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#Post#: 13095--------------------------------------------------
Re: Homo Hubris
By: 90sRetroFan Date: April 26, 2022, 9:34 pm
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[quote]Renaissance
...
the Renaissance style with its idea that buildings should have
“strength”, “utility”, and “beauty” or perfect proportions. It
inspired Battista Alberti (1404-72) to write the first
architectural treatise of the Renaissance emphasizing the layout
of the interior of buildings.
...
At the same time, we should keep in mind the humanism that
permeated the Renaissance about the earthly world of humans with
its emphasis on man as the highest form of creation. The
Renaissance preoccupation with symmetry and horizontality, the
idea that beauty was enhanced by calculating mathematical
ratios, was indeed based on the measure, and actual
potentiality, of the human body as a system of proportional
relationships. The Renaissance employment of exact perspective
to create optical illusion of three-dimensional spaces, depth
and distance, played a very significant role in the
unprecedented variety of decorative treatment of walls that
characterized Italian interiors during the 15th and 16th
centuries.
This period witnessed an unprecedented variety of wall
decorations, ornately treated door refinement with classic
elements, stop-fluted pilasters, pedestals, entablature. Flat,
vaulted, and coved ceilings were prevalent forms with surfaces
of every description. While chairs in the medieval period were
rare status symbols, the Renaissance saw new types of chairs,
including the sgabello, an armless back stool; the cassapanca, a
multi-seat unit, which also served as a chest; the credenza, a
cupboard with great variety in design; dining tables
(rectangular, long, and narrow) were also introduced. And since
Europe is made up of distinctive national peoples, there would
be a French Renaissance with its own variations, for example, in
types of materials used for floors: stone, marble, tile, brick,
and wood.
The number and size of windows increased substantially in the
early years of the French Renaissance; and highly ornamented
chimney pieces (such as the one on the right at Château de
Fontainebleau) become the focal point of the room, with a wide
variety of decorated panels, carved relief designs, and
freestanding statues. The caquetoire chair was introduced around
the mid-16th century, a lightly scale wooden chair with a tall,
narrow paneled back attached to the trapezoid seat; with storage
pieces (called a buffet, armoire, dressoir, or a cupboard)
becoming more architectural in the use of their use of columns
or pilasters carved with fluting.
HTML https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Ze3brO8El70/YZgNzVHz5UI/AAAAAAAAFCU/AsNx4O8QVyUysoCD0jxzS48osR1H9QTwQCLcBGAsYHQ/w244-h400/fontainebleau.rec.faire-savoir.com-les-appartements-royaux-bcatrice-lccuyer-bidal-salon-franaois-1er-chateau-de-fon33-scaled-scaled.jpg
The English version, 1500-1660, of the Italian Renaissance was
influenced by German and Flemish pattern books, such as the 1577
book Architectura by Johannes de Vries, and the translation into
English of a work by Sebastiano Serlio by Robert Peake published
in 1611 under the title The First Book of Architecture. The
English would soon write their own books, first a treatise by
John Shute entitled Chief Groundes of Architecture (1563), which
set down the requirements for the ‘perfecte architecte’; and
then a practical building guide by Sir Henry Wooton entitled
Elements of Architecture (1624). New to the English Renaissance
was the use of stairways as a processional route to the high
great chamber, upholstered pieces of furniture, with further
improvements in board and trestle dining tables, and a new
gateleg table which allowed the drop leaf of the table to be
raised, thereby enlarging the tabletop surface.
Baroque
Italy remained dominant in ceiling decoration during the
Baroque period, 1600-1700, a highly opulent, large scale
designing style, involving incredibly intricate details, high
contrasting colors, and elements of surprise through the use of
light, preference for curves over straight lines, painted and
vaulted ceilings, columns, arches, niches, fountains. The
materials used were stucco, paint, and fresco as well as
illusionistic perspective through the use of quadratura, which
dramatically extended the vertical dimensions of interior
spaces. A new chair with lower backs was designed, with boldly
treated curves, detailed carvings on the legs. The storage
pieces included the cassone, the credenza, the armoire, the
cabinet, and the chest of drawers characterized by intricate
moldings, and sometimes flanked by marble columns.
The French Baroque, 1600-1715, found its most creative
culmination in the reign of Louis XIV, with France becoming the
major source of artistic inspiration to other countries in the
late 17th and early 18th centuries. The most prominent architect
was François Mansart (1598–1666), credited for works “renowned
for their high degree of refinement, subtlety, and elegance”,
the encouragement of vistas through the use of the enfilade in
the arrangement of rooms, vistas from the main suites to the
landscaped garden; and vertical perspectives through the
dramatic use of light and dark contrasts in the staircase. Jean
Barbet’s book Livre d’architecture (1632-41) and Jean Le
Pautre’s Cheminées a la moderne (1661) were very influential in
the design of highly complex, massive and sculptural chimney
pieces with a variety of motifs: swags, scrolls, cartouches,
pilasters, entablatures, pediments. The commode, a chest of
drawers, was introduced, with some pieces ornamented with ebony
veneer using marquetry of tortoiseshell and brass.
André-Charles Boulle (1642–1732) was “the most remarkable of all
French cabinetmakers”.
HTML https://www.eurocanadians.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/a3b0fcc5596a69a610c905d2f5d42e5e.jpg
The English Baroque was a modification of ideas from France and
the Netherlands. The premier British architects were Sir
Christopher Wren, Sir John Vanbrugh, William Talman, and Thomas
Archer. A spectrum of wall surfaces was used, wood paneling,
mirrors, tapestries, textiles, leather, paintings. After the
chimney piece, the most decorated feature of a room was the
ceiling, deeply compartmented; with the most impressive houses
using wrought or cast-iron balustrades for their stairways. The
primary influence in the making of these stairways was the
French smith Jean Tijou and his book, A New Book on Drawings
(1693). Increasing importance was attached to the drapery of
beds (patterned velvets, silk damask, chintz, and brocade)
absorbing most of the costs.
HTML https://www.eurocanadians.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Staircase_Hampton_Court_Palace.jpg
Rococo
France was the setting for the next major epoch in interior and
furniture design, which came along with a new emphasis on
relaxation and pleasure, with furniture becoming more
comfortable, designed for conversation, and chairs more graceful
and informal, less stiff than in the Louis XIV period. This was
a reflection of both the Enlightened court aristocracy and the
nouveaux riche financial bourgeoisie. Rococo was a highly
ornate, theatrical, over-the-top style developed as a reaction
to the strictness of Baroque. It was a flamboyant, freer, more
lighthearted style, with decorative elements that often emulated
the look of shells, pebbles, flowers, birds, vines, and leaves.
The foremost French Rococo architect was Robert de Cotte
(1656-1735) and Gilles-Marie Oppenhord (1672-1742) as well as
the goldsmith and decorator Juste Aurele Meissonier (1695-1750),
who published a book entitled Livre d’ornements. Two types of
chair became common, the fauteuil and the bergère, with floral
carving, tapestry upholstery, with separate cushion, with
emphasis on informality. Many kinds of tables were introduced,
some multifunctional, while others for specific functions, such
as gaming tables, work tables, serving tables, and coffee
tables. Beds were of several types. In England the style of the
period 1715-1760 was “Georgian” rather than Rococo. The Georgian
style is a unique combination of Classical and Baroque stylistic
features. It is interesting that Lord Shaftesbury, who lived
from 1671 to 1713, just before this style emerged in England,
one of the most important philosophers of his day, insisted that
“a man of breeding and politeness is careful to form his
judgments of arts and sciences upon the right models of
perfection” (Blakemore, p. 247).
The models of this time emphasized the architectural principles
of classicism, the ideas articulated by Andrea Palladio, an
expert on Roman architecture. Palladio saw perfection in the
classical concept of harmonic proportion based on mathematical
ratios. In 1715-1725, Colen Campbell published Vitruvius
Britannicus, a survey of English Classical architecture of the
17th and early 18th centuries. Richard Boyle made a grand tour
in 1714-15 through France, northern Italy and Rome, where he
studied the works of Palladio. James Gibbs also visited Rome and
Palladio’s buildings, publishing in 1728 the Book of
Architecture and the Rules for Drawing the Several Parts of
Architecture (1732). Gibb’s influence is visible in the design
of the White House, which employed both Classical as well as the
Baroque features of floating pediments, scrolled shoulders and
oeil-de-boeuf windows.
