George Steiner playing an unidentified musical instrument
George Steiner's rhetorical signatures are by now well known: the incantatory use of proper names, the self-dramatizing opening moves ("We are entering on large, difficult ground.."), the invokation of the 'unanswerable' and the accompanying poses of humility... well, anyway, for those who might be interested, the entire text of his 1971 In Bluebeard's Castle is online here. Although I find much of Steiner rather absurd, his 'cultural conservatism' is not uncongenial. Here he is on the subject of pounding youth music:
This is being written in a study in a college of one of the great American universities. The walls are throbbing gently to the beat of music coming from one near and several more distant amplifiers. The walls quiver to the ear or to the touch roughly eighteen hours per day, sometimes twenty-four. The beat is literally unending. It matters little whether it is that of pop, folk, or rock. What counts is the all-pervasive pulsation, morning to night and into night, made indiscriminate by the cool burn of electronic timbre. A large segment of mankind, between the ages of thirteen and, say, twenty-five, now lives immersed in this constant throb. The hammering of rock or of pop creates an enveloping space. Activities such as reading, writing, private communication, learning, previously framed with silence, now take place in a field of strident vibrato. This means that the essentially linguistic nature of these pursuits is adulterated; they are vestigial modes of the old "logic."
[…] When a young man walks down a street in Vladivostock or Cincinnati with his transistor blaring, when a car passes with its radio on at full blast, the resulting sound-capsule encloses the individual. It diminishes the external world to a set of acoustic surfaces. A pop regime imposes severe physical stress on the human ear. Some of the coarsening or damage that can follow has, in fact, been measured. But hardly anything is known of the psychological effects of saturation by volume and repetitive beat (often the same two or three tunes are played around the clock). What tissues of sensibility are being numbed or exacerbated? [..]
In short, the vocabularies, the contextual behavior-patterns of pop and rock, constitute a genuine lingua franca, a "universal dialect" of youth.
See also here, at Infinite Thought:
'Sacred music has the knack of making things seem sacred, just as rock music makes them appear dangerous and sexy. If you slowed down footage of sex, deep-sea fishing or dealings on the futures market and lashed Fauré over them, you could give any of those activities the look of a religion: speed them up and add Metallica and they look satanic. This is the result of the intervention of a video editor not a deity.'
Particularly like the last sentence. Music as ersatz Spirit; the grey quotidian world, deaf and meaningless as never before, is invested with the trick of significance from without, vibrates with a 'meaning' at once alien to it and yet little more that its sonorous equivalent.