The Illusion of Depth

When I was a humble A-Level music student (about 150 years ago) I was asked to write an essay on a topic that still haunts me. Can Beethoven's 'Eroica' Symphony be considered a work of "Romantic" music? Why or why not? In the (many, many) decades that followed, hardly a day has gone by when I haven't thought about that essay topic. Not because I think it's a difficult question, and not even because I care so very deeply about the 'Eroica' Symphony (Beethoven is great, but give me Mozart or Brahms any day) but because I see this question as a microcosm of the current state of modern cultural discourse. I'm serious. Think about the implications of this essay question for a moment. In order to answer it, one first needs to establish what is meant by "Romantic Music". Then one needs to consider whether this particular symphony meets those parameters. Since "Romantic Music" is a very fuzzy term, this is necessarily a very subject...

Even Depression, it seems, must come to an end. I may have been bouncing back and forth between Busby Berkeley and Step Up for the last month of so, but all of that has been part of the larger series of Depression/Comedy that we've been exploring since January. The Busby Berkeley "musicals" of the 1930s were a direct product of that era, but I hope it has become obvious to everyone by now just how much the "Step Up" franchise owes to the Busby Berkeley model. While many film-makers over the decades have tried (with sporadic success) to emulate the "look" of a Busby Berkeley dance routine... ...the Step Up films have followed the tone, the structure and even specific plot-points of the earlier films.  And they have been wildly popular and successful with audiences. Whatever one thinks of the music, the acting, or the complexities(!) of the plots, these films appear to have met a need with modern audiences. The response to them has been dramatic and u...

Those of you who have been following the films I have been showing over the past month or so will know that I have been exploring the parallels between the 1930s Busby Berkeley musicals and the modern "Step Up" franchise. But this has all been part of the larger "umbrella" series of Depression/Comedy that I have been running since the New Year. As is (hopefully!) clear by now, the Busby Berkeley musicals were not simply "musicals produced during the Depression", they were emphatically products of the Depression. The Fred & Ginger musicals had aimed for pure escapism. Their stories took place in opulent, Art-Deco re-imaginings of exotic locations around the world...  …where all the men wore top hat and tails, while all the women wore lavish, improbable gowns (which occasionally caused their dance partners much grief, but that's another story).  Fred Astaire grumbled about those damn feathers for the next fifty years. Watching many of those RKO Fred...

Mischa Richter; 1980 In 2017, Disney Studios released Olaf's Frozen Adventure , a 21-minute animated film that centred on a beloved supporting character from their 2013 film Frozen (which had become -and remains- one of the most successful Disney films of all time). The new short film was released in cinemas as a "curtain-raiser" to another animated film ( Coco ) and the reaction from movie-goers was angry and loud. Audiences were "unhappy" (translation: they posted abusive rants on Twitter) that they were being forced to sit through 21 minutes of singing-snowman before being allowed to watch the film they had actually paid for. Theatres were compelled to post warning messages about the length of the Prologue and some cinemas junked the short film altogether. The consensus seemed to be that audiences had come to the cinema to see one film, and one film only. Asking them to sit through anything beyond that was just a kettle of fish too far. My 8-year old nephew, ...