Category Archives: Music

UPDATED: NEW COLUMN: Beethoven & Bach ARE THE WEST, Not Cardi B, Kanye, Rihanna

Aesthetics, Art, Conservatism, COVID-19, Critique, Culture, Music, Pop-Culture, Sex, The Zeitgeist

NEW COLUMN IS “Beethoven & Bach ARE THE WEST, Not Cardi B, Kanye, Rihanna.” It was a feature on WND, The New American, Unz Review and Townhall.com.

Now easily accessed and read on IlanaMercer.com: https://www.ilanamercer.com/2023/02/beethoven-bach-west-not-cardi-b-kanye-rihanna/

Excerpt:

…  THE ONLY SUBSTANTIVE CONSERVATIVE CASE to make over the Grammys is that it signifies the complete loss of immutable artistic standards. For while artistic taste is subjective and personal; artistic standards are everywhere and always objective.

Nobody looking at, and listening to, the 2023 Grammys should dare talk about beauty—of melody or movement—harmony (as in consonance and counterpoint), chord progression, and a facility with musical instruments, for these were nowhere apparent. Better melodic progression is to be found in “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep” and “Three Blind Mice.”

Nobody watching these erogenous-zone centered extravaganzas, for which the celebrity Idiocracy clapped like clapped-out whores, should dare conclude anything but this:

The Grammys were about the end of art—about the loss of all meritocratic, objective standards in art.

THE TRUE MEANING OF THE WEST is not to be found in the staged acts of ugly exhibitionists and filthy pornographers who bedeck our cultural and sporting events, the likes of loud, lousy Lizzo, a mountain of meritless flesh, and the Sam Smith Sicko—demented degenerates who are all engaged in publicly tolerated indecent exposure and tuneless yelping, that not even the Auto-tune magic software, the “holy grail of recording” technology, can correct.

THE MEANING OF THE WEST is not in this ghastly culture, in which our kids, liberal and conservative, are allowed to wallow, or in our ugly, grubby, tit-for-tat politics.

IT’S NOT in the Woke, postmodern perverts degrading the language, literature, music, art and sciences.

IT’S NOWHERE IN THE COVID CARTEL and its army of goons, medical and bureaucratic, devoid of intelligence and bereft of proficiency in anything but the use of force.

The aforementioned are imposters, interlopers; frauds, freaks and fetishists.

Beethoven is The West. It’s men like Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Mendelssohn, Schubert, Brahms, Bruckner, Debussy, César Franck, Dvorák, Tchaikovsky (a Russian homosexual, whose manly music could never be queered), Elgar, Fauré and more—they embody The West. They and the many young performers furthering their work, the work of the Lord, are examples of the best of the West. …

…READ THE REST. “Beethoven & Bach ARE THE WEST, Not Cardi B, Kanye, Rihanna” was a feature on WND, The New American, Unz Review and Townhall.com.

It’s now here, on IlanaMercer.com: https://www.ilanamercer.com/2023/02/beethoven-bach-west-not-cardi-b-kanye-rihanna/

Beethoven Represents The Best Of The West

Art, Christianity, COVID-19, Culture, English, Music, The West

Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, Mendelssohn, Schubert, Brahms, Bruckner, Debussy, César Franck, Dvorák, Tchaikovsky (Russian), Elgar, Fauré and more—they embody The Best of The West, not the Woke perverts, the Covid goons; rap, reparations, and the critical race bile ~ilana

THE TRUE MEANING OF THE WEST is not our ugly, grubby, tit-for-tat politics and even ghastlier culture, in which our kids, liberal and conservative, are allowed to wallow.

It’s not the Woke, postmodern perverts degrading the language, literature, music, art and sciences.
It’s not the COVID cartel and its army of goons, medical and bureaucratic, devoid of intelligence and bereft of proficiency in anything but the use of coercion.

The meaning of the West is not to be found in the staged acts of ugly exhibitionists and filthy pornographers who bedeck our cultural and sporting events, the likes of loud, lousy Lizzo, a mountain of meritless flesh, and Sam Smiths Sicko—degenerates who are all engaged in publicly approved indecent exposure and tuneless yelping, that not even the Auto-tune magic software recording technology can correct.

These are cultural interlopers, frauds and freaks.

Beethoven is The West. Beethoven is an example of the best of the West.

“Ode to Joy,” inspired by Friedrich Schiller’s eponymous poem, is but the soundbite in Symphony No. 9. Sublime as it is, “Ode to Joy” is the popular tune in a more magnificent whole.

