Oh dear... years ago I remember a band name that still makes me laugh... saw it in an who’s playing page of a small town weekly paper... Amish Rake Fight... wish I’d have seen ‘em now!
Get married when you're 17, have babies when you're 19, milk cows by hand, and drive the horse-drawn cart to market twice a week (but not on the sabbath). What's TikTok?
I see that the writer mentions comedy. There has never really been a significant number of conservative standup comedians who've found mainstream audiences. There have been, of course, very successful comics who are conservative themselves but their comedy doesn't necessarily play that explicitly. The various FOX Channel comedy attempts haven't been all that funny. I do enjoy the Babylon Bee. Rush Limbaugh was sometimes funny. But, just off the top of my head. I can't think of any brand of conservative comedy that has ever mocked conservativism itself.
Not so much standup, but definitely a comic writer (who also can be funny and persuasive on serious issues): P. J. O'Rourke. Since I started reading him as teenage gearhead just as the American car industry cratered in the 70s: https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a39105473/pj-orourke-obituary/
And Pat Bedard and cranky LJK Setright. The 55mph civil disobedience. The drunk-driving timed track day. The beautiful cars in the classifieds, while increasingly worse junk was featured upfront. The late 70s was a horrible time to be coming of (legal) car age. Today's cars are pretty good, I must admit. But I'm old. Happy to ride a simple, unassisted 100hp rice grinder through the mountains to my slow and comfy sailboat whence I read interesting commentary from grownups on THB rather than fanboy coverage of EVs or, worse, mechanically uninformed wannabes racing to be the next, most vain social media automotive influencer. (Did I say that all of that outloud?) Good to hear from you, 71 911E.
It's not that there aren't conservative stand-ups. It's just that like publishing or Hollywood, the distribution system is illiberally progressive.
Joe Rogan is championing conservative and libertarian content at his venue in Texas, and in the UK, there is Comedy Unleashed- a venue in London, available to watch on YouTube, which gives a platform to comedians cancelled elsewhere.
Of course, this also that requires one acknowledge the Broad Tent now belongs to the Right- many barstool conservatives and right-leaning libertarians jumped ship with the Republicans over abortion. It's one of the reasons why RFK seems to be eating into Trump's support rather than Biden's. Besides, other than on specific issues like policing, Black comedy has always been a lot more socially conservative- willing to tackle issues White comedians simply couldn't get away with.
Babylon Bee does a good, if only occasional, job of sending up conservative pretensions from time to time. Their satires of Trump were must-reads back in the day ... a few years ago.
That's not a blog post, Ted, that's the outline of a manifesto. I'm in. Do holler if you can use an expert propagandist. (I have to laugh: "Frankly, the subject deserves a book. But I doubt that I’m ready to take on that workload." You're uniquely positioned and know it.)
The neo-Romanticism movement of which you speak has already happened, in the late 60’s. The similarities are eerie: the idolatry of nature, the clothing, and most of all the music. It’s almost too obvious. What underpinnings did it have? Access to cheap education and housing. Those things don’t exist any more.
The young people now confront a system of enormous pressures to eke out a bare livelihood, much less success. Every pathway to a better life is blocked by exorbitant cost and financial hazard. Abusiveness and uncertainty lie around every corner. Mere housing is largely out of reach. Older generations hold most economic power and sneer at those who don’t.
The last wave of Romanticism existed because a fortunate generation had room to turn around. That room doesn’t exist anymore. The stakes are much higher now. I’m not optimistic.
I heartily agree, but I'm biased as someone who fell in love with the Romanticism in college. I also agree with David George Moore's quote from Lundin. The juxtaposition of Enlightenment rationality vs. Romantic intuition is spot-on. As is the assertion that faith in the self (one could say a kind of idolatry) is intrinsic to Romanticism--which is also its greatest flaw. Thank you for this essay... I have been thinking less eloquently along the same lines recently.
