Musical Homophobia - or The Homophobia Histories

[scottycelt]

Even Bruckner's battle with fear and doubt in the 9th is the more terrifying if you understand how he saw His Creator....

That's pure conjecture. Nothing more or less.

Bruckner would surely have intended a 'happy ending' in typically magnificent and glorious style.

However, he was taking that long to complete it His Creator probably got fed up waiting and wanted him in Heaven where he belonged.

That's my take!

[jayne lee wilson]

Inference from biographical fact and self-quotation (9th's adagio quotes Kyrie from Mass No.3 etc) - not conjecture, and I'm thinking of the COMPLETE Bruckner 9 in 4 movements (with its "happy ending".). Try the recording with the fairly well-known Berlin Philharmonic, directed by Simon Rattle. "All to the Greater Glory of God" and "when I arrive In Heaven and the Lord asks what I have done with his gift, I shall show him my Symphonies". Oh go on, fill in the blanks yourself for a change...

Just been watching some excellent BBC4 programmes about Dusty Springfield. Go on, tell me her hidden/half-hidden sexual orientation had NOTHING to do with the intensity of longing in the music she created in the 1960s... or the expressive freedom in her songs, her voice and her looks when The Pet Shop Boys brought her back to creative and fully-out life in the 1980s.

So classical music is different? Or is it just that 20th Century Repressive & Discriminatory Attitudes within that classical culture would always prefer to believe that sexual forces have nothing to do with the character and intensity of the given individual's artistic creations... (Elephant in the Room alert! Or in East Anglia...)

OF COURSE, OF COURSE (Just to make sure you get it) you can't read "gay" or "hetero" from a sequence of notes - but if you then say that Tchaikovsky's life-experience had nothing to do with the end of SWAN LAKE or the SYMPHONIE PATHETIQUE in their sensuous, agonised, torch-singing intensity...

...your experience of humanity, never mind music, in all its messy, tragic, glory and variety is... somewhat reduced.

***
Mr Pee - if you were my next-door neighbour I would only ask what music you listened to, or loved. Here on the R3 forum, and on this especial thread, my curiosity of inquiry HAS to reach into greater detail...

[scottycelt]

Inference from biographical fact and self-quotation (9th's adagio quotes Kyrie from Mass No.3 etc) - not conjecture, and I'm thinking of the COMPLETE Bruckner 9 in 4 movements (with its "happy ending".). Try the recording with the fairly well-known Berlin Philharmonic, directed by Simon Rattle. "All to the Greater Glory of God" and "when I arrive In Heaven and the Lord asks what I have done with his gift, I shall show him my Symphonies". Oh go on, fill in the blanks yourself for a change...

As it happens I have the video recording of the Bruckner 9 'completion' performed by Rattle/Berlin Phil though I don't see why you should pick this one out as being of particular relevance. Bruckner dedicated his final symphony to God, the one before to some Emperor or other, and his third to Wagner. The Seventh also has reported associations with the death of Wagner whose music Bruckner admired greatly. For a man brought up in the Upper Austrian countryside Bruckner's openness about his religion may have seemed laughable to smart-ass Viennese city-slickers but would have been perfectly natural to him and so too the religious quotations and final, perfectly logical, dedication. However you don't have to be a believer or know anything about Wagner and Austrian Emperors to be bowled over by the music. Bruckner deliberately chose the secular concert hall as his main stage for his output not the Church. What was in his mind when he was composing only the composer knows and he's now dead. Anything else is conjecture or over-a-century-old anecdotal.

This is neatly confirmed by one of your quotations. What I've read is that Bruckner thought God would show him mercy when he presented his Te Deum (not the symphonies!) If true, he was obviously very proud of it though it's not really my cup of tea. I also detect a whiff of dry humour in the alleged statement which seems to have escaped the 'experts'.

Reading only a likely half-true account about a long-dead composer's life may be interesting and riveting for some. For others it may actually be a hindrance as they have their own very personal thoughts when listening to the music.

I tend to be one of the latter and, frankly, don't particularly wish to 'get' anything else.

[An_Inspector_Calls]

Of course no music can be or ever was written in utter disregard of the social situation in which its composer wrote it, just as each individual's response to it will be an individual response born of an understanding or a lack of understanding of that situation; it works both ways, to the extent that, whilst "the music itself" (i.e. its component parts of structure, narrative, melody, harmony, rhythm and all the rest) can and does indeed make its own presence felt and can and does stimulate a variety of intellectual and emotional responses in the individual listener, it has not and cannot have been created in any kind of vacuum to the point at which that is all that's demanded of it by its recipients.

This must be the longest sentence posted on these boards? I make it 124 words!

[An_Inspector_Calls]

Just been watching some excellent BBC4 programmes about Dusty Springfield. Go on, tell me her hidden/half-hidden sexual orientation had NOTHING to do with the intensity of longing in the music she created in the 1960s... or the expressive freedom in her songs, her voice and her looks when The Pet Shop Boys brought her back to creative and fully-out life in the 1980s.

