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/
We're about the same age, I believe. I read C&D cover-to-cover from the seventies through the nineties. My Dad, being a fighter pilot sports car nut always had a subscription, and when I left home I did for many years. Backfires first, then a David E. Davis column, then the car stuff. I gave up when DED left, their page layouts became indecipherable, the editorials became lame, and they gave up their "save the manuals" campaign and embraced EVs. Road an Track is just as exciting these days. Oh well, I'm an old fart who remembers the good ol' days...
Thanks for the O'Rourke piece. Strangely, I had read it previously at Discount Tire or a doctor's office, but it was a fitting tribute.
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.
I have to say that Ted has the most (I actually hate this word) diverse readership on the web. Conservatives, commies and gearheads who all manage to (mostly) get along just fine. I still take the E out of the garage on weekends when the weather is nice; I need to drive it more often, for sure. At least it has the only things a car needs to be enjoyable: A gas pedal, brakes, a clutch, and a great thrust-to-weight ratio. My former daily driver, a 93 MR2 with all the same attributes died about two years ago, and my wife wouldn't let me have it repaired (again). Maybe the most fun car to drive i've ever driven, including the Porsche, Corvettes, etc. The one car I'd most like to flog around would be a Lotus Elise, the exemplar of all the things I'vve mentioned above.
Thanks again for the reminders of the good ol' C&D days Rex.
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.)
I think your own inner Romantic may be coloring, in a bit too rosy a light, your view of Romanticism—and the present moment. What we are living through now is not just the triumph of Enlightenment rationality, a sort of ultra-modern, computerized version of Blake’s satanic mills, but its unholy alliance WITH Romanticism (i.e. Modernism). Isaiah Berlin argued that the heart of Romanticism is the belief in the primacy of the self and its power to construct reality. What is the Internet but an apotheosis of science and technology serving a culture of narcissism, an infinite field of metallic poppies where each of our individualities can frolic in the joy of being its own brand? We’ve already got plenty of Romantics—a world-wide digital population of 5.3 billion. I shudder to think what will happen when those 5.3 billion users encounter, without the aid of Beethoven’s gift, the inner darkness out of which Ludwig could compose.
They - we - are already encountering it. For me the most interesting thing about the internet as a techno-social phenomenen is that it didn't deliver the "age of reason on steroids" as advertised. Instead, it reveals our own dark underbelly. Even its technical progress was fuelled more by porn than by intellect.
Yeah, that’s ripe for a sci-fi satire, Daniel. A tower of bespectacled techno bros in cubicles writing 2.8 trillion of lines of code so that the ids of 5.8 billion porn addicts can jack off to 100,000 sexual fantasies. Brave New World indeed.
I don’t disagree. That is why the next corrective trajectory will have different facets. This upcoming “romanticism” will have a different operative thesis too. But the same heart as the last romanticism. We must be like Tolkien’s Hobbits - subverting the machinations. A reconnection of the internal life in order to help heal the collective life.
You’re onto something. Enlightenment rationality, your term, leads me to think that the rationality of that period, which produced structural changes in daily life, the concept then may be materially different from the construct we understand rationality to be today. Back in the day, it seemed rational to set up manufactories to keep idle hands busy, including children. The idea was to produce material goods to trade, not to build the economy from the middle down and up to benefit humankind. Blake and the Luddites shared an disgust for this rational bludgeoning of the spirit. Neorationalism embraces the digital, not the analogic, and the situation is reversed. Now it’s rational to demand the analogic, vinyl records, handwritten letters, watermarks verifying purity of human origin. Now we have huge crowds of the great unwashed gathering live in stadiums to hear the newest musical composition. It’s profitable. Where do your images come from? Except for backward holes in the Earthly fabric like Arkansas, we send kids to school, not to meat packing factories. We teach them poetry, music, and art, preparing them to hang onto their soul through an adult life of repetitive intellectual drudgery running trophy shops or digging French drains. Even in the poorest public schools, it is rational to value critical thinking and individual argumentation despite the fact that conversational AI can produce far better analysis, synthesis, and editorials than your average middle school kid in an inner city school. Romanticism today takes on a different relationship with rationalism, perhaps calling for new theoretical frames around the concepts. You’ve tickled my brain. I think you have the seeds for a useful and necessary book for a lay audience like me.
