True Left

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/west-handed-classical-music-over-060000935.html

First the good news:

Classical music in Britain is in trouble. It’s not merely because the infrastructure of the venues, orchestras and groups that sustain the art form have suffered from underfunding for decades. Nor can we pin all the blame on the body blow that many have just received from Arts Council England (ACE) funding cuts, in which the Britten Sinfonia lost all its funding, the London Sinfonietta lost 41 per cent, and the London Symphony, London Philharmonic and Philharmonia orchestras all lost 12 per cent.

Nor is it solely down to the marginalisation of the discipline in UK schools, where enrolments for GCSE Music have declined by 19 per cent since 2011. And don’t blame the public: as Claire Allfree reported earlier this month, a healthy appetite for classical music is just waiting to be tapped. Classical-music streaming figures are higher than ever – even if, through a mixture of arrogance and incompetence, BBC Radio 3 and Classic FM are failing to capitalise.

See also:

https://trueleft.createaforum.com/true-left-vs-right/plebian-hubris/

Continuing:

The sad truth is that among Britain’s upper echelons, the situation is very different from that of half a century ago. Now, classical music and opera arouse too much embarrassment or (worse) resentment and suspicion.

In other words, the Counterculture happened. This is the only good thing that happened in Britain after WWII.

in the eyes of some, classical music and opera bear an ancestral guilt. They are fruits of the sins of Western society: its patriarchal and colonial mindset. The rules of tonal harmony are, these critics say, as oppressive as British rule in India, and have to be dismantled – witness the recent calls in universities to “decolonise” the music curriculum.

This is exactly the attitude that we are here to promote.

But now for the bad news:

One way to resist that trend would be to look outside our little island to an area of the world where classical music is loved and firmly embedded in the culture, arousing no embarrassment or resentment, and ask: what values does classical music hold there? I am thinking of the Far East, where classical music is booming to a degree that seems scarcely credible. Japan, Malaysia and South Korea all have thriving industries, while nowhere has its rise been so spectacular as in China.

The art form has surprisingly old roots there: the Shanghai Symphony, founded in 1879, is older than the Berlin Philharmonic. Even after the Communist seizure of power, classical music was encouraged, and thousands of Chinese musicians were sent off to the Soviet Union for advanced training.

Once again proving that authentic communism was never anti-Western. This is why True Leftists are necessarily anti-communist.

Gleaming new concert halls and opera houses are rising up all over the country, including the spectacular National Centre for the Performing Arts, in Beijing, opened in 2007 at a cost of more than £200 million. China’s piano-building industry is now the largest in the world – and 80 per cent of those instruments are for the home market.

I used to think of this as mere middle-class aspiration, the desire of 21st-century China to “catch up” with the West, but there’s more to it than that. Classical music chimes well with traditional Chinese values that concern self-improvement and self-discipline.

How is it self-improvement to adopt the aesthetics of your oppressors? (And how colonized do you have to be to think that it is?)

In line with this thinking, the Chinese regime has made classical music a key component of its educational policy. By the 1990s, Western classical music was judged more important than popular music and deserving of state support. There are now more than 40 million children across the country learning to play the piano, and more than 200 youth orchestras in Guangdong province alone. Higher up the chain, talented East Asian students now flock to Western conservatoires – and I can testify from experience that they often have a work ethic to match their abilities.

We have so much decolonization to do.....

(And some people think Xi is anti-Western. No, Xi is anti-Counterculture, which makes him pro-Western since the Counterculture itself was an anti-Western movement.)

The results of this nurturing of classical music across East Asia can already be seen in Western orchestras, where vacant positions are increasingly filled by players from China, Korea, Singapore and Japan. And at the level of the globetrotting star, Chinese performers and composers are ubiquitous, fired up by a love of an art form they are determined to make their own. Yuja Wang, possibly the most famous pianist on the planet, has declared that “music, in the Chinese mind, is the most sublime thing you can do”.

It would logically follow that Western classical music, in the mind of Eurocentrists from "New China", is the most sublimely Western thing you can do. Which of course is the very reason why the Eurocentrists from "New China" do it.

Wang also looks like what we would expect:



Here is a video of her trying her hardest to be as sublimely Western as possible:





Woke comments:

It's the Chinese trying to prove how civilized they're society is by subsidizing things they think are high status which includes pretentious traditions of the white elite of yesteryear.

I hate to be the one to point this out but it's incredibly sad and pathetic.

China has long admired and sought to posses western technology, building styles, and culture with a chinese twist, a hybrid, as opposed to creating something authentically Chinese.

However, it is the following based (ie. pro-Western) comment that (without intending to be) is even more revealing about the evil of Western classical music:

Classical music interest has sprout up in unexpected areas, such as in Venezuela, in the Congo, in Mexico, in Vietnam, and in Arab lands. Classical music forces people to become more focused and disciplined to understand its complexity. Would heavy metal music do that? I doubt it. Heavy metal leads one to drug usage. Most parents force their children into classical music training not so much due to their favoring the music but more so to develop inner discipline.