To what degree will you support musicians who (openly, possibly or jokingly) include racist, sexist, homophobic, or bigoted messages in their music, or who privately hold such beliefs?

gotta go but it just occurred to me when someone asked for good "Wagner substitutes", besides Bruckner I should have piped up about Liszt's 13 Symphonic Poems; Wanger quarried many many of the musical building blocks for his mature operas from these (and a lot of the other blocks from... wait for it... Mendelssohn!) and good grief we even talked abt Liszt a bunch and it didn't come to me.

anyway, I'm out, going to see Agalloch tonight!

I don't see anywhere where aero is advocating having a board set up that polices people's music/musicians for offensive

This is pretty much what ILM is tbqf.

^^ was gonna say

which does not make me try to arrive at an aesthetic that will allow me to enjoy & support their nazi music.

maybe you should think about why you were attracted to music made by nazis in the first place lol - like maybe there's something valuable for you to learn by considering, y'know, what you have in common with them

"these guys are nazis but I enjoy their music so I'll put that aside"

also nowhere have I said anything should be put aside - if it's in the work, and the work is good, it should be dealt with and acknowledged

if it overwhelms the work and poisons it, then the work isn't any good and isn't worth your time

the thing is, unless it is excoriating Nazism, I will not find the work to be good

I can appreciate and enjoy fictional, non-reality based fascism because in my mind you are all little puppets for me to play with anyway, but when you start linking to actual historical atrocities in an approving "thumbs up! :-)" manner, I get off the bus.

For some people its very presence in the work is probably sufficiently overwhelming xp

It's not like there's this objective scale of "good <--------> not good," and you weigh it on there and THEN deal with the Nazi stuff.

look this is precisely why these debates about Dick Wanger are good and healthy and interesting - on the one hand there are people who cannot stand his work, the associations are too strong, the implications of anti-semitism in his work too much in the foreground, they ruin it. But others, on this very thread even, can argue against this and delineate how it ISN'T in the work, how the themes and ideas in it can be effectively separated from Wanger's personal views and the music can be enjoyed on a level that has nothing to do with anti-semitism. It comes down to a battle of aesthetics, of interpretation, and this is okay - it is productive to have these arguments. I don't really see how it can be any other way. But as soon as you start saying WAGNER'S MUSIC IS ANTISEMITIC AND SHOULD NOT BE PERFORMED you are on the way to sharing some very unsavory company, far worse than the kind you find in open societies.

Wagner did nothing wrong apart from being enjoyed a lot by Adolf Hitler after his death.

the thing is, unless it is excoriating Nazism, I will not find the work to be good

that's all fine and good, a line in the sand and one I agree with (I can't really think of any explicitly pro-Nazi works I've found to be engaging. I mean Triumph of the Will is fascinating in an academic sense, but I don't really think it's any good. It's clumsy as fuck).

But this is just one line among many. and is also quite a different line from refusing to listen to/read/watch works by people who were privately racist/sexist/homophobic but managed to keep it out of their work

you are saying wagners anti-Semitism is "nothing wrong?

xp to geir

dnftt

XP I suppose it was, but wasn't virtually everyone in Europe an anti-Semitist in the 19th century?

guys can we not

(I continue to be amazed, btw, by the fact that Geir has never been sb'd)

Anyway

Geir stop fucking up this thread. Seriously.

Oh, not the "he likes melody and doesn't care about rhythm so he must be a racist" again.

But really... There is absolutely nothing wrong about Wagner at all. Except Hitler loved him 50 years later. Which he couldn't really help.

http://www.mineralatlas.com/mineral%20photos/A/antimony158a.jpg

Just like it is also wrong to give Nitzsche the blame for some fucked up thoughts by a sick German painter 50 years later as well.

what does Ray Nitschke have to do with this

Ha, I was gonna say, I always liked Nitzche's keyboard playing with Neil Young.

