Category: Arts

E. Michael Jones: Dionysos Rising

The Birth of Cultural Revolution Out of the Spirit of Music
 

Ignatius Press, 1994     Amazon.com     Liberty Press

Back Cover:

JonesFollowing up his best-seller, Degenerate Moderns, Jones reveals how major figures connected with modern music projected their own immorality into the field of music which has been the main vehicle of cultural revolution in the West. For the first time ever, a unified theory of music and cultural revolution links the work of figures like Wagner, Nietzsche, Schönberg, Jagger and others to show the connection between the demise of classical music and the rise of rock ‘n’ roll.

Beginning with Nietzsche’s appropriation of Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde, music became the instrument for cultural upheaval. What began at the barricades of Dresden in 1849 found its culmination at Woodstock and Altamont and the other Dionysian festivals of 1969. Jones shows the connection between the death of classical music and the rise of the African sensibility which Nietzsche saw as the antidote to Wagner prostrating himself before the cross in Parsifal. Nietzsche prophesied the end of the age of Christ/Socrates and the return of the spirit of music to philosophy. That return took place at the end of 1969 at an abandoned racetrack outside of San Francisco, and the world has never been the same.

“And a man who has not ‘music’ in him is apt to disintegrate states since music is equally suggestive of personal love or political concord.”  G. Wilson Knight, The Shakespearean Tempest

Chapters:

1  Richard Wagner: Chromaticism, Adultery, and the Beginning of Our Cultural Revolution

2  Friedrich Nietzsche: Transvaluation of All Values as the Prosecution of the Cultural War

3  Arnold Schönberg: Craving the Law and the Totalitarian Reaction

4  Sympathy for the Devil: Theodor Adorno, Aleister Crowley, Mick Jagger

Reviews:

“It hits many a nail on the head and names many a problem that needs a name.”  VROON, American Record Guide

“E. Michael Jones posits the highly povocative thesis that the roots of cultural upheavel that culminated in the sixties can be traced back to Richard Wagner’s revolt against classical rational ideals in musical composition coupled with his ‘revolutionary’ sexual ethics. The book is gripping in its story line – Nietzsche, Schonberg, and Mick Jagger form the rest of Jones’s main cast…Jones puts his finger on a notion that is at least as old as Plato’s Republic. Music, he contends, acts directly on the soul. Disordered music leads to disordered lives, which lead to disorder in the state…The idea deserves thoughtful consideration.”  E.W.C., The Religion and Society Report

“E. Michael Jones takes a meat axe to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde in his provocative Dionysos Rising. Great book…”  Douglas Wilson, Agenda Magazine

“…well-written and lucid. Catholics engaged in the Culture of Life will find the book indispensible.”  Michael Chapman, HLI Reports

“For a first hand account of how the Western musical tradition was deconstructed, there is no better place to begin than with E. Michael Jones’ eminently readable book.”  Social Justice Review

“Music can help a person develop an ordered and virtuous soul, or it can tend to disrupt a person’s soul. This fact was extensively illustrated by E. Michael Jones in Dionysos Rising.”  Eric J. Scheske, New Covenant

“…highly acclaimed trilogy on modernity: Degenerate Modems, Dionysos Rising, and Living Machines.”  Reformation & Revival Journal

About the Author:

E. Michael Jones is editor of Culture Wars and author of many books.

JOB’s Comment:

Jones makes some extreme interpretations on specific points, and ignores complexifying exceptions, but on the whole presents a convincing general picture of modern music and its effects.

Stig Strömholm: Miniatyrporträtt

Mest fransmän

Norstedts, 1978

Baksida:

StrömholmOm kardinal de Retz, vars minnen Dumas père friskt lånade till sina musketörer,

om Pascals Tankar, Racines salong, Saint-Simons memoarer – “en av de mest ‘naturliga’, vågar man säga en av de mest demorkatiska?, bland berömda författare” –

om hur det gick för barn som uppfostrades efter Rousseaus Émile,

om den svårplacerade Anatole France och om hertigars trohet,

om Goethes Faust – “en handverksmässigt ciselerad människa” – och om det sista overkliga guldglittret över ett sjunket Österrike,

om gentlemannens död,

om Odysseus’ irrfärder och om Drottning Dido – “olyckans gunstling” –

om konsten att dö och konsten att komma hem,

om detta och annat handlar Stig Strömholms levande och eleganta essäer där

“mitt i block av vad man trodde vara massiv nordeuropeisk sten går en hednisk marmorsträng i dagen, smal och gäckande, den slingrar vidare uppåt för att bli synlig någon annanstans där den inte var väntad.”

JOBs kommentar:

Det avslutande citatet på baksidan är, taget ur sitt sammanhang, på intet sätt självklart begripligt. Jag vet inte om det säger något särskilt träffande om Strömholms essäer i allmänhet. Det är hämtat ur en av essäerna – inspirerad av Winthrop Wetherbees Platonism and Poetry in the Twelfth Century – som behandlar det klassiska, platonska arvet i den kristna medeltidens lärda värld. Stenen som nämns är den som återfinns i kryptan i katedralen i det Chartres som var känt för sin platonska skola. Hursomhelst, detta är den första av Strömholms samlingar av mestadels reviderade och kompletterade, rent humanistiska artiklar, huvudsakligen understreckare i Svenska Dagbladet (hans andra kategori av klippböcker är de samhällsdebatterande; se References-sidan).