Why most people dont like Classical Music

[Amalie]

Originally posted by mrfixit:
Amalie some good points but, its a waste of time yearning for a past that never was. I think basicly Human kind is headed in a direction of inprovement, but those in power panic and mess it up on purpose. I dont get all this blame on liberals.

Well, I am not really yearning for the past Alex, merely for a better future and incorporating the best from the past, not sweeping it all away, and throwing out the baby with the bath water.
The governments of course reflect society and the people the vote for them. So in a sense I am not too hard on governments because they are only us in another guise.
Take the present UK government surely the most pathetic intellectually challenged group of dead beats that have ever been inflicted on this country, but people voted for them and the reason is I think that people just couldn't care less about politics, so the standard of political discourse goes down and the quality of politicians hits rock bottom. I suspect the millions that just about sums them up couldn't care less about anything. As Jim Rohn, the great American business philosopher says, casualness causes casualties. If people do not care about things that will ultimately both affect them and society.
Just a line about Europe, I am of course firmly in favour of a renaissance of the great European spirit in ie. music which has given so much to the world, I am not in favour of what I can only term the Euro trash, bureaucratic world of Brussels which tries to tie up all the citizens of Europe in pointless stupid rules, ranging from the length of a banana to so rampant political correctness of all kinds. What I can say for certain this will not create a new Europe, but will merely exacerbate the tensions in the nation states that comprise it. Indeed the really strange thing is that Europe was more united in the middle ages under Latin Christendom than it is now, and please don't say it was all based on warfare because that is very superficial and incorrect analysis.
The bizzare thing about the modern EU is that is seeks to prohibit, regulate or supress entirely innocent economic or other activities, and the moral degredation of our times it just simply ignores. A new Europe will not be built on paper and stupid regulations that interfere with the trade of nations.

[Amalie]

Originally posted by Gurn Blanston:
Amalie,
Just a short bit as I carried on last night and don't wish to do so again today.
I am pleased that I do not live in the same world that you do. Perhaps things are worse in Europe than in the States, but I simply don't see the things you describe, at least not in the sense that you describe them. I came from a very poor background but I took advantage of every opportunity available to me and was able to rise above it. Millions of others have done likewise. The reason that the world is a better place now is that WE WERE ABLE TO DO IT. This was not the case in the 18th and 19th century, and certainly not before. If you were born to the privelege, you were priveleged. If you were not, you were screwed with no chance of ever being otherwise. Yes, there is grinding poverty in the world. There has always been and will always be grinding poverty. The reason is that there are too damned many of us sharing the same finite resources. And as far as that goes, one man's poverty is another man's Utopia. Simply because a country full of people do not have the same technological and monetary advantages that we enjoy, does not mean that they are suffering for it. In fact they may be quite content with their lot in life. It is our culture which says that we must have certain possesions and other accoutrements of "civilization" and anyone who doesn't have them must be deprived in some sense. But other cultures live by other standards, and rate their success by other measures than we do, and it is unendurably snobbish of us to suggest that if they have not the same attainments as we have they are impoverished in some way. And although I hate to bring religion into any rational discussion, it is simply wrong to say that religion had no part in making the world the way it is now. Religion (specifically christianity) has been a mainstay of creating our culture with all its warts since it gained the ascendancy in the Dark Ages, which is where we would still be if they had been able to retain the control they had before the Enlightenment.

Gurn, many thanks for that. Perhaphs I should clarify. I was actually unaware I was giving a personal view, more a corrective to certain previous comments that have been made about the so called darkness of the 18th century, very briefly, I bilieve in personal advancement, if that has any relevance here, and in making the best of ones circumstances and poor abilities which is precisely what my husband and I have done, who do not exactly come from wealthy or priviledged backgrounds and yet have made sacrifices to improve ourselves in every sense and make better contributions to society, but that is all by the by and not what I was really trying to get at.
Yes of course I agree that certain other societies have different standards and that is why it is wrong of us to impose our standards of ie. democracy on Arab dictatorships that have never known democracy, science, or an industrial revolution, I was not arguing for that, simply saying that we in the west pride ourselves on our standard of living, but we ignore the utter grinding material poverty of two thirds of the planet and I am not saying that could be recified through governments, quite the contrary they are part of the problem.
You talk about the enlightenment and the way it emancipated us from the church. It did no such thing.
When the period you euphemisticaly term the dark ages was upon Europe, in fact an extremely literate and artistic culture developed in Northern England, in Northumbria that produced astonishing and breathtaking works of art and beauty and religion in the Lindisfarne gospels. I have seen one of these jewels that survive in the British museum and it is just staggering. Christianity was just about the only thing that kept Europe going for over a thousand years, otherwise the culture that Beethoven and the USA is a product of would not exist, neither would the culture of the enlightenment.
Voltaire and co. had a good laugh at the churches expense,
"Oh, just look at these silly clerics, don't they wear funny clothes, Oh, lets all now be modern and throw away that clerical dress". It is really a variation of the modernization arguement of today. Throw out all the past and welcome a new tomorrow, where man will suddenly be made perfect through reason.
The true heirs of the enlightenment are Lenin, Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, Karl Marx, et.al. The enlightenment thinkers were obsessed with creating a new world order of reason but it only led to a nightmare and hell on earth as Europe was ripped apart by the modernizer, Bonaparte and Russia succumbed to the Gulag experiment. It is only the pride of man that deludes himself in thinking he can reshape his fellow man in some bizzare apriori way.