I've been chewing on this since you posted it, Terry. Lemme see if I can paraphrase what you are saying. We often think of rationality as unchanging, a synonym for logic. But you seem to be saying that "rationality" is a social practice of logic, and as such it is subject to a kind of Overton Window of what is considered "rational;" it therefore changes with social change. In Hard Times, for instance, Dickens satirizes the "rationality" of the Utilitarians as anything but "rational" since it ignores the needs of the human spirit. The original form of Romanticism was born out of a reaction against Enlightenment rationality (i.e. the application of scientific law to human problems for social progress). You seem to be suggesting that a New Romanticism (of the kind Ted might be intuiting), born as it would be in a digital age of AI, would necessarily look different from its original incarnation. Does that sound about right?
Yes. I don’t think of rationality as a synonym for logic, however. Logic can be context and content free. In other words, a conclusion could be logical but irrational. Logic from Aristotle forward involves premises, terms, distributions, etc. Symbolic logic removes cognition completely from content. Rationality seems more context dependent. For example, it seemed rational to have children work twelve hours a day. We see that as irrational today. Science has two echelons of cognition--logical in that assumptions of the major premise are supportable, the minor premise is supported by evidence, and the conclusion follows accordingly. Then the question--are this conclusion and its implications rational (sane) or irrational (beyond the pale). Logic is formal; rationality is contextual, relative, cultural, content driven. Romanticism as you know it is much more nuanced and complex than my knowledge of it, but it seems right that the symmetry between enlightenment/Blake and AI/vinyl records holds.
I guess the fallacy and weakness of comparing the empty solipsism of the early 21st century with the culturally rich movement of the early 19th century has to do with the chasm between an empty culture and a rich one. Not talking about money here.
I’m not sure about this chasm WR. It’s an historical development, no? The Romanticism of the early 19th century was largely an elite cultural phenomenon, and as a vein for artistic innovation to mine, it was definitely rich, but the seeds of its degradation into the empty solipsism of our global high tech consumer culture were there all along. Byron’s poetry is sublime, but his appalling abandonment of his poor mistresses and his bastard children, anyone who might have gotten in the way of the free development of his glorious self, not so much. Hell, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein already looks over the “chasm” to just this empty solipsism of the early 21st century. From Byron to Cobain Romantic rebels have been milking the Satanic allure, no doubt a rich vein for artistic creation because of its commitment to feeling as an authentic expression of self, but as a mature worldview, it seems woefully inadequate, adolescent at best.
Two replies: 1) seeds are one thing, riotous growth quite another; and 2) critiques of public artistic accomplishments by referring to personal behavior is probably unfair and certainly not cogent, I think.
I’m sorry if I wasn’t clear. I didn’t intend to smear Byron’s artistic accomplishments. They stand as glorious as ever; nevertheless, they are founded on an philosophy of life the inadequacies of which are patent in the man and his life. It does wonders for the art, but degrades the man; we are none of us just artists.
At the risk of repeating, artistic and private life could but need not reflect on each other. Many great artists are terrible people and many great people are terrible artists.
Surely you mean postmodernism's unholy alliance with romanticism? After all, what is equity other than a counter enlightenment desire to shift the Enlightenment progress from status to contract, back to a journey from contract to status on the basis of arbitrary traits?
A modernist approach would entail expanding access to equality of opportunity, rather than trying to equalise outcomes post hoc. It would employ the type of Rawlsian redistribution seen in the Nordic Model, with perennially low Gini coefficients but also conceding the inevitability of some of the highest wealth inequality scores in the world (other than America).
The main focus would be on increasing social mobility for the bottom 60%, irrespective of race, attempting to reverse the commodification of elite education, to reverse stratification on the basis of any factor other than raw ability. Oxbridge now limits the 6% of nation's privately educated to 30% of available places. Their very rough psychometric tests shows this goes a little bit too far, but it's a far cry from the lack of natural meritocracy found in elite American education, where wealth often matters more than cognitive ability.
Above all, modernism would resist the insistence upon interjecting 'other ways of knowing' into STEM curricula- perverting the scientific method with unfalsifiable dogmas. Postmodernism on the other hand, has long rejected Karl Popper. After all, how can one have postmodernism, when there is such a thing as observable and measurable truth?