Provocative reflection from the late literary critic, Roger Lundin, in his seminal book, The Culture of Interpretation:
In the Enlightenment, to be sure, faith was centered upon rationality as the instrument of power, while in romanticism it was the intuition or imagination that promised to deliver humans from their bondage to ignorance and injustice. But the adherents of the Enlightenment and romanticism were more united by their unshakeable faith in the self than they were divided by their disagreements about the mechanism through which that self did its work.
I feel vindicated that Country Music, which has gone to Pop, is now split by “ Americana” at the Grammy’s. Americana= Woody Guthrie, Willie Nelson, John Prine, Cash, Kristofferson , Brandi Carlile and more every day..🎼🎶🎻🪕🌻
I have little use for romanticism, as I have little use for luxury beliefs. But I would not say that art today is rationalist so much as pragmatic - can I make a buck off of it, how fast and what is the anticipated ROI?
This is in large part because there is more geedus to be made than in years gone by.
For the enemy of love is not hate but indifference.
I think the art of today of which you speak is, or at least much of it, not art at all but propaganda confused with art. Hence, the emphasis on marketing of the artist, the message, the concept - not the work itself.
If a love of integrity is the heartbeat of the New Romanticism and that is what drives the art and that art helps the world; this is not only an enterprise of the leisure class. Every man in every caste can be a musician. Some of the best music I’ve heard was from dead-tired loggers sawing on fiddles.
There’s an old academic wheeze about Shakespeare: that he wrote the comedies for people who think and the tragedies for people who feel. Oversimplification often misleads but sometimes illuminates. Humans feel and think. We intuit and mull logically. All of our faculties have flaws. Ages of men routinely overdo one thing or another. Whether we calculate too much and feel too little or vice versa, it seems we always must redirect our focus eventually. Best would be balancing both, but likely we would find a way to overdo that too. It’s always interesting to read what you’re thinking. Thanks.
I found this article riveting. It makes me sad how music is going with the songwriting by committee, autotune everywhere and any singular artistic vision being lost. Hopefully at some point there is a reaction against this.
Heck, I am advocating for a return to writing postal letters in cursive, with a fountain pen! There is no other way. Who needs more? This will enable a return to thinking, and thinking of others.
A good argument for fully funding the USPS, I think. It provides a basic infrastructure that likely would survive a cyber attack at least. Physical artifacts of writing may one day have a vital value we can barely imagine.
Fascinating stuff. I agree with what Rex wrote three hours earlier. This is the prelim for what should be a mind-blowing book.
All I can contribute is that I went to a movie with my dad featuring Artur Rubinstein at a young age and fell in love with the snippets of Beethoven's 3rd piano concerto. A few years later it would be my workhorse, played it with an orchestra before my bar-mitzvah. Would be awhile before I studied the history more, and I've always said since that you can't really tell that Beethoven's first two weren't really just Mozartian. Standing on the shoulders of giants that came before. But the 3rd is radically different. Never mind what would happen with the 4th and 5th. I'm not that familiar with the sonatas, I played the "name" ones like the Pathetique and the Appassionata, and of course the Moonlight. I could have been a concert pianist, my cousins are Gil and Orly Shaham and my dad was a certified genius, I just wasn't interested. Rock and jazz were more to my liking, and when I auditioned for the best teacher in Detroit who told me I'd have to practice 5 hours a day I said nope no thanks. My mom would stop pestering me after I played for 45 minutes. Nobody could figure out how I was playing piano concertos with so little practice. I liked sports, girls, movies, TV, and smoking weed. Years later I bought a grand piano and practiced 4 hours a day because I WANTED to, and I mean 3 hours of Hanon, every scale and arpeggio in all 12 keys before I'd even start playing. Someone asked me if I meditated and I laughed and said sitting at the piano for 3 hours straight playing a million notes (I forget the number but I once did a napkin calculation) up and down with hardly a mistake, in a perfect place between intense focus and supreme relaxation- that's got to count for something? At that point compared to working 100 hours a week as a surgery resident I was like how the fuck did I ever think that 5 hours a day was insufferable? Because I was a normal 14 year old kid. Now between guitar and piano 5 hours is a typical day.
