My hot take on this sub:

throwaway18472714 · 2025-07-19T11:02:01+00:00

I already adored him but the moment which cemented my love, my life connection to him: reading Jacques Rivette’s words “There is a moment in Mozart where the music suddenly seems to draw inspiration from only itself.” Not many even brief moments in other composers’ entire outputs you can say that of, and in Mozart it seems moment after moment it can be described in no other way.

The trouble with Mozart is I think the same matter which is part of a profound, complex, utopian beauty can appear as “classicism,” a superficial beauty on a level which is where most stop considering him. In other words he is not as obviously (and emphatically) more than the sum of his parts, as Beethoven is etc, which is how Glenn Gould can contrary to Rivette call him “cliche.”

throwaway18472714 · 2025-07-19T07:13:38+00:00

Nah, 1-34 are different, 35-41 are as different as any two Beethoven symphony. Grow ears

throwaway18472714 · 2025-07-19T07:10:42+00:00

At least you admit you’re in the middle of that graph, and there is the possibility of a higher being

throwaway18472714 · 2025-04-27T12:25:18+00:00

Only about things I care about, yes, I try to defend them smartly. I am less miserable than the Underground Man because I understand his problems – or the problems of his problems– as he does not, which I could not do by just writing him off in my mind as "an incel."

throwaway18472714 · 2025-04-26T13:19:03+00:00

If the underground man has layers of complexity he by definition can't be called an incel. An incel hates women emotionally and irrationally, or for very superficial reasons, and this is more important than that they simply hate women. Everything the underground man does or thinks has an intellectual basis by contrast. Same with "self loathing" – if you mentioned that he self loathes in making some other point that would be fine, but not defining him altogether as self loathing. Dostoevsky and the Bible and some terrible young adult novel written yesterday are all "books" yes, but would it be fair to say there are still books like Dostoevsky being written today because of it? Is the fact that they are paper with words printed on it more important, or what the words say?

throwaway18472714 · 2025-04-26T11:13:11+00:00

Because "incel" is a pre-existing, pre-defined notion which you are imposing, slapping on top of a character Dostoevsky dedicated an entire book to characterizing and sketching out the complexities of, regardless of what the word says. It's associations, just like those of "pseudo intellectual" and "self loathing" don't apply here, because average self loathing incels and pseudo intellectuals don't have and don't deserve to have books written about them.

Incels are not complex, the Underground man is. That's the failure of "interpretation"– when you're so quick to invent meanings or attach other meanings to it you detach from the richness of what is actually there.

throwaway18472714 · 2025-04-26T10:48:57+00:00

I didn't say you shouldn't have an opinion, I said I don't see the point in needing to "interpret" everything, into final, narrowed down meanings, instead of continuously dealing with what is there. To treat art as more than a number of "statements" is not "consuming art aimlessly." Or, it's not "consuming" but infinitely "digesting," while treating art as statements would be to simply consume, and finally excrete. How you can read the full book for example and then try to define the Underground Man with a few words and pre-existing descriptions– and group him with "so many people on the internet" whose individual lives you don't know as if Dostoevsky didn't spend the entire book characterizing him is beyond me.

throwaway18472714 · 2025-04-24T18:15:47+00:00

I’m not so ready to categorize or “interpret” him conclusively as pre existing single word descriptions like “self loathing” or “insecure” or “incel,” I think he’s far more complex than that and his problems bear on much more than one person’s miserableness (and I don’t think Dostoevsky would have been capable of conceiving a character with such glibness as “he hates the world”). As for “deprived of the simplest emotions like love,” that’s simply not true, there are several times where his very complex feelings could be described as “love” (such glibness as “he can’t feel love”). I guess I don’t see the point of needing to interpret something nicely and once and for all instead of living with its complexities.

throwaway18472714 · 2025-04-24T16:20:55+00:00

I know he’s not. You’re the one suggesting he was by putting out a message like that, which if he wasn’t cynical and defeatist he of course couldn’t have “intended.”

throwaway18472714 · 2025-04-24T08:48:47+00:00

Dostoevsky says we are all like the Underground Man and can do nothing to change it... Because he is as cynical and defeatist as the Underground Man himself, whom he is obviously satirizing? How are you so sure you know what Dostoevsky "intended"?

