Nicholas Cook

Why music matters to polity press (location the social implications of music in general)

I feel like Polity Press publishes some very well-written, carefully-written works, accurate books: the drawback being the kinda stuffiness that goes with academic and semi-academic books, and consequent negativity—is it important enough, negative enough, is there enough dirt and slime and bodies, right. In that content, having one of their people write a book about something like music, and arguing AGAINST the uptight position, is wonderful, you know. (And I’m sure some of their uptight books have selling points too, you know.)

But yeah: it’s curious the idea that ‘music is not about the real world; it is about itself’ came from classical music, Victorian music, right—the aristocrat draws the curtains on the changing world of socialists and steam engines, and listens to music, right…. And then from that, we get the ‘music isn’t real; maybe for artists, but they don’t matter either; they’re weird and I don’t like ‘em”: or else it goes first into disposable pop anthems about what music sounds like and (universally ignored) enjoiners to dance, and then into, you know: “this has nothing to do with my goddamn life; I wanna go home”, right.

Everything is connected, after all; even high and low: even high and low.

…. Music listening obviously shouldn’t be done out of nervousness or aversion to silence: and it can unite races and cultures against enemies, you know. Anything with power can be mis-used. But it is good to dispel the ‘doesn’t matter’ story, you know. Many intellectuals say a few grand things about music, and then go on like feelings themselves don’t matter, right: they don’t Normally feel like that, right…. I remember when I was most ill, I used music as this, it was kinda negative, running-from-thought thing, right: and it increased my shame, because I didn’t understand it Could be a serious, healthful thing. (Ironically I listened to a lot of ‘good’ music like the Byrds; although I drew no distinction between different ‘qualities’ or stances, really; only neurotic distinctions I drew, right.)…. It’s amazing, you know, how long it’s been since I only listened to video game music in high school, literally just because it was playing during the game, to realize that music doesn’t have to be this radio-at-the-mall phenomenon, right. It can be an exploration of REALITY—reality hidden below the dross, right, of conventionality and, occasionally, violence, right.

…. It is very true that music often reflects and enacts male hegemony, and that people are trained to think of conservatism as apolitical.

…. “Roger Scruton….”

Roger Scruton is like, the crusty conservative superego form of evil, personified, right.

But yeah: ie ‘world music’—it’s what I meditate to; but I’m sure much of it is: I mean, I know much of the new age movement IS more impressed with the idea of attack from the right than attack from the left, right; and sometimes leftist anti-new age stuff IS crusty, right—like you start out hating new agers and you find things not to like about them, and then you end up hating them, and at no point did you stop and think, Really, and pause: but yeah, the main thing is just how incredibly unfair the world is, and a lot of new agers don’t want to do the hard work of transcending colonial whiteness: they just want to feel less anxiety or whatever, (personal anxiety, for example, I mean, is a symptom), now, and their family’s incredibly toxic church scares them, right; or they want to write a book like, In five years we can be in the Meditation Future, if we just read these nine talking points I’m going to do, right: they don’t want to get out of denial and realize that the non-toxic Meditation Future might be fucking 200 years!!! away, or whatever, right: I mean, the elections are like, Liquidate the Muslims today! Vs…. “God bless, America….” And part of that is tactics, but the radical left is very weak and small, and not always non-toxic itself, right…. But yeah: it would obviously be credulous to say that new age culture whether in the musical or any other sphere is just: (chuckles) I mean, you can’t trust hoomies, right…. (laughs). I mean, to learn about music, and be able to do music, then you can do hard work and transcend what are perceived as being short cuts, implicitly that’s how they’re seen, because they’re like ruts colonialism dug in the collective mind, right…. But to single out New Age music as worse—I don’t think he does that—that would obviously just be hyper-rationalist aggression laughter-inducing nonsense, right. It’s not like Top40 isn’t sloppy or Western classical isn’t hierarchical and white, you know: new age/meditation music is usually at least marginally better, really. And not even a shadow of the influence or prestige with the general public or institutions, right. But, like I said, that in itself can breed a certain timidity: lots of new agers are afraid of being ‘disloyal’, afraid that if they don’t make compromises they’ll be crushed…. That: and some of them think they’re on the verge of ‘relevance’, whatever that is! And which can kinda be a bad thing, for fuck’s sake, right!

…. “the construction and maintenance of national identity under the guise of merely celebrating it.”

