{"id":3084,"date":"2015-02-23T14:14:58","date_gmt":"2015-02-23T22:14:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/?p=3084"},"modified":"2015-02-24T18:19:34","modified_gmt":"2015-02-25T02:19:34","slug":"fear-of-music-then-and-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/2015\/02\/fear-of-music-then-and-now.html","title":{"rendered":"Fear of Music, Then and Now"},"content":{"rendered":"

[contextly_auto_sidebar id=”gK38C6GBzzOfcwaZG1ZznJWnGv9vKRrO”]<\/p>\n

VIOLENT, authoritarian and fascist regimes\u00a0often target artists, musicians, and the arts themselves — this is something we see East and West, ancient and modern. The latest outbreak of what Talking Heads called “Fear of Music” seems to be taking place in the Middle East, where the Islamic State is destroying drums and other musical instruments because they are somehow “un-Islamic.”<\/p>\n

The site Epic Times has a photo and brief description<\/a>. (I think the story was broken by the UK’s Daily Mail.)<\/p>\n

Instrumental music, it appears, is not music to the ears of ISIS. In one of the group\u2019s almost\u00a0daily\u00a0releases of propaganda imagery, black-clad militants in eastern Libya are shown presiding over the destruction of a number of musical instruments. Saxophones and drums go\u00a0up in smoke as the group\u00a0torches them in the open, drumming up fear in the process.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is — let me be clear — appalling. It’s especially weird since some of my favorite musicians are soulful Sufis (see RT, right) or other kinds of Muslim sect. (Ted Gioia’s n\"RT_Pdls\"ew book Love Songs<\/em> looks at how the music of Andalucian Moors shaped the contemporary Western love song.)<\/p>\n

But this censorious spirit exists in our own Judeo-Christian and Anglo-American world. Oliver Cromwell’s Puritans were violent religious fanatics who smashed the stained glass in churches and tore out the pews where chorale groups\u00a0sang psalms. (The aesthetic was considered idolatry or “Roman.”)<\/p>\n

The Nazi’s chilled expression with their Degenerate Art show; Stalin nearly destroyed Shostakovich. I’m old enough to (barely) remember the record-burnings of the “disco sucks” movement. American Christian maniacs burned Beatles records after John Lennon’s Beatles-are-bigger-than-Jesus remark.<\/p>\n

These were all reasonably brief movements. But one lasted significantly longer: The early Christian war on secular music, which lasted for hundreds of years. I spend a lot of time digging into this for my book — it’s an almost literary example of “the killing of the creative class” — though very little made it into the final Culture Crash<\/em>. Here’s a bit of it, though:<\/p>\n

Jupiter-worshipping imperial Rome was often suspicious of artists, but the early Christians could be downright hostile. As Christ\u2019s following spread from a small cult in the Levant into the Roman mainstream \u2013 becoming the official religion in the 4th<\/sup> century \u2013 its value system and roots in the very different Hebrew culture, created a tension with Roman\u2019s public spirit.<\/p>\n

Clement of Alexandria, in the late 2nd century, warned of the \u201cindecency and rudeness\u201d that musical instruments deliver, and condemned the man who \u201crages about with the instruments of an insane cult. We completely forbid the use of these instruments at our temperate banquet.\u201d And it wasn\u2019t just public performances of music that upset the early Christians: Because music often accompanied pagan sacrifice and religion, those performing music at home were suspected of worshipping idols.<\/p>\n

Saint Jerome, the Roman Christian priest, made no secret of his attitudes in his writing. \u201cDrive out the singer like a criminal,\u201d he wrote in one of his epistles. \u201cCast from your house all women lyricists and harpists, the devil\u2019s choir whose songs are the deadly ones of sirens.\u201d His attitude toward writers shows how far things had come from the Golden Age: \u201cThe songs of the poets,\u201d he wrote, \u201care the food of demons.\u201d\"Talking_Heads-Fear_of_Music\"<\/p>\n

Much of the creative class, then, began to be exiled from respectable society as Christianity takes over the Roman empire in the fourth century. \u201cWhoever performs in a theater or is a wrestler or a runner, or a music teacher or a comic actor,\u201d reads a canon of Hippolytus, “or who teaches savagery or a priest of the idols \u2013 none of these may be permitted to attend a sermon until they have been purified from these unclean works. After forty days they hear a sermon. When they prove themselves worthy they will be baptised.\u201d Dancers, actors, and especially a \u201cwoman who dances in taverns and allures people by her beautiful singing and her deceitful melody\u201d \u2013 as the Canons of Basil put it \u2013 didn\u2019t fare much better.<\/p>\n

…\u00a0For hundreds of years \u2013 until the 12th century \u2013 Christian fathers forbade the use of every instrument but the church organ. Other instruments \u2013 especially the lyre and pipes \u2013 were associated with the very paganism that the Catholic leadership was trying to stamp out. For much of the Middle Ages, all<\/em> secular music was forbidden.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Are all these repressive\u00a0Christians\u00a0— like the rocker disco-sucks crowd — as bad as ISIS? Of course not. Do our Western bad deeds excuse theirs? No, again.<\/p>\n

But let’s remember that the anti-aesthetic impulse is not unique to Middle Eastern fanatics: We’ve experienced — and perpetrated — it too.<\/p>\n

UPDATE: Now these dipshit fanatics are burning books and sacred manuscripts, here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[contextly_auto_sidebar id=”gK38C6GBzzOfcwaZG1ZznJWnGv9vKRrO”] VIOLENT, authoritarian and fascist regimes\u00a0often target artists, musicians, and the arts themselves — this is something we see East and West, ancient and modern. The latest outbreak of what Talking Heads called “Fear of Music” seems to be taking place in the Middle East, where the Islamic State is destroying drums and other […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[697,241,58],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-3084","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-fear-of-music","7":"category-middle-ages","8":"category-music","9":"entry","10":"has-post-thumbnail"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3084","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3084"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3084\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3099,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3084\/revisions\/3099"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}