Author Topic: Homo Hubris  (Read 5696 times)

90sRetroFan

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Re: Homo Hubris
« Reply #45 on: August 12, 2022, 11:49:09 pm »
Duchesne at it again:

https://www.eurocanadians.ca/2022/08/european-striving-for-the-ars-perfecta-in-linear-time.html

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Various theories have been offered on the origins and role of music: i) it evolved as an elaborate form of sexual selection, primarily to seduce potential mates, ii) as a “shared precursor” of language, iii) as a practical means to assist in organizing and motivating human work, iv) as a means to enhance communication with supernatural phenomena, v) to encourage cooperation within one’s community, vi) as a pleasant preoccupation or source of amusement, relaxation and recuperation, vi) to express one’s cultural identity and feel united with one’s culture through social celebrations such as weddings, funerals, religious processions and ceremonial rites.

These explanations have a major, disquieting flaw: they can’t explain why Europeans were continuously creative in music for many centuries, responsible for the highest, most complex form of music, classical music, along with the invention of the most sophisticated musical instruments, the articulation of all the treatises on music on matters related to pitch, notes, intervals, scale systems, tonality, modulation, and melody. Classical music expresses the best that man as man has achieved in music.

Most complex? Yes. Highest/best? No. Complexity =/= quality (except to Westerners).

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All the greatest composers in history were European.

According to whose judgement? Westerners'?

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With the invention of the Ars Nova we can start identifying great individual composers, beginning with the Frenchman Guillaume de Machaut (1300-77), who adapted secular poetic forms into polyphonic music, not only the motet, which is based on a sacred text, but also secular song forms, such as the lai or short tales in French literature, and the formes fixes, such as the rondeau, virelai and ballade, into the musical mainstream. Francesco Landini (1325-1397) was the foremost musician of the Trecento style, sometimes called the “Italian ars nova,” and for his virtuosity on the portative organ and his compositions in the ballata form. Writers noted that “the sweetness of his melodies was such that hearts burst from their bosoms.” He may have been the first composer to think of his music as a striving for perfection, writing: “I am Music, and weeping I regret seeing intelligent people forsaking my sweet and perfect sounds for street music.”

Maybe the street music sounded better?

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The English would produce their own great composers, most notably John Dunstaple (1390-1453), who developed a style, la contenance angloise, which was never heard before in music, using full triadic harmony, along with harmonies with thirds and sixths. This time also witnessed the Burgundian School of the 1400s, associated with a more rational control of consonance and dissonance, of which the composer and musical theorist Guillaume Dufay (1397-1474) was a member, known for his masses, motets, magnificats, hymns, and antiphons within the area of sacred music, as well as secular music following the formes fixe. This School originated in the “cosmopolitan atmosphere” of the Burgundian court, which was very prestigious in this period, influencing musical centers across Europe.

Creating a bridge beyond the Middle Ages, the Burgundian School paved the way for the Renaissance, which saw a rebirth of interest in the treatises of the Greek past. Franchino Gaffurio’s Theorica musice (1492), Practica musice (1496), and De Harmonia musicorum intrumentorum opu (1518), incorporated Greek ideas brought to the Italy from Byzantium by Greek migrants. These were the most influential treatises of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. There were significant composers during the early Renaissance, particularly Johannes Ockeghem (1420-97), with his Missa prolationum, a “technical tour de force in which every movement is a double mensuration canon” (p. 167).



The most renowned, and possibly the first in the pantheon of “greatest composers”, is named Josquin des Prez 1450/1455-1521), called the “father of musicians”, who made extensive use of “motivic cells”, easily recognizable melodic fragments which passed from voice to voice “in a contrapuntal texture” — a basic organizational principle in music practiced continuously from 1500 until today. This Renaissance figure distinctly aimed to raise music into an “ars perfecta“, that is, “a perfect art to which nothing can be added”. Theorists such as Heinrich Glarean and Gioseffo Zarlino agreed that his style represented perfection. For Martin Luther, Josquin des Prez was “the master of the notes”. The next giant in the pursuit of musical perfection was Adrian Willaert (1490-1562), the inventor of the antiphonal style (which involves two choirs in interaction, often singing alternate musical phrases) and an experimenter in chromaticism and rhythm.

Does Duchesne's example of des Prez's work sound good to you (let alone "perfect")? Would you want to re-listen to it frequently? (More seriously, how twisted would someone have to be in order find such music enjoyable? Now you know what goes on inside a Western mind.)

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Striving for Perfection Versus Music Outside Europe

This striving for perfection through a long historical sequence by individuals from different generations, seeking to outdo the accomplishments of the past, points to a fundamental contrast between the models of beauty and achievement in the Western and the non-Western world. The impression one gets from the study of the history of music in such civilizations as ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, or Japan, is that of time standing still in state of accomplished perfection after a sequence of achievements. In the Western world, the history of music is heavily characterized by linear time, continuous novelties, if sometimes slow and interrupted, but always moving, whereas in the East, after some initial achievements, further changes are rare, as if perfection, already achieved, needed to be frozen out in a world of cyclical time.
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As the individualism of the West took off with the demolition of kinship ties, the promotion of nuclear monogamous families, the rise of associations and institutions based on legal contracts rather than kinship norms (cities, universities, guilds, monasteries), a historicized linear conception of perfection developed,the idea that perfection lay in the future, rather than in some golden past age, or in some Platonic Form frozen out of time.