…. It does seem to matter “whether the message is actually true or not”—ie, if a commercial company or a hard-left politician is a “good” thing, then for me, an effective promotion of them is a “good” thing, although both of those examples obviously sometimes aren’t, right—but I guess the point is the musical sell doesn’t actually prove that it’s a good buy; it has nothing to do with anything logical, you know: as much as I cannot agree with the standard cold-blooded zombie critique of capitalism, where it’s like: they shouldn’t have emotions! (experiencing anger to the point of emotional breakdown) There should only be logic!!!! ~But yeah, sometimes people play you. It’s not a problem with an obvious solution, right. If it were obvious, they’d have thought of it by now, lol.

…. And yes: there can be racism without hostility—you just kinda gently shoo people into their box/cage, and lock them in after. Perhaps you pass them a little cushion in between the bars, right. And then walk away.

…. And yes: music is also ‘music’ and not just, what we make it because we’re damaged hoomis; you know. We like music, and sometimes music is part of the world that changes and lives, right.

…. At the risk of becoming a fellow traveler with Roger Scruton’s Amazing Universal Empire of Whiteness Orchestra, right—a sensibility which is probably gradually declining, but which is still probably much more influential than alternative-intellectual models: and just generally quite scary, you know~which is why I made the switch to new age music for meditation a long time ago, although as noted above, even the ‘best’ solutions start to unravel when they become ‘pat’, right…. —but, yeah, despite that risk profile, you know, we should probably see Western classical music today as being an Anglo-Asian form of music—even much of the contemporary classical compositions are Asian-influenced: like on that contemporary album that Hillary Hahn did once, right; I forget what it was called: and it is reported and seems to be born out in personal experience, you know, that the listeners and performers are also largely Asian today—and that it’s not really the “safe place” for Snob Militant Whiteness that some people would still like it to be, right. (Complete with dungeon, right.) Which I guess is nice, since Wagner is sure a useful source of mythological ‘pagan’ lore, despite being a jerk, and often I think performed by crypto-racists, you know. (There is no good reason why the dwarfs who drag Freya away in “Das Rheingold” have to have soot and coal on their faces, right, as they do in the performance I started watching.) And obviously, people mythologize Hitler—like, there was no racism before Hitler, no colonialism, no anti-Semitism; Germany was just a happy, stable, woke place, until the Adolf showed up at a Wagner opera with a bowl of tofu salad one day, and left as a dragon/Satan, right….

And yeah, Black musicians can obviously master ANY kind of music, obviously, right. (Even though classical, “classically” has a more Anglo-Asian feel.) Even though popular music is the thing that’s more classically African or Anglo-African, right: and yeah, more or less generally divided up in more or less that way…. And incidentally, re: white parody—it’s hard to come up with a better word; sometimes it is that, there isn’t that basic human respect—of Black music, I do agree that “envy” is a useful word to introduce for consideration as well. Blackness was often the straw man used to create Classic Whiteness, and, again, there often just isn’t that sense of respect or normative humane consideration, right…. But often even in those cases, there is this inappropriately held feeling that They have something worth having, you know…. It’s kinda the result of signing up for the empire, but also intuitively/unconsciously getting that Blackness is what pre-scientific/non-scientific palefaces were/are more like, than Roger Scruton’s Amazing Militant White Snob Music Collection, you know…. But then just having the lack of goodness and courage, and kinda creating this whole ‘working class white’ thing, where…. I don’t know, it’s like your Black-not-Black, Everyman/Ruler, right…. It’s incredibly lazy and nonsensical, really….

…. But yeah: the other thing you can get from music is how powerful the conservative id is, right. Conservatism is not just the superego, the way that the conservative superego would have you think, right. The conservative id is powerful…. And it doesn’t care. It just, doesn’t, care.

…. outside the giant palace in Vienna that is the home of the Mozart Festival put on by the Little Europe-r (like a Little England thing for Austrians, basically) Society for the Inherited Wealth Rich People Who Are the Only White People, and Therefore the Only Human Beings: Can you believe that some people think this has something to do with something called ‘empire’? I don’t even know what that means! I just know that white people are ~best~!

And yeah: I disagree with wounded Black people who say that, you know, ‘and you can’t do better, whitey! Aaaah! The shit got in my eyes! I’m dying!’, although I don’t hold it against them, I just disagree, you know. And actually a lot of times they don’t really mean it like that, it just sounds like that at first glance. A lot of very humane reforms sound fucking off the wall put into a single sentence, you know.