You're right about the narcissism- but I think it's also an artefact of child-centred, rather than teacher-led instruction. Learning through exploration can give the false impression that hard things are easy. A while back I was researching soil sequestration (purely out of interest). I came across a YouTube video probably aimed at 8 to 10 year olds. It seemed to be leading children to the conclusion that a reversion to subsistence (traditional) farming would help fight climate change. An American friend told me of a recent PBS special which defamed the work of Norman Borlaug, the man who saved a billion lives (though some sources put the figure at only 500 million). My friend was rightly furious.
Thinking of the Romantic movement in terms of class dynamics gets interesting. Circa 1800, in France, the rational Revolution had collapsed and was being replaced by a new, rising aristocracy. The wealth created by the rationalism of the 18th century created a new, wealthy consuming class as exemplified by Les Incroyables et Les Merveilleuses. The case was similar in England as a rising middle class "sank the shop" and merged with the aristocracy spawning countless Regency romances. I expect there were similar developments in what are now Germany and Italy. The customers for the Romantic movement were this new consumer class. It wasn't a military aristocracy or one of jurisprudence or even one of production. It was more an aristocracy of pose, amusement and style.
I am a romantic myself, but I am aware that this is a luxury, one paid for by the sacrifices of others before me. So many tyrants and monsters have been romantics and have attracted romantics as followers and henchmen that I distrust my own instincts in this regard. I am more than willing to enjoy the romantic gesture, but I always watch the hand very closely.
The class dynamic gets particularly interesting when applied to architecture and urban vs. rural migration patterns. Basically, the new rising mercantile class created great civic centres, cathedrals to modernity, and were full of public-minded and public spirited virtues when they actually lived in the cities. But they quickly moved out to the fashionable suburbs, and, where possible, even went as far as returning to a rural setting. Predictably, urban areas quickly suffered from the worst forms of neglect. It doesn't bode well for our modern paradigm, with higher income, higher status individuals quickly becoming the most likely to remote work.
Interesting piece of French history! Here in the UK we had Cromwell and the puritans. It didn't take. 'The tyranny of others' always seeks to reinvent itself, just as the healthy urge to rebel against those who would lecture, censor and preach, eventually ousts the moral authority of those who would seek to counter their own inner misery by controlling others.
As I stated, I'm a big fan of romantic art movements- but overall I think the human race would be far healthier, happier and wealthier if we sought to tend to our own inner gardens, rather than engaging in the post-adolescent fantasy of externalising our own inner unhappiness into a lens which actively seeks out perceived unfairness in the world and, ultimately, change as a mechanism for self-elevation, especially of the social variety.
Is the world unfair? Of course. But it's mostly a matter of stupidity rather than malice. Above all, why look for deep problems when easy answers feel so much better?
As a child of the 1960s, I also have reservations about the romance of political action. It can take us terrible places. One can't ignore the romantic movements of the 1930s in Germany and Russia. Still, I can't dismiss the impulse completely. Look at the reform movements that gathered steam in the 1830s. I read a book, Bury the Chains, about the abolitionist movement which was probably the first mass market reform movement. A good number of its supporters were motivated by a romantic idea of making a better world. They had everything a modern reform movement would have except tote bags(*) and web sites. The audience was the new, rising middle class, and, for all their flaws, they had some successes that others could build on.
(*) It is possible that they did have tote bags, but the book didn't mention them.
Good point about the abolitionist movement. UnHerd recently published a natural counter argument. It detailed how anti-slavery zeal in the British Empire led to colonialism in Africa. Of course, the movement was quickly co-opted by more cynical interests, but it's a good example of how moralism can effect foreign policy to the extent that it encourages conflict and conquest...
Although the triumph of the isolated self is more recent. It wasn't a feature of early Romanticism, which was populist and reaching for some sort of collective unconscious. An overly rationalistic approach to life does drive one to isolation and madness. We can't make full use of our powers of reason and language separated from others.
