Manufacturing Innocence
After the crash in 1929, the US saw a united effort to recreate innocence. Disney was at the forefront. His work from the '20s was edgy. See Mickey get more cute into the '30s. There are many other examples. The movie industry self-censored.
Three on a Match
It's odd, but I find myself now in sympathy with the project of engineering macrocosmic innocence.
It is not a desire for kitsch. Innocence--think of Bambi (1923), by the Austrian Felix Salten, written at the same moment when Robert Musil was finishing The Man Without Qualities. Disney ended up with the rights and created the cornerstone of American innocence, but with a Parsifal undertone. In Parsifal, as in Babar, the mother has to get killed-off early on.
Innocence is merely a backgrounding strategy. The evil and decadence that we came to love does not go away, but it becomes buried in metaphor, allegory, etc.
What moves me at the moment is the staleness of our present cynicism. It's likely not much different from Huysmann, Wilde and Dowson converting to Catholicism. Sometimes there's nowhere to go but toward innocence.
In my work, this translates into a complete lack of interest in shocking dissonance. It's impossible to shock that way. What shocks is juxtaposition of dissonance with as yet (in my circles) still socially unacceptable consonance.
William Anderson
I compose, play plucked instruments, run ensembles, produce concerts, and advocate for new music, I soaked up contemporary American music for 30 years, working directly with composers from all over the map. In the last 20 years I began composing works that draw on that experience, with a particular concern for finding a coherent way to make reconciling musics that were sealed off from one another. How to make embarrassingly simple and charming music work with the most complex musical modalities? Tipping in this direction has made me aware of the dangers of grasping too firmly onto any one notion.
I've come to Macherey's vision that our shadow (what we're *not*) is radiantly present in our work. So it's perfectly reasonable to *love everything*. We're imbricated. --
**The true necessity of the text manifests itself in the fact that not a word of it can be changed and nothing can be added, even though it appears at each moment as though a new topic could be chosen, an alternative narrative selected. But it is precisely this ceaseless shadowy presence of other possible phrases which could be pronounced, this ineradicable sense that things could have been other than they are, which enforces the constraining necessity of the text we actually have before us.**--Macherey