Anyway sorry for the rambling, I am going to make it point to listen to those Beethoven sonatas. I mostly played what my dad wanted me to, he had a thousand classical albums and an encyclopedic knowledge could recognize stuff on the classical radio station within 5 notes, 30 seconds later he'd name the orchestra and conductor and soloist. The announcer would confirm he was almost always correct when the piece ended. But for my playing he really emphasized the "name" pieces. Perhaps that's a shame, maybe the teachers I had were more comfortable with that stuff. But Ted's tease here is definite book material.
also I listened to the recent remastering of the Beatles' Red and Blue albums. mostly not really getting it because I never had a problem with the original versions, wondering where and when does it end? because you could never stop doing that with the digital technology now at our disposal. shocked to hear a cover the Zombies also did, and I think their version was better. a fabulous band that wrote great tunes, but they never progressed the way the Fab Four.
Why? sheer talent? then why was their version of that cover song better IMO? why did Beethoven leave everyone behind? sometimes, and I'm not religious, but I think it's like god reaches out to you like Michelangelo's ceiling in the Sistine Chapel, taps you on the shoulder, and says you are the chosen one(s). you're great, the others are great, but I'm bestowing my divine blessing on you to be the one they talk about long after the other ones are relatively forgotten.
One of the worst things you can do to a child who's learning an instrument is to tell them that HAVE to practice X number of hours a day. Failing to practice enough, then having to face the teacher, is pressure enough, and if they don't respond to that, perhaps they should play a different instrument or do something else that they enjoy. I never practiced enough in high school and got by on "talent." As a 38 yr. old, once agains studying with a teacher, I put in 5 to 6 hrs. a day and loved it.
absolutely. so it's almost a prerequisite for having what it takes to make it in the classical world slash jazz, that you have the discipline or love or some combo that you love practicing. I never got bored playing sports. I swam 4-5 hours a day in high school okay that could get boring staring at the black lane marker at the bottom of the pool thinking about girls and weed and . . . so my dad's cousin says she never forced her kids to play but they practiced 5 hours a day. I have no idea where that comes from, that discipline. Artur Rubinstein hated practicing, or so he claimed. yet he also said one day without it I know it, two days the critics know it, three days everyone knows it. I don't know about that either, some of my best playing would believe it or not be when I was a bit drunk and I'd sit at the piano and just play a concerto flawlessly. mostly because I was getting out of my own way and not thinking too much, something I always felt was a curse of classical music. or certain teachers. the great ones are truly hard to find. another thought- my parents didn't have much disposable income. the piano was a crappy upright. when I got older it dawned on me that a good grand piano makes all the difference in the world, I'd experience that at my teachers' houses, at a rich cousin's- but it didn't register because I didn't really think about it, what would the point be, we couldn't afford one. when I reimmersed I was older mature blah blah blah but also had a beautiful Yamaha grand piano in my living room. Having the proper instrument can be 180 degrees. My first guitar was literally unplayable, cheapest one in the store, mom didn't know any better nor did I. Never should have been sold. I took two lessons and quit, the strings were so far from the neck. 30 dollar piece of crap circa 1981. I smashed it to bits one day when someone told me it was unfixable. 30 was a lot of dough back then, but more like any decent guitar cost a lot more than that back then before the market was flooded with stuff from Asia. you get what you pay for . . .
If you dont love what you're doing, you won't get very far. I started playing drums, in school, at age 14 and didn't have a drum set until I was 16. Money was tight. By 16, my mother had saved enough money to buy me a snare, bass, hi-hat and ride cymbal. Every other drummer in school had a full set. I played what I had for the next 10 yrs. I got real good at the fundeamentals and could play any type of music with that little kit. It was the love of playing music that accompanied me throughout my life. As I mentioned earlier, when I was 38 I started studying again and practicing 6 hrs. a day, as well as rehearsing twice a week and gigging 5 to 8 times a week. After a year of serious study and practice, if I could think of it, I could play it. It's always about the love of what we are doing. Without that, it's just putting hubcaps on Fords.
a thousand percent! sometimes we don't realize that shit until we're older. but it really is never too late unless one is tied down by obligations to family and job. I had neither, probably by choice. so I had lots of time to devote to my passions. many walk around in a coma, obligations aside, always reminds me of the scene from the Matrix with the woman in the red dress.
