In Australia, we cannot escape the richness of thoughts and the depth of feelings of Peter Sculthorpe’s music which describes the country’s best mysteries and landscapes, but a most popular Aussie song, especially in the bush, will be "the pub with no beer…"

Sculthorpe music is so thorough that one wishes one had lived through his evocative images and imagined real wild spaces. I have though. I have travelled through Australia in many instances through its silence and its stars — and under its unforgivable sun. I have seen many landscapes where the land generously give colours and rugged shapes, only to be taken home in our saturated mind. The music is the wind in the she-oaks, the thud of a mango falling from a tree and a dingo howling afar. Then the silence is like a scarf wrapping around us the caring warmth of the earth. The sky is popping up in a million stars above the bushes that go black between the darkening red dirt. Here, the dirt is noble. Venerable dirt. The need for food is satisfied by one of the elders who silently drives a fingernail through a bush-fruit to cut it in half and share. The inside is inedible, but the skin is sweet and soft like the best ice-cream in the world. One could cry of joy, but the silence has to reign, for the hidden illusions of the past to come forth peacefully out of the ground, up into our mind. 

When Jacques Perret wrote his satirical works (see: it's time for the king to shut up...), the Beatles had not been invented. The freedom of expression was somewhat still on the drawing boards of the elites, though a few undercurrents of change had shaken the establishment, at the beginning of the 19th century, following the French revolution of 1789.

Punk music could not ever be imagined by Perret, yet some changes had come along in our scientific understanding. Einstein rocked the boat in 1905 and sunk traditional physics in 1915. Relativity was a totally new way to see the universe. By 1927, the quantum theory had bloomed. Science and technological advances became welded at the hip through these two concepts. Between then and now, mighty technological advancements have taken place and challenge the best of us to keep up with.

In Russia the music of Shostakovich was shaking the State with cheekiness and irony, precisely, though it was still part of the momentum of classical music. 

In Germany, Arnold Franz Walter Schönberg changed the musical scales to Serialism by removing natural notes and adding new ones that were “out of tune” somehow. The result was seen as a-pack-of-cats-fighting-each-other-on-a-fence, chalk-on-a-blackboard, and such. One of the most important composers in history, still unknown in the mind of many people but one of my favourite for his “Lunatic Peter", Schönberg was forced to flee Europe facing the Nazi momentum. My personal view about his "American” period that followed is that he had to become more traditional, as concert halls would have been empty despite the American advertising know-how, and he could have died of hunger. His new works thus returned to tonality with serialist structural elements becoming secondary. Schönberg's Chamber Symphony Number 2 (1939) brings the rich harmonies of Romanticism with serialistic textures and the rhythmical spirit of American freedom (Jazz?). Some of his Americana works were based on Baroque models. Meanwhile, in the 1930s, Georg Ehrenfried Groß was drawing and painting cutting cartoons (see image above) about silly stupid people (the dumb masses that were slowly coming to accept naked fascism). 


In France the musical momentum that had switched from the Romanticism of Berlioz to Expressionism under Debussy and Ravel, evolved a bit further with a variety of styles, between some very sombre stuff like that of Olivier Eugène Prosper Charles Messiaen noted for his use of mystical and resurrecting religious themes (Quartet for the End of Time) and some deeply penetrating lightweight melodies like those of Eric Sati’s Gymnopedie. Meanwhile, Saint Saëns (the last “s” isn’t silent) straddled the lot with a popular style of serious famous music that gave us “The Carnival of the Animals” posthumously. Saint Saëns’s Organ Symphony played on the massive instrument of the Sydney Town Hall, one of the biggest Organs in the world, would blow your mind away with tonalities and power to make you cry with the joy of being-alive.

As well, in France, there was the development of the typical “chanson” populaire that had been always part of people’s traditional repertoire but became a bigger staple due to new inventions such as the “recording” and radio — both relying on nifty scientific discoveries.

In America, Jazz had become a proper musical style that “liberated” many people and gave them a new enslaving optimism, as well as simplifying some of the complexities of relationships: the moonlight, boys and girls, love and betrayal of love, hope forever, my heart is yours, happy, sad, etc… These themes had also been part of the repertoire of Romanticism in a more rigorous structure of emotional display before. 


Alfred de Musset: “Romanticism is the abuse of adjectives”. 