I academically agree with this (and thank Duchesne for acknowledging Plato as non-Western). We are here to defend the non-Western conception of beauty. Beauty is above time, not in time. Oneupmanship is not beautiful at all; it is crude and barbaric:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-upmanship

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One-upmanship, also called "one-upsmanship",[1] is the art or practice of successively outdoing a competitor.
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Viewed seriously, it is a phenomenon of group dynamics that can have significant effects in the management field: for instance, manifesting in office politics.[3]

and that Western classical music has identified oneupmanship with beauty is evidence of its absolute inferiority. I also agree with Duchesne about where oneupmanship (unsurprisingly!) came from:

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To understand the European linear conception of perfection, their consistent striving for higher forms, it might be useful to go back to the ancient Greek ideal of arête, a term that originally denoted excellence in the performance of heroic valor by individuated aristocratic Indo-European warriors. In pre-Homeric times, it signified the strength and skill of a warrior. It was his arête that ranked an aristocrat (aristos = “best”) above the commoners; and it was the attainment of heroic excellence that secure respect and honor among aristocratic peers. The word “aristeia” was used in epic stories for the single-handed adventures of the hero in his unceasing strife for superlative achievements over his peers.

https://trueleft.createaforum.com/mythical-world/turanian-diffusion/

(There is of course nothing heroic about oneupmanship either. Heroism is against time, not in time.)

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Operas grew out of madrigals, and the madrigal originated from the three-to-four voice frottola (1470–1530); from the unique interest of European composers in poetry (particularly pastoral poems about shepherds), and from the stylistic influence of the French chanson; and from the polyphony of the motet.

Yes.

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There is no space here to list every major composer of “late Renaissance” Italy, England and Germany, but mention should be made of John Dowland’s (1562-1626) lute songs, and the increase in new forms of instrumental music and books about how to play instruments, of which the most influential was Michael Praetorius’s Systematic Treatise of Music (1618), an encyclopedic record of contemporary musical practices, with many illustrations of a wide variety of instruments, harpsichord, trombone, pommer, bass viola — signaling the fact that Europeans would go on to create almost all the best musical instruments in history. The greats of the Reformation period included John Tavern (1490-1545), best-known for his masses based on a popular song called The Western Wynde, and Missa Gloria tibi Trinitas, as well as the composers Christopher Tye, Thomas Tallis (1505-1585) and Robert Whyte (1538-1574). The greatest of them all, Giovanni de Palestrina (1525-94), called the “Prince of Music” and his compositions “the absolute perfection” of church style, composed 105+ masses and 250 motets, 68 offertories, 140 madrigals and 300 motets. He is remembered as a master of contrapuntal ingenuity, for his dynamic flow of music, not rigid or static, for the variety of form and type of his masses, for melody that contain few leaps between notes and for dissonances that are confined to suspensions, passing notes and weak beats.


Again, just listen to the example provided by Duchesne FFS! Is it anywhere near as good as Duchesne describes? Would you want to re-listen to something like this frequently?

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Meanwhile, as the rest of the world would not yet see a treatise on music, Girolamo Mei (1519-1594) carried a thorough investigation of every ancient work on music, writing a four book treatise, Concerning Musical Nodes, soon followed by Galileo’s father, Vincenzo Galilei’s Dialogo della musica antica et della moderna (1581), where he used Mei’s ideas to attack vocal counterpoint in Italian madrigal, arguing that delivering the emotional message of poetical texts required only a single melody with appropriate pitches and rhythms rather than several voices simultaneously singing different melodies in different rhythms.

Baroque

The next epoch is the Baroque between 1600 and 1750. Baroque originally meant bizarre, exaggerated, grotesque, in bad taste, but then it came to mean flamboyant, decorative, bold, juxtaposition of contrasting elements conveying dramatic tension. This period saw instrumental music becoming the equal of vocal music as Europeans learned how to make instruments with far higher expressive capacities, replacing the reserved sound of viols with the powerful and flexible tone of violins, better harpsichords, and originating orchestral music.

It is not easy to demarcate new epochs in Western history for this is a continuously creative civilization in many interacting fields — music, painting, exploration, architecture, science, literature — with different dynamics and therefore different yet mutually influential cultural motifs and reorientations. Some figures are considered “transitional” figures. Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) is such a transitional musician between the late Renaissance (since there was no Reformation in Italy) and the Baroque. The originality of Western cultural figures, moreover, never came out of the blue but obtained its vitality from its rootedness in the European past, reinterpreting and readapting ancient Greek, Roman, and medieval Christian themes.