But yeah, I don’t have the answers either; I just wish I could have given this Cook book (lol) to my old “music appreciation” teacher, who was kinda…. Wrong, you know. I mean, I was ill: but that was like the class I really cared about, and it didn’t help me: it made me worse. He certainly meant well, consciously, at least, and he was friendly and smart, you know. But I guess that the one thing I really don’t like is when white people use “racism” to go after The One White Person I Already Don’t Like, you know: like, Wagner is like our Christ, we crucify him that All White Men May Be Saved. Again, Wagner could be a fucker, even though I suppose he was honestly deluded, and wanted only to create (and defend! lol) beauty, right. But certainly his musical folklore and mythology was dressed up in, and implicitly, and almost promoted as by fans and performers, as very, very othering of several groups/nations/origins, you know. But Brahms isn’t really all that much better—perhaps politer, you know. He had his own style of racism, you know. Polite Liberal Racism—very rational. Rationalism is itself very problematic, the way we do it, you know. We just don’t see it, because it’s what we’re used to, right. I mean, if I had a cool twenty (dollar bill) for every racist atheist in the world, (maybe I could get a Benjamin for every book they write, LOL), then I could buy my own villa in Vienna, right. And furnish it. But my oh my: mother taught me to do racism in a very particular way, and I will call down the Wagnerian curses of the Great Non-entity on all German mythologists who do racism the wrong way, right.

I realize he doesn’t mention Wagner by name. Incidentally this Schenker fellow sounds like a fucker, you know. (Heinrich, I guess was his name.) Granted I haven’t read him, but I tend not to read people who sound like fuckers, you know, even if they’re deeply brainy fuckers, you know. I mean: we don’t have to throw Mozart out the window, because for him ‘Turk’ meant ‘wild red man’, and he wrote ‘alla turca’ to let his own inner wild red man out of the hat, right…. But do we really need deeply racist THEORY, for fuck’s sake? Beauty that produced by the hand of a sinner, so to speak, is one thing, but it seems odd to suggest you can understand music while creating a theory about it to support your delusions, right.

And as for the right-wing journalists who get offended that, you know, we perceive some people in the time-span continuum as not living in 18th century Vienna, right…. I just don’t have any respect for them, as thinkers, or producers of ideas, and will try to avoid said ideas, to the extent possible, basically. Very wrong ideas held stubbornly, and with resentment that all men do not hold them stubbornly—you know, I only have so much time, to do shit, in my life, basically, okay?

…. Palefaces are awful, but there is a layer to the paleface other than his idiotic ideas about himself, you know. Wagner is like a musical Tolkien—if you like “classical” and you’re honest, you admit that your favorite composer is a racist, whoever he is, but you’d have to be a real grey and un-magical person not to feel sad that Richard Wagner wasn’t always as full of love as he was when he was making music, you know—but that’s music; it’s love, but it deceives. I don’t know all the names, but who can look at that dwarf in Rheingold, with the Ring and the magical powers and the money and everything—piles and piles of gold, stockpiled out of power-neurosis and totally alienated and isolated from all true beauty, and all love, which it ought to feed and nourish, right: and not see the average neurotic Western academic in (for example) music, stockpiling old gold and old theories and old shit, and totally indifferent as to whether there is beauty in their life, or only stubbornness, you know…. Clinging, you know: clinging to every old coin wrested by force from the earth; clinging, and hating, basically: and never, ever changing….

“As I forswore love, so all that lives will forswear it in turn!”
~a Western rationalist academic, lol

…. (trying to figure out what mental illness Glenn Gould had) (Wikipedia) “Glenn Gould’s playing was characterized by….” Humming. His playing was characterized by humming.

(looking for the comments on his humming on YouTube) “…. terminal culture decline….” Yeah, okay: but we have better psych meds, too. 👌

That’s the funny thing about music: it’s very deceptive. Your music is saying, “I’m beautiful”, like, you’re getting married or something. Your actual consciousness is like, you’re getting hammered (like piano keys!) as the clock gets closer and closer to 2AM, and you’re arguing with someone you don’t know, like, “No, I’m SO ugly, that….”

But yeah: Lang Lang is better—no humming. And although I dislike the “as the Lord and God of Downton Abbey: I command that there be no ads!” BS, I have to say…. They should make an exception, and have no mid-stream ads for the Goldberg Variations. I’ve trying to fucking sleep, here.

