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'AI' is inherently reactionary. all it can do is collect and rearrange. nothing new can come of it. no real progress is possible with it. and that seems to be the point. to stagnate humanity once and for all.
so perhaps it's not surprising that it finds advocates among traditionalists. at the same time, many traditionalists are against it while having the exact same attitude that operates in the machines. i find that very contradictory.
having said that, i think it's a spiritual positive to hate these machines with a passion for whatever reason. and it really needs to be with a passion, because that's what they lack.
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if you ask traditionalists if there can be any new great works of art, i think they will say yes out of embarrassment or obligation, but in practice they don't believe it. there's only commentary now. i think they believe we more or less all should die right away and get to heaven, cause there's nothing more to do here. then in the next breath they complain about cultural suicide.
not that i'm optimistic about it, overall. but i wouldn't be optimistic overall in any age. i am pessimistic about most things and most people, but i am not a determinist. i believe in freedom. and that some people can use freedom appropriately. i think to close this door is very bad for a person's soul.
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more and more i feel estranged from the culture. i don't mean the wider culture (that has been the case more or less since i was twelve). i mean the little online niche of traditionalism or whatever we might want to call it. all of it is just culture war nonsense. it's all reactionary (as in reactive, with no positive vision), and i have no patience for any of it anymore. this is bad since that's what people came to expect from me. but it's never too late to repent past mistakes. and i do repent all the time i spent talking about that sort of stuff.
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essays are exoteric. fiction is esoteric. and yet… it’s a no prophet is accepted in his own country kind of thing. esoterists don’t read fiction.
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i feel the novella may have its time again in our age (of course, as a minority artifact; as it must be, good things are always so). both for the writer and the reader. short enough to pick up and get through, and long enough that it's not an afterthought.
it also favors slice of life and isolated character studies. this too is suited to our age of solitary and quiet rebellion.
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having spoken of perennialist attitudes to jazz i went to find out the other side of the esoteric coin and searched the Rudolph Steiner archive for the word. it only appears once, in a lecture about eurhythmy, and is rather negative. granted, it's from nineteen twenty seven, and jazz was still only dance music. his opinion is precisely the same as the perennialist consensus: a barbaric return to degenerate pagan forms (or something equally ominous). unsurprising. perhaps if old Ruddy had lived long enough to hear the angular melodies and impressionistic harmonies... he would have said it was a mad step into a future abyss of more madness... probably.
i do wonder if he, not to mention all the perennialist cats, have met some bebop greats in heaven by now and have changed their minds. i hope so. praying to Dexter Gordon to make it happen just in case. (i do believe that, on the way to heaven, you hear Messiaen’s Ascension, so maybe the job is done and they are finally reconciled with extended harmony).
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i don’t know if this post by William was inspired by my earlier diatribe which quoted a post of his (incidentally, and as a jumping off point; it wasn’t an attack on him), but it’s a reiteration of the same idea, and it mentions jazz specifically, so it might be.
anyway, a passage in particular caught my eye, in which he speaks of a ‘true divine understanding as with the music and cathedrals of the Middle Ages and Renaissance’.
it caught my eye because it reminded me of the pope decrying polyphony in the fourteenth century as ‘lascivious’, among other things. (the second paragraph really is a classic of 'kids these days'; i'm not a believer that there are no new things under the sun, but some things really are very old indeed and will keep appearing all the time).
it’s funny because now of course we don’t see it that way. we feel polyphony to be super spiritual (as opposed to Schoenberg or Stravinsky or jazz, using these examples because they were mentioned in the post and the comments, and also because i like all three; though serialism is a bridge too far for me, most of the time). but anyway, some people thought polyphony was an unmistakable sign of spiritual decay, an afront to God, and an intrusion of the devil in the sacred art that is music.
and maybe it was. (if we play some ars nova tunes on the piano they sound suspiciously like jazz chords. even Machaut’s Notre Dame Mass has a lot of dissonance, and that level of dissonance would have to wait for the nineteen century to be surpassed. and let's not forget that some of those motets are very 'bouncy' and might make you want to dance; another sign the devil is involved, as everyone knows).
i of course don't believe extended harmony is responsible for the ills of society (especially since both popular music and contemporary classical music have been harmonically flat for at least fifty years, so if it was an hypothesis it has been summarily rejected by reality), but maybe this just means the devil has got to me and i need an exorcism.
thus a ‘true divine understanding’ in music only existed before the middle ages. that’s at least what the pope believed. i don't know if papal infallibility is retroactive, but if it is, God help us, we've been listening to devil music for a long time.
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i was going to include another jazz tune in this one, but given the above, i'll instead share an older instance of devil music (listen at your own peril!):
