08 June 2008

"an apprenticeship in dissidence"

As an apprenticeship in dissidence, a childhood sacrificed to classical music is hard to beat. Classical music is always acceptable to authority because it cannot overtly challenge power with subversive ideas or disturbing representations. Parents and states know they are on safe ground when their children or subjects are playing Mozart or Schubert – and enjoying it. Elfriede Jelinek learned this the hard way and it sensitised her, as a citizen, to the co-option of classical music by the Austrian state as the peculiarly Austrian art and the guarantee of the country’s essential civilisation.

…from:
"Up from the Cellar" by Nicholas Spice, London Review of Books
review of Greed by Elfriede Jelinek

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