And it’s funny: I never used to notice the Glenn Gould humming, or how Goldberg is the same basic music, just, you know, different, slightly, and not just a mass of random stuff, you know…. And I was uptight before, and I was mentally ill, and I didn’t really enjoy it…. But yeah: I was having this societal conversation in my head—I ought to listen; I must. Although I must not. And yet I should, although I can’t…. I must listen to the correct number of performances, to fulfill my duty, my duties…. Always remembering that I must, but I can’t…. I didn’t actually leave space to listen to the music because I liked it, right. And I carried much of that into my explorations of the music of non-white non-rigid whitey cultures, you know…. I’ve not heard this before…. Let me listen the proper amount…. But yeah, it all goes back to the forbidding of the statement, “This is what I like because I like it”, you know. (mixture of pleasure and contempt: like I’m pleased that I get to be contemptuous of you, right) But my dear man: the other recording is the one made with the violin made with the dead Moslem’s hair. Just as I am superior, so is it.

~And yeah: music is deceptive. Bono doesn’t really love you; Eminem couldn’t really win a knife fight, right. And yeah: JS Bach, Mozart, and Wagner aren’t Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva, right…. In a way, they are a ~bit~ like little godlings, it’s true…. But they can also inspire sheer, undisguised ugliness in people, you know. Music is deceptive.

…. And although I realize people have different opinions: I can’t help but wonder, as it seems to me, what special illness is involved in taking the most obviously neurotic performer and making him like, Glenn Gould: Emotions Master, right…. I mean, it’s like, if the white man is really god, then he must not really have to command the good, right; or else, something is good, because he commands it…. It seems like there must be some special pleasure involved, in commanding the idiotic, and getting away with it, right…. Whiteness really is like a sort of collective dictatorship, you know. No one can tell the emperor what they really think of his new clothes, right….

…. And yeah: it is pretty much how the Tao says the world is: long and short create each other; “must” creates, “must not”, does it not?

…. I actually would like to say that I’m in favor of, well, not post-racism, exactly: but the journey TOWARDS post-racism. Anti-racism—getting upset at racists and the worst racism, is kinda…. It’s not productive. There’s not really a payout, so to speak. It’s like what Cook is talking about here, the individual approach, which is basically the Christian quietist approach, you know. A lot of highly political anger, you know, is also…. I mean, people can’t conceive yet, how they’ve been led astray by neurotic Christianity: or maybe it’s something bigger than that, even, since it’s not limited to Christianity or even “religion”. (A lot of atheist critique of Christianity sounds a lot like Christian attack on other religions/“heresy”, and also is often quite racist, you know.)…. The truth is—and this is why people need a BIG conception of their lives and their importance to history and the evolution of consciousness over many lifetimes, both individually and over the centuries of history: because otherwise you just give up, right—the truth that we Are racist, and we will Die racist, you know. Getting upset at some goddamn Republican as though we were fighting a civil war and might capture the Republican Capitol and end racism sometime next year…. It’s just dumb, right. It’s just, dumb. The differences in intensity, sometimes even in style, and certainly whether or not we are in denial about racism or don’t care, you know—simply don’t care…. Or worse, use it as a convenient weapon to flagellate people we already don’t like, you know, as even anti-racism education goddamn conservatives do, right…. Like, the differences all matter: far more than we know. But this story didn’t start with us in the 20th/21st centuries, and it’s not going to end with us—it’s like some massive cycle of operas, you know; it’s bigger than our little bit part, basically: although our part in such a cosmic story is of great importance, we mustn’t forget…. But yeah, we can’t even imagine, really, what post-racism is, yet: we simply are too much deceived to find the ‘final answer’ or whatever, and imagining that we’re not, is one of the great deceptions. We can’t even imagine yet, what mistakes we make or what we don’t even have on the agenda yet. People will look back, and wonder what the fuck was wrong with us, you know. “Were they all bad?” No, we’re not all bad; some of us make it better, right. But we cannot imagine the whole thing yet, the whole story: we really cannot imagine it, we cannot.

…. “…. Aboriginal music…. Objective study…. Tree frogs.”

