Today I have been listening to music to spark the mind, to lift the curtain. My mother who was a classically trained musician introduced me to Handle’s Messiah and Mozart’s Great Mass Cm and the Requiems – in Dm and others. If you are keen you can listen via YouTube.
These are uplifting, whilst celebrating Christ it is hard not to be emotional involved when listening, at least this is what happens to me and I am an atheist, but as someone said to me recently you are spiritual. I also listened to some Wagner – the old joke being “Does you name start with a V Mr Wagner, IX W”, anyway, I have always fund his music confronting almost brutal, in modern terms he was heavy metal – the Overture to the Flying Dutchman being a good example: Overture
Wagner had some odd views, the existence of inferior races being one, and his music adopted by the person responsible for the greatest world tragedy yet. It raises the question, which Derrida et al. posited that “there is nothing but the text”, this is the basis of post-modernism, in that literary works can be interpreted and deconstructed in multiple ways, each of equal validity. I have always puzzled on this, Tolstoy as I understand him argued that artistic works, primarily literature I guess, has a serious purpose and the writer should try to communicate clearly, he reportedly was most put out when readers or critics did not interpret his writing the same way he did – play writes like David Williamson are the same . You can image Tolstoy saying to Derrida “You can stick your multilayered post structural analysis – I mean what I say and that is that, there is no other valid interpretation”.
Bob Dylan did not want to be held up as a beacon of rebellion, he reacted against being included into the protest and political movements – I think he was probably saying I am free to write what I write: you are free to interpret in whatever way you wish – Blown in the Wind and Time They are a Changing being the two most adopted songs by the left.
It is interesting when you view a painting, it affects you – or at least some do, it is clearly subjective, but on the other hand how come experts can decide what is a good and bad painting. Doesn’t this imply some level of objectivity, but it is clearly different to the objectivity of Science. All that is happening with art critics is a kind of power over what you should think, hence we had Picasso et al. saying no, the old masters where fine but art is about…..well about what?
My first blog for a while, if you have got this far I am going to update the recent travels and possibly you will find something there, and maybe in what I said above, which is purely my opinion. Love to all.
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