Yeah I think that’s right, Deep Turning. That’s the reactionary, conservative side of romanticism that saw in the Volk, the supranational Self, the salvation of modern man’s alienation. It was used by the Nazis to stir up resentment against their defeat in WWI and became the rotten core of its nationalism and imperialism. It’s hard to tell which is worse, the madness of a runaway REASON, arrogantly self-assured of its intellectual powers, or the madness of losing oneself in the ocean of a collective WILL. It puts me in mind of the refrain of e. e. cummings’ poem “Jehovah Buried, Satan Dead,”—who dares to call himself a man.
And the superindividual Will as foundational was German philosophy's unique and innovative contribution to the Western tradition. It upended the traditional empiricist-rationalist debate that went back to Plato and Aristotle, or to Bacon and Locke on the one hand and Descartes on the other. Kant and Hegel tried to reconcile them, but ended up accidentally hatching the Romantic egg, with Schopenhaur's cosmic Will being the result. In France, Britain and the English-speaking world, Romanticism was individualistic, bohemian, and aesthetic. In the German-speaking world, it became racial, political, and cosmic.
Schopenhauer had no political intent with his philosophy (he was pessimistic and antipolitical), but his idea crossed wires with Germany's unification and its dissatisfaction with the European geopolitical order in the late 19th century. Leni Riefenstahl's first pro-Nazi film was called Triumph of the Will, not accidentally.
While we think of the French Revolution, with its roots in abstract rationalism, and the German Romantic reaction against it as opposites, they are in reality deeply intertwined. You see that especially with Rousseau, the key founding figure of Romanticism, yet also a major influence on the Revolution, with his concept of the General Will (volonté générale). The later stages of the Revolution, with its rule by terror and full mobilization of society for total war, left a deep impression all over Europe, including the then-still disunited Germany.
Hegel tried to capture these complicated direct influence/influence-by-reaction relationships with his concept of dialectic. He lived through and saw it first hand. Pure reason leads to terror and war. A lunge toward freedom leads to dictatorship (Napoleon).
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.
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 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..🎼🎶🎻🪕🌻
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.
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.
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.
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’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.
We're about the same age, I believe. I read C&D cover-to-cover from the seventies through the nineties. My Dad, being a fighter pilot sports car nut always had a subscription, and when I left home I did for many years. Backfires first, then a David E. Davis column, then the car stuff. I gave up when DED left, their page layouts became indecipherable, the editorials became lame, and they gave up their "save the manuals" campaign and embraced EVs. Road an Track is just as exciting these days. Oh well, I'm an old fart who remembers the good ol' days...
Thanks for the O'Rourke piece. Strangely, I had read it previously at Discount Tire or a doctor's office, but it was a fitting tribute.
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.
I have to say that Ted has the most (I actually hate this word) diverse readership on the web. Conservatives, commies and gearheads who all manage to (mostly) get along just fine. I still take the E out of the garage on weekends when the weather is nice; I need to drive it more often, for sure. At least it has the only things a car needs to be enjoyable: A gas pedal, brakes, a clutch, and a great thrust-to-weight ratio. My former daily driver, a 93 MR2 with all the same attributes died about two years ago, and my wife wouldn't let me have it repaired (again). Maybe the most fun car to drive i've ever driven, including the Porsche, Corvettes, etc. The one car I'd most like to flog around would be a Lotus Elise, the exemplar of all the things I'vve mentioned above.
Thanks again for the reminders of the good ol' C&D days Rex.
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.
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.
I think your own inner Romantic may be coloring, in a bit too rosy a light, your view of Romanticism—and the present moment. What we are living through now is not just the triumph of Enlightenment rationality, a sort of ultra-modern, computerized version of Blake’s satanic mills, but its unholy alliance WITH Romanticism (i.e. Modernism). Isaiah Berlin argued that the heart of Romanticism is the belief in the primacy of the self and its power to construct reality. What is the Internet but an apotheosis of science and technology serving a culture of narcissism, an infinite field of metallic poppies where each of our individualities can frolic in the joy of being its own brand? We’ve already got plenty of Romantics—a world-wide digital population of 5.3 billion. I shudder to think what will happen when those 5.3 billion users encounter, without the aid of Beethoven’s gift, the inner darkness out of which Ludwig could compose.
