Music Land
May. 4th, 2008 07:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
porphyryHere is one of the Disney Silly Symphonies, Music Land from 1935:
It shows popular culture actively engaged in war with traditional culture. Classical music is presented in a very misleading stereotype. It is, for a start, called ‘Symphony’ Music which is a somewhat antiquated term used by those who view it from outside with some suspicion (as I know from the example of my own mother). It is initially represented by a minuet played in a very tedious fashion, encouraging the viewer to think Classical music is boring. If, instead, they had played even the minuet from Don Giovanni, or the dance in the first movement of Schubert’s ninth symphony, to say nothing or more temporally proximate pieces such as the Firebird or the Scythian Suite, the audience might have been permitted to form a quite different opinion.
However, once open war breaks out between tradition and the modern, the fate of the Kingdom of Jazz is sealed, as the attack in the form of the Ride of the Valkyries played on the pipe organ would surely have overwhelmed all opposition, except the cause of tradition is betrayed by a Paris and Helen type intrigue. Afterwards, we are led to believe that the two forms of music will live in happy harmony, but in effect the popular seems to have won a total victory and supplanted tradition, which the audience is manipulated into viewing as a happy ending.
It shows popular culture actively engaged in war with traditional culture. Classical music is presented in a very misleading stereotype. It is, for a start, called ‘Symphony’ Music which is a somewhat antiquated term used by those who view it from outside with some suspicion (as I know from the example of my own mother). It is initially represented by a minuet played in a very tedious fashion, encouraging the viewer to think Classical music is boring. If, instead, they had played even the minuet from Don Giovanni, or the dance in the first movement of Schubert’s ninth symphony, to say nothing or more temporally proximate pieces such as the Firebird or the Scythian Suite, the audience might have been permitted to form a quite different opinion.
However, once open war breaks out between tradition and the modern, the fate of the Kingdom of Jazz is sealed, as the attack in the form of the Ride of the Valkyries played on the pipe organ would surely have overwhelmed all opposition, except the cause of tradition is betrayed by a Paris and Helen type intrigue. Afterwards, we are led to believe that the two forms of music will live in happy harmony, but in effect the popular seems to have won a total victory and supplanted tradition, which the audience is manipulated into viewing as a happy ending.
