(some of the points of mine being replied to have been snipped because the message was too long)
Racial and anti-semitic ideologies are often symptomatic of a wider world-view rather than necessarily being the primary cause. It is that world-view that can be sedimented in music; though specific racial ideologies can also be made explicit through the use of iconic musical materials; I'm not aware of Sorabji doing the latter, though. But I get the impression from the above that you do not really believe that abstract instrumental music does have a social/political dimension?
But by what specific means do you believe it to be so "sedimented"? And do you consider that this "sedimentation" occurs automatically and inevitably, or only if the composer deliberately chooses for it to manifest itself?
All composers interact with historically-derived musical materials (on various levels, can be themes, genres, idioms (and performance idioms), structural processes, etc.). Even those few composers who attempt to create some sort of 'blank slate' music are usually reacting to something else, and so are indebted to it. Those historically-derived materials are deeply informed by a wider history, which incorporates social processes, cultural assumptions, ideologies, etc., though I'm not going to take a reductive view and say they are merely a representation of such things (though in the worst cases they can be; then one gets highly desubjectivised music (or that in which subjectivity is rendered in the manner of a commodity)). If you strongly disagree with this and maintain music's complete autonomy, then there's not much point in us continuing that debate. In terms of your second question, that is all down to the nature and extent of the subjective mediation involved and its manifestations, not least to do with the extent to which a composer develops the immanent potential of the material (and I'm not taking a type of neo-Adornoesque position which would insist that that's the only real way to do it, though I reckon most decent composers do some of that), forces it into line with their 'taste', brings it into a dialogue with other types of material, and so on.
The mysticism is indeed contrived in quite a bit of late Skryabin, emanating as it does from a handful of harmonic exoticisms with which he has little idea what to do other than repeat passages wholescale a tritone apart from their original key, or the like, or the sometimes rather predictable ways of pumping up the textural volume. Not all late Skryabin is like this, some of the figurations show some genuine imagination and spontaneity; in Sorabji's case there is almost none of that, but he did not have the technique of Skyrabin.
No, he had largely different techniques, as one might expect - but then how interesting is the "mysticism" in late Skryabin compared to the best of his musical arguments?
Not particularly interesting at all, but I think a fair number of his musical arguments can be quite weak as well.
In the case of Sorabji, I see little evidence that his 'technique' enabled him to do much more than just spin out a perfumed surface, apply pedestrian accumulations of material, or create over-extended chains of banality with no distinctiveness whatsoever (such as in his fugues).
But that's your personal view, which may be shared by some but certainly not by others.
Of course it's a personal view (or personal conviction, I would prefer to say), I would have thought that the fact that that's true of what anyone says on a board like this goes without saying.
I think you'll find the definition of kitsch I used comes from Dahlhaus. I did refer to it, indeed. 'Tricks' is just a reference to compositional means.
I know that; I merely commented on its relevance here, since Sorabji was neither seeking nor achieved this in his work, nor was he any more interested in circus or other "tricks" when composing than he was in "mysticism" - "misty schism", as he sometimes called it (though I'm fairly sure this was not a term of his own original invention; he was quite wary of the Blavastskyesque, Crowleyan stuff on the basis that it was "contrived" - so "contrived mysticism" was not merely something Sorabji was uninterested in espousing but a phenomenon which he was wont to distrust and felt inclined to avoid.
Well, whatever the intentions in that respect, I'm talking about what I hear in the results. I know some of Sorabji's remarks on others' endeavours in this respect; I think if anything his attempts are even worse.
So you believe that Sorabji was attracted to the work of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Verlaine. etc. and set some of it for quite different reasons than was the case with Fauré, Debussy, etc.; abit convenient, that, surely?
I certainly think it's a distinct possibility, yes, not just because it's 'convenient' to think so, but because it would accord with the rest of his outlook. Anyhow, most composers respond to different aspects of the writers they set - compare the various people who have set Beckett, for example (say Holliger and Feldman).
I haven't explicitly said that his racial theories are made apparent in his music (though I'm not necessarily denying that either).
So what precisely are you saying about them in specific relation to his music, then?
The very point at the top of this message.
Well, I'm quite amazed if you don't think that at the very least Sorabji aspired to grandeur.