That’s the amazing thing, right: we claim that we’re in tune and not hostile because we study the ‘inferior’ groups, when we literally also study fucking amphibians that are being driven to extinction because we Give Zero Fucks, you know. 👌

Incidentally, he’s much more polite than me, LOL. 😸

…. In a healthy society, the economy—you know, the management of our relationship with physical reality—would certainly be valued, and I also do think that, although people who for whatever reason are not able to ‘produce’ economically should be provided for and made to survive, I do think that people should be inspired, encouraged, allowed and educated towards prosperity and success—although that’s obviously not what we do; we threaten people—and that success is not all of one level…. But still, I’m not even sure where to start with people who think that that the gubbermint is the Only Force Out There That Can Take Our, (hands to chest) ~Freedom~…. ~~ you know? Like, maybe they’re stupid? Maybe they’re sheltered?….

Maybe they’re…. Dumb? Like, where do you start, right? It’s such a non-starter. The right-wing in both the US and UK, most places, really: they’re so chock-full of ideas that, I mean…. And then, their other idea is that The Only Thing That Matters Is The Brain~ and it’s like, hold up. 😹

…. (UK conservative) If there hadn’t been a thing called ‘white supremacy in (mispronounces), India’: there would have been a thing called, HITLAH.
(sane person) No…. No. Just, no. You’re an idiot.
(UK conservative) (agitated violent incoherent yelling)

~But yeah, I was expecting ‘Music and Asocial Individualism’ to be like: when should rappers/punk dancers/etc (country girls?) you know, offend people, right: just take a tire iron and fight for glory, because life is a movie: and you’re the title character, and not some semi-conscious jackass walking about in a sober stupor, right…. And when should you like, allow your mom to bully you and make fun of you, and reassure her if she asks if she’s a gremlin, you know: No, mom; you’re not a gremlin, you’re an insecure tyrant: but you’re OUR insecure tyrant, and we love you…. We understand that the socially sanctioned parent-child relationship isn’t fair on you, either….

Right? It would be a conversation worth having. Ironically, it’s hard to talk about both racism AND psychology/individual religion/morality, because then Frank Capra pops up out of his grave like a whack-a-mole mole, and says, See? See? Morality—your mother—the individual: Therefore Racism, ooo, nailed it!!!

Right?

But yeah, it’s interesting to think that our ‘solution’—sometimes asocial individualism…. And to be fair, it Can be a solution, sometimes…. Can also be the problem, right. That’s the thing about racism, right. Until you see that YOUR favorite composer has racism, you’re part of the problem. You’re the guy who ate who insists that one of the other people you are with should have to pay. “Look at all that pasta you ate man…. I just had a little seafood: it doesn’t even come from the land, right….”

…. I will say one thing about new age music, though: sometimes we are attracted to it for what it lacks, like churchy classical music, or granny’s classical music, right—or ‘safe’ pop, or indeed, any sort of aversion, is a sort of attraction to lack, right.

But yeah: sometimes I would sit down to meditate and have to change the music, and now I get it: some music is just no good, even if there’s nothing aggressive or even verbal about it, right: it just isn’t pleasing….

…. But yeah: I thought it was just me—but some music is just no good, even calm music….

And the other thing is: different musics obviously have different ranges of appropriate applications, some of which are exceedingly narrow, right, ‘1001 ways to get neurotic about your lover: the millennium collection’, right—but then, also the music you use to help you cleanse your crystal doesn’t LITERALLY have to be “Music to Cleanse and Charge Crystals”, right….

…. I suppose this is selfish and superficial, but part of me is half-mollified that my own country is not the only one that produces dungheap political/social/cultural ideas, right…. Englishness can be very pretty, but it can also be very divorced from…. ‘Reality’ is a harsh word, but, if you are never grounded in something real, you end up…. English, perhaps. It ends by being very cruel, you know. Everything is excluded. Reality is not permitted—reality is far away, for this is England, right.

…. And yeah: he’s very realistic about “Western ‘art’ music”, but it would have been fun to talk about delusion in popular music, too…. Obviously older people get nostalgic about The Rolling Stones or whatever—Street Fighting Man! Yeah! That’s how the world used to be, son!…. To various incredibly deluded fast-but-sentimental pop tunes that can make people feel like a cross between an Edwardian and an Everyman while…. Screwing up their lives, in one or several ways…. And yeah, just: I mean, I can get nostalgic about music from the early 2010s, you know. I know it’s not rational: it was fast, amoral music, and in the meantime, nothing has changed, right—indeed, the same artists have subsequently come out with very similar-sounding work just like it…. Probably! Like, the only thing that happened to change anything for me is my Saturn return, right: it must have been at around 27, judging from how I took things, right…. I remember once an older guy saying, you know—definitively—I don’t listen to music from after 1973. ~I was thinking, what happened in 1973? Surely there’s been good music, similar music, on both sides of 1973….

