“Music, quite simply, has to go somewhere. It is organized in time. If there is no reason why one note should follow another, there is no way of organizing that time in any coherent fashion. Atonality meant a freedom analogous to taking down all signs and abolishing all roads.” [E. Michael Jones, Dionysos Rising (San …
Happy Birthday Dear Blog
So today is my blog’s second birthday. For all the intoleristas who are following my doings most assiduously, this means that I am just now entering my terrible twos. And right now I have my eye on that interesting Vase of Diversity on the Coffee Table of Mutual Affirmation. Seriously, I am very grateful to …
Sali Forth
For those Idaho residents interested in the upcoming primary election, I would encourage you to check out Bill Sali’s web site here. Bill is an old friend, and it is good to see him out there giving liberals heartburn. Bill would be my nominee for “Least Likely to Go Native If He Makes It to …
Don’t You Love Them Madly?
“To jump ahead roughly one hundred years: Jim Morrison described his band The Doors as ‘erotic politicians’. ‘We’re interested in everything about revolt, disorder, and all activity that appears to have no meaning.’ It is difficult to imagine what Nietzsche would have thought of the music, but it is hard to imagine him withholding his …
Playing The Cult Card
One of the things that liberals did successfully for quite some time was play the race card. One of the things that conservatives (eventually) did in response was name the practice, calling it something like “playing the race card.” Little tricks of illusion and distraction in politics operate much the same way that tricks of …
Where We Got All the Uber-Goobers
“It took Nietzsche to philosophize out of Wagner’s music a program for cultural revolution that would shake the coming age to its foundation. The twentieth century was to become the proving ground for Nietzschean philosophy in its various permutations. There were the Nazis, and then there was the global cultural revolution of 1968-1969, and then …
Mark the Music
“For the next one hundred fifty years, the West would post the Liebestod question again and again in various ways, from Nazism to Woodstock, and never be able to come up with an answer. In the process, enormous amounts of cultural patrimony were thrown overboard. Classical music, freed from patriarchal melody by Wagner’s chromatic modulations, …
For Love of the Code
These continue to be tumblesome times here in Moscow, and there is both good news and bad news intermingled. The bad news is that critics continue to multiply, but the good news is that they are getting progressively squeakier. The charges are increasingly crazy-out-there and, with reference to their goals, counterproductive. For an example of …
Musical Pornography
“To modulate the notes unceasingly from one key to another, as Wagner’s chromaticism did, was tantamount to blunting the emotional focus; to lead them away never to return to the dominant note gave the feeling of tumultuous and unsatisfied passion, a passion that never got resolved. From a human perspective, there was generally only one …
The Real Problem with “Kill the Wabbit”
“The attraction was essentially erotic. This music bespoke emotion liberated from reason. In the musical realm, the assault on tonality corresponded to an assault on sexual restraint in the moral realm and an attack on the social order in the political realm. Wagner could achieve all three, which would correspond to the deepest needs he …