Monday, February 12, 2007

History

"Those who don’t learn from history used to have to relive it, but only until those in power could find a way to convince everybody, including themselves, that history never happened, or happened in a way best serving their own purposes—or best of all that it doesn’t matter anyway, except as some dumbed-down TV documentary cobbled together for an hour’s entertainment."

From Thomas Pynchon's preface to George Orwell's 1984.

The tone around this page may often be too moralistic for some readers, especially when it comes to an insistence that new musics be historically engaged. But damn it, you open the papers each morning, or hear the "latest" in film scoring or big- commissoned works for big-name orchestras, and you have to wonder: what is the alternative?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

To quote Ken Knabb from the Bureau of Public
Secrets, "Don't call us, do it yourself".

Ps. I really enjoy your blog and read it almost everyday. Keep up the great work.

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