The denouement?

[nguyenivy]

(09-26-2022, 06:04 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(09-26-2022, 01:30 AM)JasonBlack Wrote:

Quote:I thought that it was Boomers who thought much about the last 1T as 'creepy'.

Thinking 1Ts are creepy is most common among idealists, but people of more individualistic temperament don't tend to be the biggest fans of them regardless of generational archetype. Likewise, more collectivist temperaments tend to dislike 3Ts regardless of archetype, more security oriented temperaments are more likely to dislike 2Ts, etc (I think we can all agree most people in general dislike 4th Turnings)

Apocalypse arises when those in power (Hitler, Tojo, and Mussolini are extremes) seek to change the world at all costs and fail to recognize what those costs are. Those leaders who greatly devalue human life are the most dangerous at the time. When Satan Hussein gassed the Kurds, he went to the top of the list of leaders likely to start a war with the USA. This was when the Cold War was going on.  

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Quote:Maybe it was usually children who were most critical of a time in which they were children, whether Reactives during an Awakening, Civics during a mindless and chaotic Unraveling, or Adaptives who were stifled during a scary Crisis.

These are my thoughts as well. My impression of the 3rd turning was less "this is chaotic" and more "What the hell, man? Everyone is so irresponsible. I'm all for having a good time, but all anyone wants to do is spend more money they don't have and kick the can down the road until everyone else has to suffer the consequences".

That is exactly what I would expect. A 3T is nearly pure rot. Sure, some fun is part of it, but personal responsibility and collective purpose are not. 3T rot leads to the 4T. Federal deficits became surpluses in the 1990's and energy consumption shrank due to the fall of Communism (a libertarian trend). Then Dubya became President and the Right found pretexts for Big Government. Yuck! 

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Quote:It's telling that the GI culture of the last High is readily available at Goodwill as their kids clear out the vinyl LPs and primitive electronics of GI's who died over the last thirty or so years. Bing Crosby, Guy Lombardo, Lawrence Welk, Perry Como, Patti Page, etc. in music? It all seems corny now for its insipid sentimentality.

Tbh, I've always been a fan of many GI singers. From the popular music of Frank Sinatra, Edith Piaf, Burl Ives and Mahalia Jackson, to opera singers like Franco Corelli, Eleanor Steber, Rise Stevens or Cornell MacNeil

OK, Sarah Vaughan. 

Talented musicians are to be found in all generations, as are some great voices. Of course classical music (including opera) has a tradition that largely transcends generational trends. So we have Jascha Heifetz, David Oistrakh ,Arthur Grumiaux, Henryk Szeryng, Erica Morini, Isaac Stern, and Mischa Elman on violin; Rudolf Serkin, Vladimir Horowitz, Sviatoslav Richter, and Emil Gilels on piano. Can you really separate Lost Ernest Ansermet, Charles Munch, Karl Boehm and George Szell from GI's Herbert von Karajan, Georg Solti, Rafael Kubelik, Jean Martinon, and Leonard Bernstein as conductors? Performance of classical music is timeless, with at most subtle trends that might take decades to cause subtle changes. Listeners' tastes might change, but that is a different matter.  This is more likely to appear in the repertory played, with such composers as Gretry and Raff almost completely disappearing from the repertory as 'new' composers appear.  

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Quote:Band material does get revival, if only because it was some of the best pop culture ever (think of Strauss waltzes, ragtime, and the original model for the Big Band pattern -- Josef Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Considering that Mozart and Haydn wrote music that succeeded at multiple levels of aesthetic satisfaction, the question may be why people don't see the "classical" era of music as pop music at its best. It was so received at its time. Maybe American pop culture would be different had Glenn Miller lived to a ripe old age. Boomers would have reacted to the blandness of the GI culture even without the Vietnam War; there would have been an Awakening, and it would have been more strictly cultural. 

The majority of GI music was more dry, but on the plus side 
- more suitable for adult audience, not radio stations full of people who think the ideal is to sound 16 years old
- less quite as self-absorbed. it was less about the singer personally and more about the music itself. 
- similarly, the point itself seemed less like "let's make the best music" and more "let's focus on our craft and produce beautiful singing.

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1. The adult audience no longer includes GI's in significant numbers. It's telling that Millennial adults, who are much of the market for popular music today, have not been part of any "easy listening" revival. They are not reviving GI popular music, either. 