However, by the mid-18th century, Rococo became influential in
England, with detailing of delicate linear motifs, undulating
lines, and natural forms making their way into decorations and
buildings. Isaac War’s book, A Complete Body of Architecture,
published in 1756, emphasized the use of stucco ornamental
material (lime, sand, plaster) for grand rooms. There was indeed
a lot of variety in styles, combinations of Classical, Baroque,
and Rococo motifs. Geometric patterns in floor design were
emphasized in Batty Lagley’s Builder’s and Workman’s Treasury
Designs (1739) and John Carwitham’s Kind of Floor Decorations
Represented Both in Plano and Perspective (1739). Casement
windows were commonly used while the double-hung window became
standard in upper class houses. Windows were often rectangular
but some had flattened, arched heads, while some were doubled
lancets, representing the Gothic influence during the Rococo
phase of the Georgian period. Some windows were more Classical
or Palladian, characterized by an arrangement of three openings,
with the central window being widest and having a round, arched
opening, and the two outer windows flat cornices.
Two cabinet makers, William Ince and John Mayhew, published The
Universal System of Household Furniture (1763), a collection of
over 300 finely engraved designs in the English rococo style for
parlor chairs, claw tables, sideboards, desks, ladies’
secretaries, bookcases, writing tables, candlestands, couches,
draperies, girandoles, and more. The most influential book on
furniture was Thomas Chippendale’s The Gentleman and
Cabinet-Maker’s Director (1754-62), an encyclopedic book
offering a broad range of furniture designs with 160 plates
covering a wide range of different styles, from a simple,
undecorated clothing press to a highly adorned library cabinet
with rococo ornaments. Among the wide variety of tables designed
during the Chippendale period were the tea table, toilet table,
sideboard table for used in the dining room, and a variety of
gaming tables for backgammon, cards, and chess. The
chest-on-chest (or tallboy) and bachelor chest became typical.
HTML https://www.eurocanadians.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/George-III-Chippendale-Period-Mahogany-Commode.jpg
Neoclassic
The Neoclassic style began in France around the 1740s, in
reaction to the “excesses, asymmetry, and perceived
disorderliness” of Rococo. It came in the heels of major
excavations of ancient cities and the emerging study of
archeological artifacts and buildings. Jacques Blondel’s four
volume work, Architecture Françoise (1756), was instrumental in
consolidating the French Neoclassic movement. While Renaissance
architecture and Baroque architecture already represented
partial revivals of the Classical architecture of ancient Rome,
the Neoclassical movement was aimed directly against the
decorative excesses and ritualistic arrangements of the Late
Baroque, and the naturalistic ornament of Rococo, in favor of a
purer and more authentic Classical style, adapted to the modern
Enlightenment world, characterized by reserve, restraint, and
self-command.
Walls were characterized by symmetrical features and rectilinear
treatments. Embellishment was reminiscent of the Rococo style,
but there was greater discipline and balance. Circular spaces
for stairways were frequently used, along with rectilinearity
and straight flights of stairs. Various shapes were used for the
backs of seat furniture, including medallion, trapezoid,
rectangle, and rectangle with a flattened arched cresting.
Commodes were very common in many shapes and sizes; a new type
was the demilune commode, which was semicircular in shape and
featured two drawers in the front and a curved door on each
side. Jean-Henri Riesener (1774–1792) was the foremost
Neoclassic cabinet-maker in France with a style that was “pure
Louis XVI” with its rectilinear side view and harmonious
ornamentation.
HTML https://www.eurocanadians.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/a-closer-look-spotlight-on-french-royal-furniture-by-jean-henri-riesener-lst202652-1.jpg
The English Neoclassic period, 1770-1810, also had a
predilection for the linear and symmetrical. One of the most
influential members of this movement was the architect and
furniture designer Robert Adam (1728-92), author of The Works in
Architecture of Robert and James Adam (1773). Adam actually
rejected the Palladian style for what he thought was a more
archaeologically accurate Neoclassic style. He emphasized the
principle of “movement” that have “the same effect in
architecture” as in a landscape, “to produce an agreeable and
diversified contour, that groups and contrasts like a picture,
and creates variety of light and shade, which gives spirit,
beauty and effect to the composition” (Julian Small, The
Architecture of Robert Adam). Among his many works are included
the ceiling of the Red Drawing Room in Hopetoun House, with its
dainty Rococo details composed of foliage, shells, and scrolls
in an asymmetrical arrangement, but with some classical motifs.
In his furniture designs, Adam also combined some Rococo details
but in a more classical direction, as evidenced in his design of
chairs with their thin, tapering, fluted legs; and in his
lightly scaled and rectangular or semioval tables with their
round or square sectioned legs. George Hepplewhite, author of
The Cabinet Makers & Upholsterer’s Guide (1788), was enormously
influential as far as the construction of Neoclassic furniture
was concerned.
HTML https://www.eurocanadians.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/DP-14129-007.jpg
Another great furniture designer was Thomas Sheraton, author of
Cabinet-Maker’s Dictionary (1803), which included sixty-nine
designs for furniture; he strove for lightness through reduction
in the width and taller proportions; some characterized his
style as feminine in refinement. Sheraton is generally
identified with the “late Neoclassic” style, or the “Regency
style” of the period 1810-1830, which was more eclectic in
absorbing a wider diversity of styles in combination, Greek,
Roman, Gothic, Egyptian, Tudor, etc. This eclecticism is
apparent in the architect John Nash (1752-1835), who consciously
combined discordant styles. The furniture designs of the cabined
maker George Smith, who published A Collection of Designs for
Household Furniture and Interior Decoration (1808) with 150
colored plates, showed Gothic, Chinese, Egyptian, Roman, and
Greek influences.
Some say that Smith copied Thomas Hope’s designs. Hope, author
of Household Furniture (1807), was inspired in the designs of
his Regency interiors and furniture by his travels in Europe,
Greece, Turkey and Egypt. It needs to be said that these were
not “borrowings” of architectural styles from the East, but
reinterpretations of these styles according to the far more
advanced conceptual principles of Europeans, who freely borrowed
certain non-Western motifs and then integrated them within a
European tradition, always searching for new ways while striving
for aesthetic perfection. Hope’s influence extended beyond the
Regency period, into the Regency Revival of the 1920s and 1930s,
and even Art Deco design. Hope aimed to express three qualities
in his furniture designs: character, beauty and what he called
“appropriate meaning”.
Revival Styles in France and England (1830-1901)
Lucie-Smith thinks that the period between 1800 and 1850 saw
more fundamental changes in furniture design than the preceding
200 years. It certainly becomes rather complicated to find
clearly demarcated styles due to the combination (and revival)
of different styles from Europe’s past and from other cultures,
coupled with the persistent creativity and novelties introduced
by new generations of gifted designers. The French Revival was a
continuation and further development of tendencies already
visible during the Napoleonic Empire period (1805-1815) with its
monumentality, the grand scale, and stateliness. The typical
furniture pieces of this Empire period were heavy, severe, with
sharp corners and little moldings, imposing, with uninterrupted
flat surfaces, heavy bases for cabinet pieces, and symmetry.
During the reign of Louis Philippe, 1815-30, the Napoleonic
style remained paramount through to the Second Empire, 1850-70,
with its most successful architect, Charles Gamier, combining
the Baroque, Renaissance, and Rococo styles. In both England and
France, the impact of the industrial revolution was felt as
machine processes began to replace craftsmen, though high-style
furniture continued to emphasize high quality skill work. There
was a lot of variety in the treatment of chair backs,
“upholstered, straight, backward scroll, rounded top, openwork
centered with cross bars, arcade revealing Gothic influence with
crocketed finials” (Blakemore, p. 383). Lavish display of
upholstery was common, and multiple-seat units were produced;
the tops of tables were round, oval, octagonal, square, or
rectangular; and the legs were carved in the form of
colonnettes, chimeras, sphinxes, lions, human figures.
