| | I voted "other" on your 'greatest Western artist' poll; while agreeing completely with Ms. Branden's comments as to the impossibility of finding a single height, I myself would have favored Goethe's _Faust_or Beethoven's 9th Symphony... though Wagner would come close.
But I also think that modern rock music deserves more respect... high culture types once treated opera as the pinnacle of the arts, because of its integration of the decorative, performing, and liberal arts; I observe the same applies to contemporary music videos. I'm not a Metallica fan myself particularly, but I challenge anyone to say why Elton John's "Funeral for a Friend" does not rank with the minor pieces of the great composers. Why Euripides, but not _Evita_? At the risk of reverse snobbishness, I think the electric guitar requires an educated ear just as the piano, and that it is a failure of sensibility when one is unable to enjoy a contemporary art form, not proof of aesthetic virtue.
But I think ultimately Objectivism proper has good reasons for disliking modern rock music; Rand (and Nietzsche, and Allan Bloom, and Rousas Rushdoony) is right, modern rock music as an artistic school is inseparable from a valuation of emotional states as such. Classical music is music as a formal argument, with the progression of notes in correspondence to an abstraction of the progression of human conscious thought; this is what the Medievals meant by the "music of the spheres", observing the same patterns in celestial bodies (anticipating Newtonian theory of motion... a subject also most misunderstood). Rock music contains an element irreducible to sensual, and usually sexual, rhytms. Ironically, Romantic music prefigured this shift in emphasis; anti-P.C.ists in _Heterodoxy_ have laughed at the feminist theorist Susan McClary who called the Khoral Symphony an explosion of male sexual agression ("...the carefully prepared cadence is frustrated, damming up energy which finally explodes in the throttling, murderous rage of a rapist incapable of attaining release.") , and I do think she was wrong. But her problem is in her sexist, her sexphobia, her dualistic, love vs. strife theory of value, not in her musical ear:
Freude, schoener Goetterfunken,
Tochter aus Elysium,
Wir betreten feuertrunken,
Himmlische dein Heiligtum.
Deine Zauber binden wieder,
Was die Mode streng geteilt;
Alle Menschen werden Brueder,
Wo dein sanfter Fluegel weilt.
translated:
Joy, o wondrous spark divine,
Daughter of Elysium,
Drunk with fire now we enter,
Heavenly one, your holy shrine.
Your magic powers join again
What fashion strictly did divide;
Brotherhood unites all men
Where your gentle wing's spread wide.
The proper term is heiros gamos. But then Rand disapproved of Beethoven. I think she may have known well what she was talking about. A genius' embarrasing statements are seldom accidents.
Rock music is compatible with romanticism and romantic symbolism, and possibly a truly dialectical romantic realism, but it can't be squared with Rand's Thomistic endorsement of a great-chain-of-bring relation between the rational and emotional faculties. Here must simply follow Camille Paglia and disagree with Rand.
Objectivism, which as a Pagan Cynic I have come to regard as an admirably Socratic but regrettably "right wing" classical philosophy, is correct to intuit a danger in rock music, because rock music relies on at least an element of the valuation on emotion qua emotion. Ironically, Objectivism's distrust of classical music is precisely prefounded by Plato's lengthy treatment of music theory in the _Republic_, which culminates of the explusion of all poets (except for a few parade-band sell-outs) from the ideal society. Rand's treatment of Woodstock is Plato, whole cloth. Unfortunately, this results in elements of Objectivism that cut all the way down to is defintion of (hu?)man and theprimacy of existence. I have come to conclude, with regrets, that reform is impossible within the system.
Personally, I am an admirer of Shelley, or Geothe, of Beethoven, of Ibsen, Dali, the Beatles, Rush, and the Indigo Girls. I see no contradictions between these values and do not find my experience of one diluted by the experience of the other. Objectivism teaches that the path to happiness lies in the pursuit of excellence qua excellence, whereas I have concluded that excellences are simply the highest expressions-in degree- of an educated craft and art of happiness, and essentially plural; I reject Aristotleian teleology amd believe Objectivism's position is simply the moderate realism of philosophical anthropology, rightly intended but essentially Platonic, and an obstacle to human happiness. This, along with some personal commitments, is why I'm not an Objectivist- the issue with rock music is the same as that of my own Life (or homosexuality, or drug use, or enjoying Thomas Wolfe, friendships with the heathen, or narrative attachments)- and with due apologies to admirable people, as a transgender courtesan, I tire of weaving my own chains.
Meanwhile, I can feel passion to both Wagner and Tori Amos. Irrational passion? Perhaps. Nor all your virtues wash out a word of it.
Stars,
in your mutitude,
filling the darkness,
in order and light,
you are the sentinels,
silent and sure,
keeping watch in the night.
Keeping watch in the night.
You hold your place in the sky,
you know your course and your aim,
and as the seasons return and return...
you are always the same.
And if you fall, as Lucifer fell,
you fall, in flame!
And so it has been
and so it is written
on the doorway to Paradise
that those who falter and those who fall,
must pay the Price.
- les Miserables musical
Javert
"One must have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star!
I tell you, you still have chaos in yourselves!"
- Friedrich Neitzsche
Zarathustra
Choose.
Jeanine Ring {))(*)((}
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