One should not seek out exclusively the Ode of the Finale—the fourth movement—without assimilating the typically ballsy build-up by Beethoven throughout the preceding Allegro (first movement), scherzo (second movement) and Adagio (third).

Music is Man. Like nobody else, Beethoven instantiates this truth in all his Symphonies. (Listen to No. 5 here, conducted by the great Herbert von Karajan, and tell me this is not so.)

To share with you, I have a fine performance of “Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125 ‘Choral’ (1824).” It is that of The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, conducted by Daniel Barenboim. Barenboim’s intensity during the performance and the perfection he wrung so effortlessly from these young musicians—beautiful in face and form, hailing from far flung countries across the Middle East and North Africa—led me to suspect this setting was more than just a celebrity conductor—one of the greatest, for sure—parachuted in for a night.

Indeed, the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra is a product of the vision of Maestro Daniel Barenboim and the less talented more verbose Edward Said, a Palestinian intellectual. The impetus of the collaboration, I imagine, was to foster peace through music. Done.

Not Allah or Jehovah ever inspired this kind of transcendence. Christianity did. This is The West, not the Woke perverts, the Covid goons; rap, reparations, and the critical race bile

It’s men like Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, Mendelssohn, Schubert, Brahms, Bruckner, Debussy, César Franck, Dvorák, Tchaikovsky (Russian), Elgar, Fauré and more—they embody The West. They and these young performers furthering the work of the Lord.

Sad anecdote: Beethoven had composed the sublime work utterly deaf.

Via Britannica:

According to one account of the event, the audience applauded thunderously at the conclusion of the performance, but Beethoven, unable to hear the response, continued to face the chorus and orchestra; a singer finally turned him around so that he could see evidence of the affirmation that resounded throughout the hall.

 

UPDATED (11/30/022): Complex, Masterful Music Is Not Marxist; Atonal Arnold Schoenberg Is

Art, Cultural Marxism, Culture, Music, The West

Schönberg’s music sounds as ugly as it looks—behold the the sheet-music heading this blog post

People throw about the term “Cultural Marxism” with abandon, without always understanding what it means. Like antibiotics, the overuse of  the term diminishes its potency.

About the virtuoso progressive metal band “Dream Theater,” a reader wrote on Twitter:

It is not MUSIC, it is the INSIDIOUS cultural Marxist degradation of music into a WALL OF NOISE that passes itself off as progressive. In actual fact, it is a step backward for civilization.

The reader is confused. Highly accomplished and polished progressive rock groups like “Dream Theater” or “Symphony X” follow Western rules of harmony, which go back hundreds of years. Layers of complexity in composition are being conflated here with Cultural Marxism.

The fact that it takes some dedication to listen to music that isn’t all of three chords—as is the blues or the country music twang—doesn’t make it Marxist.

What the reader is hearing in Dream Theater is, again, complexity. Highly accomplished and polished progressive rock groups like Dream Theater and Symphony X follow Western rules of harmony. And, odd time signatures, “irregular, complex, asymmetric or unusual time signature,” (my fav) are not Marxist.

While Dream Theater uses exceptionally complicated rhythms, their music is at its structural core traditional Western music.

What the reader says about Dream Theater—some would say about the genius of Béla Bartók or Igor Stravinsky. They would be wrong.

I was trained by a tough father, no longer with us, to listen to classical, in particular, chamber music, starting at a tender age. No option was given. The love followed the discipline, hence the ear for complexity.

If we wanted to spend time with dad, Friday, it was 5 hours of nonstop music. One night it’d be Bartók, the other Beethoven, but dad also introduced us to The Beatles. (Western civilization, parents. Do it up, not Kanye West.)

The routine dad enforced seemed awfully oppressive then. Today, I am grateful for the gift of knowing—nay, seeking out—the greatest music, which is, indubitably, Western music. Thus transitioning from Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” to gifted progressive rock guitarist Tony MacAlpine is organic.

Dad, a rabbi, once whispered sheer blasphemy to me as a kid, “Don’t tell anyone, but Bach is really God.”

Without going into Cultural Marxism and doing the hard work of applying the concept to music, let me say only that the music mentioned is not Marxist as it adheres to traditional scales and structures.

WHAT IS MARXIST is the G-d-awful Arnold Schönberg and his atonal technique. Schönberg’s  music sounds as ugly as it looks—check out the sheet music heading this post.