Neil why did you love a Nazi so much you wrote this beautiful song about him

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6OaS3WvABs

hahah

I believe nobody has ever blamed Jack Nitzche of being a nazi... :)
Friedrich though....

goddamnit! thread went way downhill again after shakey scared off aero

i leave work with an interesting discussion going on, log on 3 hours later and find out it's all gone to hell :/

it went all geir hongro

"(I continue to be amazed, btw, by the fact that Geir has never been sb'd)"

Pretty sure he has been actually.

only once. Some were sb'd 3 or 4 times i think

I guess on the upside we got some pretty good intelligent debate...and the other stuff...so, yknow...it at least delivered on both fronts.

I actually just had somewhere to get to

But as soon as you start saying WAGNER'S MUSIC IS ANTISEMITIC AND SHOULD NOT BE PERFORMED you are on the way to sharing some very unsavory company, far worse than the kind you find in open societies.

no, I disagree strongly with this. if saying something "should not" be performed were actually the same as saying "there should be a law against it," your point might stand. there are all sorts of things I think people shouldn't do which they have a perfect right to do. if we were discussing somebody's right to play or hear something, that would be an entirely different discussion.

As to yr other point I don't think there are many day jobs that aren't less important than furthering the cause of human good, not that there's usually much of a choice. But I think forcing benign readings onto Wagner is like...really? anybody can read the libretto to Siegfried & see what's going on. no shortage of art that isn't by a guy who wrote "Jewishness In Music," so fuck him.

counterpoint: opera is, if not an out-and-out 'dead' artform, then certainly one whose best days are behind it and whose appeal is in some irreducible sense 'historical'; therefore, one should take that history at face value and listen to the 'great artists' who were significant in the genre's development, even if they were hateful or bad people by our standards, because anything else is a falsification.

(less a 'benign reading' of Wagner than a decadent reading of European opera, I guess)

Opera is as alive as ever, man, and probably more accessible too imo

I was gonna say

completely ignores the emotional charge of Wagner - art stays alive. We can historicise away - it's easy - but it's dodging the energy and effects on many listeners of eg the Prelude and Liebestod. The wouldn't be quite so much fire in the discussion if this were just about someone 'important' but not so connected to the emotional sound-world of now (Wagner influence in film soundtracks?).

But really... There is absolutely nothing wrong about Wagner at all. Except Hitler loved him 50 years later. Which he couldn't really help.

"As a virulent anti-semitic nationalist, I am shocked and appalled that this virulent anti-semitic nationalist loves my music." - Wagner's ghost, 1933

It's okay to love the "Liebestod" when Buñuel used it cos he was taking the piss.

Also want to add that ppl shouldn't be treating 19th-century anti-semitism like it's one thing, or universal, or static: judging by what I read in essay linked above, W is far beyond the polite shitness that seems pretty commonplace.

Exactly! As has been noted, Nietzsche broke with Wagner over the latter's anti-Semitism, George Eliot wrote a major novel about it, it was by no means a default 19th Century fact of life. The fact that there were more racists and the upper levels of society were freer to express their racism doesn't mean that it was some banal unchallenged non-belief. It was the preserve of scumbags.

Why are these always the most popular threads?

Dunno, start a thread about it.

POLL: why are these always the most popular threads?

1. It's an interesting, complicated topic.
2. Clusterfuck!

ow man, wagner was an anti-semite? why does ilx want to spoil everything for me?

:(

POLL: why are these always the most popular threads?

1. It's an interesting, complicated topic. there's only one way to find out..
2. Clusterfuck!

xps

Right - in Victorian Britain, there's Eliot & Browning as positively philo-semitic, Disraeli of course, & Dickens going out of his way to sort things out after falling that way himself with Fagin.

But maybe there's some special reason it's more ok in Germany.

POLL: why are these always the most popular threads?

Because fans of disco and other corporate manufactured music love using racism and homophobia to defend their corporate taste.