The Degeneration of our Music and our Art: Who is Doing this to us, and Why?

by Monika Schaefer

Two stories follow, which tell the tale of the degradation of our culture. The first is a personal account about music. The second is a national story about art. Both have been the source of great puzzlement for me. None of it made any sense to me. Just like in the weird world of politics and global affairs, these culture stories were simply bizarre.

It made no sense to me, that is, until I became red-pilled. Then I began to understand what is really going on in the world. Now it makes total sense.

A Personal Story about Music

Growing up in Edmonton Alberta during the 60s and 70s, there was plenty of opportunity for exposure to symphonic music as well as rich and bountiful chamber music. I had the great fortune to have a mother who appreciated live classical music, and she brought us children to many concerts at a tender young age.

The Chamber Music series at Convocation Hall at the University of Alberta was especially wonderful. I have vivid memories of the many string quartet concerts in that beautiful old building. During the first half of the concerts, I would be fully alert and sat upright and attentive in my chair. Images of exploring old stairways and hallways at intermission are pressed into my mind. Second half, I often was afflicted with a period of restless leg syndrome. Anyone who has experienced this knows exactly what I am talking about. Suffice it to say that one has the insatiable urge to alternately tense and relax the muscles.

Fortunately the restless leg syndrome would not last too long, because I would drift off to sleep, with my head in my mother’s lap. I have the vague memory of that blissful feeling of floating in between wakefulness and dream sleep. I believe the strains of heavenly music went straight into my blood and soul while I was in that in-between zone of semi-consciousness. I am quite sure that is the reason for my enduring love of chamber music, especially string quartet music. Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, they all spoke directly to me.

I don’t remember when it happened, but there came a time when the obligatory modern composition was inserted into the program. There was that twentieth century contemporary piece which had to be endured. It was never very easy or pleasurable to listen to. Some people used polite descriptors such as “challenging”, or “provocative”, or “interesting”.

Was it just me who failed to appreciate those pieces? Surely others were enjoying them — why else would they be included in the program? I had a notion that we needed to give a chance to contemporary composers. But really, when there was so much great music already in existence, I did not like the fact that the beautiful music was being interrupted by something that consisted of bits of noise and dissonance strung together in haphazard fashion. It was jarring. Why could the modern composers not produce music which included something melodic? Maybe the beautiful melodies and sounds were all used up, I told myself. Perhaps this was all that was left. I was young.

It was as though we needed to be disciplined into liking something that really was not that likeable. I became accustomed to the reality that in order to get the good stuff — the pieces of immense joy and beauty which touched our emotions — we had to tolerate the modern stuff. We convinced ourselves that it was only a matter of exposure which would lead to an appreciation of this new music.

Sometimes it was indeed entertaining, interesting and surprising, but never anything I would want to take home with me.

Fast forward to 2016, when I witnessed something which was the epitome of ugliness and utter degradation, and should shame anyone who tried to call it music.

It was at a week-long string quartet competition, during which the young ensembles were required to play a variety of pieces from different eras and from different composers.

One of the components of the competition was a newly commissioned piece by a Canadian composer which all ten competing quartets had to perform. During past competitions I had found it to be a surprisingly rewarding experience, to watch and listen to ten different ensembles with their different personalities interpret the exact same piece. This time around, it was different.

The composer was in attendance, and introduced the audience to her composition by way of a speech and a question & answer session. She was sweet, funny, kind, soft-spoken, humble, an all-around lovely person. She also had her family there — her handsome husband taking care of their infant baby while she was busy on stage. This was all so picture perfect.

Imagine my surprise then, the disconnect, the cognitive dissonance which occurred when the first quartet sat down to play, and for the next 9 minutes, pure ugliness erupted from the stage. The audience was then treated to similarly excruciating noises nine more times, as each ensemble painfully took to the stage.

There certainly were a lot of acrobatic arm movements up and down the fingerboards. It was no doubt difficult to pull this piece off, but I was left wondering what the purpose of it all was. I know I was not the only one who was perplexed, as I heard one gentleman remark afterwards that there should be a rule. The rule should state that they play a minimum of three melodic notes strung together at least once per minute!

It is not necessary to name the composer in question, because this is not a criticism of her personally. She is a product of the system. She reflected the predictable endpoint for the trend which I began witnessing as a child.