HTML https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-w76npvmpW-w/YZj125DS2uI/AAAAAAAAFDQ/aEfiiauL5i4eaefvMra1tjchSR8c4bFRACLcBGAsYHQ/w400-h321/2014-006-jacob-desmalter-et-cie-empire-suite-1-.jpg
The historical setting of the English Revival Style was the
industrial transformation, the material prosperity achieved by
the middle classes, and the opening of international markets
with the spread of railway lines across the world. The word
“eclecticism” is commonly used to describe this Victorian era
because more than ever designers combined a variety of past
styles adapted to contemporary uses. This was expressed in books
such as Henry Shaw’s Specimens of Ancient Architecture (1836),
Robert Bridgens, Furniture with Candelabra and Interior
Decoration (1838), which displayed Grecian Gothic, and
Elizabethan designs. A. W. N. Pugin (1812-52) was a keen
advocate of Gothic revival, publishing the pattern book Gothic
Furniture in the Style of the Fifteenth Century, as well as
Bruce James Talbert, author of Gothic Forms Applied to Furniture
(1867). The castle Belvoir, completed in 1825, was a mixture of
Gothic, Baroque, and Rococo, Norman and Classical. The style of
chimneys reflected this eclecticism, which came in different
combinations; the chimney of the Drawing Room in the Carlton
Towers (1873-77) reflected Gothic, Elizabethan, Adam, Georgian
Revival, Rococo, and other styles. This variety of styles was
reflected as well in furniture pieces.[/quote]
I know:
HTML https://trueleft.createaforum.com/true-left-vs-right/western-civilization-is-ugly-48/
#Post#: 14444--------------------------------------------------
Re: Homo Hubris
By: 90sRetroFan Date: July 2, 2022, 8:49 pm
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Duchesne back again:
HTML https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2022/07/01/dr-ricardo-duchenses-faustian-man-in-a-multicultural-age/
[quote]Fact: 79 percent of the world’s most important
inventions, including political institutions, modern
technological innovations in medicine, agriculture and
industrial technologies, and a moral order based on reason,
moral universalism, and the rule of law came from Britain,
France, Germany, Italy and/or the United States. These facts are
irrefutable, and any attempt to reject them as false is an
attempt to rewrite what had been the settled historical record.
However, most leftist students view these realities as nothing
more than White, self-congratulatory back-patting.[/quote]
I will trivially refute it right here. Moral universalism views
includes concern for non-humans, which Western civilization does
not. For example, how many of the innovations in Western
medicine which Duchesne is so proud of came about from Western
scientists experimenting on non-consenting non-humans? Therefore
indeed Duchese is doing nothing more than "white",
self-congratulatory back-patting.
[quote]Duchesne’s recent book, Faustian Man in a Multicultural
Age, is a continuation of his seminal 2011 book, The Uniqueness
of Western Civilization (reviewed here). In that research and
subsequent book Duchesne argued that Western Civilization is
responsible for the world’s greatest innovations, technologies,
and ideas as a result of not only the West’s ability to create
something of intrinsic value from nothing, due, in large part,
to the tenets of certain native Western philosophies, but, more
importantly, the West’s burn-the-candle-at-both-ends work ethic,
never-say-die character, their commitment to rational thinking,
their inquisitiveness and willingness to explore.[/quote]
I agree, except: 1) what was created has negative intrinsic
value, in other words, the world was better before any of it was
created; 2) "empirical", not "rational".
[quote]The opening chapter of Faustian Man is replete with the
idea that White, Western men made the greatest leaps in human
history—the leaps also Duchesne discussed in Uniqueness.
...
In Faustian Man, Duchesne incorporates this cyclical view within
his theory of the West as a continually advancing civilization,
while arguing that if current immigration replacement trends
continue, and the White race is utterly marginalized, Western
civilization will die out completely.[/quote]
This is why is it a moral imperative that current immigration
replacement trends must continue and "whites" be utterly
marginalized. Western civilization absolutely deserves to die
out completely and must be made to die out completely at any
cost. With that said, I am more pessimistic than Duchesne. I am
worried that Western civilization might survive even if "whites"
become utterly marginalized. To be safe, Westernized
"non-whites" must also be marginalized.
[quote]Huntington rightfully proclaimed that “Western values
were particular to the West and alien to other cultures” (12).
However, Huntington could not come to terms with the idea that
the West, like other civilizations, had an ethnic identity. In
other words, while Huntington argued that Western ideas of
liberalism, citizenship, and democratization were universal
regardless of the West’s ethnic ties to White Europe, Huntington
had no problem identifying other civilizations in terms of their
ethnic identities, rather than focusing only, as he did for the
West, on their “cultural attributes” (12). While the ideas we
associate with liberalism are framed in a universalist language,
Duchesne argues that we should not ignore the fact that they
developed in a civilization with a particular ethnic
identity.[/quote]
What Duchesne ignores is that from the colonial era onwards,
Westernization altered the selective pressures for bloodline
survival within colonized ethnicities. Thus within those
ethnicities can be expected to be many more Western-compatible
bloodlines by now than there were prior to the colonial era.
I want to point out something else, however, namely Duchesne's
positive use of the term "Faustian" (also used by numerous other
rightist propagandists) to describe "whites":
HTML https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Faustian-Man-in-a-Multicultural-Age-by-Ricardo-Duchesne.jpg
What is the story of Faust?
HTML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faust
[quote]The erudite Faust is highly successful yet dissatisfied
with his life, which leads him to make a pact with the Devil at
a crossroads, exchanging his soul for unlimited knowledge and
worldly pleasures. The Faust legend has been the basis for many
literary, artistic, cinematic, and musical works that have
reinterpreted it through the ages. "Faust" and the adjective
"Faustian" imply sacrificing spiritual values for power,
knowledge, or material gain.[1][/quote]
Yeah, that sounds about accurate. So, in short, our enemies
proudly advertize that they are Devil-worshippers. Of course we
already knew they were Devil-worshippers based on what Western
civilization looks like, but it is nice that they themselves
admit it.
#Post#: 14475--------------------------------------------------
Re: Homo Hubris
By: 90sRetroFan Date: July 4, 2022, 2:09 pm
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Over here, Zea_mays pointed out the following:
HTML https://trueleft.createaforum.com/true-left-vs-right/western-civilization-is-ugly-48/msg7813/#msg7813
[quote]self-aggrandizement is an important part of Western art.
...
HTML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Paintings_of_art_galleries[/quote]
To which I responded:
HTML https://trueleft.createaforum.com/true-left-vs-right/western-civilization-is-ugly-48/msg7825/#msg7825
[quote]This is yet another form of space-filling, this time with
paintings inside paintings. One way or another, Westerners will
try to fill every space they get their hands on.[/quote]
Now our enemies are using exactly this to promote themselves!
HTML https://www.eurocanadians.ca/2022/07/happy-white-history-month.html
[quote]
HTML https://www.eurocanadians.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/2n25aybijuj11-1200x800.jpg[/quote]
Then again, they literally celebrate Western colonialism too:
[quote]
HTML http://eurocanadians.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/f70aed43be6c5011c1b521fb55b44e6b2B252812529.png[/quote]
The rest of the enemy article is just a repeat of the stuff we
have covered in earlier posts in this topic.
[quote] Europeans produced the highest achievements in history,
including the following (a longer article on Ricardo Duchesne’s
achievement lists is available here.
The 5 Greatest Ideas in Science
1. The Atomic Structure of Matter (Physics)
2. The Periodic Law (Chemistry)
3. The Big Bang theory (Astronomy)
4. The Plate Tectonics Theory (Geology)
5. The Theory of Evolution (Biology)
Almost all the Greatest Skyscraper Architects
Frank Lloyd Wright
Louis Sullivan
Daniel Burnham
Raymond Hood
Cass Gilbert
Hugh Ferriss
Le Corbusier
William Van Alen
John Mead
Howells
Renzo Piano
Adrian D. Smith
John Burgee
John C. Portman
William Le Baron Jenney
All the Greatest Explorers in History
Balboa 1474
Cortez
Cabot 1450
Vespucci
Champlain 1567
Cartier 1491
Cook 1728
Stanley 1841
Livingston
Lewis and Clark
Amundsen 1928
Peary
Shackleton 1874
Scott
Erikson b.970
Columbus 1451
Magellan 1480
Dias 1451
Da Gama 1460
All the Classical Musical Instruments
Bassoon
Clarinet
Colascione
Contrabassoon
Flute
French horn
Guitar
Harp
Harpsichord
Lute
Mandolin
Oboe
Organ
Piano
Pipe organ
Saxophone
Timpani
Trombone
Trumpet
Tuba
Viola
Violin[/quote]
etc. etc.