I didn't say that. He aspired to many things and I think that he largely achieved what he set out to try to achieve in his work, but there is a difference between genuine and intrinsic grandeur of expression and mere grandiosity for its own sake and I got the impression earlier that it was the latter of which you were accusing him.
Yes, it is. You had previously said 'how empty were certain delusions of grandeur that are of your making rather than his'. The surface affectation of grandiosity would be hard to deny; its banality and emptiness are the reasons I call it delusional.
I think he is 'sad' because he wrote all this portentuous music that reveals his own compositional inadequacy and the emptiness of the claims he made for it.
What's "portentous" about the songs, Fantaisie Espagnole, Un Nido di Scatole, Tessuto d'Arabeschi, Gulistan, etc., etc.?
I was actually thinking of the longer works, their grandiose titles, and so on. I don't know the songs, so can't comment on those. As for some of the others (the
Fantasie Espagnole and
Gulistan I am think of in particular), I come back to the point above; their extravagant surface mannerisms are not matched by any musical substance that I can discern.
My 'supportive evidence' comes from listening to it.
In other words, it is your own personal response, no more, no less - and therefore not a fact.
What qualifies as a 'fact' in the context of talking about music, in this way? You are sounding like a real crusty Gradgrind figure now. On one hand, the drawing in of extraneous stuff from the writings and so on is apparently missing the point, but that criticism that comes from listening is invalid on the basis of being merely a 'personal response'. Maybe you have some access to 'absolute truth' (probably Sorabji himself would have liked to think such things) on such matters?
For articulating how these things are manifest, you would find that my approaches owe a certain amount to earlier writings on Wagner and Stravinsky, by both Adorno and various others (though in modified forms), and other penetrating thinkers on the links between aestheticism, orientalism, certain varieties of romanticism and fascism, including Brecht, Benjamin, Lukacs, more recently Huyssen, Shattuck, Millett, Eagleton, Bordieu, Ahmad and various others (even occasionally McClary - much though I dislike her work, there are some things she identifies that I couldn't deny), though there are some details where I'd take issue with most of them. You could probably work out from that and knowing what else I've written what sort of form such a critique of Sorabji might take.
Yes, I can indeed, although that would be no substitute for reading the finished product; what I observe here is that you risk over-intellectualising your response to his work rather than allowing it to develop on more of a one-to-one basis - not for nothing has Richard Barrett observed that he doesn't need Adorno to tell him whether or not he likes to listen to Stravinsky.
Ah yes, the age-old British anti-intellectual cliches come back. Richard's remark was totally facile; I don't 'need Adorno' to have a view on Stravinsky, I have a view from listening. Adorno and others have investigated that and other music/culture in detail and to my mind come up with sometimes penetrating analyses of how it works, why it does what it does.
Elsewhere, we've heard much on here about the importance of education in helping to 'explain' music to those who are unfamiliar with it or simply find it difficult. I reckon that for both you and Richard, the only legitimate form of 'explanation' is that which reinforces a rather narrow view of what the music is. I think there are many angles from which to approach music and culture, and those which look (in various ways) at it critically in a wider social context can be as illuminating as most. But I know how many musicians want to preciously guard music from being considered in this sense; McClary has a point in that respect.
No, I never had any contact with him, I only know his music, and more recently his writings. Both of these seem to reveal an awful lot - if you are suggesting that they are very far from the reality, on the basis of your experiences, then I'm quite prepared to listen.
In the space I have here, I can tell you only that his salient characteristsics included a warmth, sense of humour and generosity of spirit that are quite at odds with your view of him.
OK, then his public face, as presented through his writings and music, were highly unrepresentative, at least as I read them. 'Generosity of spirit' is the last thing I would associate with him on that basis.
I know plenty about others around that circle and the sort of views they adhere to (not that uncommon in certain types of quasi-mystical cults), however, and it's from that I derive my opinions.
Ian, your are really missing the point here. I have met and corresponded with many people interested in Sorabji's work over the years and would have difficulty in remembering any who belonged to "certain types of quasi-mystical cults".
Cults of personality are themselves generally of a mystical nature.
