I’ve come to the conclusion over the past few years that the mantra, “The conservatives of today are the liberals of tomorrow,” is axiomatic. Whereas the Racialist Right of the past, viz., Rockwell, inveighed against rock’n’roll, modern-day WNs promote it to the hilt and consider it part of White cultural heritage. Thus, it’s not surprising that James O’Meara’s latest essay is part of this trend.
Essentially, O’Meara’s essay is an attempt to belittle the Western musical canon and replace it with something more “progressive” (with a homosexual tinge). There are several problems with this. Allow me to begin with the most inconsequential and then I’ll work my way up to the crux of the matter.
James O’Meara’s writing style is irritating. It’s filled with references to “pop culture” and various modern/modernistic sayings. It’s a snazzy, jazzy, and frenetic writing style with a lot of names thrown in to give it the flavor of credibility. This invoking of the modern “world of pop” is alien to me and others from the Old World. More than half-the-time, I have no clue who or what he is referring to. O’Meara is steeped in the modern world. This is not good and it’s a sign of worse things to come.
Now, I’m not an expert on Equal Tuning (ET). However, I know enough of Western music, with its modes and diatonicity, to realize that the latter expanded the possibilities of the former by allowing for better direction and finality due to harmonic progression. Contrary to what the “composer” Dane Rudhyar claims, Western music did not revoke Mysticism. The Western canon is spiritual to the core, from chant up to and including the pathos of Elektra. Incidentally, I listened to Rudhyar’s “compositions” and they are ugly and miasmic. I thought it wryly humorous that he should speak about the West losing its Mysticism with his cacophonous compositions.
Once O’Meara is done attempting to denigrate the foundations of Western music, he states that the twelve-tone diatonic system is bankrupt and washed up: it’s discordant, it’s anti-Tradition, it’s “merely psychological”, etc. If O’Meara knew anything about Western music, he would know that it goes beyond the mundane. Western music moves the Soul. Actually, it invokes various States. Those who are moved by a Beethoven symphony, a Haydn string quartet, an Ockeghem mass, and a song of courtly love by Machaut, know of what I speak. For example, the last movement of the Pastoral symphony, where the double basses take the melody, makes the music soar, and one feels as if the clouds have been ripped asunder and the Heavenly Host has shown itself in its full glory. This is not mere theatrics. If individuals, bereft of a sense of beauty, cannot see it, then they are blind.
In actuality, O’Meara’s thesis is not novel. Others have besmirched Western music before. O’Meara’s approach, however, is to attack Western music by quoting the school of Sophia Perennis in order to sanctify his agenda. This doesn’t fly as it’s disingenuous and manipulative. A case in point is O’Meara’s homosexuality and probable pederasty. O’Meara is quick to quote and use Guenon to further his agenda; to wit, his viewpoint is in tune with “Aryanism”. Yet, Guenon converted to Islam and moved to Egypt, married an Egyptian woman, and fathered a half-Egyptian daughter. Indeed, Lings, Burkhardt, and Schuon, all big names in Tradition, converted to Islam and even took Islamic names. Next time, when O’Meara raises the issue that the anti-homosexual stance is Abrahamic and not Aryan, why doesn’t he quote Guenon, Lings, Burkhardt, and Schuon, all “Aryans”, in order to see what they think of homosexuality, given their conversion to Islam?
After having attacked Western music and attempting to destroy its edifice, O’Meara calls for a new music. This new music is exemplified by a horrid modernist by the name of Partch. Said modernist, miracle of miracles, is yet another “wild boy”; i.e., a homosexual. As disgusting as homosexuality is, what’s more intolerable, philosophically, ideologically, and aesthetically, is the hubris with which O’Meara pontificates on the merits of Partch. Partch is nothing but a gasbag and a pretentious pseudo-iconoclast. This microtonal moron (like Haba and Harrison, another homosexual) is touted because he developed a new system of music and new instrumentation to go along with it. Big Deal. Experimentation is nothing but another sign of the times. Is it any wonder that Hitler stated, “There shall be no experimentation”?
