Your Email:

Subject:

Message:
Entry: The Death of Music by the Spirit of Government Subsidies Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/the_death_of_music_from_the_spirit_of_government_subsidies#15304 Post contents: <p>Atonality is like "sophistry" in language. Sophistry can be defined as inventing (through sheer verbal artistry, the metaphor-construction tools of language) distinctions where none exist and/or erasing distinctions which indeed do.</p> <p>Pretending that the components of an abstraction (the 12 tones of the chromatic scale) whose myriad "enharmonic" connections form the basis of tonal expression can in and of themselves reveal any musical expression is as absurd as assuming that the 26 letters of the English alphabet (or, at best, the 42 phonemes used in Enlish) are "imbued with" any semantics and pretending that sentences like...</p> <p>tend pre th com ing pone of an trac abs</p> <p>...can be meaningful. It is charlatanism of the worst kind. Yet it somehow stuck.</p> <p>And all this because of the idiotic romantic metaphor of going back to "nature," to the "natural" or "unalienated" man whose mind has not been corrupted (?) by the "bourgeois" culture. What nonsense.</p> <p>Those who want to enjoy the great fruits of living as the "natural" man (whatever "unnatural" man means, as if anything by definition against nature --  such as humans flying by flapping their arms of water flowing upwards -- could exist under the sun) can try the fellows in the jungles of Borneo. I'm sure they have their even more natural trio-phonic serialism.</p> <p>BTW Mr. Stove, any ideas on Bartok? I happen to have my roots in the Balkans, and he did a lot gathering the folk material of the region to build a unique "modal" harmony (although I confess his music contains too many "modernist" influences").</p> Sent at: 2008 07 09