How Faustian of them.....
#Post#: 14867--------------------------------------------------
Re: Homo Hubris
By: 90sRetroFan Date: July 25, 2022, 9:04 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
I agree with our enemies:
HTML https://www.eurocanadians.ca/2022/07/white-history-month-what-about-livingstone.html
[quote]The astonishing fact remains that near 100% of explorers
in History were European; a fact which Ricardo Duchesne
elucidates in Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age, and in some
detail in the Fortnightly Review.
...
“The Portuguese, under the leadership of Henry the Navigator
would go on, in the course of the fifteenth century, to round
the southern tip of Africa, impose themselves through the Indian
Ocean, and eventually reach Japan in the 1540s.”
...
The Age Of Discovery continued into the seventeenth century,
with such famous names as Columbus, Cortes, Pizarro, Vasco de
Gama, Vasco Nunēs de Balboa, John Cabot, Jacques Cartier,
Henry Hudson, William Barentz, and Russian explorers Demid
Pyanya, Pyotr Beketov, and Kurbat Ivanov.
Let us not forget the explorers of the Victorian Age, when a
highly scientific outlook came to be seen as a necessary
component of expeditions: David Livingstone, Frank Hatton,
George Kennan, E.A Fitzgerald, and Charles Herbert.
This is a severely lacking account, which only goes to show the
extent of the exploration undertaken by Europeans. As Ricardo
Duchesne has argued, exploration is a highly overlooked activity
which, if studied, reveals the soul of Europeans.[/quote]
In other words, talking them out of the idea of expanding into
outer space is impossible. The only way to stop them is to
eliminate their bloodlines.
#Post#: 15118--------------------------------------------------
Re: Homo Hubris
By: 90sRetroFan Date: August 12, 2022, 11:49 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
Duchesne at it again:
HTML https://www.eurocanadians.ca/2022/08/european-striving-for-the-ars-perfecta-in-linear-time.html
[quote]Various theories have been offered on the origins and
role of music: i) it evolved as an elaborate form of sexual
selection, primarily to seduce potential mates, ii) as a “shared
precursor” of language, iii) as a practical means to assist in
organizing and motivating human work, iv) as a means to enhance
communication with supernatural phenomena, v) to encourage
cooperation within one’s community, vi) as a pleasant
preoccupation or source of amusement, relaxation and
recuperation, vi) to express one’s cultural identity and feel
united with one’s culture through social celebrations such as
weddings, funerals, religious processions and ceremonial rites.
These explanations have a major, disquieting flaw: they can’t
explain why Europeans were continuously creative in music for
many centuries, responsible for the highest, most complex form
of music, classical music, along with the invention of the most
sophisticated musical instruments, the articulation of all the
treatises on music on matters related to pitch, notes,
intervals, scale systems, tonality, modulation, and melody.
Classical music expresses the best that man as man has achieved
in music. [/quote]
Most complex? Yes. Highest/best? No. Complexity =/= quality
(except to Westerners).
[quote]All the greatest composers in history were
European.[/quote]
According to whose judgement? Westerners'?
[quote]With the invention of the Ars Nova we can start
identifying great individual composers, beginning with the
Frenchman Guillaume de Machaut (1300-77), who adapted secular
poetic forms into polyphonic music, not only the motet, which is
based on a sacred text, but also secular song forms, such as the
lai or short tales in French literature, and the formes fixes,
such as the rondeau, virelai and ballade, into the musical
mainstream. Francesco Landini (1325-1397) was the foremost
musician of the Trecento style, sometimes called the “Italian
ars nova,” and for his virtuosity on the portative organ and his
compositions in the ballata form. Writers noted that “the
sweetness of his melodies was such that hearts burst from their
bosoms.” He may have been the first composer to think of his
music as a striving for perfection, writing: “I am Music, and
weeping I regret seeing intelligent people forsaking my sweet
and perfect sounds for street music.”[/quote]
Maybe the street music sounded better?
[quote]The English would produce their own great composers, most
notably John Dunstaple (1390-1453), who developed a style, la
contenance angloise, which was never heard before in music,
using full triadic harmony, along with harmonies with thirds and
sixths. This time also witnessed the Burgundian School of the
1400s, associated with a more rational control of consonance and
dissonance, of which the composer and musical theorist Guillaume
Dufay (1397-1474) was a member, known for his masses, motets,
magnificats, hymns, and antiphons within the area of sacred
music, as well as secular music following the formes fixe. This
School originated in the “cosmopolitan atmosphere” of the
Burgundian court, which was very prestigious in this period,
influencing musical centers across Europe.
Creating a bridge beyond the Middle Ages, the Burgundian School
paved the way for the Renaissance, which saw a rebirth of
interest in the treatises of the Greek past. Franchino
Gaffurio’s Theorica musice (1492), Practica musice (1496), and
De Harmonia musicorum intrumentorum opu (1518), incorporated
Greek ideas brought to the Italy from Byzantium by Greek
migrants. These were the most influential treatises of the late
fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. There were significant
composers during the early Renaissance, particularly Johannes
Ockeghem (1420-97), with his Missa prolationum, a “technical
tour de force in which every movement is a double mensuration
canon” (p. 167).
HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTPK9ZMBikM
The most renowned, and possibly the first in the pantheon of
“greatest composers”, is named Josquin des Prez 1450/1455-1521),
called the “father of musicians”, who made extensive use of
“motivic cells”, easily recognizable melodic fragments which
passed from voice to voice “in a contrapuntal texture” — a basic
organizational principle in music practiced continuously from
1500 until today. This Renaissance figure distinctly aimed to
raise music into an “ars perfecta“, that is, “a perfect art to
which nothing can be added”. Theorists such as Heinrich Glarean
and Gioseffo Zarlino agreed that his style represented
perfection. For Martin Luther, Josquin des Prez was “the master
of the notes”. The next giant in the pursuit of musical
perfection was Adrian Willaert (1490-1562), the inventor of the
antiphonal style (which involves two choirs in interaction,
often singing alternate musical phrases) and an experimenter in
chromaticism and rhythm.[/quote]
Does Duchesne's example of des Prez's work sound good to you
(let alone "perfect")? Would you want to re-listen to it
frequently? (More seriously, how twisted would someone have to
be in order find such music enjoyable? Now you know what goes on
inside a Western mind.)
[quote]Striving for Perfection Versus Music Outside Europe
This striving for perfection through a long historical sequence
by individuals from different generations, seeking to outdo the
accomplishments of the past, points to a fundamental contrast
between the models of beauty and achievement in the Western and
the non-Western world. The impression one gets from the study of
the history of music in such civilizations as ancient Egypt,
Mesopotamia, China, or Japan, is that of time standing still in
state of accomplished perfection after a sequence of
achievements. In the Western world, the history of music is
heavily characterized by linear time, continuous novelties, if
sometimes slow and interrupted, but always moving, whereas in
the East, after some initial achievements, further changes are
rare, as if perfection, already achieved, needed to be frozen
out in a world of cyclical time.
...
As the individualism of the West took off with the demolition of
kinship ties, the promotion of nuclear monogamous families, the
rise of associations and institutions based on legal contracts
rather than kinship norms (cities, universities, guilds,
monasteries), a historicized linear conception of perfection
developed,the idea that perfection lay in the future, rather
than in some golden past age, or in some Platonic Form frozen
out of time.[/quote]
I academically agree with this (and thank Duchesne for
acknowledging Plato as non-Western). We are here to defend the
non-Western conception of beauty. Beauty is above time, not in
time. Oneupmanship is not beautiful at all; it is crude and
barbaric:
HTML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-upmanship
[quote]One-upmanship, also called "one-upsmanship",[1] is the
art or practice of successively outdoing a competitor.
...
