On Charm in Music

“Life is ridiculous; and that cannot be borne.” That, I vaguely recall, came either from Ibsen or one of his characters. Our time, frilled with vain frippery, plastic pop iconography, stupid notions of facile glamour, would have been simply insufferable from the outset, but for the unfortunate (and some would say ineluctable) fact that the number of persons paying subscription to the package is rather inordinate (but perhaps unsurprisingly so); and the dwindling demographic of sound-minded people, seeing no terribly excitable motivation to incite themselves into becoming valiant proselytisers, have reduced all their potential opposition to lackadaisical, faintly pejorative phrases: “vulgar”, “crass”, “maudlin”, “schmaltzy”. Absurdity has become a monstrous fashion, an insidousness artfully wrapped in the latest brand of glitter and passed off as irony, burlesque and quirkdom. The revulsion we ought to feel and do not has become an alien reaction. Decorum, propriety, rectitude – archaisms which most would have only a fading recollection of from some Jane Austen drawing-room drama, popularly regarded as the queer and pitiable result of Victorian repression. We have lost our capacity to be scandalised; consequently, it is an accordingly difficult effort for us to become animated by the impulsions of passion, or stirred by the tenacity of conviction. Disaffection is the new heroic mode.