Monteverdi’s famous opera L’Orfeo (1607), for example, drew from the Orpheus of Greek mythology (as transmitted by Ovid and Virgil). Monteverdi’s L’Arianna was based on the Greek Ariadne myth. Orpheus, in Monteverdi’s adaptation, was a musician and renowned poet who descended into the Underworld of Hades to recover his lost wife Eurydice. Orpheus is allowed to go to his wife so long as he does not look at her, but overcome with his love, he breaks the law of the underworld, and looks at her, and loses her forever. Orpheus is a god-like figure in this heroic rescue mission, who experiences intense emotions in rapid succession, bravery, euphoria, and despondency. This adaptation was mediated by the personal experiences of Monteverdi, his  intense grief and despair at the loss of his wife combined with his chronic headaches and deteriorating eye sight. The cultural influence of Rome is evident in his trilogy, the operas Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria (1640), L’incoronazione di Poppea, and Le nozze d’Enea con Lavinia, inspired by a historical trajectory that moves through Troy, the birth of Rome to its decline, and forward to the foundation and glory of the Venetian Republic. Republican rule by proud aristocrats unwilling to submit to a despotic ruler is unique to the West, inspiring the American “res-publica”. In the 1600s there were 19 Orphean opera versions, and countless operas based on other mythologies about Venus, Adonis, Apollo, Daphne, Hercules, Narcissus.


Again, just listen to it and realize how perverted Westerners have to be to like this stuff! I'm not the one choosing these examples (so it's not me deliberately choosing bad examples); Duchesne chose them all himself!

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The invention of the Italian madrigal found its highest expression in Monteverdi, whose first five books of madrigals between 1587 and 1605 are estimated as monuments in the history of polyphonic madrigal. What made Monteverdi stand out among many other luminaries of his age, Henrich Isaac, Orlando di Lass, was the way he established in his opera a complete unity between drama and music for the first time in history, a repertoire of textures and techniques “without parallels”. While Italian opera was flourishing in every corner of Europe except France, France would soon build up its own opera tradition through the emergence of French tragedy in the grand literary works of Corneille (1606-1684) and Jean Racine (1639-1699). To these dramatic works, opera added music, dance and spectacle, beginning with Italian born Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-1687), the national director of French music as a member of Louis XIV’s orchestra.


Is anyone here downloading any of these Duchesne examples of Western classical music? I am not. Did anyone even consider downloading them? Neither did I. Why not? Because they suck, that's why.

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This was merely the beginnings of the Baroque achievement. The composers of this period constitute a veritable who’s who list. Arcangelo Corelli (1653–1713) was the first to create basic violin technique on the newly invented violin; Domenico Scarlatti (1685–1757) wrote 555 harpsichord sonatas and made use of Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish dance rhythms; Henry Purcell (1659–1695), recognized as one of the greatest English composers, is still admired for his “daring expressiveness—not grand and exuberant in the manner of Handel, but tinged with melancholy and a mixture of elegance, oddness, and wistfulness.” There is also Jean Philippe Rameau (1683–1764), known for his bold melodic lines and harmonies, and tragédie lyrique opera, and for his Treatise on Harmony (1722), which sought to establish a “science” of music, in this age of Newtonian principles, deriving the principles of harmony from the laws of acoustics, and argued that the chord (a combination of three or more notes that are heard as if sounding simultaneously) was the primal element in music.


Even more to the point, did anyone here actually even manage to sit through the entire video in any of Duchesne's examples? Neither did I. That is how much they suck.

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There were also the giants Vivaldi, Handel and Bach. Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741) wrote over 500 concertos, of which 350 are for solo instrument and strings such as violin, and the others for bassoon, cello, oboe, flute, viola, lute, or mandolin; as well as 46 operas, and invented the ritornello form (recurrent musical section that alternates with different episodes of contrasting material). Georg Handel (1685–1759), sometimes identified as the first “international composer,” though in reality deeply rooted in Europe’s cosmopolitan culture, born in Germany but becoming a naturalized British, wrote for every musical genre, along with instrumental works for full orchestra, with the most significant known as Water Music, six concertos for woodwinds and strings and twelve “Grand Concertos”, and his masterpiece Messiah, judged as “the finest Composition of Musick that was ever heard”.

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) mastered the organ and harpsichord and wrote over 1,000 compositions in nearly every type of musical form, driven by a search for perfection, to create music that would “honor the Most High God” and “produce a well-sounding harmony to the glory of God”. Bach assimilated all the music that had gone before him in his compulsive striving for arête in technique, and what he absorbed he shaped into his own endless variety of musical compositions. His music for the harpsichord and clavichord includes masterpieces in every genre: preludes, fantasies, and toccatas, and other pieces in fugal style, dance suites, as well as sonatas and capriccios, and concertos with orchestra. Bach was a Faustian man with passionate drives, measuring himself against other composers, hard to get along with, father of 20 children. Living in an age of mighty composers, it is said that he surpassed them in his harmonic intensity, the unexpected originality of the sounds, and his forging of new rules for the actualization of harmonic potentials. It is inaccurate to say that perfection is impossible. Europeans achieved it in many art forms, and would continue to do so in music, painting, and architecture through the 1800s.


I actually posted this example here:

https://trueleft.createaforum.com/true-left-vs-right/western-civilization-is-ugly-48/msg6238/#msg6238

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