All good music comes from religion

I mean qu'ran refers to abraham, Jacob and Moses as muslims. but muslim in prophets time meant hanif, submitter to God. otherwise the idea that Ibrahim could be muslim as we understood it after the umayyads is a load of tosh.

pattycakes_ said:

the bitter sweetness

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truly

a minor Chicago legend, that one

indicted for a massive pyramid scheme back in the 80s, still preaches in I believe (could be wrong) Hyde Park these days

If you define "good music" as music that goes beyond music as mere entertainment, then the thread-title-statement is correct in many occasions.

There are similarities between devoted believers (of any religion) and devoted fans of certain genres (and/or bands, musicians). There is also this communal aspect of joy, to be in e group of like-minded devotees, which gives peopel a sense of strong community. And then there is also the aspect of concert or rave/party as an extra-ordinary time which transcends the drudgery of every day life. There is also this notion of the rockstar as a shaman-type figure.

All I know is the horrors of hell are best evoked, not by listening to black metal, but by listening to "Mr Blobby" on loop for ten minutes. There is no God there, only Blobby.

"how he could explain it? that he'd gazed upon frescoes in Tuscan sunlight, and found a different, easier way to be in the world?"

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This is good. The space, the limpidity of light, the weightlessness of bodies, the absence of tension and strain, the soothing, muted colours, the implicit warmth (but not heat) in Fra Angelico's world (not just in the world of his paintings but actually in his air, under his sun and sky) could give that to you. Something you could take away with you. There is no striving there.

Is it in the story of art that Gombrich contrasts two Rennassaice self portraits, an Italian and a German? And remarks on how the self conscious intensity (strain) projected in the German is entirely absent from the Italian.

I think also of Pound talking about the climate the troubadours enjoyed which allowed "the nerve set open" not, as in harder climates, armoured and closed in. These are basic and to some extent forced bodily, primary orientations towards the world and certainly art can give you access to this level. Metaprogramming the human biocomputer as Lily had it.

But it is a question of need. Many people need the other thing, to draw the cord tauter, to lose that slackness of the spirit.

luka said:

This is good. The space, the limpidity of light, the weightlessness of bodies, the absence of tension and strain, the soothing, muted colours, the implicit warmth (but not heat) in Fra Angelico's world (not just in the world of his paintings but actually in his air, under his sun and sky) could give that to you. Something you could take away with you. There is no striving there.

Is it in the story of art that Gombrich contrasts two Rennassaice self portraits, an Italian and a German? And remarks on how the self conscious intensity (strain) projected in the German is entirely absent from the Italian.

I think also of Pound talking about the climate the troubadours enjoyed which allowed "the nerve set open" not, as in harder climates, armoured and closed in. These are basic and to some extent forced bodily, primary orientations towards the world and certainly art can give you access to this level. Metaprogramming the human biocomputer as Lily had it.

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You should read those Mantel books Luka, they are profoundly beautiful.

One thing I've discussed briefly with barty is how art, actually doing the thing, plugs you into the larger weather patterns: the low pressure zones, the sun bursts and thunder storms when the tension breaks. These larger energy fields which pass over us and interact with us, that we are made puppets of.

"Only watch the weather
as the sky does change
or the seasons in
quick-slip succession"
JH Prynne.

luka said:

I think also of Pound talking about the climate the troubadours enjoyed which allowed "the nerve set open" not, as in harder climates, armoured and closed in. These are basic and to some extent forced bodily, primary orientations towards the world and certainly art can give you access to this level. Metaprogramming the human biocomputer as Lily had it.

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Sidebar (of doubtful relevance to the thread) - but luka might find it interesting

In... early Anglo-Saxon poems I find expression of that quality which seems to me to have transformed the successive arts of poetry that have been brought to England from the south. For the art has come mostly from the south, and it has found on the island something in the temper of the race which has strengthened it and given it fiber. And this is hardly more than a race conviction that words scarcely become a man. - Ezra Pound

Each place has its specific qualities in other words, right corpse? You can track these things right across the curvature of the earth, watching the sensibility shift with longitude and latitude.

Stories like The Fall are multi dimensional and can be mapped onto and give flesh to so many different but interlinked events. They can't be ironed out into 2 dimensions. It's PKDs living plasmate.

The plasmate is real.

I'd also kick against the notion that the religious impulse and the religious experience is synonymous with striving for transcendence. Often it is about the plateau. Extending it. Staying on it. Learning how to live there.

I would add that there is a difference between meditation and prayer.

luka said:

A typology of various religious tendencies as manifested in music would be possible.

From pentecostal fervour to ambient retreat to inner sanctum and stillness. The gamut.

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There is a whole range of experiences here. A spectrum from stillness to pandemonium.

There's a Prynne poem called 'The Kirghiz Disaster'

Can't remember. I'm just going to see if I can get a haircut but I'll look for you later today. I'm wondering if it could be our plasmate at work?

Ok that's today's big task completed. I'll look up the poem now.

This turned up on my feed yesterday

Joseph Pieper https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/07/27/josef-pieper-only-the-lover-sings/

Music articulates the inner dynamism of man’s existential self, which is music’s “prime matter” (so to speak), and both share a particular characteristic — both move in time.

The power of religion as a civilising force cannot be denied. You need a sophisticated society to throw up a cathedral and then fill it with art and music. Shame none of it makes any sense within the framework such a sophisticated society inevitably adopts to manage its affairs later on.

Unfortunately it's probably too long to type out on a malfunctioning smart phone. 8 sections in all. I'll do the first for you.

1. The news comes in from the Tarim Basin,
that the passes are blocked by fresh falls. Ice forms
upwards from the floors of gravel & inwards
from the sides, the train is halted by needs quite
unforeseen in its schedule. Rock tumbles in
pretty cascades. The base-line of the 'time is
money' quadrant shifts to take up new stress;
only the line of major ripple still twists
free, trapping air under the crystal. The muse
in reckless theophany gives a familiar yell:
juniper, moss agate, jurassic boredom glows in
the empty waiting room. The fire is an unreal
mixture of smoke and damp; the reason for
this is unmusical, in stoic silence by the door.

2. Readable at Easter, the arrows flash to the lonely
mark and spell ruin quite quickly, in fact make
up the letters in triple nourishing layers. Beyond
this, light and some kind of extraction, the heart-
felt sighs drawn off like grass- there's nothing in
the way of dawn with its bald patches, why don't the
men on the other side get up & do it? The heart
has its excuses, no friend waits who has not met
the postman half-way down the beach, calmly in-
different. Wake up wake up he shouts through the
open window and you reach for the time, feeling
the warm air & its wax. Otherwise the rest is just
absolute; right down at the foot of the butress a mark
of wasted affection lies awry, all falling apart.