~Saturn slowly turning among the stars above, lol~

…. When I was interested in classical music in college, (sounds so much more polite than ‘during mental illness’, lol), I demeaned the whole conversation that even in classical music sometimes takes place around performers and performances, right—it always sounded to me like the compulsive shaming of like, cover bands, and covers of songs by an artist of a different generation, right~ like when Ellie Goulding covered “Your Song”, all that sexists came out of the woodwork, like cockroaches with bazookas, or something: and yeah, some of Elton John’s music is sexist; it capitulates to sexism, right: “Don’t go breaking my heart, woman!” “O noble man: I am the frail church mouse woman without sex appeal or danger, and well I know, O man-who-comes-from-the-god-of-maleness, that a bruised reed you will not break, a flickering candle—“ “Yeah: okay, girlfriend: don’t go breaking my heart!” (bats her around the ears a little bit)—but I mean, holy shit, Elton John wasn’t LIKE some of these older people on the internet, OMG….!…. And yeah, incidentally, the classical music internet is the land of the snob-troll, right: “you do not know what BWV stands for in German or how it relates to the inimitable BACH…. And yet, for some reason, we allow you to live! (cartoon villain laugh) Slaves! Bring me more Gold! I need more GOLD!!….” (And yeah: I don’t know whether that’s funnier as like a societally-underwritten delusion, or a fantasy totally out of sync with his lifestyle, right….)

But yeah: I’m going to have to research (with active listening!) this whole aspect of performers and performances, right…. Because the application is basically determined by the composer/composition; really by the genre, almost…. But the aesthetics are different with different performances and performances, right….

…. Sports commentary, to talk about something else, is usually terrible. Here are the two athletes—I’m watching a tennis match from 1980; every so often I watch a few games, and note down my progress on the video; sport is not a BIG hobby, lol—and they’re, you know, being physical: and then there are the people commenting, and they’re very, you know, negative, disembodied, and, I mean, basically they just criticize how one of them played the last point, and then that guy goes on to win the next point, and the commentator just finds some similar negative thing to say, basically. It’s very past-centric, reductionist, (god! Those “Joe Blow won in five sets two years ago”—And they LITERALLY pay you to take the recorded-match pleasure out of watching that crap, you little gremlin?), disembodied, and negative, right. And again: I’m watching tennis, and 1980, but I don’t think sports has changed much…. Imagine if a psychic were a sports commentator! Fucking old Noraid fucktards would send out feelers to their old IRA contacts to see about blowing up her house, right; they could work together with the worst-of-the-bad-seeds of the UDA who got fired after the renaming of the police, right…. Gender, and rationalism, and things like that—and especially with sports, but it doesn’t really matter, that hasn’t changed, you know.

And certainly in music there’s been tremendous grandiose surface change, but a lot of it doesn’t go beyond that superficial level of fanfare. If you want to think about it seriously, or you deal with older music, an older genre, than the fanfare-superficial grandiose change, right…. A lot of musical cultures have just spent these decades digging their trenches and spreading their barbed wire and pouring their concrete, you know. The more time goes by, the more they know that they don’t REALLY want change, you know….

What I mean is: what would music be if the ‘best/right’ way to analyze it, among the thinkers, wasn’t rationalism, right? (Again: a rationalist sports commentator says three or four times that Joe Blow is playing bad tennis, and he holds serve: nobody cares. Nigel Negative is an old man of tennis, a commentator. Nancy North does commentary and she feels like the returner is playing good tennis because of “(energy/astrology/whatever)” and she feels like he’s really pushing and controlling the game, and he doesn’t break serve—Richard Dawkins and Neil De Grasse Tyson break into her house and shoot her, right.)

But yeah: what music would people create, as well, if elitist fuckers weren’t constantly calling them stupid and unable, basically, right?…. We might not find out for a long time! 😸

…. It’s harder to explain how music is positive, rather than how it goes wrong—and I feel like there is correspondingly less text about that, since there are fewer effective words to be deployed—but basically I guess music focuses people on feeling/commonality, rather than thinking/separation, and creates relationship, not just through pleasure but through the interplay between musicians and elements of music.

