Working the Refs…

There is no more perniciously undemocratic notion than the claim, “If I am losing a democratic argument, it is because of unfairness.”  Yet, we see electoral losers float this argument in the face of losses all the time.  The absolute immodesty the claim entails utterly reeks of stupidity.  If there are no conditions under which one would accept an electoral process to reasonably reject your position, then you are interested in democracy, you are interested in dictating.  

PS – This applies as well to those who still do not let go of Bush v. Gore on the left.  Yes, there are many reasons to accept that under very slightly altered conditions, Gore would have been President – but it can hardly be ignored the vast number of people who reasonably rejected Gore, that this rejection reflected an utter indifference to the political interests of vast swaths of American territory by candidate Gore, and the large sense of indifference between the two candidates when people went to the polls.  In short, party loyalists who lose elections: spare me your outrage.

From the New World…

I’m listening to Dvorak’s 9th Symphony.  Some thoughts on musical borrowing come to mind.  

• large parts of this piece sound an awful lot like Beethoven’s 9th.
• certain movements of this piece are familiar to me as part of James Horner’s Star Trek music scores (also heavily influenced by Britten’s Four Sea Interludes from Frank Grimes, and Vaughan William’ Sea Symphony I would gather.)
• the beginning of John Williams’ “Duel of the Fates” sounds an awful lot like the beginning of the third movement.  

Both Star Wars and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan were put on the television a lot when I was a child because it was the era of VHS and HBO being novel things, and it was considered a way to entertain me when things were happening like when my family was in the process of moving when I was 5.  I always loved the music for both when I was 5, and so it is perhaps not surprising that my tastes have been reversed engineered to their sources.  Music critics sometimes lampoon film scores that sound “derivative,” but at least, in my case, they exposed me at a very early age to the power that classical composition can have in generating aesthetic sensations.  I have learned to appreciate the complexity of the compositions of Dvorak, Mahler, Vaghan Williams, Britten and other such inspirations for my favorite movie scores, but the movie scores are still fun to me.  

It is especially no surprise with Horner’s scores for Star Trek (yes, I like Star Trek, it’s been said), as the Star Trek director who hired him was a successful patiche writer.  Writing probably the best Sherlock Holmes story not penned by Sir Arthur and also writing and directing the quite wonderful movie Time After Time.  

Meyer told Jamer Horner that his Star Trek is “Horatio Hornblower in Space.”  In short, the Nicholas Meyer Star Trek films are themselves pastiches that include Star Trek as part of the great navel fiction of the twentieth century. What Meyer did in film, Horner did in song.

The point of this is that film scores like James Horner’s or John Williams’ are not highly original, but they are still highly creative.  They are intelligently pieced together ode’s to familiar themes, and I think that it is profitable to enjoy them as such rather than holding one’s nose and calling them derivative. 

After all, as I pointed out, Dvorak makes good use of paying tribute to Beethoven’s Ninth in his own Ninth.  One could call this “unoriginal.”  Or one could notice the parallel that they are both 9th symphonies, and that Beeethoven’s Ninth is about the rising tide of equality in Europe and Dvorak’s symphony is named for the United States, widely considered the place where equality has been best realized.  These parallels make tribute, not plagiarism.