They - we - are already encountering it. For me the most interesting thing about the internet as a techno-social phenomenen is that it didn't deliver the "age of reason on steroids" as advertised. Instead, it reveals our own dark underbelly. Even its technical progress was fuelled more by porn than by intellect.
Yeah, that’s ripe for a sci-fi satire, Daniel. A tower of bespectacled techno bros in cubicles writing 2.8 trillion of lines of code so that the ids of 5.8 billion porn addicts can jack off to 100,000 sexual fantasies. Brave New World indeed.
I don’t disagree. That is why the next corrective trajectory will have different facets. This upcoming “romanticism” will have a different operative thesis too. But the same heart as the last romanticism. We must be like Tolkien’s Hobbits - subverting the machinations. A reconnection of the internal life in order to help heal the collective life.
Yoicks! But yeah...every man a king makes everyone a pauper...
You’re onto something. Enlightenment rationality, your term, leads me to think that the rationality of that period, which produced structural changes in daily life, the concept then may be materially different from the construct we understand rationality to be today. Back in the day, it seemed rational to set up manufactories to keep idle hands busy, including children. The idea was to produce material goods to trade, not to build the economy from the middle down and up to benefit humankind. Blake and the Luddites shared an disgust for this rational bludgeoning of the spirit. Neorationalism embraces the digital, not the analogic, and the situation is reversed. Now it’s rational to demand the analogic, vinyl records, handwritten letters, watermarks verifying purity of human origin. Now we have huge crowds of the great unwashed gathering live in stadiums to hear the newest musical composition. It’s profitable. Where do your images come from? Except for backward holes in the Earthly fabric like Arkansas, we send kids to school, not to meat packing factories. We teach them poetry, music, and art, preparing them to hang onto their soul through an adult life of repetitive intellectual drudgery running trophy shops or digging French drains. Even in the poorest public schools, it is rational to value critical thinking and individual argumentation despite the fact that conversational AI can produce far better analysis, synthesis, and editorials than your average middle school kid in an inner city school. Romanticism today takes on a different relationship with rationalism, perhaps calling for new theoretical frames around the concepts. You’ve tickled my brain. I think you have the seeds for a useful and necessary book for a lay audience like me.
I've been chewing on this since you posted it, Terry. Lemme see if I can paraphrase what you are saying. We often think of rationality as unchanging, a synonym for logic. But you seem to be saying that "rationality" is a social practice of logic, and as such it is subject to a kind of Overton Window of what is considered "rational;" it therefore changes with social change. In Hard Times, for instance, Dickens satirizes the "rationality" of the Utilitarians as anything but "rational" since it ignores the needs of the human spirit. The original form of Romanticism was born out of a reaction against Enlightenment rationality (i.e. the application of scientific law to human problems for social progress). You seem to be suggesting that a New Romanticism (of the kind Ted might be intuiting), born as it would be in a digital age of AI, would necessarily look different from its original incarnation. Does that sound about right?
Yes. I don’t think of rationality as a synonym for logic, however. Logic can be context and content free. In other words, a conclusion could be logical but irrational. Logic from Aristotle forward involves premises, terms, distributions, etc. Symbolic logic removes cognition completely from content. Rationality seems more context dependent. For example, it seemed rational to have children work twelve hours a day. We see that as irrational today. Science has two echelons of cognition--logical in that assumptions of the major premise are supportable, the minor premise is supported by evidence, and the conclusion follows accordingly. Then the question--are this conclusion and its implications rational (sane) or irrational (beyond the pale). Logic is formal; rationality is contextual, relative, cultural, content driven. Romanticism as you know it is much more nuanced and complex than my knowledge of it, but it seems right that the symmetry between enlightenment/Blake and AI/vinyl records holds.
I guess the fallacy and weakness of comparing the empty solipsism of the early 21st century with the culturally rich movement of the early 19th century has to do with the chasm between an empty culture and a rich one. Not talking about money here.
I’m not sure about this chasm WR. It’s an historical development, no? The Romanticism of the early 19th century was largely an elite cultural phenomenon, and as a vein for artistic innovation to mine, it was definitely rich, but the seeds of its degradation into the empty solipsism of our global high tech consumer culture were there all along. Byron’s poetry is sublime, but his appalling abandonment of his poor mistresses and his bastard children, anyone who might have gotten in the way of the free development of his glorious self, not so much. Hell, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein already looks over the “chasm” to just this empty solipsism of the early 21st century. From Byron to Cobain Romantic rebels have been milking the Satanic allure, no doubt a rich vein for artistic creation because of its commitment to feeling as an authentic expression of self, but as a mature worldview, it seems woefully inadequate, adolescent at best.
