The trouble with most of the “early music” groups that I have heard is that they take stuff originally played by drunken peasants (setting aside Christian church music) and make it sound like it is played by anorexic graduate students.
In this case, however, no one knows what ancient Roman music sounded like. They have the instruments and knowledge of ancient modes — and the rest is just conjectural.
But I still think they all need to slam back some of the good Falernian wine and then play.
Nine years ago I wrote a post about Islamist reaction against popular Middle Eastern singers such as Haifa Wehbe. For some reason, I kept working in references to Sappho.
The process continues. Now a court in the new, improved Islamist Egypt has ordered al-Tet, a television channel devoted to belly dancing, shut down.
The channel was also accused of airing advertisements that “arouse viewers,” sell sexual-enhancement products and promote matchmaking, according to the court’s statement.
According to [Baleegh] Hamdy, the court ruling was not based on accurate evidence. “The judge was supposed to check the facts present in the lawyer’s allegations.”
There is not much the court can do about the the owners’ YouTube channel, however.
• Finding a complementary relationship between Paganism and Tantra at The Pagan Perspective. Not this:
My sabbatical led me down the rabbit hole of tantra, or rather neo-tantra, which turned out to be nothing more than a mobsterized store front for polyamory and polysexuality. Now I am the last person to dismiss sexuality or the free expression of it; however, when sexuality becomes a religion in disguise, we lose something of both sexuality and religion.
• Download a free compilation album, Songs of the Goddess.
• Edward Butler, who has published two articles in The Pomegranate, has put them and some other material into a book: Essays on a Polytheistic Philosophy of Religion.
• Occult Chicago links to an old article about a “spirit photographer” of that city. Some people sure did want to believe, didn’t they.
If you watch this video, the original Latin lyrics for “O Fortuna” will be erased from your brain. You have been warned.
If you do watch, save the Wikipedia link above.
• At The
Allergic Pagan, a three-part series on Neopaganism in America (link goes to the third part) with a lot of “whatever happened to?”.
• Jason Pitzl-Waters uses the reunion of the band Dead Can Dance (one of my favorites) to look back at the history of Pagan music.
• A new blog devoted to the history of Chicago occultism has me excited, since I will be there in November.
. . . at the Beltania festival, where the temperature is about 45° F with rain now and again.
I spent the morning at one of the volunteer fire department’s monthly training day, helping more people become familiar with the whole process of drafting water from a creek (hydrants? we don’t need no stinking hydrants) and pumping it into our two 2,500-gallon summer storage tanks (in case the creek goes dry).
Then off to the festival, not too far away, successfully negotiating the Pagan equivalent of the TSA. Merchants Row seemed sort of forlorn — no one was buying all the colorful gauzy garments, for some odd reason. Even those who sometimes swelter under the Colorado sun while dressed for the Scottish Highlands were wearing extra coats today.
But once the dogs are fed we will go back for the concerts — if the rain holds off.
Pagan festivals are becoming more “tribal” in one sense: you can have people doing some kind of ritual thingie while right next to it, folks are feeding their faces, drinking wine from the bottle, braiding feathers into the air, slouching around like bored teenagers if in fact they are teenagers, and just starting into the warming fires. It’s not like you have to be all churchy and attentive.
POST-CONCERT UPDATE: M. and I had to miss some of the Saturday night music, but we did hear at times the Orpheus: the Pagan Chamber Choir of Colorado, a little of S.J Tucker, Forest of Azure, and Sharon Knight and Pandemonaeon. All good. And Pandemonaeon cleared the skies before midnight—can’t beat that.
Metal bands expressed in terms of population, from Steve Sailer.
Related: the article in Witches & Pagans on “Viking Chick Kaboom,” in which Madder Mortem and Nightwish, among others, figure prominently.
At The Mead Muse, reviews of a different Pagan musician or group each day for 28 days during February.
First came Sharon Knight and Pandemonaeon, a solid choice.
This is not a new topic, but many people still do not realize how much the Central Intelligence Agency, through various fronts (cooperative or fake foundations, for example), influenced the artistic movements during the peak of the Cold War years—the 1950s and 1960s.
For example, Abstract Expressionist painters like Jackson Pollock got huge boosts through important exhibitions and other patronage.
Why? The Soviet Union, like Nazi Germany before it, officially disapproved of non-representational art. In that government’s view, non-representational art was morally degenerate—in other words, insufficiently propagandistic.
But we in the freedom-loving United States championed Abstract Expressionism and made it almost official in our towers of government and commerce, to the point where even people who did not like the style knew that it was High Art and above criticism.
Likewise jazz. There was no point in competing with the Soviet Union in the realm of classical music—their system identified talented musicians and ballet dancers young and trained them rigorously. They sent the best of the best on international tours, and the only problem was that sometimes the talent ran away (see, e.g., Mikhail Baryshnikov).
Soviet dissidents listened to jazz, so it was programmed on the Voice of America. And sending top American jazz musicians on world tours showed that we valued free artistic expression, etc. etc. and also, incidentally, that not all American Negroes were oppressed, an accusation frequently made by Soviet critics. We did also play up composers whom the Soviets did not like, such as Shostakovich.
It’s not exactly The Da Vinci Code, but sometimes there are indeed conspiracies behind world events.
It has always seemed to me that modern jazz began to lose its coolness cachet in the 1980s, and I cannot but think that such a loss was connected to the “winning” of the Cold War and the loss of secret funding. Abstract Expressionism has faded too, although whether the loss of secret support matters as much as the faddishness of the art world, I cannot say.