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Category: Music
Excerpted from Werner Ross’s Der ängstliche Adler
– Friedrich Nietzsches Leben (1980):
Carl Ludwig Nietzsche,
Nietzsche’s father
The boy does not remember the Röcken home dominated by women, but only the image of the father, idealized on par as it gradually fades out. The pious rural cleric remains completely safe from the uprising against Christianity, which would be the true mission of Nietzsche from his eighteen years. Since then, his father is for him an “ethereal angel.” One of the qualities that he has inherited from him is the kindness, the renunciation of revenge for nobility. So in the late self-portraiture of Ecce homo we read that, in case of offense, Nietzsche prohibits himself “any retaliation, any measure of defense.”
[Chechar’s note: Those who have read the passages of Alice Miller in The Untouched Key as to why Nietzsche went mad—just imagine a self-proclaimed Antichrist who, simultaneously, never defended himself before the father clergyman!—would treasure passages such as these.]
Another inherited quality is the love of music. In a postcard to Peter Gast [Heinrich Köselitz] of the time of Zarathustra an observation is included: “It is raining in torrents, music gets me away. I like that music and the way I like it is something I cannot explain based on my experiences: rather based on my father. And why should not…?”
The phrase is cut, but can be completed with another of Ecce homo in which he says: Why should not I continue to live in him and he in me after his untimely death?
And he was no less mystical in his later years, when he conceived the doctrine of eternal recurrence, so he could skip the generational order to become a descendant of Napoleon, Caesar or Alexander. But the same process also allowed otherwise: the mysterious identification with the father, either in the agonizing fear of premature death and madness, either in the gut, not even confessed to his friend Gast, that having survived the fateful thirty-third year of his life he would merge with his father to form a single figure with him.
The family was assured that Fritz (short for Friedrich) would be clergyman as the father. His mother, who was not limited to accompany him to the bed but every night carried him into it, panting said, “If you continue like this I’ll have to carry you up to bed until you study theology.” Fritz, meanwhile, was a precocious and obedient child; knew by heart passages of the Bible and religious songs so that their local school classmates called him the little shepherd. He was no friend of other children, and in school they laughed at him but then, at home, spoke wonders of the little sage.
Young Nietzsche, whose strange factions made one think of an owl, had an excellent performance. An anecdote belonging to the repertoire of Elisabeth [Nietzsche’s sister] tells us that, at one point, it started raining and as everyone ran from school to their homes, he continued to walk at a leisurely pace with the board over his hat and scarf on the blackboard. When Nietzsche got home was completely soaked. That why he had not run like the others? Well, because the school regulations say that, after school, children should go to their houses quietly and politely. The story seems credible; it was not normal behavior, but a show of obedience directed against his classmates’ behavior.
The little shepherd never tires of reciting pious maxims, edifying virtuous desires and prayers. Words like purpose, wise decision of God, beneficent hand of God, heavenly father come out of his lips with astonishing naturalness.
The strongest impressions were those that religious music gave Nietzsche. In the misty autumn evenings, the boy came sneaking into the cathedral to witness the rehearsals of the Requiem for the day of the dead; he was overwhelmed to hear the Dies irae and was deeply delighted with the Benedictus. It was not just a childish impulse that led him at fourteen, in Schulpforta, to write in all seriousness motets, chorale melodies and fugues and even try a Missa for solo, chorus and orchestra. At sixteen Nietzsche outlined a Miserere for five voices and, finally, began a Christmas oratory on which he worked for two years.
At seventeen, the son of the pastor received confirmation. His classmate Deussen, also a son of pastor says the two maintained a pious attitude, away from the world. They were willing to die immediately to go to meet Jesus. When his friend Wilhelm Pinder received confirmation, Nietzsche wrote: “With the promise you walk into the line of Christian adults who are considered worthy of the most precious legacy of our Savior, and through their enjoyment of life, achieve happiness of the soul.” Not even from the pastor’s pen would have come such pious words.
In High School Nietzsche had an “excellent” in religion. The commentary reports confirm that the student has shown, along with a good understanding of the New Testament, a keen interest in the doctrine of Christian salvation which he has easily and solidly assimilated, and is also able to express himself clearly on the subject.
