[NewMusic] What David Cope is up to

[Matthew Goodheart]

Hmmm, this is fun. There are some smart folks on this list!


On Dec 29, 2007, at 11:28 AM, Sarah - 21 Grand wrote:

>  However, there's a "school" of post-modernism that attempts to find  
> subversive meanings and themes in this functional art.

Well yeah. This is what has become the pervasive recuperation,  
packaged as post-modern irony. Corporations LOVE this.

Again Forest Whitaker's "DEW mocracy" -

"They speak about how light and reason had retreated, how greed gave  
way to great power, how power gave way to great fear. . . The  
Corporate Lords claimed the world. Creativity and self-expression were  
outlawed."

Sounds like one of mine or George's posts, though replaced outlawed  
Orwellian newthink; the terms of alternative thinking have been  
colonized, therefore .

> One could dismiss it
> as the equivalent of junior high kids looking for the silhouette of  
> the
> naked lady in Camel cigarette ads

I thought it was a guy with a hard-on. . .

> religious music, what about the kids listening to some of Bach's St.  
> whoever's Passions and developing a love for
> Satan-worshipping black metal?

I think it's partly because Bach's music has been so recontextualized  
that it bears little resemblance to what it was in his time, either  
sonically or culturally. Its the contemporary meaning that kids are  
reacting to; bathed in the post-WW II conception of adolescence, and  
hence particular pre-figured tropes of rebellion and individuality. It  
would be far more interesting if in 1715 some of Bach's Lutheran choir  
boys started a satanic cult. . .