Darren Staloff Q&A with Royal Northern College of Music

Charity and steelman arguments for interpreting others

Place them in context and surround with other perspectives to hone your own view.

Cyclical time vs linear time

Living in the Maha Yuga (Yuga Cycle in general)

The “denigration” of life and the world

Rules of art

constraints define

1:03:00 - made me think about Shuhari. How you need to understand the rules before breaking.

Enjoying art, and especially “high art”

• think about wine, music, art, movies

@not_emerald

3 years ago

At 1:01:20 dr. Staloff mentions the fact that governments give money for artists to make a sort of eternal revolution that is not "nice to listen to" or look at, as he puts it. This reminds me of two things. First, of Eliade's Myth and Reality (which I read in Portuguese and was quite a pain to find the quote in English haha), in which at a point he says: "The myth of the damned artist, which obsessed the nineteenth century, is outmoded today. Especially in the United States, but also in Western Europe, audacity and defiance have long since ceased to be harmful to an artist. On the contrary, he is asked to conform to his mythical image, that is, to be strange, irreducible, and to 'produce something new.' It is the absolute triumph of the permanent revolution in art. 'Anything goes' is no long an adequate formulation: now every novelty is considered a stroke of genius beforehand and put on the same plane as the innovations of a Van Gogh or a Picasso, even if the artist only mutilates a poster or signs a sardine tin." The fact that this was published in 1963 kind of shows how stale the arts are nowadays. Everything is revolutionary, everything needs to be revolutionary. Is it really, then, a revolution? The second thing that it reminded me of was Frank Zappa. In his late career, in the 80s onward, he was mostly focused on classical, orchestral music (he was very influenced by Stravinsky, Webern and Varèse from the very beginning, and began composing classical pieces before he even had a rock band), and he famously published a few works while going negative on money. Knowingly, he published a work with the London Symphony Orchestra in a limited edition that materially only gave him losses since the orchestra was expensive, he paid everything by himself and less than 10 thousand copies of the album were even made. He's commented on that very same issue: "It's not easy to keep converting capital from doing other things into reinvesting into doing that kind of stuff. There's no way that the music I'm working on is gonna pay its own way. But I would rather do it this way than to rely on a government, or to rely on a king or a duke, or somebody who wants to take drastic action if he doesn't approve of your work of art. Forget that." "I spent money on an English orchestra to record my music so that I could take it home and I could listen to it. And, if somebody else likes that kind of stuff, I will make it available so they can hear it. That is my part of the public service of spending the money to make this thing happen. No foundation grant, no government assistance, no corporation, no committee, just a crazy guy who spent the money to hire English musicians to do a concert at the Barbican and make an album for Barking Pumpkin Records [his label]." I should also point out that Zappa dealt with people trying to interfere with his art on many occasions, a few of them pretty infamous (We're Only in It for the Money). Although in his time there was no Patreon or crowdfunding, he still did it through business outside of music. From seeing these three comments what I can see is that government assistance pretty much dictates what we see now. We will never see actual innovation from people who depend on institutions like the government or corporations.