♣
The above was extracted from one of the first chapters of Ross’ book. Unlike Curt Paul Janz, hundreds of pages later Ross only dedicates a few paragraphs to Nietzsche’s life after his breakdown. He writes:
Nietzsche’s biography ends in the early days of 1889, although his life was extended until August 25, 1900. Paralyzed and demented, he died of pneumonia.
On August 10, 1889 Nietzsche entered the psychiatric clinic of the University of Basel; a week later he is taken to the Jena University Clinic where he remains for about fifteen months, and on March 24, 1890 he is discharged in writing and sent home. Nietzsche remains under the care of his mother until her death in 1897. In July 1897 the sister purchases a Weimar villa, “Silberblick,” for the Nietzsche Archive and in it she installs the patient.
About the demented Nietzsche several persons issued reports: (1) Turin dentist, Dr. Bettmann, who with Overbeck brought Nietzsche to Basel; (2) the diaries of Basel and Jena for the sick by the physician (and later professor) Ziehen; (2) the mother in his letters to Professor Overbeck, and (4) friends and visitors, from Gast to Deussen and from Overbeck to Resa von Schirnhofer.
The extracts that follow from 1889-1892 show on one hand the state of the disorder, but on the other they shed light on the “healthy” Nietzsche, specifically those oppressed and repressed aspects that madness liberated.
Dentist Bettmann’s opinion, in Turin:
The patient is usually excited, he asks much food but is unable to do something and take care of himself. He claims to be a famous man, and constantly asks a woman for him.
Basel journal for the sick, January 1889:
He only answers partially and incompletely or not at all to the questions addressed to him, insisting in his confused verbiage nonstop.
First day at Jena, January 19, 1889:
The patient walks on the department with many bows of courtesy. With majestic step, staring at the ceiling, enters the room and gives thanks for the “great reception.” He doesn’t know where he is.
Extracts from the diary for the sick at Jena, from January to October 1889:
He wants his compositions to be premiered. He has little understanding or memory of ideas or passages from his works. He always identifies the physicians correctly. He proclaims himself now Duke of Cumberland, now Emperor, etc… “At last I have been Frederick William IV,” “My wife Cosima Wagner has brought me here.” “At night they have uttered curses against me, have used the most horrible mechanisms.” “I want a gun if there is any truth in the suspicion that the very Grand Duchess commits these filthy acts and attacks on me.”
At night we always have to isolate him. He often smears himself with excrement. He eats excrements. He urinates in his boot or glass and drinks the urine or smears himself with it. Once he smeared a leg with excrement. He wraps excrements in paper and puts it all in the drawer of a table.
The mother to Overbeck, April 8, 1889:
About an hour ago my son has been taken to the department of the peaceful sick… The greatest joy you can provide is to speak in Italian or French to him… Gone are the ideas of grandeur that initially made him so happy…
On March 24, 1890 the mother takes Nietzsche out of the center to live with him in Jena. On one occasion Nietzsche undresses in public with intent of swimming and a guard is hired, who follows at a distance mother and son when they go for a walk. On June 17, 1890 she writes to Overbeck:
He plays a little of music every day, partly his small compositions or songs of an old book of songs… The religious sentiment is asserted more and more in him. During Pentecost, when we were sitting quietly in the balcony with me holding an old Bible [he says] that in Turin he had studied the whole Bible and taken thousands of notes, when I read this or that psalm; this or that chapter, I expressed surprise that he knew the Bible so thoroughly.
From 1892 Nietzsche can no longer feed himself. He has to be washed and dressed. The walks have to be abandoned because Nietzsche shouts and hits everything on his way. In 1894 Nietzsche recognizes Deussen, but in 1895 he no longer recognizes Overbeck.
In madness it clearly appears a regression to infantile and juvenile stages. In the time of megalomania Dionysus and Zarathustra are totally excluded. Instead it reappears Frederick William IV [discussed in Ross’ earlier chapters], and Nietzsche says to his mother he is twenty-two. The last letter to Jacob Burckhardt is written by a “student.” His fears (the light should remain lit at night, the door must be closed) belong to an early childhood stage, like the “magic of the pieces of glass.” It is also noteworthy the return to the old religion and a fearful, even radical avoidance of everything philosophical. As a sick man Nietzsche is an obedient or uninhibited child.
