Friday, July 19, 2013

As an example, take this

All crooks and madmen in the Art of the 20th century find inspiration in classical music. The examples in films and movies are countless. Real characters are no exception -Hitler was an extraordinary whistler (although a vulgar and failed painter) and Stalin frequented the Bolshoi. But still, classical music is presented as the music of order, the kind of music the fetus must listen to in order to better develop its internal organism. The order of a symphonic orchestra is reflected and somehow transposed to the order within the baby to be born. Such argument is heard over and over again.

But Classical music calls for something evil in the human nature. It is in the spinal chord of the doomed poets of the Beat Generation, the monsters of Kubrick and the singers of the masculine devils: Bukowski, Bellow and Vonegut. There is nothing instructive in it. Evil is a substance compatible with virtue. In the back-cover note of my cheap edition of Charles Bukowski's Tales of Ordinary Madness, I can read: "In this tales (...), Charles (...) mixes high and low culture, from prostitutes and the philosophy of Kant to despair and classical music, to create his modern dystopia". The murderer was listening to Brahms in Philadelphia in 1942 when the FBI knocked at the door and arrested him. Joseph, the Dangling Man and Bellow's journal keeper, lost control of himself in the house of his brother Amos on the Christmas Day of the same year while listening to Haydn's Divertimento for Cello. There is always a different reading of a well-known composer, full of pain, violence, passion or some other unspeakable human emotion, from Rachmaninoff to Tchaikovsky.

And the madmen and doomed seem to be the only ones to grasp it... . That Evil takes hold of remarkable souls is a uneasy fact and, as an example, you can take this above.

(PLEASE, LEAVE YOUR COMMENT).

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