[Steppenwolf]

Originally posted by Amalie:


3. Of course Mr. Blair is only a reflection of the society around him, shallow, narcisstic, and delusional. But what really gets me, is the arrogance of this - super vacuo, who wants to sweep away the past and forget history because he does not understand it and finds it too challenging, and yet seems to want to replace it with a world where young children are brainwashed into sexual licence, dissent of all kinds is abolished, where in fact the rich are encouraged to gain further advantages at the expense of the poor, and Britians vanishing identity is submerged in a sludge of Euro trash. As I previously said, all of these themes were summed up by Huxley in Brave New World, and Blair, Stalin, Mao Tse Tung etc. etc. are on the side of the modernizers, ie. the future is what I say it is, and the, for want of a better word 'conservatives' who believe in culture and the enobling of the human spirit are consigned to the scrap heap.

You are right to say that it is the liberals who are wearing the rosey spectacles. They are the ones, for instance, who keep telling us education is getting better! BETTER!! I have never heard a more ridiculous lie. I have often entertained the idea (albeit not with complete seriousness) but there is a conspiracy of socialists to dumb down everything - from education to the BBC - so that we end up with a stupified, dumb public who read the Daily Star and other brain-dead tabloids and care about nothing but Big Brother, celebrities, pop idol, and David Beckham ... how easy then for the tyrants to take over! When the revolution comes (and believe me, it has already come!), the socialist criminals can seize absolute power for themselves and nobody will realise, far less care! F**kwit Blair is about to impose on us an EU constitution - centuries of history and independence flushed down the toilet - and who really cares? Why aren't people rallying in the streets at this assault on our liberty? But half of them don't know, and the other half are too apathetic to do anything about it, or even care about it. The average Joe-public cares more about David Beckhams new haircut. The Britain of old I respect, but modern Britian is turning into something repulsive .. it is true that people get the government they deserve, and I often think that we DESERVE someone like Blair, we deserve to go under and be enslaved by left wing fanatics in Brussels ... if the people act like cattle they deserve to be treated like cattle. The Britains of 1940 would not have allowed this to happen ... how degenerate we are in comparison. We are entering the twilight of Britain (part of the twilight of the West), and sometimes I lament the loss, but at other times I think things are so currupt that they DESERVE to go under ... like Valhalla it deserves to go up in flames!

[Amalie]

Originally posted by Steppenwolf:
You are right to say that it is the liberals who are wearing the rosey spectacles. They are the ones, for instance, who keep telling us education is getting better! BETTER!! I have never heard a more ridiculous lie. I have often entertained the idea (albeit not with complete seriousness) but there is a conspiracy of socialists to dumb down everything - from education to the BBC - so that we end up with a stupified, dumb public who read the Daily Star and other brain-dead tabloids and care about nothing but Big Brother, celebrities, pop idol, and David Beckham ... how easy then for the tyrants to take over! When the revolution comes (and believe me, it has already come!), the socialist criminals can seize absolute power for themselves and nobody will realise, far less care! F**kwit Blair is about to impose on us an EU constitution - centuries of history and independence flushed down the toilet - and who really cares? Why aren't people rallying in the streets at this assault on our liberty? But half of them don't know, and the other half are too apathetic to do anything about it, or even care about it. The average Joe-public cares more about David Beckhams new haircut. The Britain of old I respect, but modern Britian is turning into something repulsive .. it is true that people get the government they deserve, and I often think that we DESERVE someone like Blair, we deserve to go under and be enslaved by left wing fanatics in Brussels ... if the people act like cattle they deserve to be treated like cattle. The Britains of 1940 would not have allowed this to happen ... how degenerate we are in comparison. We are entering the twilight of Britain (part of the twilight of the West), and sometimes I lament the loss, but at other times I think things are so currupt that they DESERVE to go under ... like Valhalla it deserves to go up in flames!