At the end he completely sinks into apathy.
The mother, fearful, “limited” (as seen in the Basel clinic) was at first mean, although she continued to receive Nietzsche’s pension. But when he was with her she cared for him, protected and looked after him with motherly love. Friedrich then again became what in her opinion should have always been: her little child.
Categories
Dance over the abyss
If you look into an abyss, the
abyss, likewise, looks into you.
This self-addressed pæan of intoxicated happiness is, I know, regarded by modern physicians as a morbid euphoria, as the last pleasure in a decaying brain, as the stigma of that megalomania which is characteristic of the early stage of paralytic dementia. But Nietzsche talks clearly and incisively amid the ardours of intoxication. No other mortal, perhaps, has ever in full awareness and without a trace of giddiness leaned so far and seen so clearly over the edge of the precipice of lunacy.
No doubt the light that sparkles here is a perilous one. It has the phantasmal and morbid luminosity of a midnight sun glowing red above icebergs; it is a northern light of the soul whose unique splendour makes us shudder. It does not warm us, it terrifies us. It does not dazzle, but it slays. He is not carried away as was Hölderlin by an obscure rhythm of feeling, is not overwhelmed by the onrush of melancholy. He is scorched by his own ardours, is sunstruck by his own rays, is affected by a white-hot and intolerable cheerfulness. Nietzsche’s collapse was a sort of carbonization in his own flames.
He commanded the German emperor to go to Rome in order to be shot; he summoned the European powers to take united military action against Germany, to encircle his fatherland in a ring of iron. Never did apocalyptic wrath shout more savagely into vacancy, never did so glorious presumption scourge a mind beyond earthly bounds. His words issued like hammer-blows striving to demolish the edifice of established civilisation. The Christian era was to cease with the publication of his Antichrist, and a new numbering of the years was to begin.
“No one has written, felt, suffered in such a manner before; the sufferings of a god, a Dionysius.” These words, penned when his mental disorder had already begun, are painfully true. The little room of the fourth floor, and the hermitage of Sils-Maria, not only sheltered the man Friedrich Nietzsche whose nerves were breaking under the strain, but also served as the places from which were issued a marvellous message to the dying century. The Creative Spirit had taken refuge beneath the attic roof heated by the southern sun, and was bestowing its entire wealth upon a timid, neglected, and lonely being, bestowing far more than any isolated person could sustain.
Within those narrow walls, wrestling with infinities, the poor mortal senses were stumbling and groping amid the lightening-flashes of revelation. Like Hölderlin, he felt that a god was revealing himself, a fiery god whose radiance the eyes could not bear and whose proximity was scorching. Again and again the cowering wrench raised his head and attempted to look upon the countenance of this deity, his thoughts running riot the while.
Was not he who felt and wrote and suffered such unthinkable things, was not he himself God? Had not a god reanimated the world after he, Nietzsche, had slain the old god? Who was he? Who was Nietzsche? Was Nietzsche the Crucified; the dead god or the living one; the god of his youth, Dionysius; or both Dionysus and the Crucified—the crucified Dionysius?
More and more confused grew his thoughts; the current roared too loud beneath the superfluity of light. Was it still light? Had it not become music? The narrow room on the fourth floor in the Via Carlo Alberto began to intone; the shining spheres made music; all heaven was aglow. What wonderful music! Tears tricked down his face, warm tears. What sublime tenderness, what auspicious happiness! And now, what lucidity! In the street, everyone smiled at him in friendly fashion; they stood up to greet him; they made obeisance to him, the slayer of gods; they were all so delighted to see him. Why? Why?
He knew. Antichrist had appeared upon earth, and men acclaimed him with hosannas. The world hummed with jubilation, was full of music. Then suddenly the tumult was stilled. Something, someone fell down. It is he, himself, in the street, in front of the house where he lodged. He was picked up. He found himself back in his room.
Had he been asleep for a long time? It seemed very dark. There was the piano. Music! Music! Then, unexpectedly, people appeared in the room. Surely one of them must be Overbeck. But Overbeck is in Basel; and where is he, Nietzsche? He no longer remembers. Why does the company look at him so strangely, so anxiously? He is in a train, rattling along the rails, and the wheels are singing; yes, they are singing the “Gondolier’s Chanty,” and he joins in, signs in an interminable darkness.