Jazz was sometimes incorporated in compositions by French and Russian Composers, the latter being in trouble for doing such, during the Stalinist era.

These days, the most popular radio-transmitted music "that does not break the piano” is already 40 to 60 years old as the new inventions have had many difficult styles from punk, heavy metal and grunge — music that makes use of saturation of the sensory perceptions rather than provide tranquil, romantic or intellectual melodies — and to say the least do not live too well in  "bourgeois-minded countries” where money and advertising rule to make you buy stuff — not to destroy your senses senselessly… The establishment needs you. This is why there are TV shows like X-factor in search for news ways of doing the same old things, with massive vocal cords.
Add drugs to the metal/grunge mix in public concerts and people die early. In those “songs”, the revolutionary spirit faded long ago to be replace with a pseudo-nihilism-plus-abuse of the musical instruments and the early destruction of the hearing faculty of the listening/boozing public. We’re so in need of stronger and stronger distracting decimation of the mind to peel away from the lazy nothingness that has replaced our useless beliefs in gods. This is why we need sciences.


Classical music is now caught between repeats of the charming, the monumental, the regal, the classical past, versus the new noises which fewer and fewer aficionados listen to. Abstraction has its good and bad sides. Few composers have manage to stop the regression of public acceptance, such as Philip Glass, regarded as one of the most influential musicians of the late 20th century. His work is minimalist music. Other less well-known minimalist composers include La Monte Young, Steve Reich, and Terry Riley.

In all of this, it has to be seen that governments played a part in the management of appreciation and support given to the musicians, often in order to control the main stream of the “culture” and avoid breakaways. Publicity, movies and theatre were often part of the greater Hollywoodian dream, full of conflict resolutions, comedies alla Charlie Chaplin and exultation of the conquest of the West with the six-shooters, as a sub-shopfront of the CIA. 


Following later on in this article, are a few sayings by Alfred de Musset, from around 1830-1850… especially from Lorenzaccio, his play written in 1834. It is set in 16th-century Florence. Lorenzino de’ Medici kills the Duke Alessandro de' Medici, his cousin, because the Duke is a ruthless tyrant. Having engaged in dubious debaucheries to gain the Duke's confidence in order to kill him, Lorenzino thus loses the trust of the citizens of Florence, earning the insulting nickname of "Lorenzaccio". Lorenzino knows he can never return to the Florentine State — as opponents to the tyrant's regime fail to use Alessandro's death as a way to overthrow the ruling family and establish a republic. Lorenzo's action did not help the people's now uncertain future. This was a political allegory which is still current today, as most of us are fed bullshit through the main-stream media.

Written after the French July revolution of 1830, at the start of the July Monarchy, when King Louis Philippe the First came to power, the play contains many cynical comments on the lack of republican sentiments in the face of violent royalist machinations. It has been said that the play was inspired by a work of Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, otherwise known as George Sand. De Musset was one of George Sand’s lovers — lovers who also included Frederik Chopin.
As many Romantic tragedies, including plays by Victor Hugo, this was somehow influenced by William Shakespeare's Hamlet.


Sand was one of many notable 19th-century women who chose to wear male attire in public. The French police had issued in 1800, an order requiring women to apply for a permit in order to wear male clothing. Some women applied for health, occupational, or recreational reasons such as for horseback riding, but many women chose to wear male attire in public without a permit, for practical reasons, but often to subvert stereotypes.

Sand did not apply for a permit. She claimed male clothing was less expensive and sturdier than the typical dress of women at the time. Sand's male attire enabled her to move freely around Paris and gave her increased access to venues from which women were often excluded, even women of her social standing. 

It has to be said that George Sand's father, Maurice Dupin, was the grandson of the Marshal General of France, Maurice, Comte de Saxe, an illegitimate son of Augustus II the Strong, King of Poland and Elector of Saxony, and a cousin to the sixth degree of Kings Louis XVI, Louis XVIII and Charles X. She was also distantly related to King Louis Philippe of France through common ancestors from German and Danish ruling families. Sand's mother, Sophie-Victoire Delaborde, was a commoner.

Known to her friends and family as “Aurore” (Sunrise) – Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin was born in Paris and was raised for much of her childhood by her grandmother, Marie-Aurore de Saxe (also known as Madame Dupin de Francueil), at grandmother's own estate, Nohant, in the French province of Berry. Sand used the place’s setting in many of her novels. 