Shirley. I immediately thought of Charlotte Bronte's least-known novel Shirley. Set during the early industrial revolution when the Luddites were active. Her father was a curate in Yorkshire during this period and wore pistols to go about his business because the mood was so ugly.
She describes the mills being thrown up and actually says something to the effect -- 'and that was the last time the fairies were seen in that field'. Of course, she wouldn't have believed in fairies herself. She was making a point about folk beliefs in the new, rational age.
I think this is one of the most stimulating pieces I have read on Substack and I hope you write a book on it. I want to hear more. This challenges me.
I'm not persuaded, however.
Musically, Western music broke down in the 20th century and is only just starting to be reconstructed. It took centuries of progress for classical music to a place where Romantic music was possible. All sorts of algorithms: scales, triads, time signatures, isorhythms etc. You need all that structure in place to destabilise it, otherwise, you are rebelling against thin air. I feel we are nowhere near that in the reconstruction phase.
Second, there is in a sense a romantic movement in pop music, in the sense of somewhat egotistical artists who play heroic and tragic roles. I won't name names because it's pointed and mean, but if you listen to pop music from the 1930s compared to now, there is far more celebration and examination of the individual in our contemporary culture. Louis Jordan's Five Guys Named Moe almost couldn't happen now, because it's too detached from the artist.
Third, I don't accept the idea that algorithms are opposed to romanticism, as such. I think what we associate with algorithms now is what Silicon Valley has done to them, and that's pretty easy to find offensive and dehumanising, but that's more a commentary of Freedman and Hayek's nightmares manifesting than something quintessential to algorithms. The Alhambra in Granada, Spain, shows that algorithms, beauty, a certain type of romanticism, and God are not mutually exclusive.
If I had to bet, I would say that music, as well as society, is yearning for something more meaningful and spiritual - even if I can't exactly define what that means. The algorithm offers transcendence and an escape from our obsession with self; it also leads to the unexpected rather than simply the coldly calculated, although that does happen. In a culture that has an increasingly nihilistic streak with extreme politics, porn, consumerism, and a breakdown of our living planet happening all around us, I actually expect us to move more towards transcendence and a sense of ambition. I don't think that preludes romanticism, but it is a specific type of romanticism. In fact, the Moors are quite an inspiration to me in that regard, as they seemed to balance the romantic and the intellectual, as well as the corporal and the spiritual in a way that remains exemplary to this day. Our age stands to learn a lot from them.
I absolutely love the idea of your project. I hope you write more about it.
I’ve joked that I keep expecting teenagers to go faux-Amish as rebellion against the algorithms. This revolution will not be TikToked.
Oh dear... years ago I remember a band name that still makes me laugh... saw it in an who’s playing page of a small town weekly paper... Amish Rake Fight... wish I’d have seen ‘em now!
Oh, wow, that is a great name that has probably been changed!
70s back to the land
Get married when you're 17, have babies when you're 19, milk cows by hand, and drive the horse-drawn cart to market twice a week (but not on the sabbath). What's TikTok?
This article by the excellent NS Lyons comes to mind: https://www.city-journal.org/article/a-new-counterculture
I see that the writer mentions comedy. There has never really been a significant number of conservative standup comedians who've found mainstream audiences. There have been, of course, very successful comics who are conservative themselves but their comedy doesn't necessarily play that explicitly. The various FOX Channel comedy attempts haven't been all that funny. I do enjoy the Babylon Bee. Rush Limbaugh was sometimes funny. But, just off the top of my head. I can't think of any brand of conservative comedy that has ever mocked conservativism itself.
Not so much standup, but definitely a comic writer (who also can be funny and persuasive on serious issues): P. J. O'Rourke. Since I started reading him as teenage gearhead just as the American car industry cratered in the 70s: https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a39105473/pj-orourke-obituary/
How could I've forgotten P.J? So funny, so very funny.