He is in a strange room, and always it is dark. No more sunshine, no light at all, either within or without. People talk in the room. A woman among them, surely it is his sister? He had thought she was travelling. She reads aloud to him, now from one book, now from another. Books? “Was not I once a writer of books?” Comes a gentle answer, but he cannot understand. One in whose soul such a hurricane has raged grows deaf to ordinary speech. One who has gazed so intently into the eyes of the daimon is henceforth blinded.
Categories
Flight into music
For many years music remained a private amusement to which Nietzsche delivered himself up in a spirit of irresponsible pleasure, with the pure delight of an amateur, a pastime altogether outside his main “mission” in life. Music flooded his being only after the philological crust had been removed, only when his erudite objectivity of outlook had become disintegrated, when his cosmos had been shattered as if by a volcanic eruption.
Precisely because he had pent up these primal springs of his nature for so long behind the damns of philology, erudition, and indifference, did they gush forth so vehemently and penetrate into every crevice, irradiating and liquefying his literary style. It was as if his tongue, which had hitherto sought to explain tangible things, had suddenly refused its allotted task and insisted upon expressing itself in terms of music. Even his punctuation—unspoken speech—his dashes, his italics, could find equivalents in the terminology of the elements of music.
The details of each work are vibrant with music, and the works as a whole read like symphonies. They no longer belong to the realm of architecture, of intellectual and objective creations, but are the direct outcome of musical inspiration. Of Thus Spake Zarathustra he himself says that it was written “in the spirit of the first phrase of the Ninth Symphony.” And how better can I describe the opening of Ecce Homo than as a magnificent organ prelude destined to be played in some vast cathedral? “Song of Night” and “Gondolier’s Chanty” resemble the croonings of primitive men in the midst of an infinite solitude. When was his inspiration more joyous and dancing, more heroic, more like a lilting cadence of the Grecian music of antiquity, than in the pæan indited during his ultimate outburst of happiness, in the Dionysian rhapsody? Illuminated from on high by the pellucid skies of the South, soaked from beneath by the waters of music, his language became as it were a wave, restless and immense.
Music, limpid, freedom-giving, and light, became the dearest solace of Nietzsche’s agitated mind. “Life without music is nothing but fatigue and error.” “Was a man ever so athirst for music as I?” He, the solitary wanderer cast out by the gods desired only that they should not rob him of this one consolation, this nectar, this ambrosia which eternally refreshed and reinvigorated the soul. “Art, nothing but art! Art was given us that we might not be slain by truth.”
The world had forsaken him; his friends had long since gone their ways and ignored his existence; his thoughts strayed forth on interminable pilgrimages. Music alone walked by his side, accompanying him into his final, his seventh, solitude.
When in the end he fell into the abyss, she watched over his obliterated mind. Overbeck, coming into the room after the catastrophe, found the unhappy madman sitting at the piano, his fingers fumbling the keys in a vain effort to find the harmonies so dear to him.
Categories
Epigrams and arrows
Why is the white nationalist movement fraudulent? Because white nationalists don’t really believe in their own shit:
• Any “nationalist” who says he hates Hitler is a phony white nationalist
• Any “nationalist” who says he supports homos is a phony white nationalist
• Any “nationalist” who promotes pop music is a phony white nationalist
• Any “nationalist” who embraces feminism is a phony white nationalist
• Any “nationalist” ignorant of the history of Europe is a phony white nationalist
How many are there in the American scene that hate Hitler or accept the homo agenda or listen popular music (this includes gyms) or accept women in what should be boys only clubs or are reluctant to learn basic facts about the Old World that allowed the New World in the first place?
If these guys are the cream of the Aryan people… you guys must be in good shape! Consider these epigrams and arrows taken from the site of Iranian for Aryans:
§ The sign of the times is degeneracy. This term—degeneracy—sums up all that is happening to the West. As a case in point, witness the efflorescence of “zoo brothels” in Germany (here). What’s amazing—is it really?—is that the zoophilic campaigners push the moral relativism card.
§ I am a staunch defender of the Western canon and I consider those who degrade it and marginalize it as my enemies.
