Thursday, February 26, 2015

A Mystical View, Some Quarter Century Before "Interstellar Space"

"Art has no immediate future because all art is collective and there is no more collective life (there are only dead collections of people), and also because of this breaking of the true pact between the body and the soul. Greek art coincided with the beginning of geometry and with athleticism, the art of the Middle Ages with the craftsmen's guilds, the art of the Renaissance with the beginning of mechanics, etc. ... Since 1914 there has been a complete cut. Even comedy is almost impossible. There is only room for satire (when was it easier to understand Juvenal?). Art will never be reborn except from amidst a general anarchy—it will be epic no doubt, because affliction will have simplified a great many things. ... It is therefore quite useless for you to envy Leonardo or Bach. Greatness in our times must take a different course. Moreover it can only be solitary, obscure and without an echo... (but without an echo, no art.)" - Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace





Other philosophers on Interstellar Space are here and here

Tuesday, February 10, 2015

Blues: Coltrane, "Mars" and Harris, Symphony No. 7

The substrate for the best American music is the blues (including van der Merwe’s broader notion of the “popular style”), even when the musician in question is a mid-20th century symphonist: note the variable third in the cello right from the start of Roy Harris’s Symphony No. 3. 




Or take, for example, the strikingly and perhaps unexpectedly similar descending gestures, clearly identifiable as "blues" (4 -♭5 - 4 -♭3 - 1), that end local phrases in both John Coltrane’s “Mars” from Interstellar Space (1967) and Roy Harris’s Symphony No. 7 (1955) — at 1:26 and 6:33, respectively, of the recordings below. (Harris's figure continues with one extra tone, the lower ♭7.)







Brief observations like this don't usually make it to the blog: for more, follow me on Twitter.