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Daniel h's avatar

Hey this is awesome. Kiefer is sort of endlessly pertinent to a consideration of any (attempted) ahistorical aesthetics and I love seeing him in this context specifically.

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Allen Lowe's avatar

This is all, I suspect, above my pay grade (after all I am an old, lowly, lonely, jazz musician), but thanks for that piece, which will probably give me the kind of weird, confused dreams I usually get after reading Walter Benjamin. But I have come to accept my limitations, my failed intellectualism; at some point I have to stop trying to figure out things and just compose. But I tend to think all music is absolute and here, if I am understanding correctly what absolute music is, is why: music may have, in its origins. a social theme, a political theme, or any number of sociopolitical means of origin; that's fine, and I have used those kind of externals for stimulus myself. But at the moment of creation, at the moment of creative origin, everything, for the composer, is discarded except for an aesthetic sense of expressive, sonic possibility. That moment is not political, it is not social, no matter how much the title of the work points to concrete themes. That moment is a moment of pure feeling (to quote Peter Handke) in which all externals other than the physical/emotional/aesthetic/technical moment are discarded. I say this as a rather worn out 71 year old who has been performing and composing for many years while not really getting very far professionally in my field. What has sustained me is not the sense that I am accomplishing anything politically but rather a satisfied, internalized aesthetic sense. This has kept me alive particularly through the last 5 years of some regular near-death and near-life experiences, and I believe that is the reality as opposed to the ideal. We should support social justice through our political actions but if we think our aesthetic actions are going to have any real long-term results we are hopelessly deluded. Think about the Germans - a great history of humanist literature, philosophy, and musical composition and what did it get them? A little guy with a little mustache who murdered everyone he could get his hands on. Germany's Got Talent, maybe, but it also had a sick, deadly social underbelly that came to the surface in no time. Same with America, whose fascist tendencies have now bubbled up from under a surface that never really went away.

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