This or That.

B

blissblogger

Well-known member
luka said:
so blake is doing this very consciously and crucially it's how he's reading dante and milton (and chaucer and so on and so forth) and yeats is also writing like this very consciously and deliberately and he is also reading poets of the past in this way.
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have you read Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence? is it about this kind of Oedipally freighted relationship of revision of earlier poets by current poets, who then become ancestor poets to the next wave of poets

gist of it is that no great poetry is written without the anxiety of influence (i.e. feeling that all been said before, nothing original is left to be said) and that a great poem is "an achieved anxiety" - there a various ruses of revision, displacement, incorporation etc etc that poets use to defeat their ancestors

that's a bit off topic admittedly

but you can map it onto music (or indeed onto music journalism)
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
no but ive seen you quote or reference it numerous times! the stuff up there is more about a specific tradition and way of working. a particular expanded (arguably to the point of madness) sense of metaphor.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
becasue i tend to view these things (the dark materials of creation) as actually existing im a little less interested in influence and more interested in who has been where and what have they brought back with them. im getting too far away from where i started the thread but i just wanted to give a sense of where im coming from. some of the basic assumptions that underlie the questions im asking.
 
B

blissblogger

Well-known member
yin versus yang

i would be wary of over-valorizing the yin terms in this schema - ie. flow, surrender, yielding, relaxing, loosening, blurriness etc - and wary of a sort of reflexive impulse to devalue the yang terms like dynamism, drive, clenching, assertion, fanaticism, focus, definition

there's a lot to be said for will

even a musician who's dedicated his life to yin-niness e.g. Eno - is clearly driven, ambitious, fanatically committed to chasing his ideas to fruition

to make masterworks that aurally depict a kind of haemorrhaging of the will into reverie and trance - e.g. On Land - involves a fair bit of work and mastery
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
i would be wary of over-valorizing the yin terms in this schema - ie. flow, surrender, yielding, relaxing, loosening, blurriness etc - and wary of a sort of reflexive impulse to devalue the yang terms like dynamism, drive, clenching, assertion, fanaticism, focus, definition
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i think you are familiar enough with my taste in music to realise there is never any chance of me undervaluing will!
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
it's really impossible to make music which stands entirely at either one pole or the other. it reminds me of the Yeats book, 'A Vision', in which phases of the moon all stand in for various types of character all except for the 2 extremities, which can never exist on this earth!

Twenty-and-eight the phases of the moon, The full and the moon’s dark and all the crescents, Twenty-and-eight, and yet but six-and-twenty The cradles that a man must needs be rocked in: For there’s no human life at the full or the dark.
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but having said that the music which falls under your masculine armour umbrella includes a lot of my most cherished things.

http://www.yeatsvision.com/Phases.html

http://www.yeatsvision.com/Wheel.html

http://www.yeatsvision.com/Human.html

http://www.yeatsvision.com/28Incarnations.html
 
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luka

luka

Well-known member
megalomania, bombast, aggression, anger, self-assertion, pride, delusions of grandeur, elephantitis of the ego, these are some of my favourite things.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
im not remotely interested here in creating hierarchies of value. i suppose partly im proposing a way of listening and a way of interpreting and a way of communicating. it's not something i've made up, as i've said, i find it in your (reynolds) work and i find it in more brilliant than the sun.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
incidentally these

what does music evoke (shapes, colours, movements, people, places, smells, etc.)?

how does it evoke it?

why does that feature evoke that feeling?

can we find common ways to express the same thing musically (if i want to express x how do i ‘say’ it musically? what luka calls language)?
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are all very good questions and to the point.

so think about them!
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
what does music evoke ?
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a particular way of moving for instance. precise, yet gentle, graceful movement let's say. then ask again, what do those movements mean? a particular attitude towards self presentation. and that predicated by a particular scale of values. what are these? where on the natural-cultivated axis for instance? the desire-sublimation axis. how is sexual display codified here?

or if the movements mapped out by the music are wild? undisciplined. unstructured.
or if that wildness is contained within a formal pattern. the sounds just as loud and violent but adhering to an exquisitely precise and complex pattern.

what attainments and understanding have been valued here? what is the implicit scale of values?
what does it aspire to?
what is the good life?
how is time structured? and what pace does it move at? what does it feel like to be in a body moving at that tempo, and in that rhythm?

can you place yourself in a body that moves like that? or is something preventing you from moving in that way? why?
not so long ago it was important for members of the upper classes to sit bolt upright. the back rigidly straight. why?

is it redolent of an era? which era? what is it that ties it to its time? or what is it about its time that is preserved within it?
a comportment? a psychological attitude? a bearing towards the world? how is that enacted in the music?
 
B

blissblogger

Well-known member
yango tango

luka said:
elephantitis of the ego
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love it!

that is a favorite thing - at least for me - only when it's occurring at some distance, i.e. in music, writing, film - and you can turn it off

but when it's e.g. your dad, who is the one with the paranoid delusions of grandeur it's less entertaining

or indeed the President of the USA

this Presidency is essentially like a Ted Nugent stage performance

(or a Ted Nugent talk radio show)
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
yeah well, these are all ways of reading trump as well as ways of reading music. or rather ways of reading how trump presents.

we all do these things all the time so it might seem a little superfluous or quixotic me trying to spell them out like this.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
so this is what i'm referring to when i say

As the dial is turned different kinds of
greatness
become possible
NEW HORIZONS come into focus
Altered capacities for feeling/OTHER INTENSTIES.
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does that make sense?
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
This thread has been bleeding into my thoughts all weekend believe me.

What I'd like to know is how (if at all) these ideas you're exploring influence your taste in music, or if they explain them to you in any way - in other words, what's music got to do with it?

I don't want to either defame your views or make myself look like a clot but I noticed how you say that you don't want to set out a hierarchy of values. What strikes me about that is you clearly DO have a sense of a hierarchy of aesthetic value, one you express passionately and eloquently and often hilariously on here. So what I wonder is, are these ideas changing your way of listening to and valuing music or "simply" conforming the validity of what you already feel?
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
What I like about this thread or this line in particular is that it makes music matter in a spiritual sense... I'm sure this is how many people feel already and how I often feel and seek to feel, but it's hard not to feel a nihilistic indifference to art sometimes, in a materialist age. I am amazed and excited to think that reading Yeats e.g. could somehow heighten my appreciation for, I dunno, Foul Play or something.
 
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