§ White man, stop being such a degenerate. Your daughters sleep with niggers, they dress like strumpets, they behave like harlots, they talk back, and they abort. And to think that you have the temerity to be offended! What fatuousness!
§ Everything that this unlamented, for me, degenerate stood for was a direct slap to civilization and culture; especially, music. The strident cacophony, the profligacy, the words, the attire, the overall appearance, and the destructive aura of these retarded, sophomoric culture-wreckers damns them to eternal perdition as far as I’m concerned.
§ Sexual jealousy is one of the worst feelings a man can have. It is all-consuming and all-encompassing. Now I fully realize the importance of the traditional doctrine of marrying a virgin.
§ Hell is having to listen to and watch all forms of modern entertainment.
§ I’m sick of seeing young white women with tattoos.
§ I hate, I detest, I loath, I excoriate, I vilify modern “movies”, “music”, “art”, “poetry”, “literature”, and every other flatus meant to represent modern “culture”.
§ The “White movement” is no movement in the true sense. It is a loose aggregate—at best—of armchair loudmouths and pretentious pontificators. The overwhelming number of individuals who are either self-penned or peon-promoted “leaders” are half-baked intellectuals; to wit, those who spout off Evola and Nietzsche from one aperture while doing the same for rock’n’roll from the other, posterior one.
The pretenders, these pseudo-thinkers claim, disingenuously, that modern Whites, youth especially, don’t like and can’t digest the Western musical canon. They need, so they say, something more “up beat” and “relevant”. In other words, let’s teach them all the thoughts of the bigwigs from the Western past, which is somehow not antithetical, while pushing the “musical” excrescences of modernity. This is not only hypocritical, but otiose, since our agenda must be to invoke the Past in its entirety. Imagine, having a people who can quote Guénon while gyrating to AC/DC!
If such a group was ever to come to fruition, it would get nowhere. How can a mind house the soul of a nigger? It is a veritable abortion. And the people who talk big while listening to filth have no taste and they have no soul. The thoughts and milieux of great minds are antipodal to modern “White music” and even to musical modernisms of any and all sorts à la Stravinsky and Bartok. Can one even fathom a Nietzsche-like prophetic figure perorating such great and inspiring thoughts while contemplating offal?
Categories
Not impressive
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.
“I apologize as it’s not my purpose to browbeat you, but your promotion of said ‘music’ is prima facie evidence that the West is defunct.” —Iranian for Aryans
Music is the external side of the soul. If a culture’s soul is rotten, the external side of that culture must be rotten too.
Together with sexual mores and architecture, music has been my litmus test that shows that many white nationalists have not rejected the rottenness of our world.
In another thread the illustrious Roger said:
You are right that jazz requires some skill from the performer. What it does not require, however, is discipline from either the composer or the performer. It is inherently transient because of its improvisational character—if not for audio recording technology, alleged classics like Kind of Blue would have no posterity. The only thing that most jazz musicians bother to compose is what they refer to as the head, whilst the rest [is] improvised. Their structure is a binary A-B-A-B-A-B-A form: A represents the head, and B represents the improvisational passages led by each of the soloists. It is about showmanship and impulsiveness. That might be impressive for unruly teenagers and permanent adolescents, but it is not serious music. The mere form and structure of jazz prevents it from integrating any thoughtful counterpoint and orchestration. The harmony tends to be very basic and trite.
As for heavy metal, I don’t deny that people like Steve Vai and John Petrucci are capable performers with their electric guitars. Their problem is that they adore a bastardised conception of music, and they seem unable to perform without using artificial amplification and/or sound effects (which automatically close the instrument off to subtle dynamics and articulation). The electric guitar is one of the worst inventions of the 20th Century. Its steel strings create a sound which is not at all conducive to interesting polyphonic music (unlike, for instance, the classical guitar music of Fernando Sor). You will seldom hear an unaccompanied electric guitar, and if you do, it will be no more appealing to the ears than the accompaniment of an overbearing drum kit, a bass guitar, a screechy “singer”, and perhaps a keyboard synthesiser.
