Sto causen

Libriccino davvero interessante, che prende le mosse dalla constatazione che mentre la Tate Modern e' oggi la principale attrazione turistica del pianeta Terra per numero di visitatori, la musica contemporanea resta un linguaggio sostanzialmente povero e di nicchia. Questo nonostante le arti visive e la musica colta del XX secolo si siano sviluppate seguendo percorsi paralleli - a partire dalla sinestesia teorizzata da Kandinsky insieme a Schoenberg.

Alcuni passaggi:

1) One of the great reasons avant garde music needs to exist is that it does not need to exist. It defies, momentarily, the glum, onward and upward propulsion of Western society into which the majority of us are whipped or whip ourselves, on a daily basis. It fails, successfully, to be commandeered into the ranks of function. It posits and evokes entirely alternative modes, worlds, possibilities, stepping off the tramlines and running aground on new, virgin territory. It goes nowhere. It repeats. It radiates energy, wastefully, into the air. It leaks out of the grid. Yet none of this is a reason to condemn it as indulgent, or degenerate. It is the threat it notionally poses to civilisation that makes it so supremely civilised.

2) The arts must be morally improving - you must come out of them a marginally better person then you entered them. A little more educated, a little more spiritually uplifted, a little fitter for life's purpose. If they are not any of these things, well, that is okay, so long as they provide some form of entertainment, for it is important to let one's hair down, the better to bundle it up again in the morning - or perhaps to soothe, to relax, so as to prevent the citizen from stress or burnout.

3) Cast an aerial eye along the white lines of mainstream rock's grey road and it goes something like; Elvis, the Beatles, the Stones, Dylan, Neil Young, David Bowie, the Sex Pistols, Elvis Costello, the Smiths, REM, U2, Oasis, all part of a great, heroic narrative tradition, even though each has, in some way, revolted violently against orthodoxy. These are honourable men in the main, even though, in this writer, such a list induces stirrings of ennui and a mild nausea at its odours of heritage and tradition, the floor polish of the Hall of Fame. But then there is another tradition, an anti-tradition, whose names include the Mothers of Invention, Captain Beefheart, Jimi Hendrix, Can, Faust, Kraftwerk, Brian Eno, Cabaret Voltaire, Suicide, This Heat, PIL, the Associates, Yello, the Young Gods, My Bloody Valentine, Sonic Youth, Radiohead, by which point the line has long since tangled up and tapered off into a thousand threads. The names in this second list are famous ones, yet as rock ossifies into retroism and decade by decade musical retrospectives focus increasingly on a decreasing canon of all time greats, then this whole anti-tradition is becoming increasingly marginalised.