Thomas Beecham
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Sterling Morrison, quoted in Rob Sheffield's Beatles book I'm guessing the VU hated the Mothers ever since that period when the latt... -
"When I first saw Tarantino's 'Pulp Fiction' , I turned to my wife during the screening & said, “Everything I have d...
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The preservation of music in records reminds one of canned food. —Theodor W. Adorno
Then obviously it ain't a lot of the time working as it should do for many of us!
ReplyDeleteWell, yes. I'm not sure it's true either of the creators, the players, or the listeners - but equally it does seem to capture something of the way one gets caught up in the movement of music and thought processes, petty worries, mundanity, thoughts of the future or the past, all get abolished.
DeleteInteresting also as a sentiment expressed by an English classical musician, so presumably fairly upright, into music's civilizing and elevating functions - yet here espousing something with more than a tinge of Dionysus about it.
"thought processes, petty worries, mundanity, thoughts of the future or the past, all get abolished" = gardening!
ReplyDeleteEdmund - Yes, altho for me it's cooking.
ReplyDeleteBeecham's comment reminds me of Funkadelic's: "Here's a chance to dance. Our way out of our constrictions."
It's Dionysian but you could equally apply it to the link between Christian mysticism and music. Or Steve Kode9's insistence that music is pre-Oedipal.
As a former evangelical Baptist and now atheist, music is my last connection to the Divine, to the Infinite. I get Beecham's point here.
I was raised in an atheist family (not even agnostic - both parents were former Christians now very much committed to the no-God position) so music is also my main connection to the Divine, Not the only one though - there's a few others too.
DeleteDon't garden and indeed associate it with a teenage weekend job that was a bit of a horny-handed chore. But cooking, yes.
In fact cooking and music go together as a doubled release from conscious thought. I find the kitchen is one of the very best places for listening to music, something about how the body and immediate-timeframe-decision-making faculties are fully engaged, leaving the aesthetic ones wide open.
But there's a bunch of things that can get me to that worries-conscious-thought-etc abolished place - a really good piece of toast, for instance.