Viewed seriously, it is a phenomenon of group dynamics that can
have significant effects in the management field: for instance,
manifesting in office politics.[3][/quote]
and that Western classical music has identified oneupmanship
with beauty is evidence of its absolute inferiority. I also
agree with Duchesne about where oneupmanship (unsurprisingly!)
came from:
[quote]To understand the European linear conception of
perfection, their consistent striving for higher forms, it might
be useful to go back to the ancient Greek ideal of arête, a term
that originally denoted excellence in the performance of heroic
valor by individuated aristocratic Indo-European warriors. In
pre-Homeric times, it signified the strength and skill of a
warrior. It was his arête that ranked an aristocrat (aristos =
“best”) above the commoners; and it was the attainment of heroic
excellence that secure respect and honor among aristocratic
peers. The word “aristeia” was used in epic stories for the
single-handed adventures of the hero in his unceasing strife for
superlative achievements over his peers.[/quote]
HTML https://trueleft.createaforum.com/mythical-world/turanian-diffusion/
(There is of course nothing heroic about oneupmanship either.
Heroism is against time, not in time.)
[quote]Operas grew out of madrigals, and the madrigal originated
from the three-to-four voice frottola (1470–1530); from the
unique interest of European composers in poetry (particularly
pastoral poems about shepherds), and from the stylistic
influence of the French chanson; and from the polyphony of the
motet.[/quote]
Yes.
[quote]There is no space here to list every major composer of
“late Renaissance” Italy, England and Germany, but mention
should be made of John Dowland’s (1562-1626) lute songs, and the
increase in new forms of instrumental music and books about how
to play instruments, of which the most influential was Michael
Praetorius’s Systematic Treatise of Music (1618), an
encyclopedic record of contemporary musical practices, with many
illustrations of a wide variety of instruments, harpsichord,
trombone, pommer, bass viola — signaling the fact that Europeans
would go on to create almost all the best musical instruments in
history. The greats of the Reformation period included John
Tavern (1490-1545), best-known for his masses based on a popular
song called The Western Wynde, and Missa Gloria tibi Trinitas,
as well as the composers Christopher Tye, Thomas Tallis
(1505-1585) and Robert Whyte (1538-1574). The greatest of them
all, Giovanni de Palestrina (1525-94), called the “Prince of
Music” and his compositions “the absolute perfection” of church
style, composed 105+ masses and 250 motets, 68 offertories, 140
madrigals and 300 motets. He is remembered as a master of
contrapuntal ingenuity, for his dynamic flow of music, not rigid
or static, for the variety of form and type of his masses, for
melody that contain few leaps between notes and for dissonances
that are confined to suspensions, passing notes and weak beats.
HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBEwP95zNGk[/quote]
Again, just listen to the example provided by Duchesne FFS! Is
it anywhere near as good as Duchesne describes? Would you want
to re-listen to something like this frequently?
[quote]Meanwhile, as the rest of the world would not yet see a
treatise on music, Girolamo Mei (1519-1594) carried a thorough
investigation of every ancient work on music, writing a four
book treatise, Concerning Musical Nodes, soon followed by
Galileo’s father, Vincenzo Galilei’s Dialogo della musica antica
et della moderna (1581), where he used Mei’s ideas to attack
vocal counterpoint in Italian madrigal, arguing that delivering
the emotional message of poetical texts required only a single
melody with appropriate pitches and rhythms rather than several
voices simultaneously singing different melodies in different
rhythms.
Baroque
The next epoch is the Baroque between 1600 and 1750. Baroque
originally meant bizarre, exaggerated, grotesque, in bad taste,
but then it came to mean flamboyant, decorative, bold,
juxtaposition of contrasting elements conveying dramatic
tension. This period saw instrumental music becoming the equal
of vocal music as Europeans learned how to make instruments with
far higher expressive capacities, replacing the reserved sound
of viols with the powerful and flexible tone of violins, better
harpsichords, and originating orchestral music.
It is not easy to demarcate new epochs in Western history for
this is a continuously creative civilization in many interacting
fields — music, painting, exploration, architecture, science,
literature — with different dynamics and therefore different yet
mutually influential cultural motifs and reorientations. Some
figures are considered “transitional” figures. Claudio
Monteverdi (1567-1643) is such a transitional musician between
the late Renaissance (since there was no Reformation in Italy)
and the Baroque. The originality of Western cultural figures,
moreover, never came out of the blue but obtained its vitality
from its rootedness in the European past, reinterpreting and
readapting ancient Greek, Roman, and medieval Christian themes.
Monteverdi’s famous opera L’Orfeo (1607), for example, drew from
the Orpheus of Greek mythology (as transmitted by Ovid and
Virgil). Monteverdi’s L’Arianna was based on the Greek Ariadne
myth. Orpheus, in Monteverdi’s adaptation, was a musician and
renowned poet who descended into the Underworld of Hades to
recover his lost wife Eurydice. Orpheus is allowed to go to his
wife so long as he does not look at her, but overcome with his
love, he breaks the law of the underworld, and looks at her, and
loses her forever. Orpheus is a god-like figure in this heroic
rescue mission, who experiences intense emotions in rapid
succession, bravery, euphoria, and despondency. This adaptation
was mediated by the personal experiences of Monteverdi, his
intense grief and despair at the loss of his wife combined with
his chronic headaches and deteriorating eye sight. The cultural
influence of Rome is evident in his trilogy, the operas Il
ritorno d’Ulisse in patria (1640), L’incoronazione di Poppea,
and Le nozze d’Enea con Lavinia, inspired by a historical
trajectory that moves through Troy, the birth of Rome to its
decline, and forward to the foundation and glory of the Venetian
Republic. Republican rule by proud aristocrats unwilling to
submit to a despotic ruler is unique to the West, inspiring the
American “res-publica”. In the 1600s there were 19 Orphean opera
versions, and countless operas based on other mythologies about
Venus, Adonis, Apollo, Daphne, Hercules, Narcissus.
HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8361qIY8wpk[/quote]
Again, just listen to it and realize how perverted Westerners
have to be to like this stuff! I'm not the one choosing these
examples (so it's not me deliberately choosing bad examples);
Duchesne chose them all himself!
[quote]The invention of the Italian madrigal found its highest
expression in Monteverdi, whose first five books of madrigals
between 1587 and 1605 are estimated as monuments in the history
of polyphonic madrigal. What made Monteverdi stand out among
many other luminaries of his age, Henrich Isaac, Orlando di
Lass, was the way he established in his opera a complete unity
between drama and music for the first time in history, a
repertoire of textures and techniques “without parallels”. While
Italian opera was flourishing in every corner of Europe except
France, France would soon build up its own opera tradition
through the emergence of French tragedy in the grand literary
works of Corneille (1606-1684) and Jean Racine (1639-1699). To
these dramatic works, opera added music, dance and spectacle,
beginning with Italian born Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-1687), the
national director of French music as a member of Louis XIV’s
orchestra.
HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15ouTM7Nx14[/quote]
Is anyone here downloading any of these Duchesne examples of
Western classical music? I am not. Did anyone even consider
downloading them? Neither did I. Why not? Because they suck,
that's why.
[quote]This was merely the beginnings of the Baroque
achievement. The composers of this period constitute a veritable
who’s who list. Arcangelo Corelli (1653–1713) was the first to
create basic violin technique on the newly invented violin;
Domenico Scarlatti (1685–1757) wrote 555 harpsichord sonatas and
made use of Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish dance rhythms;
Henry Purcell (1659–1695), recognized as one of the greatest
English composers, is still admired for his “daring
expressiveness—not grand and exuberant in the manner of Handel,
but tinged with melancholy and a mixture of elegance, oddness,
and wistfulness.” There is also Jean Philippe Rameau
(1683–1764), known for his bold melodic lines and harmonies, and
tragédie lyrique opera, and for his Treatise on Harmony (1722),
which sought to establish a “science” of music, in this age of
Newtonian principles, deriving the principles of harmony from
the laws of acoustics, and argued that the chord (a combination
of three or more notes that are heard as if sounding
simultaneously) was the primal element in music.
HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eLt22XYuLI[/quote]
Even more to the point, did anyone here actually even manage to
sit through the entire video in any of Duchesne's examples?
Neither did I. That is how much they suck.
[quote]There were also the giants Vivaldi, Handel and Bach.
Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741) wrote over 500 concertos, of which
350 are for solo instrument and strings such as violin, and the
others for bassoon, cello, oboe, flute, viola, lute, or
mandolin; as well as 46 operas, and invented the ritornello form
(recurrent musical section that alternates with different
episodes of contrasting material). Georg Handel (1685–1759),
sometimes identified as the first “international composer,”
though in reality deeply rooted in Europe’s cosmopolitan
culture, born in Germany but becoming a naturalized British,
wrote for every musical genre, along with instrumental works for
full orchestra, with the most significant known as Water Music,
six concertos for woodwinds and strings and twelve “Grand
Concertos”, and his masterpiece Messiah, judged as “the finest
Composition of Musick that was ever heard”.
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) mastered the organ and
harpsichord and wrote over 1,000 compositions in nearly every
type of musical form, driven by a search for perfection, to
create music that would “honor the Most High God” and “produce a
well-sounding harmony to the glory of God”. Bach assimilated all
the music that had gone before him in his compulsive striving
for arête in technique, and what he absorbed he shaped into his
own endless variety of musical compositions. His music for the
harpsichord and clavichord includes masterpieces in every genre:
preludes, fantasies, and toccatas, and other pieces in fugal
style, dance suites, as well as sonatas and capriccios, and
concertos with orchestra. Bach was a Faustian man with
passionate drives, measuring himself against other composers,
hard to get along with, father of 20 children. Living in an age
of mighty composers, it is said that he surpassed them in his
harmonic intensity, the unexpected originality of the sounds,
and his forging of new rules for the actualization of harmonic
potentials. It is inaccurate to say that perfection is
impossible. Europeans achieved it in many art forms, and would
continue to do so in music, painting, and architecture through
the 1800s.
HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ho9rZjlsyYY[/quote]
I actually posted this example here:
HTML https://trueleft.createaforum.com/true-left-vs-right/western-civilization-is-ugly-48/msg6238/#msg6238
ARTICLE CONTINUES ON NEXT POST
#Post#: 15119--------------------------------------------------
Re: Homo Hubris
By: 90sRetroFan Date: August 12, 2022, 11:50 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
CONTD.
But never mind:
[quote]Classical Period
The eighteenth century Enlightenment is often celebrated for
giving birth to a cosmopolitan age in which the West embraced
“universal values” for humanity’s well being against age-old
customs and beliefs limited by ethno-national boundaries. Kant’s
famous essay, “Toward Perpetual Peace” (1795), is now seen in
academia as a “project” for the transformation of millions of
immigrants into “world citizens” of the West with the same
“universal” rights. It does not matter that Kant was calling for
a federation of republican states coexisting with each other in
a state of “hospitality” rather than in a state of open borders.
This “Enlightenment project” has prompted many dissidents to
reject the very notion of cosmopolitanism. Yet cosmopolitanism
is an inherent product of the European pursuit of the highest in
human nature, the ars perfecta. European national elites have
always borrowed from each other even as they developed musical
styles and philosophical outlooks with national characteristics.
Bach is very German in a way that Vivaldi is not — though he
absorbed into his works all the genres, styles, and forms of
European music in his time and before. Ars Perfecta should not
be confused with the pursuit of one uniform model arrived at
some point in history and then fixated into a state of
unoriginal repetition thereafter. Ars Perfecta allows for
national authenticity of performance, intention, sound, and
personal interpretation. Authentic works can be deeply rooted in
a nation’s history and personality.
When we read the German flutist J.J. Quantz writing in 1752 that
the ideal musical style would be “a style blending the good
elements” of “different peoples”, “more universal” rather than
the style of a “particular nation” — we should interpret this as
an expression of the reality that the language of classical
music, which is singular to the “different peoples” of Europe
(and should not be confused with a people’s musical folklore)
was cosmopolitan from its beginnings. This is evident in the
European preoccupation with a universal theory of harmonics, the
nature of scale systems, pitch, and melodic composition. It is
evident in the way Europeans went about, earnestly during and
after the Baroque era, creating the most perfect instruments to
achieve a maximum of musical flexibility between strong and
soft, crescendo and decrescendo, with almost imperceptible
shades: perfect violins, violas, violoncellos, flutes, oboes,
bassoons, horns, pianos. This strive for perfection was required
to express and arouse all the shadings of human feeling as
Europeans dug deeper into their interior selves to manifest in
full their joys, afflictions, grandeur, rage, compassion,
contemplation, and exaltation.
To be sure, the peoples of the world are “gifted with conscious
rhythm”. Man “cannot refrain from rhythmic movement, from
dancing, stamping the ground, clapping his hands, slapping his
abdomen, his chest, his legs, his buttocks”. This rhythmic
disposition, it is true, prompted all peoples to create musical
instruments. Primitives developed a variety of simple
instruments, drums, flutes, trumpets, xylophones, harps. These
were “folk and ritual instruments”, but with the rise of
civilizations in the Near East, India, and the Far East, we see
a distinct class of musicians developing instruments with
greater musicality and flexible intonation, enhancing the
artistic expression of sounds. We see a greater variety of
stringed instruments, new lutes and violins in Mesopotamia; and
in Egypt vertical flutes with greater musical possibilities than
the whistle flutes; and the complex double clarinet. Among
Asiatic peoples, we see vertical and angular harps, lyres,
lutes, oboes, trumpets. Instruments in ancient China include the
mouth organ, pan pipes, percussion instruments, long zither; and
in the medieval Far East we find the fiddle bow, flat lutes,
resting bell, hooked trumpet. The gamakas are said to be the
“life and soul” of Indian melody; the vina and the fiddle
sarinda with its fantastic shape are found in India.
But in the West, with the rise of civilization in the Greek
peninsula, we see both musical instruments and treatises on
harmonics. It is really during the Renaissance that the West
starts to outpace the rest of the world in the creation of more
sophisticated and original musical instruments, including a
tabella universalis, a classification of all wind and stringed
instruments in all their sizes and kinds, as well as numerous
scientific manuals on how to play them “according to the correct
tablature”. By 1600, the level of sophistication and variety in
kinds of European instruments is the highest; and then between
1750 and 1900 the quantity of timbres “increased astonishingly”,
along with the quality of the sound of each instrument; for
example, the harp was made chromatic after being strictly
diatonic for 5000 years; and under the pressure of orchestration
all instruments were developed to the “greatest possible
technical efficiency”. The magnificent piano was invented and
improved upon continuously.
HTML https://www.eurocanadians.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/6cb966f0642bcbfd.jpg
It can be argued that with modern individualism, that is, the
complete breaking out of individuals from kinship groups and
norms, European music witnessed an intensification in the
expression of personalities through music, leading to more
sophisticated, refined, and specialized musical instruments — in
order to express the wider range of personal feelings and
experiences afforded by a liberal culture. This culture
propelled modern Europeans to breach the medieval limits of the
traditional order of consonance and dissonance, of regular and
equable rhythmic flow, to improvise chromaticism, tonalities,
and create many styles of monody, recitative, aria, madrigal,
and the integration of theater and music for dramatic
expression. It can’t be denied that modern Europeans did in fact
originate a far greater variety of genres and instruments
capable of bringing out the complex emotional and psychological
constitutions of Europeans into the light.
The cosmopolitanism of Europeans in their striving for novels
ways of achieving perfection has misled historians into think
that the language of music expressed in Monteverdi, Scarletti,
Bach, Rameau, Brahms was “global” and not limited by
civilizational and national boundaries. While they acknowledge
that each of these composers absorbed into his music their
national traditions, they insist upon the “internationalism” of
the music of the Classical era, believing that with Handel,
Haydn, Mozart…we have “international composers”. Handel
(1685-1759), they tell us, borrowed, transcribed, adapted and
rearranged universally accepted practices in music, a German who
became a naturalized British. They hail Christopher Gluck
(1714-84) as a “cosmopolite” who professed a new style of opera
away from the particular embellishments and ornateness of
Baroque opera towards the Classical (universal) ideals of purity
and balance. They cite Gluck’s own words about how he created
“music suited to all nations, so as to abolish these ridiculous
distinctions of national styles”. Mozart (1756-1791), they
insist, was a cosmopolite who travelled extensively throughout
Europe, becoming familiar with every kind of music written and
heard, his work “a synthesis of national styles, a mirror that
reflected the music of a whole age, illuminated by his own
genius“. While Haydn (1732-1809) was localized in Vienna, they
tell us that his music was an outgrowth of an increasingly
cosmopolitan Europe.