…. I feel like politics is less central for me than it is for him; I don’t mean that anybody lives in a fantasy-dreamworld without politics, right—that is kinda the sense I got from reading Milton Friedman: it’s like the fantasy-dreamworld of conservative equations, right; big words and complicated notions, that mean that the bad things that can happen to me are the only bad things anybody has any right to talk about, (James Stewart) (waves hands) And everyone else can go, fooey! ~I wonder if he ever played a character that wasn’t naive, right: it would be like a river flowing uphill, right…. Like, it’s just something about America, right: selfish naivety, you know…. But yeah, for some liberal thinkers, politics is like the primary organizer of their thought-life, right. (And again, for conservatives, right: it’s like drinking. (If James Stewart were playing an alcoholic) Drink? Me? Why no, no…. I don’t drink…. Well, maybe a little (whips out a bottle)…. ~Like, social control? Me? The conservatives: no, no…. You’re thinking of Joseph Stalin the Hitler-Buddha: Prince of Hell, the Hollywood Liberal! Now, if we could just pass a law, that would say that….)…. But yeah: for a lot of liberals, political theory is the *preferred* method of organizing reality, you know: there are many ways of doing that; not all can be the preferred way, right…. But yeah, I certainly think that politics is INEVITABLY, something that happens along the way, sooner or later, right…. We don’t live in a fantasy-dreamworld without business and government and practical affairs, right….

And yeah: my freedom as an autonomous individual is not my freedom to trounce on and pummel public health, you know—it’s not my freedom to willfully exacerbate a public health crisis, right. (But a crazy whack-a-doodle white man told me to willfully exacerbate the public health crisis! (imagine all caps) This country was founded by crazy whack-a-doodle white men, you know! If it weren’t for us, crazy disturbed white men who lust for power and craziness wouldn’t have a home: we wouldn’t have a place to go…. (imagine all caps ends)…. Well, you know, we would have, you know, a couple countries…. A couple continents, maybe…. Like three or four continents, I guess…. (waves fist) But this is America, dammit! I was promised things by the men of old times!

…. I never found COVID as ‘interesting’ as some people did. It did change how I think about the world: I learned that unlimited time with my books was not really my sole need in life; the very weird social interaction situation of the time did make me feel a little nutty sometimes. It was odd in that sense: not that I made COVID happen—lol—but I was very like: yes, I know how to make use of personal time for study and meditation, and actually I guess that’s was when I started walking for exercise…. But yeah: I did learn some things through those specific experiences, (as opposed to just, X hours of me learning, as opposed to X hours of—you know, I know I dump on people, but it’s sad; you shovel time at some people, it just goes through like through a sieve, right), but yeah…. I never really found the disease interesting. I’m not a doctor or a medical researcher, and I never saw the point in having journalists help me pretend that I was part of the local government, you know…. After it was over, I read a book about it, which was not a waste of time…. But I mean: it’s like, you give people a year to just sit inside and—I mean 24/7 for a year is a LONG time to have a free schedule, lol; and the terrible thing was that it’s not like we knew how long it would be, at the outset, right—it was like a power outage, only for social life instead of electricity, in that sense—but I mean, you give people day after day to themselves, and they just watch the news every day, right: like, Yup, today, you had the day all to yourselves; it was literally not healthful to go to work; you had to stay inside…. You know: and you just turn it into a press conference. That’s just depressing, you know: how technocratic man takes everything and just sucks the life out of it, right. In that sense, ‘democracy’ seems like quite a dubious project, right: theoretically, we’re supposed to believe it’s like, Every Man His Own Technocrat…. And the way the average Top40 citizen kinda goes about ruling his mind under the gentle, guiding benevolence of the all-knowing technocrats, lol…. Just, lol…. Oh, lol: unhappy lol….

…. (end) But yeah: it’s not a bad book; I don’t dislike him, at all. He kinda improves my opinion of the potential of the sort of liberal he is—the liberal attached to older art forms, and political/economic theories: really they tend to disparage what matters to me, which makes me adopt a very detached-yet-loving stance, right…. I go like, 👹…. But yeah: they tend to low-ball or dismiss/blow-up about what matters to me, right: low-ball background; dismiss/blow-up about religion/culture…. But the Cook book doesn’t do that, you know. It’s basically in possession of sober judgment, you know: which is good….

Because it can be a moral question of something is beautiful; and it can be a moral question if our ideals of beauty are prejudicial, you know.