If the sexual orientation of the performer influences their performances to this extent, just think what fun we're going to have with a string quartet.

[jean]

I've already indicated I prefer the music of the Protestant Bach to that of the Catholic Mozart ...

I find Mozart's 'religious' music quite banal and not evocative of any religious feeling at all, though I am probably in a minority here. His Catholic faith, if he had any, does not for me manifest itself in the music he wrote for the liturgy.

Bruckner's faith shines through his liturgical settings, though.

And I think it is impossible to separate the work of the great composers of the Renaissance and earlier from the Church they served.

[Mr Pee]

Just been watching some excellent BBC4 programmes about Dusty Springfield. Go on, tell me her hidden/half-hidden sexual orientation had NOTHING to do with the intensity of longing in the music she created in the 1960s... or the expressive freedom in her songs, her voice and her looks when The Pet Shop Boys brought her back to creative and fully-out life in the 1980s.

So classical music is different? Or is it just that 20th Century Repressive & Discriminatory Attitudes within that classical culture would always prefer to believe that sexual forces have nothing to do with the character and intensity of the given individual's artistic creations... (Elephant in the Room alert! Or in East Anglia...)

OF COURSE, OF COURSE (Just to make sure you get it) you can't read "gay" or "hetero" from a sequence of notes - but if you then say that Tchaikovsky's life-experience had nothing to do with the end of SWAN LAKE or the SYMPHONIE PATHETIQUE in their sensuous, agonised, torch-singing intensity...

...your experience of humanity, never mind music, in all its messy, tragic, glory and variety is... somewhat reduced.

And we're back in the room. I rather fear that your view of music is unduly influenced by your obsession with the composer or performer's sexuality, to the extent that you can no longer listen without loading it with external baggage.

[An_Inspector_Calls]

And I think it is impossible to separate the work of the great composers of the Renaissance and earlier from the Church they served.

So you can tell a Protestant from a Catholic through their music?

[MrGongGong]

And we're back in the room. I rather fear that your view of music is unduly influenced by your obsession with the composer or performer's sexuality, to the extent that you can no longer listen without loading it with external baggage.

I wonder if you have a photograph or painting of the Malvern hills on your wall ?

[jean]

So you can tell a Protestant from a Catholic through their music?

No, but I might be able deduce something about the prevailing religious ethos of the time when they were writing, or
alternatively about their own religious faith - which isn't divisible neatly into Catholic and Protestant.

Bach is the obvious example of a composer who can't be pinned down in this way.

And whereas a Marian antiphon from the Eton Choirbook, say, or by Tallis in his early years, is clearly a Catholic piece, while a later, simpler work of Tallis's such as from Archbishoo Parker's Psalter could be said to be Protestant in feeling, that doesn't mean that both sorts of religious sensibility were not part of Tallis's own religious faith.

(If he had one, of course. He may have been a secret atheist - no other sort in those days - an if he was, my argument is nonsense.)

[french frank]

...your experience of humanity, never mind music, in all its messy, tragic, glory and variety is... somewhat reduced.

An alternative way of looking at these examples, might be to suggest that your experience is enriched because of your experience, rather than that of others is reduced. In other words, isn't it impossible for others to experience it in the way that you do yet they experience it in their way? The experiences then are not transferable from one listener to another - but also not perhaps fully transferable from the composer to a particular listener yet partially transferable to another.

Whose experience is richer is up to the individual to decide. Have I got my 'nots' and 'im-s' in the right places?

[scottycelt]

So you can tell a Protestant from a Catholic through their music?

Maybe learning that Bach had 20 children and Bruckner had none might help one to 'get it' ... ? :winkeye:

[ahinton]

This must be the longest sentence posted on these boards? I make it 124 words!

So you can count! (unless, perhaps, you copied it into MS Word and got the program to do it for you). If it makes you any happier, you could always substitue "situation: it" with "situation. It", thereby breaking the sentence into two. Anyway, your point (if any) is?...

[Mr Pee]

So you can count! (unless, perhaps, you copied it into MS Word and got the program to do it for you). If it makes you any happier, you could always substitue "situation: it" with "situation. It", thereby breaking the sentence into two. Anyway, your point (if any) is?...

Well the point is, and it is hardly a subtle one, that you have written possibly the longest sentence ever posted on these boards. ("D'oh" emoticon). Although I am sure that if we checked back over some of your previous contributions, that record might well be broken.

As for your "so you can count" comment, was there really any need for that?

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Well the point is, and it is hardly a subtle one, that you have written possibly the longest sentence ever posted on these boards. ("D'oh" emoticon). Although I am sure that if we checked back over some of your previous contributions, that record might well be broken.

Whereas your "Unbelievable" on the Damascus Thread is one of the shortest. Never had you down as someone who preferred Webern to Wagner, Mr Pee.