What this “cosmopolitan” interpretation misses is that classical
music, in its origins and development, was 100% circumscribed to
the continent of Europe; it had no connection with and no
resonance outside Europe. When composers like Bach and Mozart
absorbed all the genres, styles, and forms of music of their
age, they were striving to express the highest potentialities in
European music, rather than express “international music”, as we
understand that term today. Handel said that when he composed
his Messiah he was guided by the perfect hand of God, driven by
a state of pure spirituality, in tears, ignoring food and sleep.
It was a common belief among European philosophers that God is
the all-perfect being embodying the perfections of all beings
within itself. Schelling (1775–1854) then suggested that the
perfection of God existed only in potentia, and that it was only
through the human striving for the highest that God actualized
itself.
HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JH3T6YwwU9s[/quote]
And why does the music go on for so long in the first place?
(Answer: for the same reason Duchesne's article goes on for so
long.)
[quote]Conservatives often lament the restless striving of
Europeans. They wish the West had been collectivist like China
or the Incas, without a linear conception of time, attached to a
golden eternal age in the past, without seeking to overcome the
resistance of things, without disruptive individualists full of
energy and fire trying to impose their subjective wills upon the
world. They dislike Beethoven. They prefer the continuous tonic
dominant harmonies of the eighteenth century, even before Bach.
Beethoven is seen as an admirer of France’s 1789 revolutionary
ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity; the composer of the
Eroica symphony dedicated to Napoleon, the conqueror who is
blamed for ending Europe’s monarchical order. Such has been the
nature of European creativity.
Beethoven’s music was an expression of his propulsive inner
state of being, for whom the elegant, highly refined sense of
Mozart was not enough; he needed to bend classic rules with
unexpected metrical patterns to convey his sense of conflict,
transformation, and transcendence of his age. Eroica was very
Western in its expression of the ideal of heroic greatness,
which he saw in Napoleon, built into this civilization since
prehistorical Indo-European times. With Beethoven, expression of
inner feeling became more intense and personal, for European
individuality had reached a higher level of inwardness. His
Sixth Symphony, Pastoral, is about his feelings aroused by
delight in nature, apprehension of a storm approaching,
awareness of the fury of the storm, and gratitude for the washed
calm afterwards. He was drawn into his silent world of
increasing deafness and solipsism, as he continued to compose.
The great Romantic composer, Hector Berlioz, said that in the
Sixth “the most unexplored depths of the soul reverberate”.
Beethoven, a corporeal man who had a habit of spitting whenever
he felt like, a clumsy guy who could never dance, sullen and
suspicious, without social graces, prone to rages, was
nevertheless a man of immense inner strength, who once told a
friend: “I don’t want to know anything about your system of
ethics. Strength is the morality of the man who stands out from
the rest and it is mine”.
HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAVnEWQlzyA[/quote]
Which is worse: Duchesne's article itself or the accompanying
examples?
[quote]Romantic Epoch
Only Western history is characterized by a continuous sequence
of discontinuous revolutionary epochs. New epochs tend to be
morphologically present across many fields from politics to
science to painting and architecture, philosophy and music —
although each field sees movements and schools peculiar to
itself. The Romantic period in music runs roughly from 1830 to
1900; however, the variety of compositions is outstanding, with
many characteristics of the preceding “Classical” period
persisting, and new “Nationalistic” tendencies coalescing with
it, along with new “Impressionistic” tendencies.
This makes the West incredibly hard to understand. The word
“Hindu” or “Talmudic” can define a people for centuries. Not the
West. “Romanticism” alone is very difficult to grasp. In
literature, it spans a shorter period from 1790 to 1850,
displaced by “Realism”, which does not appear in music. The
different names associated with this movement bespeak of its
intricacy: Joseph de Maistre, Rousseau, Stendhal, Goethe’s “The
Sorrows of Young Werther”, Chateaubriand, Coleridge, Blake,
Herder, Byron, Wordsworth, Delacroix, Wuthering Heights,
Hölderlin, Novalis, Schlegel. In music one can choose Liszt,
Schumann, Wagner, Mahler, Tchaikovsky, Weber — but Verdi,
possibly Wagner, and the Russian Mussorgsky are best identified
as Nationalists. Brahms had little respect for most composers of
his era, remaining a Classicist.
Perhaps the best composer to convey the meaning of Romanticism
in music is Hector Berlioz (1803-69). It is said that “after
him, music would never be the same…he did it all by himself,
impatiently brushing aside convention”. He departed from the
convention of “four-squareness” in melody, the rigidity of
rhythms, and formulaic harmonies, expressing his moods and
attitudes to the world. Experts say that Berlioz broadened the
definition of orchestration by allowing each instrument to
create sounds not heard before. He also expanded the use of
programmatic music to accentuate the emotional expressiveness of
the music by recreating in sound the events and emotions
portrayed in ancient classical legends, novels, poetry, and
historical events. He was a deep admirer of Western history and
literature: Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare. and Byron.
What experts leave out is that the “intensity and expression of
feeling” (to use the words of Liszt) in Romantic music was
itself an expression of the amplification of the introspective
consciousness of Europeans after 1750s. Whereas expression of
feelings in the Baroque era had been confined to a few moods,
each at a time, now music sought to express the complex shadings
of human moods in the same breath. To express this subjectivism,
this period saw the development to the greatest technical
efficiency and musical effectiveness of all instruments, with
the piano reshaped and enlarged to 7 octaves with felt-covered
hammers for both expressiveness and virtuosity. In the Romantic
age, a need emerged for instruments that would go beyond the
expression of a few general moods at a time, to make use of all
possible timbres so as to to express all the shadings of
feelings, modulating from chord to chord — for Romantic
Europeans, rather than being in one emotional state, anger or
fear, until moved by some stimulus to a different state, were in
a constant state of psychological flux, with unpredictable
turns.
HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5n7qfRNzS3s[/quote]
Both Duchesne and the composers he posts are Westerners. And
that explains why both the article and the music are tediously
bad in the same way. And worst of all, neither are aware of this
at all, instead each having an extremely high opinion of
himself.
[quote]Evolutionary theory is incapable of explaining the
intense subjective expressiveness of modern Europeans, the
virtuosity and continuous creativity one detects from Bach to
Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, and from the Classical composers to
Schubert, the German Schumann, Chopin, Liszt, and Wagner. The
transcendence of European high culture over evolutionary
pressures is one of its defining features. It is very hard for
simpler cultures to rise above these pressures, and so they are
easier to explain in evolutionary terms. Schopenhauer once said
that classical music “is entirely independent of the phenomenal
world , ignores it altogether, could to a certain extent exist
if there was no world at all”. What he meant is that the history
of European music does not obey evolutionary pressures but is an
immaterial realm of freedom where pure aesthetics reigns
supreme. This transcendence peaked in the Romantic era.
Evolutionary psychologists today believe they can instruct us
about the “biological basis of human culture”. But they can only
explain culture at its most basic level. They can only tell us,
rather boringly, that music is a “cultural universal”. They
can’t explain the difference between Beethoven and Berlioz, and
between them and traditional folk music. For this reason,
evolutionary theories are inclined to ignore, if not trivialize,
high cultural achievements in philosophy, art, and literature.
Steven Pinker once said that “the value of [European] art is
largely unrelated to aesthetics: a priceless masterpiece becomes
worthless if found to be a forgery; soup cans and comic strips
become high art when the art world says they are, and then
command conspicuously wasteful prices.” They see high culture as
“gratuitous but harmless decoration” without much import as
contrasted to what Marx called the real foundation of culture:
eating, digestion, getting money, satisfying one’s appetitive
drives.
The way to explain European cultural creativity is to recognize
its greater freedom from evolutionary/materialistic pressures.
European consciousness acquired the power to turn in upon
itself, take possession of itself, not merely to be conscious
but to be aware that its consciousness is uniquely its own,
constituted as a centre from which all other realities, the
successive data of sensory experiences, the pressures of the
world, are held together in what Kant called a “transcendental
unity of apperception,” which implies a unity of self, which
implies the discovery of the self as the agent of consciousness,
doubling back upon itself, and thus rising to a new realm with
its own autonomous inner life.
...
