Posts by Paul Litterick
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I'd argue that works by Charles Goldie and Peter McIntyre are somewhat more relevant to our nation than the Well Tempered Clavier.
Auckland City Art Gallery has an irrelevant Guido Reni - Dead White Italian, died in the same year that Tasman found New Zealand. The Gallery has also received some French Impressionists from some American bloke. We should have told him that they aren't relevant. Bloody foreigners.
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The name Douglas Lilburn springs to mind:
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As Giovanni says, Nina Simone said it so well:
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I'm not asking you to pay for my musical taste but you seem to think it is your privilege that i pay for yours based on some outmoded ideal of higher arts and culture ?
Where do you think your music came from? It wasn't invented in a lab. Music is a continuing tradition that goes back millennia. Whatever it is to which you are listening today, it is the product of that tradition. Ideas of notation, melody, harmony, rhythm and so on have been developed over centuries. We could not be where we are today without what had happened before us. You may not like the music played on Concert, but you owe it an awful lot.
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Right in front of all the bellboys and the over-friendly concierge...
I am constantly amused that the neophiles always claim that the old styles are oppressive while trying to bully the rest of us into accepting their latest fad. No, I will not get with the programme, because I am going to make my own choices.
Besides, there is nothing worse than dance music for people who can't dance.
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It's evolutionary, like hanging on to obsolete cultural traditions is a waste of time or keeping that cassette walkman in your shed thinking casesttes are gonna make a come back.
Yeah, we need to round up all those turntables which the DJs are using, despite their obsolescence. Then we should burn the old school records. Then we can live in the permanent ephemeral present (until it becomes the past).
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And William Dart runs Art New Zealand. I don't know how he does it all.
I liked Dark Tower as well. I am so unhip I'm hop.
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its not that classical music is useless and redundant Gio, just irrelevent to most. It's had it's day and so time to move on. Which is how i feel about the concert program and radio in general.
Gawd.
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Arcade Fire were reviewed by William Dart on his New Horizons programme, on 6 May 2007 and 22 March 2009.
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As I said earlier, I started off this stoush because I was incensed by Sacha's link, "for a local creative life probably deprived of the 'best' concertos, ballet and oil paintings." It is a huge assumption to say that PI kids are deprived of such things and the implication seems to be that such deprivation is a good thing.
I mentioned Lemalu because the stereotype of PI kids is that of rap and graffiti. As you say, there is a rich choral tradition. I mentioned him also because of all the talk of Concert being for old white folk and because of the demands for diversity.
There are also more than a few visual artists who draw on both their island traditions and on the heritage of Western Art, and do not seem to get hung up about things being Eurocentric. These hang-ups seem to be created by Palangi and by academics who write in terms of the Post-Colonial Discourse.
Of course, you might respond that I am hung-up about Hip Hop. Well, the music is alright, some of the time, and it is good that local acts are making their own styles. The graffiti is largely repetitive and unadventurous.
You might think I am creating strawmen, but you should hear some of the stuff I come across at Varsity, such as the "essentialist" architectural theory which says that only Maori academics are entitled to research Maori architecture.
Anyway, punk changed my life as well, and I agree that music mixes things up. This is a good thing. What I dislike is the suggestion that that Western influences are hegemonic or colonial. A few dead white males in the mix does no harm at all.