In the News (The Telegraph): “Cambridge music students are being instructed to ‘decolonise the ear’ and consider the classical canon as ‘an imperial phenomenon’.

“The works of composers such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Giuseppe Verdi are being taught in relation to topics including European imperialism and Orientalism, as the music faculty pursues work on ‘curricular decolonisation’.

Undergraduates studying for the course, titled Decolonising the Ear, are taught to consider listening to sound in a ‘postcolonial’ way, while a ‘music, power, empire’ module explores how the classical repertoire is a middle-class and imperial phenomenon. …

“According to a course guide for Decolonising the Ear, undergraduates will examine topics including how musical repertoires could be ‘complicit… in projects of Empire and neoliberal systems of power’.

“Students also learn how ‘Empire… affected our understanding of what constitutes “music”’ and how ‘genres like opera seem particularly susceptible to racialised representations’.”

Question: To be honest, I thought that music was above all this. Tell me—you like classical music, rap, you also like jazz—how do you connect all this?

Answer: What is the difference? This is an expression of human feelings, and therefore I welcome it all. I can listen to Odessan folk songs and criminal ones too. And Vysotsky songs [a famous Soviet bard]. In every expression there is a piece of some soul. This is the main thing.

Question: How can we avoid reaching these prohibitions?

Answer: This is the limitation of people.

Question: How can you reach such a height while listening to music?

Answer: You can raise any criminal song, whatever you want, to a high level, because this is the work of a person, no matter how low or insignificant; you can say about him whatever you want, but this is a work emanating from the forces of his soul. This is why you cannot just strike it out.

Question: What can connect me with this person, who, frankly speaking, is low?

Answer: I would say that the ability of a composer, an artist, a poet, a writer, is to highlight or to express some feature in our character, which was created, in principle, by the Creator. Therefore we must understand that there are no bad qualities; there is only a problem of how we treat them correctly in order to see the Creator’s thought in them. Then the most terrible works of hatred will get their rightful place in the common human pantheon.

Comment: Now you are destroying all the stereotypes by saying that there are no low and high genres.

My Response: There is nothing bad, low, or terrible. All this is necessary for us only so that we treat it as a direct communication with the Creator. Everything comes from Him, and all of us must bring it all and bow before Him. That’s all.
[301050]
From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 6/6/22

Related Material:
The Healing Power Of Music
The Power Of Music
Music That Attracts One Towards Attainment Of The Upper World

Filed under: Music, News | Add Comment →