The reason he’s Marxist is that Schönberg treated all 12 semi-tones as equal, seeking to weaken harmonic progression. This rigidly ruled out patterns and familiarity, and with it the pleasant sensation that comes with beauty and symmetry.

MORE here:
http://barelyablog.com/category/music/
www.ilanamercer.com/category/music/

UPDATED (11/30/022)

Arnie Schönberg would think “Brother Of Mine,” a sublime piece by “Yes,” kitschy in the extreme.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5LNojKALxc

https://youtu.be/U5LNojKALxc

While it has plenty odd time signatures; it also has exquisite compositional complexity, masterful execution, top-notch musicianship. AND THIS IS LIVE. Indistinguishable from the studio version.

Most so-called musicians today, other than classical, are inaudible and tuneless live without the mighty Auto-Tune: the “holy grail of recording,” that “corrects intonation problems in vocals or solo instruments, in real time, without distortion or artifacts.”

UPDATE III (8/13/022): Trump Raided: Fate Of The 4th Amendment & Due Process In Police State USA

Celebrity, Constitution, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Law, Music, South-Africa

UPDATE III (8/13/022):  TAKE NOTE: “The American Gestapo A.K.A. FBI” by Paul Craig Roberts: DOJ, Judiciary, FBI: “…none of these people are good people. They are not people we can have any confidence in. These are not people we would let our sons and daughters marry. These are very bad people. Yet these very bad people are in control of our lives. ..”

****************

Ashleigh Banfield of News Nation, ACTUALLY covers the raid of Trump’s Florida mansion, whereas other leftist channels are lying low. Waiting to have the matter focus-group tested given the impending primaries? I bet they are.

Banfield lets a conservative radio mouth, one Bill Cunningham, roar about 4th Amendment violations and the revolt the raid will ignite among Deplorables, all crucial points.

News Nation clearly provides more substantial coverage than does Fox News, which, unlike Cunningham, hardly mentions the Constitution, and only rabbits on about how unprecedented the raid is and about logistics, such as:

“If only the FBI coordinated better with Trump”.

Fox is also indulging in “what aboutism”, namely, “If this were Hillary Clinton… blah, blah”.  As I said, nothing substantial. These people aren’t smart. Tucker excepted, Fox News is about ratings, not deep reflection.

Violations of due process, in the case of the Mar-a-Lago raid today, in search of classified material and presidential records removed,  have become more common in police state America than in Apartheid-era South Africa, which, as chronicled in Into The Cannibal’s Pot, was unsurprisingly legalistic and by-the-book. But then, rooted in Roman-Dutch law, South Africa was a minority ruled, first world civilization at the tip of Africa.

UPDATE II (8/9/022):  Fox News continues to voice support for the “men and women of the FBI.” It’s only those at the top who stink, said a guest agent. Speechless. The FBI is among the most corrupt government agencies.

When in recent memory has the FBI stopped an attack on the homeland other than attacks originating in its own entrapment schemes, where a low-IQ Abdul is persuaded to purchase explosives from the FBI “for Jihad” and then is “caught” in the act. A presser follows. (HERE)

The FBI is progressive to its core.  And Trump hired the last of its major swamp creatures. President Trump hired Christopher Wray, whose heroes, as stated in his confirmation hearings, are Directors Robert Mueller and James Comey. How did Trump imagine Christopher Wray, who looks up to the two and swam in the same polluted waters, would reform the FBI? (“Hiring Another Swamp Creature For The FBI“)

Michelle Malkin offers an excellent summary of FBI depredation in “FBI: Feds Behaving Incorrigibly.


Notes in the margins:

RIP Olivia Newton John. She had had breast cancer. It always comes back to claim its victims, eventually. “Seize the day” has become a cliché, but it should not be. The passing of a vital, rather young woman is a reminder of how often we squander the gifts and opportunities we are afforded, because we would rather play it safe than experience life to the fullest.

I loved this one: Olivia Newton John, 1974, “I Honestly Love You”:

So-called musicians today lack the emotional depth, the facility with language and the skill (for chord progression) to compose a love song. When we were growing up, these kinds of aching tunes were in abundance.

UPDATE (8/9/022): Another youngish woman felled, aged 64: veteran anchor Uma Pemmaraju. Time is something we run out of fast.

Original Fox News Channel Anchor Uma Pemmaraju Dies at 64