…. (end 2) And yeah: two different performances of the same composition are like two different pieces of music—albeit similar ones—even in classical, which almost exists in order to privilege the intellectual-cognitive act of composition over the physical-performative one of actually making music, right….… (mehr)

O problema dessa introdução razoavelmente curta ao tópico geral "música" é que o autor está muito preocupado demais com a musicologia, não apenas como o que dá nome aos entendimentos do que é música, mas como disciplina, e com isso não consegue evitar de se deter em controvérsias na área, que de fato demorou a estudar seu assunto como uma prática, uma arte, algo social e histórico. Nesse movimento, é antipático porque quer nos convencer (e talvez isso seja um sinal de euro-eua-centrismo) de que estávamos seguindo teorias erradas e concepções muito restritas do que era música. Nisso, há um euro-EUA-centrismo: pressupõe que levamos a sério todo aquele corpus a ponto de ser essencial ele aparecer numa introdução ao assunto; pressupõe que uma introdução deve cuidar do herdeiro do universal - o multicultural; mas leva isso a cabo pincelado primeiro como "estivemos equivocados". Dito isso, não é um livro ruim, mas como disse, antipático - com frases exageradas sendo corrigidas logo após o dito, além de uma interessante discussão inicial sobre como música e obra musical não coincidem e não precisam coincidir.… (mehr)

The author sets out his aims very early in the piece: He "wants to spread out a map that all music could, in principle be put onto".....To talk about music in general is to talk, not about staves and quavers but about what music means.....I love the quote, attributed to Elvis Costello, that "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture". (So why am I reading this book?)
He talks about the role of authors and interpreters of music and points out that classical music has promoted its performers as stars, just as in pop music. And he suggests that the main message of the book is "that we have inherited from the past a way of thinking about music that cannot do justice to the diversity of practices and experiences which that small word 'music' signifies in today's world".
Since Beethoven's time it has become the normal expectation that great music should continue to be performed, long after the death of the composer. (That wasn't always so). There is an intuition that music is a kind of a window into an esoteric spiritual world ...dating back to Pythagoras. Today, entering a concert hall is like entering a cathedral. Within the inner sanctum a strict code of audience etiquette prevails. And the confident distinction between high and low art (in music) still persists in the standard format of musical history or appreciation Textbooks.....totally eurocentric ...ignoring the contribution of other cultures..Asian, African. Though since the 1980's a sea change has taken hold in the academic disciplines of Musicology.
He suggests that all descriptions of music involve metaphor and when we study music, we aren't just studying something separate from us, something 'out there': there is a sense in which we are studying ourselves too.
The history of music has been very much about the constructionist view of art ...that the important part is the composing and performing but Cook draws attention to the "reception-based' approaches to music. He suggests that the two approaches have to work in harmony. But the reception based approach is inclusive rather than exclusive; that we can best understand music by being in the middle of it.
Beethoven wanted to produce a complete and authoritative edition of his music but this never eventuated. A consequence for his music, and virtually all the composers, is that their work was copied and reproduced with errors or corrected and redrafted so that what we have today is more or less a bit of a guess at what the composer intended.
A historical performance movement emerged where the objective was to perform music the way it was originally performed for/by the composers (eg with harpsichord rather than piano) but in most conservatories these days you can hear historical and unhistorical performances of Bach....it's just become a fact of life.
There's an interesting mention of ethnomusicologists working in Ethiopia with the Beta Israel community who consider their origins to be Jewish but the ethnomusicologist's study of their liturgy placed them as of Christian origins. It became a political question rather than a musical issue whether to reveal this.And with modern critical theory analysis of musicology one really big issue has been gender and music. Women were allowed to play music (in some societies) but certainly not encouraged to compose it or play professionally. And there are arguments that strong, assertive music is masculine and soft more flexible music is feminine......and gay composers write gay music etc. As Cook says, "You can read the same stereotypes into nineteenth century composers Beethoven and Schubert". And interpretations of music open up its ability to function as an arena for the negotiation of gender politics, and indeed, of other personal and interpersonal values.
I thought when I first read this book that it was easily understood. Yes, Cook writes clearly in a way that is easy to understand but on re-reading, I've realised that it's very difficult to capture the essence of what he's written. There are just so many different threads running there. He ends up (as he'd begun) with a kind of warning about the seductive power of music (though advertising) to seduce us. Hence advocates maintaining vigilance and an eternal critical attitude towards music and its ideologies.
Four stars from me.… (mehr)