I am quite taken aback that so many of the Sorabji worshippers (and I'm afraid I do have to include you here) seem so unconcerned at the very least by his hatred for people, democracy, women, espousal of an aggressive form of neo-feudalism (seeing the Indian caste system as a model for society), or the fact that very similar ideologies (and indeed sometimes drawing upon particular appropriations of Eastern philosophies) were deeply entailed in the most pathologically hate-filled and genocidal regime the world has seen.
Then you should get to know your facts better before doing so. Sorabji did not "hate people" per se
I'm sure you recall his comments on the working classes and mackerels, and so on. And there's plenty more where that came from. When I have a bit of time I will dig them out again.
- he simply found the company of quite a few of them uncongenial but maintained a wide network (rather than a circle) of friends of many different persuasions, many of whom did not know one another.
Hmmm - you could say that about many artists who also spewed out vitriolic, dehumanising hatred of vast swathes of people. You know about Lawrence's ideas for extermination chambers?
He didn't "hate women" either. He distrusted "democracy" in many of its governmental manifestations and, frankly, I can't say that I blame him.
From a neo-feudalist position, also to do with racial exclusivity and hierarchies. Again like so many other artists of the time, frustrated by the fact that in a more democratic world, they were no longer automatically granted a high status in society (you should read Carey's
The Intellectuals and the Masses if you haven't done so). What would you put in democracy's place? With respect to women, I'd be interested to know how some women (unfortunately these discussions about music and gender have only been conducted by men on here) would respond to his essay on Women Musicians.
His views about the Indian caste system changed at least as radically as hid his views about Fauré and Richard Struass (about which he published his changes of mind) and Shostakovich (about which he didn't).
Nonetheless, he was quite happy to espouse it in a number of his writings, and didn't seem to have a problem with those being published later on.
Sorabji's views do not seem fundamentally different from those of lots of other artists from the late-19th and early-20th century, just rather more extreme. Now I argue that these views are clearly manifested in the music itself.
We all know that you do, just as we know that you duck the issue of explaining how on the basis that it would take too much time and that this is not the place for such an essay.
There is a serious issue of time (responding to a post like this doesn't take long), and what is at stake would take a whole essay.
I could argue to greater or lesser degrees some of the same principles are at play in Khlebnikov, Mayakovsky, Strindberg, Crowley, Pound or any number of others
You could and you do - but these were people whose business was words, whereas Sorabji's was mainly music.
Ah, and music has no meaning, does it? Perhaps you'd like some examples from the non-figurative visual arts as well? How about Albert Speer, for example, do you not think that his architectural style reflects his wider aesthetic ideologies? Anyhow, in the case of the above writers, I'm not merely talking about 'content' but about form as well (and the two things are rarely entirely separable). The quasi-militaristic approach to language in some of Pound's earlier poetry (things changed a bit with
The Cantos, as he himself realised, not least through his ability to bring this style into a dialogue with others) would be an example.
I do note that you are not prepared to engage with Baudelaire's misogyny, by the way.
And now I will pull out of this thread (maybe these posts should be shifted to another one called 'Sorabji Depreciation'?), after giving one quote from a Sontag essay I gave a link to (
http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/classes/33d/33dTexts/SontagFascinFascism75.htm ) in another thread, which touches on some of the issues at stake here:
More important, it is generally thought that National Socialism stands only for brutishness and terror. But this is not true. National Socialism—more broadly, fascism—also stands for an ideal or rather ideals that are persistent today under the other banners: the ideal of life as art, the cult of beauty, the fetishism of courage, the dissolution of alienation in ecstatic feelings of community; the repudiation of the intellect; the family of man (under the parenthood of leaders). These ideals are vivid and moving to many people, and it is dishonest as well as tautological to say that one is affected by Triumph of the Will and Olympia only because they were made by a filmmaker of genius. Riefenstahl's films are still effective because, among other reasons, their longings are still felt, because their content is a romantic ideal to which many continue to be attached and which is expressed in such diverse modes of cultural dissidence and propaganda for new forms of community as the youth/rock culture, primal therapy, anti-psychiatry, Third World camp-following, and belief in the occult. The exaltation of community does not preclude the search for absolute leadership; on the contrary, it may inevitably lead to it. (Not surprisingly, a fair number of the young people now prostrating themselves before gurus and submitting to the most grotesquely autocratic discipline are former anti-authoritarians and anti-elitists of the 1960s.)