Steppenwolf for Prime Minister, I think!

He makes the unanswerable point that the dumbing down of the country which is now been going on for at least 20 years and is increasing in pace, of course makes it so much easier for dictators and corrupt politicians to run their own agenda, seize power and riches and keep the masses anaesthatized before probably disposing of them once their slave purposes have been exhausted. It is the great point about Huxley's Brave New World, that you enslave people and rob them of their humanity by pandering to their lowest instincts, but if you are a controller and aim to do this, you must first destroy that troublsome thing called 'High Culture', music, art, philosophy, Shakespeare, Beethoven etc. which gives man such strange ideas about his own self transcendance and higher purposes. This is precisely what is going on in the west at the moment of course, and all of us on this site certainly are perceptive and intelligent enough to see through the agenda that is at work here.

Right on Steppenwolf!

[spaceray]

I think an element that isn't being addressed is money.Why do people care more about Mr. Beckhams hair than they do about the state of the world? It's about money.
Money is power from ancient times to now.
While Europeans struggle with a way to make things equal in trade the rich get richer and the middle class get poorer and the gulf between them gets wider and wider.

[spaceray]

Originally posted by Gurn Blanston:
[B]Actually, I am not all that sure that I can accept your basic premise - i.e. "Most people hate classical music". If you would phrase it thusly "most people don't consider classical music as their main musical choice"

I regret to say that in my twenty five years working as a cook in a variety of food services,I have yet to find another cook that shared my taste in classical music.And never mind share,we would actively battle over the choice of music played during working hours.I could not stand their choice(always a Rock and Roll radio station)nor they mine (Baroque).

[spaceray]

Originally posted by Amalie:
...enslave people and rob them of their humanity by pandering to their lowest instincts....

Where they are quite happy thank you very much,living in their intelectual squalor.Culture dosen't mean the same thing today,forget Shakespeare lets get nice and cosy on the couch with the WWF .

[Peter]

Originally posted by Amalie:

The true heirs of the enlightenment are Lenin, Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, Karl Marx, et.al. The enlightenment thinkers were obsessed with creating a new world order of reason but it only led to a nightmare and hell on earth as Europe was ripped apart by the modernizer, Bonaparte and Russia succumbed to the Gulag experiment. It is only the pride of man that deludes himself in thinking he can reshape his fellow man in some bizzare apriori way.

This is simply not true - these people were the complete opposite of Enlightenment ideals. The notions of human rights it developed are powerfully attractive to oppressed peoples everywhere.

The Enlightenment has its roots in such 'enlightened' men as Galileo and Newton and its ideals of freedom, tolerance and education were in accord with those of Beethoven.

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'Man know thyself'

[Amalie]

Originally posted by Peter:
This is simply not true - these people were the complete opposite of Enlightenment ideals. The notions of human rights it developed are powerfully attractive to oppressed peoples everywhere.

The Enlightenment has its roots in such 'enlightened' men as Galileo and Newton and its ideals of freedom, tolerance and education were in accord with those of Beethoven.

The point about the enlightenment is that it was trying to re-design society on the basis of supposed rational principles.
That was the impetus for the mad schemes of the early French revolution, for instance, to re-name pointlessly all the months of the year. Yes there was a concept of human rights in this, but it was a very dangerous concept, because when pushed to its logical extreme it corrodes society and sets man against man in an insane quest for personal self fullfillment at whatever cost. I am aware that these ideals carried over into the American revolution, but surely the point about the USA today is that 200 years later it has still not properly digested the enlightenment credo, and no one in America seems to know what the bounds of the constitution are with regard to ordinary life and people, and it has spawned the most outrageously litigious society on the planet.
The dark side of the enlightenment is communism and the Gulags. People like Diderot and Montesquie imagined a society based on pure reason where everything was governed by logical principles and there was no place for emotion or powerful feelings of any kind. Everyone was made to fit into this Utopia which turned into a Dystopia and the logical conclusion which they refused to draw out was that people who did not tow the line were to be compelled to do so. We see this very clearly in the work of Karl Marx with all his impeccable enlightenment credentials, dreaming of a perfect society and with the latent threat which became a terrible reality in Russia, that people were to be forced into this Brave New World.
So you can take it I am not particularly enthusiastic about the enlightenment. Quite apart from the fact that the obsession with rights rather than duties is coming near to destroying the whole of what is left of society as we know it.