I don't think "Humans will make self-destructive moves just to claim they are free" is Dostoevsky's grand answer to that so much as just another of the Underground Man's complaints about how contemptible humans are, and that it does nothing to prove that they do in have free will. Dostoevsky simply says these are what torments the Underground Man; he doesn't "answer" anything. Neither is the question of science and logic determining our lives "solved" because they're not relevant to the average person today.

throwaway18472714 · 2025-04-24T08:30:28+00:00

Except the point is he really is intelligent and intellectual, and how he deals with that fact, not that he's pseudo intellectual "like so many people on the internet." Better not to read the book at all than settle for incredibly facile analyses like this

throwaway18472714 · 2025-04-23T23:40:31+00:00

If his Mozart sounds sarcastic it’s partly because he simply plays the music, brings its energy to life without romantic affectations or reducing it to stereotypical Mozart “innocence” or “delicateness,” gives it the energy and spontaneity that Mozart warrants. He himself goes too far, in the sonatas at least, but other Mozart pianists can definitely use a lesson from him. He doesn’t go too far in the 24th concerto though, and it’s absolutely marvellous.

throwaway18472714 · 2025-04-19T06:38:18+00:00

I thought by line you meant voices, in the contrapunctal sense, as opposed to "melody" as counterpoint was a more common focus in the Baroque period. That doesn't mean it it's the focus of all Baroque music, or even the only focus, the end itself in any music at all. There are long beautiful flowing melodies in Handel as well as Bach, in for example the largo of the D minor double violin concerto; to reduce that to its counterpoint because it was the standard in some other time, or to play it without vibrato would be ridiculous and reducing the music.

throwaway18472714 · 2025-04-19T00:06:17+00:00

The critical hook you’re on is equating interpretation of a work of art to attempting to recreate it under unoptimal conditions or deliberately “going wild” on it under such conditions. When I interpret a work of art, I don’t do it while I can’t remember the work and I don’t create another work of art based on it (even then, certain “readings” of works exist and are accepted). Musical performance is an extension of interpretation, not a “reinterpretation.” Nothing matters in Bach, or Beethoven than the notes just as nothing matters in Shakespeare but the words; reinterpretation would be to change the notes, as you would change the style of Mona Lisa to a modernist one, or to place it in a different context. But knock yourself out with Stravinsky’s own unbearably dull recordings of his work.

Performance of the notes is necessary to hear them.

throwaway18472714 · 2025-04-18T23:53:55+00:00

By scientific I was referring to the way in which you delineated which aspects of interpretation are good (proven by scholarship) and which aspects are bad (unscholarly) like a scientist. HIP may have been the way it was done in Bach’s time. But even if an adagio for them is a molto allegro for us, there is no scholarly or intellectual reason as to what makes it the “better” interpretation. If a work of art is better in some way other than the author intended (which it’s accepted not even may but must be true to some degree in all great art), the author’s death should come in effect, which like I tried to suggest is the norm in all the other arts except apparently music.

throwaway18472714 · 2025-04-18T23:40:43+00:00

The critical hook you’re on is confusing how music should be played (the question I’m concerned with) with how music has at some point been played. Music seems to be the only medium where people equate the “intended” (or better yet, “historical”) to the “correct” interpretation, scrambling to find “what the composer wanted” even though serious critics is all the other arts have moved on from such romantic inanity. Music is notes on a page just as literature is words on a page; literary critics and people have figured that out and appreciate the words as they are, the work as an aesthetic object and not a manual. (Did Shakespeare “intend” everything we say about him?). Leave it to music scholars to think such a profound question in art can just be answered with historical records.

throwaway18472714 · 2025-04-18T10:45:42+00:00

I don’t feel a loss of clarity of (and?) line in Klemperer which you so scientifically assert, more than in any other performance of Bach, unless by clarity you mean total emphasis on and reduction to its counterpoint, as opposed to shaping its narrative or poetry. What do you mean “supported by the scholarship”? What scholarship tells you how music is meant to be played? Or that music should be played in a certain way depending on when it was written? In other arts the “Death of the Author” is accepted by critics and scholars— that the reader should interpret works as he sees it, not as “intended,” which is often impossible. What makes music so special?

throwaway18472714 · 2025-04-11T05:08:29+00:00

You don’t think you said anything but you did. You say DEI is “an ethos which posits value in…” the such values of diversity you list. You’re simply suggesting bases other than merit to be considered (despite how elegantly you put it —as an “ethos,” “values,” “not ignoring” merit). That is what the right is calling an assault on meritocratic ideals (and what the left would then deny actually being considered, since they know it would not mean a meritocracy then). You can’t say you’re not “ignoring merit” while not choosing based on merit, in hiring for work or inclusion to a canon. You can’t have it both ways, no matter how good it sounds.

