Paul Christensen's Blog - Posts Tagged "music"

The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy by Bryan Magee

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Wagner, in Magee’s words, was ‘the only major composer who seriously engaged with philosophy’, so any book looking at the philosophers he read is bound to be interesting.

And so it is - where Magee follows Wagner’s early interest in Feuerbach, his earth-shattering discovery of Schopenhauer, as well as the real reasons for Nietzsche’s break with the master (namely the fapping advice incident).

However, the book has a major glaring omission - Arthur de Gobineau. Gobineau’s influence may have arrived too late to affect Wagner’s music and libretti, but Wagner’s fascination with his ideas was by all accounts a very strong one (although he rejected Gobineau’s pessimism, believing as he did in regeneration).

So, it would have been interesting to read about Gobineau’s ideas and how they affected the great man, but Magee dismisses Gobineau in a sentence or two as ‘unimportant’, when by all accounts he was W’s greatest philosophical discovery after Schopenhauer himself.

Magee seems to have written this book as a justification to his liberal friends as to why he likes Wagner so much, trying to make the latter seem philosophically ‘respectable’, but at the expense of truth. (To be fair, Magee lives in the UK, where it would be illegal to objectively discuss Gobineau’s ideas). So, while this book sheds valuable light on Wagner’s work, I can’t award it very high marks.



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Listen to This by Alex Ross

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


The description of the mausoleum-like atmosphere of a typical classical concert (on pp.20-21) is very funny. What Alex Ross doesn’t consider, however, is that (mainly white) audiences listen in silence because it’s their ancestral heritage, like going to a local museum in an old, old building.

They don’t want noisy cheering every time a catchy melody appears (a la Parisian opera in the early 1800s), which the author seems to think would ‘liven it up’, nor do they want it mixed with jazz, or the orchestra playing Radiohead covers.

The ‘classical concert’ is an elegy for a certain mode of whiteness, a grand whiteness that no longer exists. That isn’t to say the music isn’t brilliant in its own right, but Ross doesn’t consider the unconscious motive of average 2000s concertgoers, who don’t go to hear living composers, not even beautiful ones like Arvo Pärt (which they can buy recordings of if so inclined).

What Ross calls a ‘cold marble facade’ is actually a much-venerated tombstone.

Ross’ broad knowledge of musical history leads him to make many interesting observations, but his taste in contemporary music is pretty mundane (though bonus points for mentioning Skrewdriver(!)).

The chapter on Radiohead is revealing: the band are as airheaded as their music is boring!

References to Kurt Cobain’s ‘suicide’ make the book appear a bit dated, as since ‘Soaked in Bleach’ (2014) everyone knows he was bumped off.



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England's Hidden Reverse: A Secret History of the Esoteric Underground by David Keenan

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


This book is a complete whitewash.

In looking at one of the most interesting music scenes of the ‘80s and ‘90s, it removes the more politically incorrect bands (Death In June, Fire + Ice, Allerseelen, Boyd Rice, and even The Moon Lay Hidden Beneath A Cloud) from the picture, thus making World Serpent music safe for ‘consumption’ by oily hipsters in the 2000s (Tony Wakeford, after jumping through hoops to prove what a good ‘anti-fascist’ he is, gets a token pat on the head).

The same hipsters who leeched onto anodyne black metal bands like Wolves in the Throne Room, scrubbing ‘problematic’ bands like Burzum and Graveland from history in good Orwellian fashion.

When hipsters leech onto something, you know it’s past its creative prime.

In 2020, David Tibet gives art shows in galleries whose curators hold his religious views in amused contempt.

Was the ‘respectability’ really worth it?



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