Sand smoked tobacco in public. This scandalous habit had not been sanctioned by the upper-crust, though Franz Liszt's squeeze, Marie d’Agoult, also smoked, especially large cigars. While there were many contemporary critics of Sand's public appearances, many people accepted her behaviour until they read the shocking subversive tone of her novels, precursors of D. H. Lawrence's work by a century for example. 

Those who loved her writing were not bothered by her rebellious elegant public behaviour. An impressed Victor Hugo commented, “George Sand cannot determine whether she is male or female. I entertain a high regard for all my colleagues, but it is not my place to decide whether she is my sister or my brother.”

We had been fighting this controversy till the “marriage equality” vote settled it, late last year.

In 1822, at the age of eighteen, Sand married “François” Casimir Dudevant (1795–1871) illegitimate son of Baron Jean-François Dudevant. She and Dudevant had two children: Maurice (1823–1889) and Solange (1828–1899). In 1825 George Sand had an intense affair with a young lawyer. In early 1831, she left her husband and started a period of "romantic rebellion." By 1835, she was legally separated from Dudevant, and took custody of their children.

Sand had romantic affairs with Jules Sandeau, Prosper Mérimée, Alfred de Musset , Louis-Chrysostome Michel, Pierre-François Bocage, Charles Didier, Félicien Mallefille, Louis Blanc, and composer Frédéric Chopin. Later in her life, she corresponded with Gustave Flaubert (Madame Bovary), and they eventually became close friends. She then had an intimate friendship with actress Marie Dorval, which led to rumours of a lesbian affair.


"George Sand was an idea. She has a unique place in our age. Others are great men… she was a great woman.”                         Victor Hugo, eulogy to George Sand


So Alfred de Musset, though a devout Christian, was a keen realist observer of humanity’s foibles:

“There are temptations more attractive than angels. Liberty, Patriotism, the good of humanity – words like that are the silver scales of the Tempter’s flaming wings”. 


“Is it true that dictators never dream because they are able to change their smallest fantasies into realities if they want to?”



“Poets represent love as sculptors design beauty, as musicians create melody; that is to say, endowed with an exquisite nervous organization, they gather up with discerning ardor the purest elements of life, the most beautiful lines of matter, and the most harmonious voices of nature. There lived, it is said, at Athens a great number of beautiful girls; Praxiteles drew them all one after another; then from these diverse types of beauty, each one of which had its defects, he formed a single faultless beauty and created Venus. The man who first created a musical instrument, and who gave to harmony its rules and its laws, had for a long time listened to the murmuring of reeds and the singing of birds.

Thus the poets, who understand life, after knowing much of love, more or less transitory, after feeling that sublime exaltation which real passion can for the moment inspire, eliminating from human nature all that degrades it, created the mysterious names which through the ages fly from lip to lip: Daphnis and Chloe, Hero and Leander, Pyramus and Thisbe.

To try to find in real life such love as this, eternal and absolute, is but to seek on public squares a woman such as Venus, or to expect nightingales to sing the symphonies of Beethoven.”



“L'humanité souleva sa robe et me montra, comme à un adepte digne d'elle, sa monstrueuse nudité.”

“Humanity lifted her dress, and showed me, as if I was a worthy follower, her monstrous nakedness”

——————————


We cannot underestimate the power of music and art used in politics — all designed to give impressions of truth, power and rightfulness. 

A Republican and a Democrat conventions cannot happen without music nor balloons.  

Most of it is popular crass but still well-chosen average arts that entice the mood of the participants and is excitingly promoted by the bought-out media. As most of our general “culture” is like blancmange and burnt sausages at a lawn barbecue, we need to dig into the graves of those stylistic devious revolutionary such as Sand and de Musset, Schönberg and Groß, to take us away from the Laurel & Hardy routines who, instead of amusing us, have become our slapstick leaders into the future, with no idea but a dangerous joke that is turning to an interminable planetary tragedy…

This is why we need the arts, the comedies, the music to be subversive, as we have to know that the leading sausage of our political barbecue isn't full of sawdust, unless it is a dog turd picked up from the grass full of RoundUp.

Gus Leonisky
Your Local Literary agent orange...