We can take in a picture at a glance and then choose to go back for more when we have sufficient time. Music takes time, even in YouTube gobbets. You either experience it in some extended time or you do not experience it at all. Life is too short in a very meaningful sense. Art and music is seen to be, perhaps required to be, a soother of anxieties or an expression of adolescent feeling. It forms the mind in youth and comforts later. Music is not, for most people, a thing-in-itself.
It cannot have a discomfiting purpose, one designed, as Throbbing Gristle clearly intended it to have, to change consciousness through disrupting perception. The population are not elite tantrics but rather are stressed out survivors of a demanding capitalist democracy. They simply cannot cope with Anonymous, let alone Sun Ra.
This exhausted population wants meaning on a plate rather than to be faced with anything that simply exists in and for itself, meaning that soothes and endorses identities that are constructed not in accordance with reality but in defiance of it.
The musicians and composers named by Stubbs and not previously known to me will now be searched out over the coming years. If others do this perhaps advanced music will become more popular. But there are treasures out there for anyone, most of which can be found with only a little effort on YouTube and then put it in a Playlist for when time is available. One major complaint is that the proofreading of this book is, in places, dire.
It rather confirms the prejudice that lefties find it difficult to organise a whelk stall. Sep 20, Ugh rated it really liked it. Despite being subtitled "Why people get Rothko but don't get Stockhausen", Fear of Music doesn't actually address the question of "why modern [read: avant garde] art is embraced and understood while modern [as above] music is ignored, derided or regarded with bewilderment as noisy, random nonsense perpetrated and listened to by the inexplicably crazed", as the blurb puts it, until its conclusion - a mere 26 pages out of Rather, the first pages set out the parallel histories of the two b Despite being subtitled "Why people get Rothko but don't get Stockhausen", Fear of Music doesn't actually address the question of "why modern [read: avant garde] art is embraced and understood while modern [as above] music is ignored, derided or regarded with bewilderment as noisy, random nonsense perpetrated and listened to by the inexplicably crazed", as the blurb puts it, until its conclusion - a mere 26 pages out of Rather, the first pages set out the parallel histories of the two beasts.
The answers eventually proffered are: because the megabucks associated with modern art have familiarised the public with it; because modern music can feel like an infliction; because music more powerfully depicts the future, and the future is bleak; because humans are inherently more tolerant of visual than auditory chaos; and, a more general repetition of the first, because people aren't used to modern music. Of these, I give most credence to the infliction and tolerance suggestions.
To take the latter first, modern music much more commonly causes physical pain through sheer extent in its case, volume than modern art when experienced live, and auditory chaos also much more readily causes headaches even at reasonable volume. The infliction point is related. Although modern art often aims to challenge, it doesn't generally aim to cause as much unpleasantness to its audience as possible, whereas this does seem to be the aim of bands like Throbbing Gristle, Napalm Death and Sunn O.
A more appropriate comparison to these more extreme avant garde bands than the sublime in an artistic sense works of Rothko would be images of violence such as those force-fed to Alex in A Clockwork Orange.
The very premise of the book is on shaky ground in this respect. In setting out the history of avant garde music, Stubbs includes such figures as Jimi Hendrix, Kraftwerk, Joy Division, Brian Eno and Radiohead - hardly musicians that lacked a popular following. Furthermore, he states that millions of people already do embrace avant garde music albeit calling this "a tiny fragment of the overall demographic".
Most damagingly, he even says "it's hard to conceive that Duke Ellington's music was once considered 'dissonant' or to recapture just what a fissure the joyful peal of Louis Armstrong's trumpet represented" - i. Likewise, although Rothko is indeed extremely popular, the same cannot be said of all avant garde art.
The public much prefers shows of works by old masters like Rembrandt and Leonardo or impressionists like Monet to the Futurists or conceptualists. Having said all that, I like the premise of the book even if it's a false one, simply because it gives Stubbs the chance to provide his parallel histories of these two fascinating movements. And I like the book itself: Stubbs writes well and with a keen eye for what to cover from what must have been a wealth of material, and includes just enough of himself to add an extra dimension without being intrusive.
I read it in one day, fighting to keep going through straining eyes. The book is also a fantastic way of discovering new music, and I recommend having access to Spotify or similar when reading it so that you can appreciate what's being discussed as you go along. I also like the ethos of Zero Books, which claims to have the lofty aim of fighting the contemporary elimination of the public and the intellectual.
However, while both the publisher and the author seek to stand up for the avant garde, I do wish they hadn't taken such a free-thinking approach to grammar and spelling in the edition of FoM I read: practices such as printing words in a meaningful order, including every word in a sentence but only as many times as is required, subject-verb agreement, apostrophe placement, knowledge of what commas are for and reserving paragraph returns for the ends of paragraphs do help to convey a message more easily, boringly conservative though they may be.
Dec 07, Irene rated it it was ok. Great title, very attractive subject. Sadly, the execution didn't live up to either of these. By the end I'd gained or been reminded of lots of reference points to go and look up in my own time, but very little sense that Stubbs had answered the question he posed in the book's subtitle.
Also, and it may seem like a small quibble, whoever proofread the book assuming anyone did needs to be shot. Jul 24, Stagger Lee rated it it was ok Shelves: x , arts-culture , music , non-fiction. I usually enjoy Stubbs' work but this is poor. The initial premise 'why people get Rothko but don't get Stockhausen' is an intriguing one that he doesn't can't? It's also badly written, barely edited, full of non sequiturs and threads that go nowhere. There's a good book to be written about this, but Fear Of Music isn I usually enjoy Stubbs' work but this is poor.
There's a good book to be written about this, but Fear Of Music isn't it. Jun 12, WM Hall rated it really liked it. Feels a little unfocused at times and can often be somewhat overwhelming in the sheer volume of information it provides in its short length.
One Dimensional Woman Nina Power. Militant Modernism Owen Hatherley. Cold World - The aesthetics of dejection and the politics of militant dysphoria Dominic Fox. Between and he was reviews editor for The Wire, the UK based magazine dedicated to avant garde and experimental music of all genres. Between and he was staff writer at Melody Maker, before going on to join the staff of the NME. Rating details. Book ratings by Goodreads.
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