“During the sixties, a number of important cultural transactions took place. The classical musical tradition (that is, new music being composed in the tradition of Beethoven and Mozart) finally collapsed under the weight of its own inanity. The fact that John Cage and Karl Heinz Stockhausen were at all taken seriously was a sign that …
Musical Four-wheeling
“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 …
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 …
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, …
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 …
Wagner and Cultural Revolution
“Wagner was as committed as ever to the overthrow of existing conditions. However, the scope of his rebellion had changed. His desire for change now went deeper than the political process in terms of its end and beyond the political process, beyond even revolutionary politics, in terms of the means to bring that revolutionary change …
High Standards Lead to Relativism
“Even so, most people still tend [to] think of the popular arts as ‘lowbrow’ entertainment and not something to be thought about or evaluated as art. This has disastrous consequences for the cultivation of Christian discernment . . .Undermining the status of popular art has not led to education of the audience to heighten appreciation; …
Magazined
“We adults look around, for example, and observe that while brain surgeons and Nobel laureates probably have their good points, surely glossy-magazine editors are the most impressive people in America. Every month, in the front of their magazines, many of them have to write those six-hundred word columns with titles like ‘From the Editor’s Desk’ …