Experimentation is proof that music, including other fields of cultural expression, are dead and stinking. When an artist must create something novel, for the sake of novelty, then there is no creative spirit present. Hasn’t one witnessed that every degenerate and soporific (at best) “composer” of the modern era has been noted for one hare-brained form of experimentation or another? One can take serialism, minimalism, microtonalism, and their various permutations and amalgams as proof that not one of these turds (how appropriate, given their homosexuality) has anything to say. Further, isn’t it also telling that there is a large degree of perverse sexuality (homosexuality) in these aesthetically horrid circles: Harrison, Cage, Partch, etc.?
A Traditionalist would look to the past and stick with that, refusing to infuse today’s cacophony and faux-music (“folk metal”, for example) to build something new, since the age of creativity in the Arts has passed and said Frankenstein will be a chimera full of monkeyshines. This lack of understanding shows that O’Meara’s utilization of Tradition is flawed. It’s quasi-Tradition raised on rock’n’roll and other types of “pop culture”. All that this ridiculous talk does is, yet again, show that O’Meara and his ilk lack musical refinement while exhibiting, unbeknownst to themselves, the utmost hubris. As a case in point, O’Meara’s third installment on Partch refers to the decomposer as “Our Wagner, Only Better”! My God, what fatuousness!
Speaking of Wagner, he’s considered an idol because the NS, Hitler in particular, made him such at the expense of others. This is a case of sycophantism. In fact, the Right doesn’t know any better, because it, too, lacks knowledge and aesthetic sensitivity, to a large degree. Brahms and other composers who weren’t revered by Hitler and Co. didn’t shine as strongly for the Right as we currently witness. Be that as it may, I agree with Rossini: “Mr. Wagner has beautiful moments, but bad quarters of an hour.”
You who love the Western musical heritage and give it more than cursory lip-service should be aghast at what this pederast has written. He has an agenda of promoting the most absurd ideas as novel and almost always with some homosexual angle. His “wild boys” are charlatans, hacks, freaks, homosexuals (excuse the redundancy), modernists, and purveyors of ugliness. I have yet to listen to a piece by Partch that can compete with the most nugatory of classical compositions.
The fact that Western youth do not listen to their musical hits and wonderments is not a reason to forego the Musical Masters, but to accept the fact that Western youth are degenerate through and through and must be redeemed. They need the light and they need to be re-acquainted with their heritage. Simulacra of a nadir variety are simply not to be brooked.
7 replies on “Not impressive”
The most unnerving aspect of pop-culture? Entire generations lost. I started thinking, what would interest someone say 20 generations from now about the last 50 years? Maybe a few decent novels and films, most of science and technology and a few technical works from the humanities.
Our civilization is creating cheap junk at a record tempo, the Jewmedia are pumping out cheap junkflicks, dramaseries, violent video-games and cheap kitchen and fantasy novels. They offer no rest, no dept and no spirit.
Brilliant! Quite an ‘impressive’ post. My comments below:
“Now, I’m not an expert on Equal Tuning (ET)…”
Re: All technical jargon used to justify an attack against ET is just a smoke-screen designed to hide a simple fact. Max Weber, the German sociologist, once wondered why was it only in Europe, and during a certain epoch, that the polyphony that had almost everywhere emerged in the area of folk music developed into harmonic music, whereas everywhere else the rationalization of music took another, and mostly quite the opposite direction, namely that of developing the intervals by divisions of distance (particularly of the fourths) and not by harmonic division (of the fifths). This is the answer: because of the historical appearance of a particular ‘sensitivity’ linked to a particular type of human being.
‘Classical music’, far from a universal phenomenon, constitutes a specific geographical and cultural epoch without equal in other eras or civilizations. Indeed, even in pre-Bachian Europe, the music the Church imposed on the catholic ecumene was based on repetition of Greco-Roman musical tradition, which was fundamentally of Mediterranean and Middle-Eastern origin and, arguably, deriving from an exclusive ‘melodic’ sensitivity.
Shortly after Carolingian times – with the forced conversion of Saxon tribes that followed the Massacre of Verden and the restoration of the Empire – another musical sensitivity (in this case ‘harmonic’) starts to penetrate the musical universe of the Church, which had remained secluded until that point. What might have been the origin of such new sensitivity?