Newton an enlightenment thinker! The greater part of Newtons work was devoted to an exegesis of the prophecies in the old testament Book of Daniel and very fine work it is too, from the small amount I have read of it. To say he was an enlightenment thinker is really very wide of the mark. Like many great scientists he is unclassifiable and most certainly he does not fit into a neat category. Newton was a great Christian thinker and scientist and he would have been horrified to be classed with the pagan philosophers of the enlightenment.
Galileo is far more complex even than Newton. But we won't go into that here.




[This message has been edited by Amalie (edited September 28, 2003).]

[Gurn Blanston]

Amalie,
Yes indeed, the Enlightenment did try to redisign society, and I may say that it was long overdue for redesign. But like every other human endeavor (so far), when the humans got their hands around it, they proceeded to throttle it, for precisely the reasons mentioned above, money and power. We have gone far afield from the starting point of this thread, but I see the 2 things as tied together in some twisted way. As for the communists you mentioned, they were merely following a philosophy, and carrying it far beyond the basic principles proposed by Marx, but in what way are they different from the zealots who attempt to further the aims of any other philosophy? In the event that the parallel is less than obvious, religion is a philosophy with zealots too, nad I am not singling out any one of them here, as they all bear the blame. From the seeds mentioned above, of light in the Dark Ages, was grown a tree that totally shaded out what that particular religious philosophy should have been putting forward. Of course there were seeds of cultural lightness in those times, as in every time (even ours), but that does not absolve those who went to such extremes to crush the spirit out of those who believed differently. And another thing, how can you rationalize using the French as a model for anything? ;-)) They've always been looney, and very little of what they say or do is germane to what the civilized world does. Sorry, had to get that off my chest. Anyway, we have been around the bush and back again, and I have not changed yuor mind, nor you mine. I would simply like you to consider the possibility that things are not as bad as you make them out to be, the trangressions of your notorious Liberals notwithstanding. Hell, our Liberals are no better than yours, and I haven't much faith in our Conservatives either.


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Regards,
Gurn
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That's my opinion, I may be wrong.
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[Gurn Blanston]

Originally posted by spaceray:
I regret to say that in my twenty five years working as a cook in a variety of food services,I have yet to find another cook that shared my taste in classical music.And never mind share,we would actively battle over the choice of music played during working hours.I could not stand their choice(always a Rock and Roll radio station)nor they mine (Baroque).

Space,
Perhaps then it is my sparkling personality which has won them over? ;-)) Or possibly my personal choice of "upbeat" music which even a rocker can love, given the proper impetus. Or the fact that I outrank most of them so they are subordinate? Or possibly, I am just lucky. In any case, what I am saying is that perhaps hate is too strong a word, and I think that aptience and perseverance can sometimes pay dividends.



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Regards,
Gurn
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
That's my opinion, I may be wrong.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

[qsx85j4c]

I've been reading this bulletin board for a while now and this thread has finally prompted me to register and say something.

Gurn and Peter, your comments about the world of the 18th century and today were spot on. I agree with practically everything you've written.

Amalie, I think you've got the wrong idea about the Enlightenment and its effects on modern society. The point is not to replace emotion or passion or spirituality with reason alone, but to bring reason to bear on these things. Thus, Newton is the perfect Enlightenment thinker in his broad interests in both science and religion. It is all about understanding the world around us.

And do you really believe that it is impossible to have a life of culture and happiness at once? I think that's a horrible thought. Perhaps pain is necessary for great achievement, but surely we should strive to make it otherwise, and reason and science have done more in the past 200 years to do this than anything that came before, and I do not see how this can be regarded as a bad thing. Even accepting the premise that greater suffering in times past produced greater achievements (which I do not), perhaps they are not worth their price. Maybe we would have been suffering so much that we wouldn't have give a damn about what our culture was achieving.

[This message has been edited by qsx85j4c (edited September 28, 2003).]

[Amalie]

Originally posted by qsx85j4c:
I've been reading this bulletin board for a while now and this thread has finally prompted me to register and say something.

Gurn and Peter, your comments about the world of the 18th century and today were spot on. I agree with practically everything you've written.

Amalie, I think you've got the wrong idea about the Enlightenment and its effects on modern society. The point is not to replace emotion or passion or spirituality with reason alone, but to bring reason to bear on these things. Thus, Newton is the perfect Enlightenment thinker in his broad interests in both science and religion. It is all about understanding the world around us.

And do you really believe that it is impossible to have a life of culture and happiness at once? I think that's a horrible thought. Perhaps pain is necessary for great achievement, but surely we should strive to make it otherwise, and reason and science have done more in the past 200 years to do this than anything that came before, and I do not see how this can be regarded as a bad thing. Even accepting the premise that greater suffering in times past produced greater achievements (which I do not), perhaps they are not worth their price. Maybe we would have been suffering so much that we wouldn't have give a damn about what our culture was achieving.