And Pat Bedard and cranky LJK Setright. The 55mph civil disobedience. The drunk-driving timed track day. The beautiful cars in the classifieds, while increasingly worse junk was featured upfront. The late 70s was a horrible time to be coming of (legal) car age. Today's cars are pretty good, I must admit. But I'm old. Happy to ride a simple, unassisted 100hp rice grinder through the mountains to my slow and comfy sailboat whence I read interesting commentary from grownups on THB rather than fanboy coverage of EVs or, worse, mechanically uninformed wannabes racing to be the next, most vain social media automotive influencer. (Did I say that all of that outloud?) Good to hear from you, 71 911E.
It's not that there aren't conservative stand-ups. It's just that like publishing or Hollywood, the distribution system is illiberally progressive.
Joe Rogan is championing conservative and libertarian content at his venue in Texas, and in the UK, there is Comedy Unleashed- a venue in London, available to watch on YouTube, which gives a platform to comedians cancelled elsewhere.
Of course, this also that requires one acknowledge the Broad Tent now belongs to the Right- many barstool conservatives and right-leaning libertarians jumped ship with the Republicans over abortion. It's one of the reasons why RFK seems to be eating into Trump's support rather than Biden's. Besides, other than on specific issues like policing, Black comedy has always been a lot more socially conservative- willing to tackle issues White comedians simply couldn't get away with.
Babylon Bee does a good, if only occasional, job of sending up conservative pretensions from time to time. Their satires of Trump were must-reads back in the day ... a few years ago.
The only one who comes to mind is Nicholas de Santo, who I've only just recently come across.
With apologies to Gil Scott Herron (The revolution will not be televised) LOL
Great line! I've already borrowed it! Thanks:)
That's not a blog post, Ted, that's the outline of a manifesto. I'm in. Do holler if you can use an expert propagandist. (I have to laugh: "Frankly, the subject deserves a book. But I doubt that I’m ready to take on that workload." You're uniquely positioned and know it.)
I agree wholeheartedly~
Yup. 👍🏼
And just because Ted was in school at the same time and place: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_h4DZeBleLs
As I was, not Bluto. For the record and forgive my wording.
The neo-Romanticism movement of which you speak has already happened, in the late 60’s. The similarities are eerie: the idolatry of nature, the clothing, and most of all the music. It’s almost too obvious. What underpinnings did it have? Access to cheap education and housing. Those things don’t exist any more.
The young people now confront a system of enormous pressures to eke out a bare livelihood, much less success. Every pathway to a better life is blocked by exorbitant cost and financial hazard. Abusiveness and uncertainty lie around every corner. Mere housing is largely out of reach. Older generations hold most economic power and sneer at those who don’t.
The last wave of Romanticism existed because a fortunate generation had room to turn around. That room doesn’t exist anymore. The stakes are much higher now. I’m not optimistic.
Those seeds will bloom. Perhaps the plant will have more power than the sowing.
A similar line of thinking... The Master and His Emissary: the Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, Ian McGilchrist
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/jan/02/1
I am an admirer of McGhilchrist's work, and he has influenced my music writing. Check out, for example, this section from my ongoing book 'Music to Raise the Dead.' https://www.honest-broker.com/p/is-there-a-science-of-musical-transformation
McGilchrist is quite brilliant, I've been checking out his videos and interviews.
I heartily agree, but I'm biased as someone who fell in love with the Romanticism in college. I also agree with David George Moore's quote from Lundin. The juxtaposition of Enlightenment rationality vs. Romantic intuition is spot-on. As is the assertion that faith in the self (one could say a kind of idolatry) is intrinsic to Romanticism--which is also its greatest flaw. Thank you for this essay... I have been thinking less eloquently along the same lines recently.
Provocative reflection from the late literary critic, Roger Lundin, in his seminal book, The Culture of Interpretation:
In the Enlightenment, to be sure, faith was centered upon rationality as the instrument of power, while in romanticism it was the intuition or imagination that promised to deliver humans from their bondage to ignorance and injustice. But the adherents of the Enlightenment and romanticism were more united by their unshakeable faith in the self than they were divided by their disagreements about the mechanism through which that self did its work.
