sex, the Left for violence, and many other interested sects for many other things. But the music has hardly been touched, and what efforts have been made are both ineffectual misguided about the nature and extent of the problem.If someone can find me a better analysis of the contemporary scene, I'd like to read it. This is from a chapter in Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind. In the excerpt above you can easily replace Reagan with Bush and Michael Jackson with Bono. The times have not changed that much, increase in profits has. Meanwhile there is still that same ubiquitous naivete that sweet adolescence reserves for its highest good. In the end, love is what contracts in the self and is fully endorsed in the new age of rights: the virtue of courage is reduced to non-surrender "there will be no white flag . . I'm in love." But with what?
Others may provide various positive views of the goodness of music, its therapeutic comfort in our weakest moments, its solace in solitude. Such positive views, as Bloom recognizes, are often given as evidence in apologies of indignation. I really wish someone could come forward and best this critique with an understanding that lifts this unturned rock.
Anyway, most of us young people know more about classical music than we're willing to admit, and those who don't will eventually discover it when they grow out of Justin Timberlake.
It reminded me of an old b&w film "The Devil and Daniel Webster" (1941) based on the short New England story by Benet. It also reminded me of a latin poem by Crashaw Non est hic fugitivus Amor (or, This Cupid is not a Runaway) Do you read Latin?
When the Berlin Wall came down, this was the selection played to celebrate its demise. Beethoven's tribute to Schiller, an "Ode to Joy." "Joy" in the German sense -- much, much more than sheer "happiness." Joy, as Schiller put it, "bright spark of Divinity, daughter of the Heavens."
That Joy is the engine that drives Man, more than any other energy. And music -- in all its forms -- captures the distilled spirit of Joy.
Classical music will die only when that Joy does. At that point, entropy will have won and life won't be worth living anyway.
desuetude ("dEswItju;d) [a. F. désuétude (1596 in Hatzf.), ad. L. dUsuUtGdo disuse, f. dUsuUtus, pa. pple. of dUsuUscSre to disuse, become unaccustomed, f. de- 6 + suUscSre to be accustomed, to be wont.] †1. A discontinuance of the use or practice (of anything); disuse; †protracted cessation from. b. The passing into a state of disuse. 2. The condition or state into which anything falls when one ceases to use or practise it; the state of disuse.
1623 Cockeram, Desuetude, lacke of vse.
1629 tr. Herodian (1635) 131 A generall lazinesse and desuetude of Martiall Exercises.
1652–62 Heylin Cosmogr., To Rdr., My desuetude from those younger studies.
1661 Boyle Style of Script. (1675) 139 By a desuetude and neglect of it.
1677 Hale Prim. Orig. Man. ii. iv. 160 Desuetude from their former Civility and Knowledge.
1706 J. Sergeant Account of Chapter (1853) Pref. xv, By a desuetude of acting, expire, and be buried in oblivion.
1821 Lamb Elia Ser. i. New Year's Eve, The gradual desuetude of old observances.
1637–50 Row Hist. Kirk (1842) 14 To revive acts buried and brought in [= into] desuetude by Prelats.
1678 R. Barclay Apol. Quakers x. §22. 315 The weighty Truths of God were neglected, and, as it were, went into Desuetude.
1703 Lond. Gaz. No. 3914/4 Reviving such [Laws] as are in desuetude.
1820 Scott Monast. i, The same mode of cultivation is not yet entirely in desuetude in some distant parts of North Britain.
1826 Q. Rev. XXXIV. 6 This beautiful work+fell (as the Scots lawyers express it) into desuetude.
1874 Green Short Hist. iv. §2. 168 The exercise of rights which had practically passed into desuetude.
Are you a musician, IJ?
I remember a conversation about music on Firetalk once and you were there.
Schiller tried his best in believing the happy harmony between reason and the passions (On the Aesthetic Education of Man), a harmony Bloom espouses as an ideal. It's a struggle for order, internal for Aristotle, externalized into a sacred world by St. Paul, and secularized and internalized again by Kant. Schiller follows Kant.
Perhaps Nietzsche's orientation to the Dionysian potencies--reaching back beyond Greek rationalism--is too often confused with the spark of divinity. This is all very German, very French, very European after the sunset of Scholasticism. And then over the graves of Locke and Hobbes the English gave us the Beatles and their children who turned the tension into a schizophrenia: seriously singing of love--our highest joy--by demoting it to unseriousness.
Roberto Benigni in "Life is Beautiful" presents a triumphant joy in the face of tragedy, although its very frenetic and exhausting--only the vibrant could keep it up. Have you seen it?
A pretty coarse thing to say...
Aside from occasionally torturing a piano, sadly, no.
the happy harmony between reason and the passions
I believe any harmony starts with a recognition of prime forces, and that freude is that force. It is the fire that fuels both passion AND reason.
Have you seen [Roberto Benigni's "Life is Beautiful"]?
No, I haven't. But I'll be on the lookout for it.
You subscribe to the OED?
I now listen to classical and some "popular" artists such as Enya. But my obsessive "must listen" has been and continues to be Mike Oldfield.
An instrumentalist--mainly--he writes what I call "Rock Symphonies". Actually influenced by Carribean, African, Asian, and Celtic (mostly Celtic) music. I find his music compelling and evergreen. I believe that in--perhaps--100 years, his work will be considered in the same league as the "second tier" of composers. No Bach or Beethoven, but certainly up there with Mendelsohn.
He shares a knack with Bach: his music hooks into the alpha rhythm of your brain; at its best it is music for ruminating, pondering, analyzing, dreaming. Almost hypnotic. With each listening I find more and deeper threads. Many have called him "boring and repetitious"; Oldfield fans call such critics "cloth-eared nincompoops" because they fail to hear the subtleties. Philip Glass is also criticized for being repetitive and boring, and he sometimes is--but Koyaanisqatsi is one of my favorites...
--Boris
Indeed. I bought it on CD-ROM. The only dictionary to have. Incidentally, I broke the copy-protection; it is the first and only CD software I have encountered that is copy-protected...but not from me.
--Boris
The opening sentence synchronistically mugged me personally..."Jessica" by the Allman brothers, and "San Lorenzo" by Pat Metheny...now THAT'S music.
Having said that, there is a certain sexual dimension that defines rock music (and to a certain extent, the Blues). It all comes down to live performances - all of the girls want to sleep with the performers, and all of the boys want to be the performers who can have their pick of the girls.
Very Evolutionary.
That must be Plato's fault, who is said to have confused eros with porne. But after amps and ohms even country music prefers this confusion.
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