‘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)
Gary with a waspish portrait of Susan Sontag - someone he admired / liked !
One of the mysteries about pop is its repeatability. The way that repetition of a song doesn't dim its power, or only at extreme degrees of repetition (absolute blanket radio coverage causing you to get temporarily get sick of a song). A great song is that seemingly contradictory thing: the repeatable surprise. The classic pop single as a radio drama that never wears out.
This degree of repeatability is not unheard of in other forms, but is much rarer. There are a few films that can be watched over and over; a few books, likewise. But wherever plot as such is involved, the ability to repeat-view or repeat-read is severely diminished. Whereas the pop song is plotless, it offers drama without narrative.
(Okay there are some story-songs but most pop songs do not involve a punchline or pay-off or resolution; they don't "go" anywhere; they capture a state or a moment; or there is a movement back and forth between two states, two modes of action / feeling - verse to chorus, tension and release, buildup to climax). Rather than narratives, pop songs are dramas of energy.
Charles Baudelaire
There are many translations of this, and the one I prefer is the one that has the closing line
"It is the hour to be drunken! Lest you be the martyred slaves of Time, intoxicate yourselves, be drunken without cease! With wine, with poetry, with virtue, or with what you will."
That's a much more interesting headswerve - the idea that you could get intoxicated with virtue
Perhaps it's even possible to be intoxicated with sobriety, or the idea of sobriety as society-salvation, a cause, the single solution to everything wrong (the fanatical anti-drink campaigners of the temperance movement)
Born again former drug users, addicted to AA meetings, clutching little positivist mantras to one's bosom
(R. Meltzer quite scathing on how a cleaned-up Lester Bangs got into this whole humanist trip, 'bring back emotions, they are threatened in this society', reeling out maxims and homilies of the kind he would once have mercilessly scorned and mocked)
"At the time I began to write, a change in the direction, imagery, and rhythms in poetry had become necessary, owing to the rhythmical ...