That great illusion; the self.
"What’s my goal? I’m still not entirely sure."
I think that's how a lot of us are feeling right now. We are being pulled by something that is impossible to articulate or explain.
Is that what Beethoven felt?
I feel vindicated that Country Music, which has gone to Pop, is now split by “ Americana” at the Grammy’s. Americana= Woody Guthrie, Willie Nelson, John Prine, Cash, Kristofferson , Brandi Carlile and more every day..🎼🎶🎻🪕🌻
I have little use for romanticism, as I have little use for luxury beliefs. But I would not say that art today is rationalist so much as pragmatic - can I make a buck off of it, how fast and what is the anticipated ROI?
This is in large part because there is more geedus to be made than in years gone by.
For the enemy of love is not hate but indifference.
I think the art of today of which you speak is, or at least much of it, not art at all but propaganda confused with art. Hence, the emphasis on marketing of the artist, the message, the concept - not the work itself.
As I said, there's a buck to be made.
Shakespeare wrote for money. It doesn’t invalidate his work.
True, but the past wasn't so pure either. Wagner was a master of self-promotion. Everything he did was calculated and deliberate.
https://www.cambridge.org/es/universitypress/subjects/music/opera/richard-wagner-self-promotion-and-making-brand?format=PB&isbn=9781107404397
“more geedus to be made than in years gone by” Clearly you have no idea what the music business is like these days 🤣
Good point, but my perspective was the last fifty or so years.
What we're seeing now is thr picking of a carcass.
If a love of integrity is the heartbeat of the New Romanticism and that is what drives the art and that art helps the world; this is not only an enterprise of the leisure class. Every man in every caste can be a musician. Some of the best music I’ve heard was from dead-tired loggers sawing on fiddles.
There’s an old academic wheeze about Shakespeare: that he wrote the comedies for people who think and the tragedies for people who feel. Oversimplification often misleads but sometimes illuminates. Humans feel and think. We intuit and mull logically. All of our faculties have flaws. Ages of men routinely overdo one thing or another. Whether we calculate too much and feel too little or vice versa, it seems we always must redirect our focus eventually. Best would be balancing both, but likely we would find a way to overdo that too. It’s always interesting to read what you’re thinking. Thanks.
Shakespeare helped us see thru others' eyes. That to me is the great gift.
I found this article riveting. It makes me sad how music is going with the songwriting by committee, autotune everywhere and any singular artistic vision being lost. Hopefully at some point there is a reaction against this.
You can still here it today, in small venues. There are musicians out there who are pursueing their vision. Money is scarce and the music is rich.
There is in small places
Madison, WI and Trinidad, CO., are two places that I know about.
Heck, I am advocating for a return to writing postal letters in cursive, with a fountain pen! There is no other way. Who needs more? This will enable a return to thinking, and thinking of others.
But what if the Postal Service disappears? That's what happened to us in Ecuador.
A good argument for fully funding the USPS, I think. It provides a basic infrastructure that likely would survive a cyber attack at least. Physical artifacts of writing may one day have a vital value we can barely imagine.
You would love my piece on writing one handwritten letter a day, a project I started in 2019!
https://shannonhood.substack.com/p/why-i-wrote-hundreds-of-handwritten
What would it sound like? A million years ago it would’ve sounded like this….
🎶 Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us, only sky
Imagine all the people
Livin' for today…🎶
Fascinating stuff. I agree with what Rex wrote three hours earlier. This is the prelim for what should be a mind-blowing book.
