VV(18): The night of the performance ...

[lorentzen-nicklaus]

Dave Monroe schrieb:

> "The night of the performance arrived." (V., Ch. 14,
> Sec. ii, p. 412)
>
> >From Paul Mitchinson, "Settling Scores: Richard
> Taruskin Explores the Dark Side of Music," Lingua
> Franca, (July?August 2001), pp. 34-43 ...
>
> "Taruskin sggests that we should still be protesting
> Stravinsky--at least in our hearts.  Early ballets
> such as the Rite 'participated in the great stripdown
> ... from humanism to biologism,' he argues; its
>
> primitivist score 'was originally heard (and is still
> easily heard) as the annihilation of teh subject and
> the denial of psychology.... Rarely has an
> antihumanist message been so irresistibly
> communicated.'" (p. 38)
>
> Mitchinson may or may not be citing here ...
>
> Taruskin, Richard.  Stravinsky and the Russian
>    Tradition.  Berkeley: U of Cal P, 1985.
>
> Which, unfortunately, I couldn't shell out for
> ($185.00 list), and I couldn't score in time from a
> library intown here.  But I'll keep at it ... or
> Mitchinson might be citing the lecture of Taruskin's
> he attended.  To continue ...
>
> "Taruskin devotes the second half of his talk to
> Stravinsky's 1952 Cantata, which is set to words by
> various English poets.  One of the movements, a
> setting of the fifteenth-century Christmas carol
> 'To-morrow shall be my dancing day,' shows the aging
> composer's growing interest in serial composition
> techniques....  But isn't it starnge, asks Taruskin,
> how the greatest minds of music theory have never
> managed to address the actual text of the piece? 'The
> Jews on me they made great suit,/ And with me made
> great variance,/ Because they lov'd darkness rather
> than light.'  It is the old libel of Jews as 'Christ
> killers.'" (p. 39)
>
> "The point is not that Stravinsky was personally
> anti-Semitic, although he certainly wa.  It is that
> Stravinsky and his modern defenders are indifferent to
> the text or, even worse, believe that respect for a
> work's 'artistic integrity' must always supersede
> moral qualms.  In insisting on such 'integrity,' we
> follow the artistic ethic of Stravinsky himself, who
> preached slefless submission to teh composer's wishes.
>  But 'how ethical,' Taruskin asks his audience, 'is an
> ethic that holds artists and art lovers to be entitled
> by their artistic commitment to moral indifference,
> and the greater the artist, the greater the
> entitlement?'" (ibid.)
>
> Unfortunately not online, but ...
>
> http://www.linguafranca.com/print/index.html
>
> And see also Taruskin's Mussrogsky: Eight Essays and
> an Epilogue (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1997) ...
>



  in "philosophie der neuen musik" [1949], theodor adorno writes: " ... when the 
  avantgarde declared itself to the negro sculpture, the movement's reactionary 
  telos was completely hiddden: the grasp at primeval history seemed rather to 
  be serving the liberation of bounded art than its reglementation. even today 
  we still have to keep in mind the difference between those culture-hostile   
  ["kulturfeindlichen"] manifests on the one and cultural fascism on the other  
  side, when we want to understand the dialectical double meaning of   
  stravinsky's effort. like nietzsche, he's grounded in liberalism. cultural 
  criticism requires some substantiality in culture; in the later one's shelter, 
  it [cultural criticism] is growing and receiving the right of plain speech as 
  something spriritual ["geistiges"], even when it, finally, turns against the  
  spirit/mind ["geist"] itself. the human sacrifice, in which the rising       
  over-violence of the collective is already calling, is evoked out of 
  individualism's discontent with itself, and especially the wild representation 
  of the wild satisfies not only, as the philistine says, the 
  romantic-civilisatory sensation seeking, but also the yearning for the end of 
  society's illusions, the urge for truth beneath the bourgeois mediations and 
  masks of violence. in such sentiments the heritage of especially the civic 
  revolution is present. fascism, then, which literally liquidated liberal 
  culture including its critics, can, thus, not stand the expression of the 
  barbarian. it wasn't for nothing that hitler and rosenberg decided the 
  cultural struggles inside their party against the 
  national-bolshevistic-intellectual wing in favor of the petty bourgeoisie's 
  dream of temple columns, noble simplicity, and quiet greatness. the sacre du 
  printemps could, in the third reich with its uncounted human sacrifices, not  
  have been put on stage, and whoever dared to declare himself to practical   
  barbarity in ideological productions, fell into disgrace. the german barbarity 
  - that's how nietzsche might had seen it - perhaps would have, without telling 
  a lie, eradicated with this [the lie: here the meaning switches to the above  
  mentioned "bourgeois mediations and masks of violence".kfl] also barbarity 
  itself. nevertheless, the sacre's affinity to the theme/reproach ["vorwurf", 
  of a violent 'blood and soil'-aesthetics. kfl] cannot be overseen, his 
  gauguinism, the sympathies of the one, who, as cocteau reports, shocked the 
  players in monte carlo by wearing the jewellery of a negro king. not only does 
  the work indeed echoe the noise of the coming war, it also openly enjoys the 
  chaotic splendor, which, however, could be understood in the paris of valses 
  nobles et sentimentales. the pressure of commodified bourgeois culture 
  enforces escape into the phastasmagoria of nature, which then turns out to be 
  the messenger of absolute oppression. the aesthetic nerves are shivering to 
  regress into stone age." (ffm 1978: suhrkamp, pp. 136f., own translation)    

breakdancing: kai //:: ps: yes, yes, i know ... well, i really went regularly to 
                      my anonymous p-listers meetings & i even tried hypnosis,  
                    but it all didn't work ... guess it must be karmic or       
                  something ... "you can check out any time you like/but you can 
                 never leave ..."