Two replies: 1) seeds are one thing, riotous growth quite another; and 2) critiques of public artistic accomplishments by referring to personal behavior is probably unfair and certainly not cogent, I think.
I’m sorry if I wasn’t clear. I didn’t intend to smear Byron’s artistic accomplishments. They stand as glorious as ever; nevertheless, they are founded on an philosophy of life the inadequacies of which are patent in the man and his life. It does wonders for the art, but degrades the man; we are none of us just artists.
At the risk of repeating, artistic and private life could but need not reflect on each other. Many great artists are terrible people and many great people are terrible artists.
And what does this duality tell you?
Surely you mean postmodernism's unholy alliance with romanticism? After all, what is equity other than a counter enlightenment desire to shift the Enlightenment progress from status to contract, back to a journey from contract to status on the basis of arbitrary traits?
A modernist approach would entail expanding access to equality of opportunity, rather than trying to equalise outcomes post hoc. It would employ the type of Rawlsian redistribution seen in the Nordic Model, with perennially low Gini coefficients but also conceding the inevitability of some of the highest wealth inequality scores in the world (other than America).
The main focus would be on increasing social mobility for the bottom 60%, irrespective of race, attempting to reverse the commodification of elite education, to reverse stratification on the basis of any factor other than raw ability. Oxbridge now limits the 6% of nation's privately educated to 30% of available places. Their very rough psychometric tests shows this goes a little bit too far, but it's a far cry from the lack of natural meritocracy found in elite American education, where wealth often matters more than cognitive ability.
Above all, modernism would resist the insistence upon interjecting 'other ways of knowing' into STEM curricula- perverting the scientific method with unfalsifiable dogmas. Postmodernism on the other hand, has long rejected Karl Popper. After all, how can one have postmodernism, when there is such a thing as observable and measurable truth?
You're right about the narcissism- but I think it's also an artefact of child-centred, rather than teacher-led instruction. Learning through exploration can give the false impression that hard things are easy. A while back I was researching soil sequestration (purely out of interest). I came across a YouTube video probably aimed at 8 to 10 year olds. It seemed to be leading children to the conclusion that a reversion to subsistence (traditional) farming would help fight climate change. An American friend told me of a recent PBS special which defamed the work of Norman Borlaug, the man who saved a billion lives (though some sources put the figure at only 500 million). My friend was rightly furious.
Thinking of the Romantic movement in terms of class dynamics gets interesting. Circa 1800, in France, the rational Revolution had collapsed and was being replaced by a new, rising aristocracy. The wealth created by the rationalism of the 18th century created a new, wealthy consuming class as exemplified by Les Incroyables et Les Merveilleuses. The case was similar in England as a rising middle class "sank the shop" and merged with the aristocracy spawning countless Regency romances. I expect there were similar developments in what are now Germany and Italy. The customers for the Romantic movement were this new consumer class. It wasn't a military aristocracy or one of jurisprudence or even one of production. It was more an aristocracy of pose, amusement and style.
I am a romantic myself, but I am aware that this is a luxury, one paid for by the sacrifices of others before me. So many tyrants and monsters have been romantics and have attracted romantics as followers and henchmen that I distrust my own instincts in this regard. I am more than willing to enjoy the romantic gesture, but I always watch the hand very closely.
The class dynamic gets particularly interesting when applied to architecture and urban vs. rural migration patterns. Basically, the new rising mercantile class created great civic centres, cathedrals to modernity, and were full of public-minded and public spirited virtues when they actually lived in the cities. But they quickly moved out to the fashionable suburbs, and, where possible, even went as far as returning to a rural setting. Predictably, urban areas quickly suffered from the worst forms of neglect. It doesn't bode well for our modern paradigm, with higher income, higher status individuals quickly becoming the most likely to remote work.
