Someone recently asked Greil Marcus why "sixties and seventies rock crits hate prog so much?" 

"Why do people hate prog rock? Because it epitomized the worst of its time, that post-60s desert of stale ideas, idiotic new trends and catchphrases, where bad tv commercials were the great art form of the epoch. It was pretentious, claiming the world while gazing at its own navel. It was pleased with itself. It had no conviction and no doubt. It was able to vanish as if it had never been, because it hadn’t.  

Of course there was Can."

Just throwing this to the wolves.... 

I will say though that I have never ever seen a musician more pleased with himself than Robbie Robertson in The Last Waltz

 

Green Gartside, Smash Hits, June 1982.

 ... what Wyndham Lewis calls ‘the Time-mind’ or ‘the Time-view’. The adherents of this mind are very numerous and apparently diverse, among them Einstein, Darwin, Spengler, William James, as well as writers such as Gertrude Stein, Joyce and Proust, artistic schools such as naturalism and futurism... The principal villain however is Bergson... The charismatic metaphysics of Bergson, as Lewis must have remembered from his lectures, described human identity, at its most primal and non-intellectual, as the creature of a numinous time deeper than the mere succession of the clock... Lewis... understood Bergson to be advocating a rampant subjectivism, dissolving into pure consciousness objects that one might have otherwise naively assumed to exist independently of one’s experience of them. Repelled by Bergsonian flux, Lewis proposes as an alternative ‘a philosophy of the eye’, a celebration of ‘the concrete and radiant reality of the optic sense’... The appeal to ‘deadness’ is a rebuke to Bergson’s exalted concept of a universal evolutionary vitality which ‘makes of the whole series of the living one single immense wave flowing over matter’. Bergson ended Creative Evolution (1907) by encouraging the philosopher of the future to see ‘the material world melt back into a simple flux, a continuity of flowing, a becoming’. Lewis was not remotely attracted by the idea of melting into anything – ‘we should retain our objective hardness, and not be constantly melting and hotly overflowing’ – so he had a double complaint to make: not only does Bergsonian thought strip you of ‘the clearness of outline, the static beauty, of the things you commonly apprehend’ but it also takes away ‘the clearness of outline of your own individuality which apprehends them’. Bergson often writes with heady rapture about things interpenetrating and merging, and Time and Western Man is largely a statement of Lewis’s opposite preference, ‘them standing apart – the wind blowing between them, and the air circulating freely in and out of them’.​ 

Lewis repeatedly champions here ‘the beautiful objective, material world of common sense’ over ‘the “organic” world of chronological mentalism’ and remarks at one point that ‘my case is an overwhelmingly good one.’ But whether his argument amounts to much is another matter. This is the sort of thing he says, a comparison of our experience of a statue, existing in space, and a piece of music, existing in time, the upshot of which is meant to be that we have a strong ‘space’ sense which the prevailing Time-mind ignores or denies: ‘You move round the statue, but it is always there in its entirety before you, whereas the piece of music moves through you, as it were. The difference in the two arts is evident at once, and the different faculties that come into play in the one and the other.’

- Seamus Perry in the LRB

 'pop songs celebrate not the articulate but the inarticulate ... they measure the depth and originality of their emotions by reference to their inability to find words for them'. 

Simon Frith, Sound Effects, 1983

‘I cannot play that, my dear lady! I am your most devoted servant but I cannot. That is not music – believe me! ... this is chaos! This is demagogy, blasphemy, insanity, madness! It is a perfumed fog, shot through with lightning! It is the end of all honesty in art. I will not play it.’

Edmund Pfühl, organist in Buddenbrooks, by Thomas Mann, refusing to play Wagner's Tristan and Isolde. 

 The pinnacle of that view of freedom, of course, is avant-garde jazz, which I find by and large a dead loss. It operates on the assumption that if you remove all constraints from people, they will behave in some especially inspired manner. This doesn’t seem to me to be true in any sense at all — not socially, and certainly not artistically. The point is that the typical jazz or even rock concept of improvisation is based on the theory of the individual breaking loose of something. The African version is based on the idea of the individual making an important, timely contribution to a social event. Talking Heads is an ideal example of that kind of communion: their whole style involves sociorhythmic interconnectedness

Brian Eno, 1981, via 

 Audio musicam ergo sum

Music supplies us with a first clue. What part of me hears music when I listen to it? My body trembles, dances, kicks up its heels, perhaps jumps with joy; music innervates and stretches  the  muscles,  accelerates  the  pulse,  moves  the  stomach and stimulates the genitals. My intellect counts, unconsciously, admiring the harmonic composition and construction of counterpoint. My hearing, in its delight, floods the whole sensory system with musical waves; inner rhythms and tempos keep time with the same metronome. My feelings move me to tears and fill me with happiness—all these bonds, suddenly global, construct my unity. No part of me is unaffected by the mute ecstasy that listening to music induces. Music seizes me, holds me spell-bound, passes through me, possesses me, makes me all its own, causes some unknown federative and existential function to operate in me, unifying the integral of what I am, like an immense embrace—this intense ecstasy that is called existence. I listen to music, therefore I am.

Michel Serres, Religion

(via Matt Moore)