Schönberg did not want to be Mozart. Schönberg wanted, first and foremost, to push intellectual barriers with his serial music. Mozart was appealing to emotion in the most direct form, freed from intellectualism, yet deeply intellectual. The master transcending his craft!

Schönberg’s music was and is ‘unangepasst’, edgy as we say nowadays. With Schönberg there was a willed ‘unangepasstheit’, shared by Stockhausen and Boulez, which in a round-about fashion almost makes the music angepasst. Schönberg wanted to take music down the path of intellectualism, and it has stayed on that path. The path became the destination. For most unangepasste human beings the state is undesired. There is a strong wish to become accepted, and for the work resulting from the unangepasste to become mainstreamed. Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, of such beauty and romance, was famously derided as something ‘whose stink one can hear’ when it came out. Hard to believe as it is, perhaps Tchaikovsky was pushing boundaries, yet very soon the Violin Concerto was ubiquitous, mainstreamed. This was surely what Tchaikovsky wanted. Van Gogh, impossibly edgy in life, is now the favourite of billionaires (and me). Continue reading “Atonality” →

‘To publish or not to publish’ is the fundamental question for every writer. For some probably ranking up there with ‘To be or not to be’. Some writers will see publishing as an extension of existence, the treasured book becoming a material symbol of being there, of having seized the Word. The book becomes a way of communicating with a potentially large number of other human beings, becomes one of the writer’s faces towards the world at large.

Continue reading “On Gutenberg and Google” →

I shall bring out a book ‘What If We Don’t Die?’ with the sub-title ‘The Morality of Immortality’ in a few weeks’ time. The publisher is the Copernicus imprint of Springer.

In the blog I shall be writing about the book and about publishing, but may also stray into more general ruminations. Below you will find my first contribution. I hope you will like it, and that you will follow the blog and ultimately read the book!