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Book Review Part II: The Coming of the Third Reich by Richard J. Evans
Nietzsche and WagnerPart II of the Ongoing Critique of: The Coming of the Third Reich by Sir Richard J. Evans.In Part I of this series of this ongoing series of discussions on The Coming of the Third...
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Music and Personality Type Part II
IntroductionIn part I of this series on music and personality, I introduced readers to the Jungian MBTI system of classifying personality types and the theory underlying it. Today, we will go through a...
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Music Genres
One of the things that perpetually amuses me about the popular music world—the world of Adorno's "commodity music"—is how many supposed "genres" there are. Just when you think you know them all,...
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Jean-Paul Sartre: "nefarious and catastrophic"
Today, I am going to stray off my usual philosophico-musicological path and just let off a little intellectual steam that has been building up over about 20 years. I wish to talk about Jean-Paul...
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Derrida and Music: Part I—an Introduction to Postmodernism
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.” Lewis Carroll: Alice in WonderlandMost introductions to...
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Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach
My project to finish Part II on a series on post-modernist approaches to musical semiology and linguistics has stalled, alas. It has proven rather more tricky than first thought. I am having to re-read...
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Derrida and Music: Part II—Music as a Language
La beauté convulsive sera érotique-voilée, explosante-fixe, magique-circonstancielle, ou ne sera pas. Convulsive beauty will be erotic-veiled, exploding-fixed, magical-circumstantial, or it will not be...
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Pop Music: the Most Insidious Form of Capitalist Brainwashing
Remember that the media have two basic functions. One is to indoctrinate the elites, to make sure they have the right ideas and know how to serve power. In fact, typically the elites are the most...
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Derrida and Music: Part III—The Dispute Between Music and Words
In the field of literary criticism Derrida has been an enormous influence, yet his name is seldom to be heard in musicology circles. Musicologists do tend to be rather insular, and often seem oblivious...
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The Freud Files by Mikkel Borch-Jakobsen
I couldn't help noticing that in some Wagner websites on the internet people are talking about Freudian interpretations of Wagner, with Barry Millington being quoted as saying ‘Wagner was grappling …...
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Wagner and Schelling in "The Last of the Titans"
I have been promising readers a review of Joachim Köhler's Richard Wagner: The Last of the Titans (TLT), or in German Der letzte der Titanen (LDT), for a while. I doubt that I have the time and...
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Saul Friedländer on Richard Wagner
Sorry for the long silence but I have been a touch distracted by life. One substantial blog entry a month is the best I can do, but I seem to have skipped a month. It gives me time to think about what...
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Gramophone Article on Tonality Today
While you are awaiting for the appearance of Part II of the series of musicologically oriented critiques of The Rise of the Third Reich, I simply had to comment on the following article by Philip Clark...
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Hegel and the Myth of the Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis Dialectical Scheme
I found myself in a discussion on Twitter about a common "citation" attributed to the philosopher, Hegel, that goes:Truth is found neither in the thesis nor the antithesis, but in an emergent synthesis...
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What Your Music Says About Your Personality
I really should be working on my draft of Part II of the series about the Evans Rise of the Third Reich. But it's heavy stuff, and time consuming, as my approach is quite academic with lots of...
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Time to Get Rid of "Classical" Music
I hope everyone has had a good Christmas and New Years period. It's time for the first entry of the year on this blog.For me, my musical resolution for the start of the year is to get rid of the term...
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Time to Deny the Nazis their One Last Victory
The conductor Daniel Barenboim (who is also Jewish) is famous for saying that it is important that Wagner be played in Israel to deny the Nazis their "one last victory".Today, it occurred to me that...
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Alfred Rosenberg Contra Richard Wagner
One of the publications by a prominent member of the National Socialist ("Nazi") Party during the years of the German Third Empire (Dritte Reich) that has been least studied is that of The Myth of the...
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Did Hitler ever say "whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany...
Is there evidence that Hitler ever said: "whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner"? The simple answer to this question is: no, there is currently no evidence that Hitler...
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Music and Personality Type Part II
IntroductionIn part I of this series on music and personality, I introduced readers to the Jungian MBTI system of classifying personality types and the theory underlying it. Today, we will go through a...
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