We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
I have already quoted from and commented on The Ninth: Beethoven and the World in 1824 a couple of times here. Now I’ve read it. Unless I’m being paid to read a book, I only read it to the end if I’m enjoying it, so point one to make about this book is that I wasn’t paid to read it. Samizdata writers and readers are not brought together by a shared fascination for classical music and the world in which it was created and had its first impact, so I don’t know if you would also enjoy reading this book. But I can say a bit about why I did.
I know Beethoven’s music, and the Ninth Symphony in particular, quite well, possessing as I do a large classical CD collection containing lots of Beethoven and more than a few recordings of the Ninth. A painlessly entertaining way to learn more about classical music in general, and Beethoven and his Ninth Symphony in particular, is, for me, always welcome. This book was painless partly because it is all written in a language I can easily follow, English. Many books about classical music use lots of musical notation. I can just about decipher such symbols, but seldom with the fluency that is necessary immediately to get the points an author is trying to make with them. Sachs could easily have peppered his text with such hieroglyphics, having himself been a conductor before he became a writer. He did not. He relied on words. He also avoids using Italian words, saying very loud rather than fortissimo, and so on.
This book is also painless in being quite short. 225 pages, including all the extras. I’m a slow reader, so that, for me, was another plus. → Continue reading: Beethoven’s Ninth – before and after
In my youth, we libbos used to go to P.J. O’Rourke for American libbo laughs. Now that mantle – of American, deceptively profound, politically right on the money laughs – has passed on to IMAO man Frank J. Fleming, whose book, Obama: The Greatest President in the History of Everything is coming out quite soon now.
Good recent Frank Jism:
Things often overwhelm and underwhelm, but seldom do things just whelm.
You see? It’s funny (I think), but it also gets you thinking. Where did the word “overwhelm” come from, from which the word “underwhelm” has recently been derived (because as soon as you say “underwhelm” everyone immediately understands)? “Overwhelm” means that “whelm” must once upon a time have meant something too. But what? Is it an upper class mispwonouncing of “realm”? Does “whelm” have a future, as a word? I’m not trying to be funny (although that is one of the standard methods of actually being funny). I’d really like to know.
This is good too:
I support double standards. I expect better behavior out of conservatives than I do liberals.
And this:
You know how everyone has their idea of what a fair tax plan is? Well, I have now unveiled the “Frank J. Fleming Super Double Extra Fair Tax Plan” at PJ Media and it is the fairest of them all. I mean, it’s crazy fair. You’ll recoil in horror and scream, “No! Too fair!” That’s how fair it is.
I need something to end this with, now. I know. Here’s my funny yet deceptively profound and right on the money tax plan: The Top Rate of Income Tax Should Be Cut To Zero. If FJ’s tax plan is too fair for you, that might be just right.
I’m now reading that book I mentioned here earlier, by Harvey Sachs, about the first performance of Beethoven’s Ninth.
The event itself was nearly shifted by Beethoven, for both financial and organisational reasons, from Vienna (where Beethoven lived for all his adult life) to Bonn, which caused a great gang of Viennese high-ups to write Beethoven a public letter, begging him to keep the show in Vienna. Of this letter, Harvey Sachs writes (pp. 30-31):
The letter-signed by seven aristocrats and various well-known local bureaucrats, musicians, music publishers, and the piano maker Andreas Streicher – is valuable not only as proof of the esteem in which Beethoven was held in his adoptive city but also because it demonstrates how deeply the notion that great music could be both “immortal” and widely disseminated had taken hold in Europe within Beethoven’s lifetime. Pre-nineteenth-century audiences had tended to lose interest in music that failed to follow the dictates of fashion. Bach, who was born in 1685 and whose works were already stylistically passé at the time of his death sixty-five years later, would have been delighted but astonished to learn that his music would be venerated and widely performed nearly three centuries after it was written. He may have believed in the hereafter, but he wrote for the here and now – for the church ceremonies and court occasions that took place as his life unfolded and for the instruction of the musicians of his day. Haydn (1732-1809) and even Mozart (1756-1791) still worked within the specific-piece-for-specific-occasion system, although the fact that Mozart began at the age of twenty-eight to keep a catalogue of his works, and the even more significant fact that he and Haydn published as many of their compositions as possible, demonstrate composers’ dawning ambition to have their works survive them, perhaps even for a considerable time.