It might also be added that jazz and rock music are both highly repetitive. The song you have posted is a good example. Not only are the lyrics juvenile and unpoetic, “sung” in a lacklustre fashion, but the lauded guitar solo is unmusical and (as expected) affected by irritating wah-wah sound effects. James O’Meara might enjoy it, because it is filled with bent notes and whammy bar movements, defying the twelve-tone equal temperament which he so opposes. It certainly does not require the same discipline from the performer as, for example, Joachim’s cadenza for Brahms’ violin concerto. There is no attention to ornamentation (e.g. staccato, legato, trills), harmony or dynamics, and there is no real craft involved. Joachim’s cadenza has all of those things, and it requires a very high level of skill to perform all of the double and triple stops—and that’s just the cadenza! It is the least interesting part of the concerto, in my view, as I find Brahms’ orchestration far more compelling and ingenious than any violin solo. The third movement is more exhilarating than anything one can find in heavy metal, regardless of how much the New Right wishes to think of it as “Viking” music (as if!).
You also wrote:
We can not listen to Beethoven all day, we also need a more basic entree to lighten our daily burden, which is “folk music”. Which has to be reinvented after a total extermination process since the 40’ties.
This is wrong on several counts. Starting with your last point, it is not true that folk music needs to be “reinvented”. I rather like Breton and Scottish folk music, and I can testify that these are two very strong living traditions. If you visit Lorient during the first two weeks of August in any given year, you will have a hard time making it down a street without hearing at least one busker (or a group of them) performing traditional music. People flock in from all over France and Europe for the “interceltique” festival in Lorient, and the enthusiasm on the streets is a stark reminder of Old Europe (there’s rarely a black face to be seen, either).
I love it, and I find the music of the Breton bagads delightful. The sound has a wonderful sense of discipline, and the better ones have a strict regimentation of the different sections of the band. It is well-suited for outdoor events in general, and street parades in particular. This is just one example to show that the folk traditions in most European countries have not suffered a “total extermination”, contrary to your claim. Most people are disconnected from them in the West (many favouring the modernist music you offer as an alternative), but they still exist, and enough people take an active interest for competitions, festivals, sessions and concerts to be regularly staged. The strong rhythm of this folk music is designed to complement traditional dance forms like the hornpipe, the an dro, the hanter dro, the gavotte and the reel, incidentally (this is also a function of much classical music). Jazz dancing is a different thing altogether, as is the frenzied idiocy of rock crowds. To compare the two is laughable. One of them serves the cause of decency, and the other serves the cause of debauchery.
As for the first point, nobody is suggesting that we ought to “listen to Beethoven all day”. There is so much variation in the Western classical canon that it would take at least a decade to properly absorb the full catalogues of all the major composers—and that’s without even mentioning the all of the lesser-known composers of merit (neglected or unesteemed composers still have more value than slimy modernist music). Beethoven is the acme of late Classical music, but there is obviously more to it than him alone. Frequently played favourites in my house include Dowland, Buxtehude, Bach, Monteverdi, Josquin, Dufay, Byrd, Haydn, Elgar, Schubert, Rachmaninoff and Dvořák, with many others in between. It is not hard for an attentive listener to hear the distinctions between each one of these composers, nor to understand what it is that unites them as part of the same broad musical tradition.
I think it comes down to this question: are we to behave as animals or as men? Their music appeals to the body because of the primacy of its rhythm (and, in the case of rock music, its deliberate, artificial loudness). Western music, on the other hand, appeals to the soul. This is something that you appear to be contemptuous of with your comments about “repression” (a favourite word of the feminists). I do not hold out much hope of convincing you to reject the sensualism which underlies your assumptions about the purpose of music.
(Source: here)
It took Will Durant more than three decades to write the monumental The Story of Civilization. After finishing the ten volumes of the Story, it followed the essay The Lessons of History, which reflect both Durant’s erudition and his accumulated wisdom. I read The Lessons of History while living in the States and would like to quote some excerpts from one of the chapters, “Biology and History”:
The third biological lesson of history is that life must breed. Nature has no use of organisms, variations, or groups that cannot reproduce abundantly. She has a passion for quantity as a prerequisite to the selection of quality. She does not care that a high rate has usually accompanied a culturally low civilization, and a low birth rate a civilization culturally high, and she sees that a nation with low birth rate shall be periodically chastened by some more virile and fertile group…
There is no humorist like history.
