tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8827040061563065922.post5466024303969747557..comments2024-03-18T14:05:44.909-05:00Comments on The Music Salon: Violence and MusicBryan Townsendhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09482696991279345516noreply@blogger.comBlogger8125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8827040061563065922.post-37728107022120857712016-06-30T09:07:05.304-05:002016-06-30T09:07:05.304-05:00Andrew, thank you very much for this perspective. ...Andrew, thank you very much for this perspective. You could be quite right and it is certainly a good thing to read Alex Ross' essay with a sympathetic ear. Bryan Townsendhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09482696991279345516noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8827040061563065922.post-90824312085695398822016-06-30T08:20:19.295-05:002016-06-30T08:20:19.295-05:00I very well could be being overly generous to his ...I very well could be being overly generous to his argument, but he was arguing with a trite, popular misconception about music. He may not be arguing as much with any in-depth aesthetics, but more with a mass view. As quoted from the end of the introduction:<br /><br />"To quote the standard platitudes, it has charms to soothe a savage breast; it is the food of love; it brings us together and sets us free. We resist evidence suggesting that music can cloud reason, stir rage, cause pain, even kill. Footnoted treatises on the dark side of music are unlikely to sell as well as the cheery pop-science books that tout music’s ability to make us smarter, happier, and more productive."<br /><br />He loosely ties it to the certain Romantic thinkers as emphasizing this significance, vs earlier Greeks etc:<br /><br />"German thinkers in the idealist and Romantic tradition—Hegel, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Schopenhauer, among others—sparked a drastic revaluation of music’s significance. It became the doorway to the infinitude of the soul, and expressed humanity’s collective longing for freedom and brotherhood." (I think you could more appropriately combine this with the self-importance of Romantic artists' conceptions of their own projects).<br /><br />I think people like you and your readers already take the power of music seriously, and so find the point obvious or unnecessary to state. It did not seem like heavy handed Marxism to me, nor about any sort of privilege-checking, but merely to actually take the medium, with its use and intentions, seriously in a popular conception that ignores it beyond a nicety.Andrew Rnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8827040061563065922.post-57256388449923262612016-06-29T17:15:01.881-05:002016-06-29T17:15:01.881-05:00Listening to Nils Fram playing the piano with his ...Listening to Nils Fram playing the piano with his toilet brush, It rather reminds me of Moscheles with a frontal lobotomy.Bryan Townsendhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09482696991279345516noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8827040061563065922.post-5000198691537544632016-06-29T16:25:04.211-05:002016-06-29T16:25:04.211-05:00Having run out of amusing bits about poor Mr Corby...Having run out of amusing bits about poor Mr Corbyn-- it's slow at work and I'm taking a break from OBF today-- I went to the Guardian's classical/opera section where the headline "My music can be quite heavy, some people faint" caught my eye, now that I'm sensitised by Mr Ross's lesson on musical violence. "Why I want to manipulate people is not important. What is important is that my manipulation works." You can't say fairer than that, can you? [https://goo.gl/ykhujW]Marc in Eugenehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04331547981498637474noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8827040061563065922.post-88782532604315554272016-06-29T14:58:39.338-05:002016-06-29T14:58:39.338-05:00Very nicely put! Thanks, Marc.
Yes, Moscheles, on...Very nicely put! Thanks, Marc.<br /><br />Yes, Moscheles, one of a number of Jewish musicians, was in Vienna during Beethoven's lifetime. He is perhaps better known as a piano virtuoso than a composer.<br /><br />Must read Houellebecq sometime.Bryan Townsendhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09482696991279345516noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8827040061563065922.post-63878337479591409512016-06-29T14:18:34.438-05:002016-06-29T14:18:34.438-05:00"Despite the cultural catastrophe of Nazi Ger..."Despite the cultural catastrophe of Nazi Germany, the Romantic idealization of music persists"-- ha. I get the impression that Mr Ross wants me to go through a checklist each time I enter a concert venue, recognising all my various privileges, noting my awareness of this evil possible and that evil done, and that, and that other. Pft. I knew that name Quignard seemed familiar; 'one astonishing sequence', Ross says, in his book ends in St Peter soundproofing each of his homes... am going to constrain myself to shaking my head. The Gramscian march, indeed (whether or no Ross himself may be at least vaguely aware of his servitude to it). Houellebecq's <i>Soumission</i> describes perfectly those sorts of quasi-humanist and pseudo-intellectual cadres in its bathetic protagonist François.<br /><br />I have just discovered Ignaz Moscheles's <i>La Marche d'Alexandre</i>, op 32, with its variations, speaking of marching. Indeed, had never heard of him before Monday, although I must have seen his name because he figures in the biographies of both Beethoven and Mendelssohn, evidently.Marc in Eugenehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04331547981498637474noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8827040061563065922.post-91837461836698855072016-06-29T09:19:00.327-05:002016-06-29T09:19:00.327-05:00Andrew, thanks for your comment and welcome to the...Andrew, thanks for your comment and welcome to the Music Salon. You may be right, but I don't see Ross as saying that in the present text. He does say, "To admit that music can become an instrument of evil is to take it seriously as a form of human expression" which offers some support to your interpretation. But this is that odd, convoluted kind of arguing against a Straw Man. No-one to my knowledge was saying that music cannot be used as an instrument of evil. Nor was anyone saying that it should not be taken seriously as a form of human expression. So who is he arguing with?Bryan Townsendhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09482696991279345516noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8827040061563065922.post-77514857705443439832016-06-29T09:04:48.249-05:002016-06-29T09:04:48.249-05:00I disagree with your assessment. While there may b...I disagree with your assessment. While there may be much to critique, I don't think your hidden agency applies in that way here. I read him as disagreeing with the idea that music has independent moral agency, precisely as you are. "Music", he seems to say, is not an embodied force of good or positivity. Instead, he appears to emphasize its instrumental nature as a "medium", or a "tool". To me, that very much reinforces the same idea that it is not music which is a directed force, but it is the use to which it is put by composers, performers, advocates, etc, that matters.<br /><br />The long section about sound as a weapon--the use in torture etc--was a method to reinforce the fact it is an instrument and not an embodied force for good (or bad), but a tool, used in one of those ways by moral agents.Andrew Rnoreply@blogger.com