So why and how did this come to pass? Who promotes this? Who judges what is meaningful, challenging, deep, or whatever other platitudes the critics come up with? Who is steering this degradation? Who are the “thought-leaders” and who is giving these people ink to push their agendas of uglification?

Have we all convinced ourselves that we just aren’t sophisticated enough to understand or enjoy something? People will whisper to each other about what they just heard, but will the press or the music schools dare to say the Emperor has no clothes?

A Story about Modern Art

There was a great uproar in 1990 when the National Gallery of Canada purchased a piece called Voice of Fire by Jewish American Barnett Newman for $1.76 million (right-hand image above). It consisted of a huge canvas 18 feet tall and had a vertical red stripe in between two stripes of blue. That’s it. What kind of insanity was this, Canadians asked? Of course the “critics” made all their highfaluting statements about abstract expressionism, and if people didn’t like it well they just didn’t understand art.

So we are not allowed to trust our senses and our own ability to think. The pundits tell us this is “good” art, brilliant actually. But we are just too stupid to see it.

Barnett Newman was the son of Polish Jewish immigrants, and was born and raised in New York. He came late into painting, and had destroyed much of his early works because he deemed them unworthy. He became known for his signature style which the critics called “colour field painting”(1). The Voice of Fire piece was not atypical for Barnett. It makes one wonder what his early works looked like, if this colour field style was a progression from something unworthy.

The insanity continues. Peter Simpson wrote in the Ottawa Citizen on July 31, 2014:

Recently, a senior member of today’s National Gallery personnel mentioned to me, off the record, that Newman’s Voice of Fire “is worth well over $40 million today.”(2).

Who says? And who would pay that? Some public gallery, in other words the taxpayer! Guided by the thought-leaders! And who are those thought-leaders?

Communist Goals and Jewish Influence

One need only look at the Communist Goals which are in the American Congressional Record–Appendix, pp. A34-A35 January 10, 1963, to learn that the degradation and uglification of art has been a deliberate plan all along.

Number 23 states:
Control art critics and directors of art museums. “Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art.” (3)

The promotion of ugliness applies to all the arts, whether visual or musical or theatrical.

Brenton Sanderson writes about the Jewish promotion of abstract expressionism in this 2011 article in the Occidental Observer. He concludes with this observation:

Israel Shamir aptly summarizes the process of degeneration that occurred when he notes that “in the beginning, these were works of some dubious value like the ‘abstract paintings’ of Jackson Pollock. Eventually we came to rotten swine, corrugated iron, and Armani suits.  Art was destroyed.”[xxviii] The result of this degradation has been to erode European cultural confidence and make Western societies, in the eyes of their increasingly atomized White populations, essentially “unlovable” and not worth defending. The new “art” has worked effectively to impair the racial and cultural immune systems of Whites, and represents an important front in the general post-WWII drive to transform relatively homogeneous White nations into the type of multi-racial, multicultural (and therefore presumably Holocaust-proof) societies in which Jews can pursue their self-interest in relative safety — free from the threat of any hostile reaction from a large and cohesive bloc from among their White host population.(4)

In Conclusion

There has been a gradual but deliberate degradation of art and music and culture over the past century. Classical beauty has been pushed aside and has been replaced with the ugly, the profane, and the dumbed down.

Our natural sense for beauty has been actively suppressed and warped. We have been taught to distrust our own sensibilities. Our minds have been poisoned by the downward spiral and incessant drip-feed of degrading images, messages, sounds, and words.

It is time to listen to our gut feelings, our hearts and our minds, about our perceptions of beauty and ugliness. It is time to challenge the critics and the so-called experts. Let us not be dictated to by an alien elite. Let us call out the emperor with no clothes! The demoralization and degradation of our art and music is a Jewish agenda. It is time to take back our culture and revive our natural sense and spirit!

(1) https://www.moma.org/artists/4285?locale=en

(2) http://ottawacitizen.com/entertainment/local-arts/newmans-revenge-the-value-of-voice-of-fire-is-scorching-hot

(3) http://rense.com/general32/americ.htm

(4) http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2011/09/25/mark-rothko-abstract-expressionism-and-the-decline-of-western-art-part-3/