No humorist indeed! Presently the Moslems are gradually outbreeding the Anglo-Saxons, the French, Dutch and the Germans in a Europe that will soon become Eurabia. But how could this have happened?
The 2005 movie adaptation of Pride and Prejudice is a good start to approach what I said in recent posts about the Jane Austen world, even if the 1995 television series depict more faithfully the early nineteenth-century England. The music of the 2005 adaptation (hereafter referred simply as P&P), composed by Dario Marianelli, mostly for piano and very little for the orchestra, demonstrates that it is a lie that sublime music cannot be composed by whites after the century of Mozart and Beethoven.
Watch the film!
I have posted nine short diatribes against degenerate music in this site—a National Socialist term—, the simian music that even white nationalists seem to be very fond of.
It is impossible to demonstrate objectively that to like contemporary pop music (which must not be confused with folklore) is a symptom of degeneracy, insofar as an intra-psychic emergency from Neanderthalism is a thoroughly subjective dimension. What can be done is to imagine a future ethnostate that re-establishes marriage as the central institution for the white people. After the first and second generation of citizens of the ethnostate pass away, I bet that the surviving grandsons and granddaughters, so imbued in Austen-like sexual mores and memes, will not comprehend why their granddads fell spiritually as low as liking rock music and its heaviest modalities.
Presently Western popular music, television and the overwhelming majority of movies only reflect the utterly rotten souls of the white peoples. It is no coincidence that those white nationalist sites that promote rock and Hollywood also promote homosexualism or heterosexual fornication—never traditional marriage, generous breeding and chastity. What can I say to those nationalists who want a truly traditional ethnostate? That the latest film adaptation of P&P reflects a possible future.
The dollar will crash soon. Social havoc will result especially at the epicenter of the crash: Washington, New York, Los Angeles—precisely the western cities with more non-whites. A huge political change will follow the crash, with a bankrupted US no longer capable of playing Globocop and with all the American military bases called from overseas to deal with the chaos at home. It is not clear what would be the fate of Israel once its sole defender is removed.
Later in this century the monetary/social/political crises will converge with the depletion of oil, as Sebastian Ernst Ronin has been hammering in his Hammer & Anvil site, with no reliable energetic resource capable of replacing it in due time. This will cause mass starvation, especially in the undeveloped countries. The convergence of catastrophes will lead to a world completely different from our own, with country farming as the central lifestyle instead of big cities advocating the glory of Mammon.
If after such convergence white ethnostates are formed, and I believe that Harold Covington has a point in what he describes in his futuristic novels, the ethnostate will likely resemble past centuries with whites living in bucolic Englands and wearing Victorian clothes as a sign of repudiation of the liberal ethos of our centuries.
It surprised me that Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in 1888 that Europe was starting to abandon the institution of marriage in the pursuit of more eudemonistic sentiments. And it surprised me too learning that Francis Parker Yockey wrote that even in the 1940s Hollywood started to promote the ideal of mere romantic loves with no connection to biological reproduction or the perpetuation of our species.
Fortunately, after the Dantesque conditions that the convergence of catastrophes will bring to the western world, the white people will rediscover that Life has a prize: that many young white soldiers will perforce die virgins while defending their new nations, and that each fair, young woman will be bringing lots of white babies to the world even if that means going back to domestic drudgery. Yes, there may still be an occasion for romantic love but the general rule for whites will be to breed generously and to fulfill what Durant called a lesson of history.
Categories
Pseudotradition
Iranian for Aryans latest entry is called “In case it’s not published,” in reference of a proposed comment for a thread in a Counter-Currents article, of which I quote most of it below:
I wrote the following commentary in response to this essay.
Sound and fury signifying nothing. There’s nothing “Radical Traditionalist” about these “works”.
If you want real Tradition check out music from the Western canon: chant to (some) Shostakovich; take your pick.
Modernists, almost all of whom are either degenerates, charlatans, or both, represent a creative and spiritual anti-Tradition degeneration. Pärt, like others, saw that his serialism was not filling concert halls nor paying dividends, so he followed the changing times and attempted to create a niche for himself. The result? An empty and very insipid attempt at “numinosity”; if one may deign to call it such.