"The highest criticism, then, is more creative than creation, and the primary aim of the critic is to see the object as in itself it really is not."

- Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist:

"I like to read about people who have done nothing spectacular, who aren’t beautiful and lucky, who try to behave well in the limited field of activity they command, but who can see, in little autumnal moments of vision, that the so-called “big” experiences of life are going to miss them; and I like to read about such things presented not with self-pity or despair or romanticism, but with realistic firmness and even humor"

- Philip Larkin

Art should be independent of all claptrap – should stand alone...and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism and the like." - James McNeill Whistler

 The death of Leslie Philips at the extremely ripe age of 98 had me thinking about his suave upper-class persona versus the fact that he came from a working-class East London background, as did other professionally posh actors + showbiz personalities of the same era such as Terry-Thomas and Frank Muir. The latter quipped that despite appearances "I was educated in E10, not Eton."  There are many other examples of artistes who did a kind of auto-Pygmalion job and taught themselves to speak proper. But this thing of performers adopting received pronunciation upon entry into the entertainment world is long gone. If anything, their modern equivalents would try to blunt any poshness in their speech patterns. There's this weird disjunction between a cultural ascendancy of the demotic, even as class divides and economic inequality are worsening and Eton rather than E10 continues to fill the cabinet.

  Better over the top than under the top

 "Is it possible - and I know this mad hypothesis is asking for ridicule - that we are poisoning ourselves with music? Our lot, my contemporaries, from our adolescence on, we listened to dance music, day and night, and it was all of it romantic or sentimental. It yearned, it wanted, it longed, it needed - and expected, too, for somewhere, some time, a promise had been made. Some day I'll find you... We were immersed in dreams. But since then music has changed. Its rhythms no longer swoon or sway or linger, they beat and pound and drive and the sound is so loud you have to hear it with your nerves....  So my question is, when some person goes out to kill or torture or maim, can one reason be that he or she has been set for the crime by music that has driven them mad? Shamans have used music for thousands of years to create special moods, young men are prepared for killing by stirring marches, churches use inspirational music to hold their flocks together, and it is known that real spiritual teachers use music, but this is so delicate a thing that it is used carefully, by specialists, in special circumstances. But we deluge ourselves with music, of every kind, soak ourselves in it, often feed it direct into the brain with machines designed for this purpose - and we never even ask what effect it may be having. Well, I, for one - and I know there are others think it is time we do ask."

 

- Doris Lessing, 1994

 

(from Under My Skin: Volume I of my Autobiography, to 1949)

"Outdoors, minor!"

 "Sometimes my contribution [as a record producer] might have been as minimal as just saying, 'Shall we stop for a few minutes?... And then of course, other times I work like a normal musician. I say, 'Why don’t we have a G major instead of that B minor' or whatever. In fact, I nearly always say that, 'Why don’t we have a major instead of a minor?' It’s part of my destroy-minor-chords crusade that has been going on for 50 years or so"

- Brian Eno

Questions for people who know music from a musician's point of view:

- why would Eno take against minor chords? (Is it because they connote a "subtlety" that he finds middebrow, a too easy signaling of sophistication?)

- does Eno in fact avoid minor chords in his work? I haven't inspected them with this in mind (and not wholly confident I would spot their presence) but I can't help thinking that the downbeat, dreamy-drifty songs on Another Green World and Before and After Science might feature some minor chords...