2. When I think of truly immature people I think of people who have never had to face the harsh realities of an economic order that puts elite power, indulgence, and gain above all else. Narcissistic personalities are terribly immature, and the cure for narcissism is to be in the position in which must spend a couple years doing mind-numbing, soul-crushing work that destroys any excess of self esteem. Work for a company that reminds people at every turn that someone else wants your job and that assumes that everyone who works there is a potential thief, and you will be humbled fast. At some point one may fully believe that nothing is so wonderful as to suffer for shareholders, executives, bosses, and customers from whom all blessings (survival and what else? Not much!) flow and one believes that liberals do nothing for one but raise taxes that make life tougher. Narcissists at the top of corporations, governments, and non-profits get away with sadism and often create an environment perfectly suited to masochists at the bottom. (The connection between narcissism and sadism, including economic sadism, should be obvious).

3. Narcissism is common among creative people of most kinds (writers, artists, musicians, and stage or screen actors). If they reach a certain level of competence they can easily dictate the terms of their work because they are who they are. There was only one Igor Stravinsky or Pablo Picasso at the time, and there is none now. Narcissism is the norm among politicians. Creative people need some individuality unless they are making predictable art such as that for some 'creative' corporation (let us say Disney, Warner) or something suited to ad copy.  

4. Teenagers are the ones being sold on mass low culture. Figure that the people who buy movie tickets and music singles (whether 45-rpm records in the old days or downloads today) or 'young adult' novels are heavily teenagers spending what little money they have (some of the rest will be on fast food) from allowances or chores. Relatively few GI's got to do this while still children, but they often got to turn the radio dial to Big Band music as children. Their parents may have preferred that the dial be turned to religious devotionals instead, but at least Big Band music was fun and squeaky-clean. Remember: by current standards most GI kids led hardscrabble lives which expressed themselves in Our Gang and Little Rascals shorts.  Kids not northern and western WASPs were largely poor. World War II changed that just in time for many Silent children getting to know the Good Life as their GI parents moved from the tenements to the suburbs.  It would take another Great Depression or the calamitous post-apocalyptic world of a horrific war to break that pattern. Boomers may have thought that GI's were doing well, but they saw GI's only in adulthood.

If adults are the only ones with the means to buy books and recorded movies, then they dictate what is available on the gramophone or in the library of entirely hard-cover books (cheap paper-back books were available starting in the 1930's, and the military offered a veritable library of cheap paper backs to soldiers and sailors during WWII), and no teen culture really appears. With television such programs as American Bandstand started to appear with the ability to market stuff to teens in the advertising... that changed everything. 

Say what you want, but there has been a boom in expensive boarding schools for kids -- largely in which the school administration can keep kids from having access to the mass low culture that their 'mere' middle-class contemporaries face. That is now one of the biggest class distinctions in America. 

5. If you want music for its own sake, then listen to the preludes and fugues of Bach and especially Reger (Reger is not entertaining), the late string quartets of Beethoven and the string quartets of Bartok and Shostakovich which really are pure music. Then there is twelve-tone music that relatively few people (I am not one of them) 'get'. Medieval polyphony was typically intended to strengthen and confirm religious faith. Vivaldi, Handel, Haydn  Mozart, Chopin, and Dvorak wrote most of their works as entertainment or for some occasional use. Operas since Monteverdi have always been large-scale entertainment in conception if not now in practice. Some music is a mindless exercise in using a hook and a conventional feeling ("I'm En-or-ee the Eighth I am!" , "They're coming to take me away, ha! ha!, or "Like a Virgin"), but even something so sublime as Bach's Goldberg Variations or Puccini's Turandot that requires a huge investment in personal time for tuneful and clever music. In those two cases the music is clever and tuneful and satisfying. Maybe it takes some effort to appreciate music not from our time that is not so obvious such as Monteverdi madrigals or folk music from some other culture, but it is worth the effort. The perfect basis of long music such as Mozart's Divertimento for String Trio K 563 or the elegiac theme of the adagio of Bruckner's seventh symphony might not be as suited for an advertising jingle (on which Barry Manilow gets rich) -- but it certainly is coherent.  

OK, for musical coherence the folk-tune is still the model, and at that I can see great faults with some popular music, as in the examples I displayed above. For truly beautiful singing, listen to some medieval polyphony. Little could be more magnificent than Thomas Tallis' Spem in alium.
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Interesting points about GI music given my own tastes may be a bit similar in this time & place: a Millennial who doesn't need lyrics (or is fine with lyrics in a language I don't understand) to enjoy music. Much of the electronic music I listen to doesn't necessarily have or need lyrics. I also enjoy new age music with vocals that aren't necessarily lyrics. I'm not sure how popular trance, techno, d&b, new age, or any other electronic type genres are now vs in prior Turnings, but one big reason I gravitated to electronic music was due to it being difficult to come across offensive lyrics (or any lyrics at all). I do understand however that not everyone can stand music that doesn't have a message to say or story to tell. So instrumental trance/techno/EDM tracks with either no lyrics or lyrics that don't play a large role may bore people. Was jazz or classical popular in the previous 4T among GIs? Most of my Boomer relatives can't seem to do music w/o lyrics.