Musicologists refer to a ‘pagan residue’ existing in the indigenous cultures of Northern Europe. Undoubtely, a tonal system emerged, after a few centuries, from the opposition of the Church tradition and that of the indigenous music culture of Northern Europe. Music is the ‘secret language’ that the Aryan collective unconscious, surrounded by a repressive Jewish-Christian environment, creates in order to talk to itself. This ciphered language is expressed – becomes significant – thanks to the tonal system, forged step by step by what is now labeled ‘classical canon’. That is the reason why Harry Partch, to European ears, sounds ‘Orientalist’.
“…he states that the twelve-tone diatonic system is bankrupt and washed up…”
Re: The old platitude that it is impossible to create anything new within the tonal system after Wagner, Liszt, etc. disguises an unconscious or malicious aversion against the ‘spirit of European music’ – the Aryan psyche. There is no intrinsic impossibility within the equal temperament system. Even Schönberg, the inventor of atonality, affirmed at the end of his life that it was still perfectly possible to write plenty of masterpieces in C major. The psychological causes behind the dislike of the twelve-tone system are multiple but all characteristic of our dying, decadent civilization. 1945 marked a watershed in the musical world also: just before the ‘Götterdämmerung’ there were still geniuses such as Mascagni, Respighi, Orff, Pfitzner or Rodrigo, and then suddenly afterwards there emerged Cage, Partch & co.
“Speaking of Wagner, he’s considered an idol because the NS, Hitler in particular, made him such at the expense of others…”
Re: Here I have to disagree. During the III Reich, Verdi’s operas were performed more often than Wagner’s, Bruckner was consacrated at the Walhalla Memorial, Richard Strauss was the President of the Reichsmusikkammer and the Last Emperor’s birthday was usually celebrated with Beethoven’s 9th symphony. The importance of Richard Wagner for NS was mostly of a metapolitical character.
Richard Wagner, especially his Ring of the Nibelung – an epic masterpiece of musical genius – represents a milestone and, arguably, the completion of a parabola symbolized by the great European tradition of tonal and polyphonic music, extending from Johann Sebastian Bach and his contemporaries to Mozart and Beethoven, and culminating, after Wagner, in Richard Strauss and Carl Orff. The Aryan spirit, travelling underground in the spirit of music, becomes self-conscious again with Richard Wagner.
Together with Parsifal, the Ring has been, until very recently, in the annual programme of the Bayreuth Festival, and it was conceived by Wagner as a sacral rite in the regeneration of history. He believed art might redeem a culture, a society – and its people. Wagner likened the theatre to a temple of Aryan art and mystic rite, and through the Teutonic myth he found elements which would consecrate higher folk-consciousness, and an upward path to the Übermensch.
The work of Wagner demonstrates an eminently agitating character; its importance resides in the new historical and psychological principle it introduces into the European spirit. As poiesis, his artistic endeavours may be considered a campaign of poetic seduction and provocation that should give rise to a new type of man: a superior man, always tending towards the superman, capable of guaranteeing to humankind eternal historical becoming, eternal creation and self re-creation.
I know nothing of classical music. Where should I start?
Watch Disney’s Fantasia and Sleeping Beauty!
Also Mighty you eventually get around to watching Amadeus, which I think most young people do when they get into classical music, remember that it is a movie and half of it is made up for the sake of drama.
Rossini’s Wagner comment must be taken in all context. And he was himself a sick man who gave up on music. In any case, history is really the final arbiter of art, and contemporaries may not have an historical sense. We are reminded that Beethoven, while congratulating Rossini on Barber, told the Italian that he really wasn’t good enough to do anything of a serious nature. And Schopenhauer, for whom Wagner understood to have penetrated the essence or form of music, was apparently not very keen on the composer qua composer.
One may consider Rossini’s views on Wagner, the man, recorded after their only brief meeting in 1826:
[quoted from an article in Musical Times, Vol 48, No 770, April 1st 1907]
Erratum: the Wagner/Rossini Paris meeting was in 1860, and not 1826.