Interesting piece of French history! Here in the UK we had Cromwell and the puritans. It didn't take. 'The tyranny of others' always seeks to reinvent itself, just as the healthy urge to rebel against those who would lecture, censor and preach, eventually ousts the moral authority of those who would seek to counter their own inner misery by controlling others.
As I stated, I'm a big fan of romantic art movements- but overall I think the human race would be far healthier, happier and wealthier if we sought to tend to our own inner gardens, rather than engaging in the post-adolescent fantasy of externalising our own inner unhappiness into a lens which actively seeks out perceived unfairness in the world and, ultimately, change as a mechanism for self-elevation, especially of the social variety.
Is the world unfair? Of course. But it's mostly a matter of stupidity rather than malice. Above all, why look for deep problems when easy answers feel so much better?
As a child of the 1960s, I also have reservations about the romance of political action. It can take us terrible places. One can't ignore the romantic movements of the 1930s in Germany and Russia. Still, I can't dismiss the impulse completely. Look at the reform movements that gathered steam in the 1830s. I read a book, Bury the Chains, about the abolitionist movement which was probably the first mass market reform movement. A good number of its supporters were motivated by a romantic idea of making a better world. They had everything a modern reform movement would have except tote bags(*) and web sites. The audience was the new, rising middle class, and, for all their flaws, they had some successes that others could build on.
(*) It is possible that they did have tote bags, but the book didn't mention them.
Good point about the abolitionist movement. UnHerd recently published a natural counter argument. It detailed how anti-slavery zeal in the British Empire led to colonialism in Africa. Of course, the movement was quickly co-opted by more cynical interests, but it's a good example of how moralism can effect foreign policy to the extent that it encourages conflict and conquest...
https://unherd.com/2021/09/how-liberals-made-the-british-empire/
Although the triumph of the isolated self is more recent. It wasn't a feature of early Romanticism, which was populist and reaching for some sort of collective unconscious. An overly rationalistic approach to life does drive one to isolation and madness. We can't make full use of our powers of reason and language separated from others.
Yeah I think that’s right, Deep Turning. That’s the reactionary, conservative side of romanticism that saw in the Volk, the supranational Self, the salvation of modern man’s alienation. It was used by the Nazis to stir up resentment against their defeat in WWI and became the rotten core of its nationalism and imperialism. It’s hard to tell which is worse, the madness of a runaway REASON, arrogantly self-assured of its intellectual powers, or the madness of losing oneself in the ocean of a collective WILL. It puts me in mind of the refrain of e. e. cummings’ poem “Jehovah Buried, Satan Dead,”—who dares to call himself a man.
https://www.americanpoems.com/poets/eecummings/jehovah-buriedsatan-dead/
And the superindividual Will as foundational was German philosophy's unique and innovative contribution to the Western tradition. It upended the traditional empiricist-rationalist debate that went back to Plato and Aristotle, or to Bacon and Locke on the one hand and Descartes on the other. Kant and Hegel tried to reconcile them, but ended up accidentally hatching the Romantic egg, with Schopenhaur's cosmic Will being the result. In France, Britain and the English-speaking world, Romanticism was individualistic, bohemian, and aesthetic. In the German-speaking world, it became racial, political, and cosmic.
Schopenhauer had no political intent with his philosophy (he was pessimistic and antipolitical), but his idea crossed wires with Germany's unification and its dissatisfaction with the European geopolitical order in the late 19th century. Leni Riefenstahl's first pro-Nazi film was called Triumph of the Will, not accidentally.
While we think of the French Revolution, with its roots in abstract rationalism, and the German Romantic reaction against it as opposites, they are in reality deeply intertwined. You see that especially with Rousseau, the key founding figure of Romanticism, yet also a major influence on the Revolution, with his concept of the General Will (volonté générale). The later stages of the Revolution, with its rule by terror and full mobilization of society for total war, left a deep impression all over Europe, including the then-still disunited Germany.
Hegel tried to capture these complicated direct influence/influence-by-reaction relationships with his concept of dialectic. He lived through and saw it first hand. Pure reason leads to terror and war. A lunge toward freedom leads to dictatorship (Napoleon).
That’s a nice overview, Deep Turning. Thank you for that. Beautifully stated AND clear. Wonderful.
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.
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.
"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..🎼🎶🎻🪕🌻
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.