All I can contribute is that I went to a movie with my dad featuring Artur Rubinstein at a young age and fell in love with the snippets of Beethoven's 3rd piano concerto. A few years later it would be my workhorse, played it with an orchestra before my bar-mitzvah. Would be awhile before I studied the history more, and I've always said since that you can't really tell that Beethoven's first two weren't really just Mozartian. Standing on the shoulders of giants that came before. But the 3rd is radically different. Never mind what would happen with the 4th and 5th. I'm not that familiar with the sonatas, I played the "name" ones like the Pathetique and the Appassionata, and of course the Moonlight. I could have been a concert pianist, my cousins are Gil and Orly Shaham and my dad was a certified genius, I just wasn't interested. Rock and jazz were more to my liking, and when I auditioned for the best teacher in Detroit who told me I'd have to practice 5 hours a day I said nope no thanks. My mom would stop pestering me after I played for 45 minutes. Nobody could figure out how I was playing piano concertos with so little practice. I liked sports, girls, movies, TV, and smoking weed. Years later I bought a grand piano and practiced 4 hours a day because I WANTED to, and I mean 3 hours of Hanon, every scale and arpeggio in all 12 keys before I'd even start playing. Someone asked me if I meditated and I laughed and said sitting at the piano for 3 hours straight playing a million notes (I forget the number but I once did a napkin calculation) up and down with hardly a mistake, in a perfect place between intense focus and supreme relaxation- that's got to count for something? At that point compared to working 100 hours a week as a surgery resident I was like how the fuck did I ever think that 5 hours a day was insufferable? Because I was a normal 14 year old kid. Now between guitar and piano 5 hours is a typical day.
Anyway sorry for the rambling, I am going to make it point to listen to those Beethoven sonatas. I mostly played what my dad wanted me to, he had a thousand classical albums and an encyclopedic knowledge could recognize stuff on the classical radio station within 5 notes, 30 seconds later he'd name the orchestra and conductor and soloist. The announcer would confirm he was almost always correct when the piece ended. But for my playing he really emphasized the "name" pieces. Perhaps that's a shame, maybe the teachers I had were more comfortable with that stuff. But Ted's tease here is definite book material.
also I listened to the recent remastering of the Beatles' Red and Blue albums. mostly not really getting it because I never had a problem with the original versions, wondering where and when does it end? because you could never stop doing that with the digital technology now at our disposal. shocked to hear a cover the Zombies also did, and I think their version was better. a fabulous band that wrote great tunes, but they never progressed the way the Fab Four.
Why? sheer talent? then why was their version of that cover song better IMO? why did Beethoven leave everyone behind? sometimes, and I'm not religious, but I think it's like god reaches out to you like Michelangelo's ceiling in the Sistine Chapel, taps you on the shoulder, and says you are the chosen one(s). you're great, the others are great, but I'm bestowing my divine blessing on you to be the one they talk about long after the other ones are relatively forgotten.
One of the worst things you can do to a child who's learning an instrument is to tell them that HAVE to practice X number of hours a day. Failing to practice enough, then having to face the teacher, is pressure enough, and if they don't respond to that, perhaps they should play a different instrument or do something else that they enjoy. I never practiced enough in high school and got by on "talent." As a 38 yr. old, once agains studying with a teacher, I put in 5 to 6 hrs. a day and loved it.
absolutely. so it's almost a prerequisite for having what it takes to make it in the classical world slash jazz, that you have the discipline or love or some combo that you love practicing. I never got bored playing sports. I swam 4-5 hours a day in high school okay that could get boring staring at the black lane marker at the bottom of the pool thinking about girls and weed and . . . so my dad's cousin says she never forced her kids to play but they practiced 5 hours a day. I have no idea where that comes from, that discipline. Artur Rubinstein hated practicing, or so he claimed. yet he also said one day without it I know it, two days the critics know it, three days everyone knows it. I don't know about that either, some of my best playing would believe it or not be when I was a bit drunk and I'd sit at the piano and just play a concerto flawlessly. mostly because I was getting out of my own way and not thinking too much, something I always felt was a curse of classical music. or certain teachers. the great ones are truly hard to find. another thought- my parents didn't have much disposable income. the piano was a crappy upright. when I got older it dawned on me that a good grand piano makes all the difference in the world, I'd experience that at my teachers' houses, at a rich cousin's- but it didn't register because I didn't really think about it, what would the point be, we couldn't afford one. when I reimmersed I was older mature blah blah blah but also had a beautiful Yamaha grand piano in my living room. Having the proper instrument can be 180 degrees. My first guitar was literally unplayable, cheapest one in the store, mom didn't know any better nor did I. Never should have been sold. I took two lessons and quit, the strings were so far from the neck. 30 dollar piece of crap circa 1981. I smashed it to bits one day when someone told me it was unfixable. 30 was a lot of dough back then, but more like any decent guitar cost a lot more than that back then before the market was flooded with stuff from Asia. you get what you pay for . . .