[This message has been edited by qsx85j4c (edited September 28, 2003).]

The point about Newton if you really want to know now that we are on the subject is that for nearly 250 years his massive biblical writings were suppressed by 'progressive' and enlightened historians of science, and the great English ecomomist, John Maynard Keynes came across some of these books quite by accident in a book shop in Cambridge near Newton's old college, Trinity, in the 1930's.
I am not suggesting we cannot have a form of culture today, but it will not be high culture and never can be, according to Nietzsche's dictum. But then are you happy with the culture that we have got?
Or perhaps you will think against all the evidence that it will improve in a true enlightenment fashion?



[This message has been edited by Amalie (edited September 28, 2003).]

[Amalie]

Originally posted by Gurn Blanston:
Amalie,
Yes indeed, the Enlightenment did try to redisign society, and I may say that it was long overdue for redesign. But like every other human endeavor (so far), when the humans got their hands around it, they proceeded to throttle it, for precisely the reasons mentioned above, money and power. We have gone far afield from the starting point of this thread, but I see the 2 things as tied together in some twisted way. As for the communists you mentioned, they were merely following a philosophy, and carrying it far beyond the basic principles proposed by Marx, but in what way are they different from the zealots who attempt to further the aims of any other philosophy? In the event that the parallel is less than obvious, religion is a philosophy with zealots too, nad I am not singling out any one of them here, as they all bear the blame. From the seeds mentioned above, of light in the Dark Ages, was grown a tree that totally shaded out what that particular religious philosophy should have been putting forward. Of course there were seeds of cultural lightness in those times, as in every time (even ours), but that does not absolve those who went to such extremes to crush the spirit out of those who believed differently. And another thing, how can you rationalize using the French as a model for anything? ;-)) They've always been looney, and very little of what they say or do is germane to what the civilized world does. Sorry, had to get that off my chest. Anyway, we have been around the bush and back again, and I have not changed yuor mind, nor you mine. I would simply like you to consider the possibility that things are not as bad as you make them out to be, the trangressions of your notorious Liberals notwithstanding. Hell, our Liberals are no better than yours, and I haven't much faith in our Conservatives either.

Totally agree with you about the French Gurn, why do you think the English have always fought so many wars with them, and won! They should have kept their monarchy, but then look at ours now! Still, we are all allies now.
I quite like what Charlie Tremendous Jones once said, "there are Liberal lies and Conservative lies, but I prefer Conservative lies".
We were having a discussion of course, and I was only putting Nietzsche contentious point up for discussion, Of course things are not that bad, but we all appreciate that there are some very deep issues here
and it certainly does make one think about ones own take on this and the sort of future we are heading for.

Everyone on this site is surely on the right side of things anyway, because they are connected to the luminous presence of Beethoven, and we would all agree would we not that whatever solutions there may be, Beethoven is an integral part of that..



[This message has been edited by Amalie (edited September 28, 2003).]

[Peter]

Originally posted by Amalie:

The point about Newton if you really want to know now that we are on the subject is that for nearly 250 years his massive biblical writings were suppressed by 'progressive' and enlightened historians of science, and the great English ecomomist, John Maynard Keynes came across some of these books quite by accident in a book shop in Cambridge near Newton's old college, Trinity, in the 1930's.
I am not suggesting we cannot have a form of culture today, but it will not be high culture and never can be, according to Nietzsche's dictum. But then are you happy with the culture that we have got?
Or perhaps you will think against all the evidence that it will improve in a true enlightenment fashion?

[This message has been edited by Amalie (edited September 28, 2003).]

Without the enlightenment we would have had no 'Bill or Rights', no abolition of slavery, no true democracy (though I still don't think we really have, but at least it's better than the 18th century version) and a whole host of other benefits you dismiss very lightly. What about the music of the time? - the ideals of the enlightenment were personified by the freemasons - Mozart, Haydn Goethe and possibly Beethoven were Masons! The Magic flute contains all the humanitarian symbology of the time and the enlightenmnet's ideals are enshrined in Schiller's ode to Joy - Without the enlightenment, music and the arts would have been very different!
Beethoven was initially in favour of the 'loony French revolution' and even as late as 1810 he considered dedicating the Mass in C to Napoleon.

Your comments about Newton focus on one aspect of this great scientist's work -perhaps the Principia would be better to cite for without it the modern world as we know it wouldn't exist. I'm pleased we're not going down the Galileo path because I'd hate to discover you agree with his imprisonment and consider that the planets orbit the Earth!

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'Man know thyself'