Yes indeed - especially since, with the best (or in certain unnamned cases the worst) will in the world, anyone's views here on his "social attitudes" will inevitably at best be derived from conclusions drawn from reading certain of his literary writings rather than from personal correspondence from him or meetings with him.

Best,

Alistair

Or from the music. Many composers have seen their work as being about expressing and communicating a world-view - some succeed in so doing.

Do you mean in his specific case or generally or both?

Whether or not he does and whether or not anyone else here does, would it be an inevitable necessity for any expression whatsoever about his "musical attitudes" to include his "social or cultural attitudes", especially since (as I have already observed) any commentary on the latter will almost certainly not have been derived from direct contact with the composer?

Best,

Alistair

Have they and do they indeed? All their work? For every listener, without fail? Never mind the answer to that right now - what about Sorabji in this context (since he is the subject of the thread)? You, for example, have in the past claimed to hear all of his non-musical attitudes in his music (although you have yet to explain the hows, whys and wherefores of this in specific terms), yet not every listener to his music will claim to do the same, whether or not they approve of either his music or what they may or may not understand about his non-musical attitudes.

Best,

Alistair

Like with jokes about black people, Asians, Irish, etc.? Dear me, when people object it's 'political correctness gone mad'.....

Sorabji wrote in praise of such composers as Mahler, Busoni, Szymanowski, Alkan, Liszt, Medtner, York Bowen, Van Dieren etc at a time when these composers were underappreciated. I applaud him for this. I find much of his social and political outlook abominable. The music of such composers as I've listed above is not abominable. This is the essence of the point I addressed to Poivrade.

Oh, I'm sure you know that.

As I've said on countless occasions, but you've evidently forgotten, to do so in detail would be an essay, which would be lost on you anyhow, I reckon.

Perhaps instead, as you have your own moral crusade against feminist musicology and the like, you'd like to explain why, when I taught a course on music and society that included study of feminist work on music, the (predominantly female, by a large margin - but that was true of many courses) students generally clicked very immediately with a lot of what was being said, finding it provided an explanation of something they'd felt innately for a long time about various music, whether Schumann or Stockhausen. In the case of the latter and similar work, despite my best attempts to interest them in the music, many found the critiques of such music a lot more immediate and relevant than other claims made for the music itself (and some wrote excellent essays on such subjects). Now, that's not my view, but it did make me think that one should take seriously how others might hear this sort of work, and realise that all the customary baggage that accompanies it should be questioned from time to time. A lot of music that purports to achieve some grandiose ends can sound like little more than an expression of male egotism to some women.

Quite simply the reasons are very similar to those in Wagner, the ideological nature of whose rhetorical approach have been analysed with great subtlety by many - though there are vastly fewer redeeming factors in Sorabji. I don't go into it because I really can't be bothered with all the pedantic stuff and failure to see the bigger issues that I know will be forthcoming from you, and also because I'm not really interested in talking about KS any longer (if I remember rightly, I did give some precis when talking back at TOP on the subject, in response to autoharp asking for more; after hearing people commend the Transcendental Studies, I went off to hear them, hoping to find something different, but if anything they were worse, and so posted on those). I'd recommend reading Adorno's In Search of Wagner, in many ways his best book on music, and one which has been vastly influential on hermeneutical studies of Wagner since then.

As far as 'moral crusades' are concerned, the fact that relentlessly you want to come in on numerous different sites to attempt to refute any suggestion that music might have something to do with gender, ethnicity, sexuality, class, etc., speaks for itself. That's what I would call a crusade. Why are you so bothered to do so otherwise?

If anyone really wants more detail on these subjects, then we should have a different thread concerning 19th/early 20th century aesthetics and Weltanschauung, their varying relationships to right-wing ideologies, and how these composers (often very consciously) set about their compositional work so as to make these things manifest. A complex subject; what has been ascertained and analysed by a very wide range of thinkers looking at various different art forms in this respect often gets to the heart of lots of things I've merely felt instinctively beforehand, or helped to bring about a wider understanding of what is at stake in certain seemingly innate reactions. But I sort of imagine from various quarters we would get the usual anti-intellectual, anti-musicological, anti-theoretical platitudes. It's very much a no-go area for those who have a lot vested in the innate value and importance of such work.