If you dont love what you're doing, you won't get very far. I started playing drums, in school, at age 14 and didn't have a drum set until I was 16. Money was tight. By 16, my mother had saved enough money to buy me a snare, bass, hi-hat and ride cymbal. Every other drummer in school had a full set. I played what I had for the next 10 yrs. I got real good at the fundeamentals and could play any type of music with that little kit. It was the love of playing music that accompanied me throughout my life. As I mentioned earlier, when I was 38 I started studying again and practicing 6 hrs. a day, as well as rehearsing twice a week and gigging 5 to 8 times a week. After a year of serious study and practice, if I could think of it, I could play it. It's always about the love of what we are doing. Without that, it's just putting hubcaps on Fords.
a thousand percent! sometimes we don't realize that shit until we're older. but it really is never too late unless one is tied down by obligations to family and job. I had neither, probably by choice. so I had lots of time to devote to my passions. many walk around in a coma, obligations aside, always reminds me of the scene from the Matrix with the woman in the red dress.
See also Mary Harrington's essay in UnHerd: https://unherd.com/2023/11/why-the-fairies-disappeared/
Ted, I think you are sounding out the zeitgeist here!
Shirley. I immediately thought of Charlotte Bronte's least-known novel Shirley. Set during the early industrial revolution when the Luddites were active. Her father was a curate in Yorkshire during this period and wore pistols to go about his business because the mood was so ugly.
She describes the mills being thrown up and actually says something to the effect -- 'and that was the last time the fairies were seen in that field'. Of course, she wouldn't have believed in fairies herself. She was making a point about folk beliefs in the new, rational age.
I think this is one of the most stimulating pieces I have read on Substack and I hope you write a book on it. I want to hear more. This challenges me.
I'm not persuaded, however.
Musically, Western music broke down in the 20th century and is only just starting to be reconstructed. It took centuries of progress for classical music to a place where Romantic music was possible. All sorts of algorithms: scales, triads, time signatures, isorhythms etc. You need all that structure in place to destabilise it, otherwise, you are rebelling against thin air. I feel we are nowhere near that in the reconstruction phase.
Second, there is in a sense a romantic movement in pop music, in the sense of somewhat egotistical artists who play heroic and tragic roles. I won't name names because it's pointed and mean, but if you listen to pop music from the 1930s compared to now, there is far more celebration and examination of the individual in our contemporary culture. Louis Jordan's Five Guys Named Moe almost couldn't happen now, because it's too detached from the artist.
Third, I don't accept the idea that algorithms are opposed to romanticism, as such. I think what we associate with algorithms now is what Silicon Valley has done to them, and that's pretty easy to find offensive and dehumanising, but that's more a commentary of Freedman and Hayek's nightmares manifesting than something quintessential to algorithms. The Alhambra in Granada, Spain, shows that algorithms, beauty, a certain type of romanticism, and God are not mutually exclusive.
If I had to bet, I would say that music, as well as society, is yearning for something more meaningful and spiritual - even if I can't exactly define what that means. The algorithm offers transcendence and an escape from our obsession with self; it also leads to the unexpected rather than simply the coldly calculated, although that does happen. In a culture that has an increasingly nihilistic streak with extreme politics, porn, consumerism, and a breakdown of our living planet happening all around us, I actually expect us to move more towards transcendence and a sense of ambition. I don't think that preludes romanticism, but it is a specific type of romanticism. In fact, the Moors are quite an inspiration to me in that regard, as they seemed to balance the romantic and the intellectual, as well as the corporal and the spiritual in a way that remains exemplary to this day. Our age stands to learn a lot from them.
I absolutely love the idea of your project. I hope you write more about it.