The rise of Russian classical music certainly came with a very
strong nationalist impulse rooted in the use of folk music. Of
the so-called “mighty five” Russian composers who developed a
classical tradition, Mussorgsky, is credited with true
masterpieces, though all he wanted was to express the soul of
Russian people. It has been noted that Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s
music, which came a generation after the “mighty five”,
contained a peculiarly Russian melody. However, while his early
compositions quoted folk songs, his later music has been
categorized as “more cosmopolitan,” although Igor Stravinsky
insisted that it remained “profoundly Russian”. Antonín
Dvořák (1841-1904), a peasant from Bohemia, said that his
music expressed his love for his native motherland. But what
makes him a “genius” composer rather than a gifted provincial
composer, was precisely his ability to absorb folk influences
while finding ways to integrate them into the
perfectionist-universal-transcendental impulse inherent in
classical music. In varying degrees the greats were all rooted
in their nations combined with some degree of Pan-Europeanism,
the singular tradition of classical music in Europe.
HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RyLq5Pbw8M[/quote]
Conclusion: WESTERN CIVILIZATION MUST DIE!
Of course Duchesne's article also includes the mandatory
Sinophobia:
[quote]The Chinese did not produce a single treatise of music
that we can identify as theoretical on matters related to pitch,
notes, intervals, scale systems, tonality, modulation, and
melody. Britannica says that “the official Song shi (1345; “Song
[Dynasty] History”) contained 496 chapters, of which 17 deal
directly with music, and musical events and people appear
throughout the entire work.” They also wrote manuals on how to
play some instruments. However, these were descriptive works.
This article does not mention one single Chinese composer. After
all, China did not produce any classical music.[/quote]
Now, having finally made it to the end, reward yourself by
listening to this example which I posted previously:
HTML https://trueleft.createaforum.com/mythical-world/the-birth-of-civilisation-cult-of-the-skull-(8800-bc-to-6500-bc)/msg6200/#msg6200
[quote]
HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ezpWOuWJ_c[/quote]
Because a random video game BGM is better than everything in
Western classical music combined.....
#Post#: 15123--------------------------------------------------
Re: Homo Hubris
By: guest30 Date: August 13, 2022, 9:33 am
---------------------------------------------------------
[quote]And why does the music go on for so long in the first
place?[/quote]
Do you all want to know the most simple song which created from
Europe, with the simplest lyric tone? Have you ever hear "Horst
Wessel Lied"? The song emphasize on how we sing rather than how
we play the musical tone. Short music, more simple to play...
So, I doubt that "Horst Wessel Lied" song is using Western
music's characteristics
#Post#: 16106--------------------------------------------------
Re: Homo Hubris
By: 90sRetroFan Date: October 18, 2022, 11:53 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
And our enemies are back with more self-congratulation:
HTML https://www.eurocanadians.ca/2022/10/the-destruction-of-western-civilization.html
[quote]let me just try to explain in a few words why European
civilization is the greatest civilization the world has ever
known. It’s precisely because of one word: biology. Globalists
such as boyish, miserable, unsatisfied, demanding, despotic, and
useless sniveling brat, Trudeau, can just run to a safe place
and suck their thumb if they refuse to acknowledge this fact
accepted by all genuine scientists of the world. Races are real,
and we are not equal in aptitudes. Some races such as the White
race are in fact more intelligent, more adventurous, and more
creative than others. And only a machine gun can change
that.[/quote]
Which is why we have this topic:
HTML https://trueleft.createaforum.com/true-left-vs-false-left/firearms/
As I keep saying, there is no better poetic justice than using
modern weapons against the civilization which invented them.
[quote]Whites who are of Indo-European stock are also endowed
with unique characteristics, which demoralized and subdued
Whites who think of themselves as the scum of the earth, should
consider before depreciating themselves and bowing down to
diversity traitors and Third-World invaders. Intellectual Giants
such as Max Weber, Friedrich Nietzsche, G.W. F Hegel, and
several others such as Spengler, notes Dr. Duchesne, had only
good things to say about
the strikingly vibrant European culture driven by a
personality overflowing with expansive impulses, the
‘intellectual will for power,’ ‘fighting,’ ‘progressing,’
‘overcoming of resistance,’ ‘battling against what is near,
tangible and easy.’[/quote]
Of course they had only good things to say about it. They
themselves were Westerners!
[quote]Dr. Duchesne cites Spengler who writes of how “the Nordic
climate forged this man full of vitality, through the hardness
of the conditions of life, the cold, the constant adversity,
into a tough race, with an intellect sharpened to the most
extreme degree with the cold fervor of an irrepressible passion
for struggling, daring, driving forward.”[/quote]
Which is why we have this topic:
HTML https://trueleft.createaforum.com/human-evolution/temperature-effects/
We do not deny the fact that cold habitats exert different
selective pressures; we merely disagree on which selective
pressures we prefer!
[quote]Do you have any idea what these people from the Caucasian
steppes, riding on horse-pulled wagons and brandishing
double-edged axes ended-up accomplishing once they started
dispersing all over Europe and mixing with the Nordic
Hunter-Gatherers?[/quote]
Yes:
HTML https://trueleft.createaforum.com/mythical-world/gentilism/
+
HTML https://trueleft.createaforum.com/mythical-world/turanian-diffusion/
=
HTML https://trueleft.createaforum.com/true-left-vs-right/homo-hubris/
I reached this conclusion years before you lot did!
[quote]Why would anybody want to demean, dispossess, and destroy
us except to take our place because they are not gifted enough
to compete with us fairly?[/quote]
Because we in the first place never wanted to compete in making
life far more violent and complicated than it ever should have
been, yet have been forced to compete in order to not let you
hold all the economic/military power that results from taking a
lead in machinism etc.! Ending the competition requires first
destroying those who started it without anyone else's consent.
[quote]They need to lie, intimidate, and even kill to beat us at
our game. It must be enormously frustrating for them to realize
how mediocre and useless they really are.[/quote]
What is enormously frustrating for us is that we (who hate the
game) have to beat you (who love the game) before we can stop
playing. If only you had never existed, we could have sent our
time and energy more meaningfully.
Bonus exhibit:
HTML https://twitter.com/dr_duchesne/status/1582169470734213121
[quote]Whites created all the most profound words:
Atom
Natural Law
Transcendental Ego
Will To Power
Thing-In-Itself
Being-In-The-World
Free Will
Cosmos
Pure I
Mass
Gravitation
Evolution
Energy
Infinitesimal
Deontology
Syllogism
A Priori
Transcendental Unity of Apperception[/quote]
along with Duchesne's Twitter account header photo:
[img]
HTML https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_banners/1518981310529871872/1664671331/1080x360[/img]
The worst part is not that our enemies like this stuff (though
this is already bad enough), but that they genuinely think we
envy them for this stuff.....
#Post#: 16109--------------------------------------------------
Re: Western civilization = sustainable evil
By: guest90 Date: October 19, 2022, 6:17 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
One amusing yet highly aggravating habit of rightists is how
they will bemoan modern western civilisation while believing in
‘traditional’ western civ (pre-1950s) supremacy. They’re anti
vaxx and the pharmaceutical industry yet boast about western
science, they hate modern machinery like AI yet praise western
inventors and high IQ rates. They loathe everything western civ
has become while simultaneously supporting that which led it
here. Their cognitive dissonance is astounding... but not
surprising.
#Post#: 16374--------------------------------------------------
Re: Homo Hubris
By: 90sRetroFan Date: November 11, 2022, 4:31 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
HTML https://www.telegraph.co.uk/columnists/2022/11/08/cop27-dont-owe-developing-countries-climate-reparations-owe/
[quote]We don’t owe developing countries ‘climate reparations’ –
they owe us
We are on the hook for untold billions to countries experiencing
adverse weather conditions, because we invented factories – and
cars
...
The UK will neither apologise nor make amends for the Industrial
Revolution whose beneficial effects continue to be felt every
day around our world.
Should you persist in your unfair demands for “climate
reparations”, may we suggest you pay us royalties for the
following: the internal combustion engine, Spinning Jenny, steam
power, Tarmacadam, electrical telegraph, railways, automobiles,
airplanes, radio, television, computers, pharmaceuticals and the
world wide web.
We’ll throw in Parliamentary government and democracy for free
as a gesture of goodwill. Bank transfers welcome.[/quote]
The author also looks like what we would expect:
HTML https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/Author%20photos/Allison%20Pearson%20Aug%202021-small.png
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