Not until Beethoven’s day, however, did winning a place in posterity become a major goal – the greatest goal, for many composers. With the rise, in his lifetime, of the bourgeoisie, middle-class families were able to give their children music lessons, and Hausmusik – music in the home became the home entertainment system of the 1800s. The equipment required for making it comprised a piano, one or more other instruments and/or voices, and printed music, the demand for which increased almost exponentially. This phenomenon occurred just as the figure of the Romantic genius – the artist as a being unhampered by normal constraints – was taking hold. The music of the brilliant, eccentric Beethoven circulated widely, and the conviction that this music would become “deathless” was a logical consequence of both his persona and the diffusion of his works. In the letter from his Viennese admirers, the reference to “the many who joyfully acknowledge your worth and what you have become for the present as well as the future” is an exceptionally significant sign of the times: The arts were no longer to be considered mere “means and objects of pastime.” Composers were becoming the high priests, perhaps even the gods, of a secular religion; the best among them were expected to create works that would endure, . . .
All of which reminded me of something Benjamin Britten once said:
The rot set in with Beethoven.
Meaning, Beethoven was the first of a huge tribe of artists who from then on took themselves, and were also taken by others, a whole hell of a lot too seriously. Beethoven was, of course, entitled to think of himself as a genius. In his case, it helped to turn him into the genius he became. Most of his imitators got the trappings of genius off pat enough, but neglected the bit in the genius rule book where it says that you have to produce works of genius.
After writing that, I tried googling that Britten quote, and look what I found, almost immediately. Yes indeed, a review of The Ninth by Michael Henderson, which begins thus:
‘The rot set in with Beethoven’, said Benjamin Britten, who, cold fish that he was, could never understand the idea of the artist as hero (though he admired Mahler, whose music is nothing if not attention-seeking). He had half a point, because the past century has been chock-full of artists, or ‘artists’, who have asked us to soothe their fevered brows. They are still around today. No matter. Their egotism cannot disguise Beethoven’s greatness, . . .
Snap.
I don’t often do that LOL thing, but I did yesterday, in a crowded café, when I read this:
Beethoven’s contempt for most human beings conflicted with his all-embracing love for humanity.
That’s on page 54 of a book by Harvey Sachs entitled The Ninth: Beethoven and the World in 1824, which is about the composition and first performance of the Ninth Symphony, and about the world and the time in which this happened.
Remembering that I had written here before about Beethoven, I just reread an earlier piece I did called Eroica (at first mis-read by some as Erotica – what can you do?). It still reads well, I think. And it tells you all you need to know to enable you to forgive Beethoven a hundred times over for preferring humanity to humans.
I haven’t read this Sachs book yet. Yesterday I was just doing a preliminary flick-through, and came across the above sentence only by the sheerest good fortune. I certainly now want to read to rest of it.
This is interesting:
“In the past 30-or-so years, hip hop has tried politics and it has tried gangsterism. But in the end it settled for capitalism, which energised it and brought it to a position of global dominance. American rappers like Puff Daddy and Master P, men who fought their way into the big time, did so by selling a vision of independence, empowerment and material success. That vision is also found, if less vividly, in Britain’s rap music. And though hip hop retains unpleasant features, the core message, that people can have better lives, is incontestably a good one.”
Prospect Magazine.