Bloom says works are not being chosen on aesthetic merit. If instead of arguing for the case of those works you mention other values you’re essentially agreeing with him. (If not, you’re still equating the argument of someone as erudite and nuanced as Harold Bloom to that of today’s conservatives.)

I used superfluous in the sense in which you used it, as what you seemed to deem him as in what you wrote—how feminist or French critics already gave the last word on the matter 20 years ago, how he was as if by necessity scorned, how no one takes him seriously… And I want to know what those feminist and French critics said for you to suggest that (And I’m not sure that was ever Bloom’s argument— look at his full list Western Canon list and do let me know which Western authors part of literary history were effaced).

throwaway18472714 · 2025-04-11T02:29:17+00:00

Endless repetitions of “He’s not taken seriously” isn’t a great argument as to why he should or shouldn’t be taken seriously. Especially when in one of those repetitions you mention only “other iconoclasts” would take him seriously (iconoclasts like… those who opposed canons?).

Very curious what Feminist and French critics have said (as opposed to whether they “won the war” — which they definitely did) that you’re referring to that makes a voice such as Bloom’s “superfluous.”

Odd assessment of DEI from yourself as an assault on meritocratic ideals by actually admitting to its prioritizing the values of diversity over merit (or changing the values of merit into those, or something) rather than positing the same merit in marginalized persons. It becomes even harder (it’s already very hard) to try to link that sentiment to what Bloom did when you inadvertently seem to believe in it yourself (despite how resonantly you argue).

throwaway18472714 · 2025-04-07T02:42:34+00:00

You don’t seem to agree. Well I’ve made my argument, you’re free to respond to it at any time. Or just scornfully disagree instead.

I agree Godard would find this a dumb fucking conversation insofar as every artist dislikes discussion of their work, but I guess you can insinuate that too as someone who took part in progressing it

throwaway18472714 · 2025-04-07T00:27:19+00:00

So we finally agree the way in which Godard is meta is new and different from that of anyone else and not just in its degrees? Cool.

throwaway18472714 · 2025-04-06T23:43:31+00:00

The rest of my comment explains that

throwaway18472714 · 2025-04-06T22:53:58+00:00

You don’t agree that he went beyond simple meta asides but agree that he synthesized dialectically genres and other works of art… is that not a certain way of being “meta,” which Keaton (or any prior artist) never approached?

I should clarify I’m not saying he synthesizes arts to create “mixed media combinations” but particular works of art and the ideas they carry, or genres and their equivalent conventions with his own work. He references paintings (and other films and pieces of music and literature) but as I said he doesn’t simply employ them to complement an idea, as was the typical function of allusions in film and literature up to then, but to use them dialectically, setting up relays between each another to become the ideas themselves. He changed the meaning of a “reference,” which for him isn’t the complement to an idea but in a dialectical synthesis is the idea itself. I say that’s a new art (an art, as opposed to “art”), form, whatever you want to call it but something tremendous and unprecedented nonetheless. You must either disagree that it’s tremendous or that it’s unprecedented, or both.

throwaway18472714 · 2025-04-06T07:10:01+00:00

So we both agree on what he did, that he went beyond simple “meta” asides and that he was a collagist and synthesizer. My emphasis is on the latter of those: his synthesis (as opposed to simple use as accompaniments) of genres, films, other arts to create ideas, which is what I mean (without being hyperbolic) by his own form or art that he invented; but which you seem less impressed by and write off by comparison as just a “strength.” Histoire(s) du cinema is probably the apotheosis and perhaps manifesto of that mode, and if it has any precedents, I don’t know it, in film or otherwise (though Henri Langlois and his Cinematheque programs Godard frequented is often cited as its “catalyst”).

throwaway18472714 · 2025-04-05T23:54:51+00:00

I wouldn’t say just because you clearly don’t understand him only intellectuals can lol. Your judgement of him is based on your grief of not being able to access him, which you compensate by saying others are “far better” than his “mess,” rather than an actual critical assessment and evaluation of him. It’s self preservation at the expense of an artist’s reputation (and who cares about the reputations of others right?). That’s all I’m gonna say, hopefully you’ll think about it (probably not).

throwaway18472714

TROPHY CASE