A point for we pro-market zealots to remember is that defending the market is not the same as defending all of the stuff that gets bought or sold in a market. The freedom to produce and sell products and services is emphatically not the same as saying that all of these things are splendid. Some are mediocre. Some are bloody awful, like rap music, in my opinion. Musical taste is, in any event, notoriously subjective. (I even know of friends who hate music, period). But it is interesting how even a lefty magazine such as Prospect points out that how the profit motive can have its own benign effect on a genre as aggressive as rap. You can tell that capitalism is weaving its magic when people start moaning that a certain once-rebellious arts and music genre has lost its “edge” (ie, it is no longer downright nasty).
Here is a website that I have come across about the late, very great John Barry, the composer best known for all those superb James Bond tunes, as well as films such as Out of Africa.
He was never nominated for an Oscar for any of his 007 tunes. As Mark Steyn has observed, a classic case of snobbery at work.
“For as long as the culture of business has been an integral part of American life, it has also been frowned upon by important sectors of our society. Among our intellectuals especially, the business world has been the subject of many brutal caricatures, portraying corporations large and small, and the people who run them, as heartless, soulless agents of greed. These caricatures have shaped our implicit understanding of the nature of the business world, so much that they have come to pass for conventional wisdom.”
– Algis Valiunas
An interesting piece, although its caricature of Ayn Rand is a duff note.
“But even if there had been no march, the Okies would have been made obsolete by the depression. The histories of depressions show that a period of economic chaos is invariably followed by a period of extremely rigid economic controls – during which all the variables, the only partially controllable factors like commodity speculation, unlimited credit, free marketing, and competitive wages will get shut out.”
Cities In Flight, by James Blish, pages 421-422. From the multi-edition book published by Gollancz. Copyright 1970.
The book has many interesting themes for science fiction fans and interestingly, commodity-based money is a key plot device. The date of the copyright is interesting – it is just a year before Richard Nixon finally severed any link between the dollar and gold, to his everlasting shame.
Here is a nice appreciation of Blish over at “Templeton Gate 3.0”.
A regular commenter and occasional writer for Samizdata, Paul Marks, has recently, over at the Counting Cats blog, taken aim at the output of John Le Carre and in particular, the George Smiley character that got one of its most famous outings in the Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy novel (now a film starring Gary Oldman). I remember watching the old TV series starring the late, very great Alec Guinness. For what it’s worth, I enjoyed the series a lot and how it showed George Smiley, with a few associates, track down the identity of the mole inside UK intelligence. (If you don’t want to know who the mole is, Paul Marks’ item gives him away immediately, which is a naughty thing to do without a warning).
Of course, the role of spies, the nature of spying and the Cold War confrontations in which they were involved produced an interesting genre of work that continues to appeal even now that some of the issues have changed. I always felt that Le Carre tried a bit too hard to show how he wasn’t a vulgar entertainer such as Ian Fleming, say, or for that matter, John Buchan. And I imagine he positively disdains such thriller writers as Vince Flynn, Tom Clancy or Brad Thor. (These are more overtly about action rather than spying, anyway).
For me, my favourite spy stories of all time are as follows:
From Russia with Love (Ian Fleming)
Journey into Fear (Eric Ambler)
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (John Le Carre);
The Ipcress File (Len Deighton)
Under Western Eyes (Joseph Conrad).
The “Hook, Line and Sinker” trilogy by Len Deighton is also wonderful, by the way. And anything by Eric Ambler is good.
“If feminism ever succeeds in making men and women full-fledged equals (for what else might?), we will be able to stop talking about whether women genuinely belong to the literary canon. Maybe there will even come a time when we can speak of Jane Austen without thinking of her as a female. Then comments like Naipaul’s will be universally mocked as the sexist “tosh” they so obviously are. Whenever this comes about, Jane Austen will still be a great author.”
– Audrey Bilger.
She is having a go at VS Naipaul, and even though I dislike aspects of feminism, I think her argument deserves respect. An interesting piece.
Nick Gillespie, who when he is not pointing out how American politics is changing rapidly with his fellow Reasonoid Matt Welch, has an interesting essay up about how much of what passes for the “artistic community” was left looking pretty lame in how writers, painters, sculptors, film-makers and even poets responded to 9/11. (Yes, it is almost a decade ago). He makes a number of good points. Tim Sandefur weighs in with some thoughts of his own and makes this pretty blunt point:
“That is largely due to two factors: for one thing, much of the artistic community, and especially its elite, sympathize more with the perpetrators of the attacks than with a United States that they hate for its “commercialism,” “materialism,” dynamism, secularism, industrialism, and so forth. The artistic world is dominated by romanticist ideologies that see science, technology, free markets, and human progress as essentially evil things—precisely the ideology that produced the September 11th attacks. What is an artist, who has spent his or her career producing work to condemn capitalism, going to produce to mourn the loss of the World Trade Center at the hands of anti-capitalist terrorists? They certainly aren’t going to produce a second Mourning Athena. As Robert Hughes says, American artists particularly are obsessed “with creating identities, based on race, gender, and the rest. These have made for narrow, preachy, single-issue art in which victim credentials count for more than aesthetic achievement. You get irritable agitprop…. The fact that an artwork is about injustice no more gives it aesthetic status than the fact that it’s about mermaids.” Relatedly, the artistic world is dominated by aesthetic notions that preclude powerful artistic commemorations of anything, really. The elite artistic world produces work that is simply not accessible to average people—the people who actually do mourn September 11th and rightly see it as an attack on everything America and they stand for. This is especially true in public monuments, which, since Maya Lin, have been minimalistic, sterile, and unmoving. (As is often true of art, Lin’s Vietnam Memorial is damn good—powerful and effective and brilliant; it’s her followers and imitators who have mucked it up.) Since the artistic elite have abandoned representationalism and powerful emotional appeal for cold abstractions, they also belittle the works of representational artists who might produce works friendlier and more moving to general audiences—and the political leaders are going to listen to the elite, not to the remaining believers in representationalism.”
For me, the only really telling film made about 9/11 has been Flight 93. I watched it several years ago and remember it as a powerful, if flawed, production.
As Sandefur says, the inadequacy of art in relation to a terrible event such as 9/11 is a broader reflection of how art has arguably, degraded in recent decades. For what it is worth, I am one of those old grouches who finds a lot of what passes for Modern Art to be mind-erasing garbage. But then again, my “modern” tastes in things like science fiction, and all the whizz-bang art that can come with it, don’t necessarily make me old fashioned, either.
As an aside, I came across these photos of Civil War memorial art. Worth a look. It adds to Sandefur’s point on representational art, I think.
“Recent theater encounter: Trailer for “Battle Los Angeles”. Some fat angry looking woman starts hissing. I shout “I didn’t pay $10 to listen to you. Save your opinions for that blog no one reads. Not even your friends.”. After that, not a peep. If you want to save our culture you’ve got to stand up to the barbarians.”
A commenter called Guan-ju, writing about an article at the Big Hollywood blog concerning the oafish behaviour of some cinema-goers. Well said indeed.
In my fortunate experience, I have generally not suffered from chatty couples, paper rustlers or smelly eaters. However, I often will be sitting in front of someone who keeps kicking the back of the chair. My usual response is to turn around slowly, and give the offending idiot my best attempt at the “Clint Eastwood stare”. Sometimes works, sometimes doesn’t. (Alas, the use of something handy, like a taser is banned in the UK. Shame. It would be brilliant). The trouble is, of course, is that if you go to a cinema quite late, a lot of the audience will be fairly merry, indeed drunk. At least in the UK, anyway. And of course the type of film will affect this: if you are watching a French art house film, it is probably less likely to be an issue than if you are watching something like Transformers or Dumb and Dumber, or somesuch. On the other hand, the louder the movie (think Iron Man 2) and the more crazy the action, the more the usual pin-heads are dumbstruck into silence.
Of course, while watching a Michael Moore “documentary”, I reckon that loud heckling is mandatory.
|
Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
|
