Brass Band France Blog
Posted: Thu Jun 19, 2014 6:06 pm
Brass Band France Blog
I am travelling around northern France and Belgium with my daughter Diana who is the singer for the Eastern Australia Brass Band. Today we were in Paris. I went with some others from our hotel near Laplace into Notre Dame by train. We managed to get into Notre Dame Cathedral with no queue, being early, so I filmed the stained glass windows, which are magnificent. Myself and a friend nicknamed Tex had a cup of coffee on the left bank of the Seine River, where we discussed some of the psychological difficulties of life, including the relation between existence, anxiety and freedom. As you do.
We then wandered down to the Louvre Museum, which is surrounded by the most magnificent and astounding sculptures, redolent of the mythology of the human conquest of nature. France follows the cult of supreme reason, so the Louvre has sculptures of all the gentlemen of logic, such as Descartes, Laplace, Colomb, Rousseau, Voltaire, all around it. We checked out the arch in which Napoleon celebrates crushing Austria at Ulm and Austerlitz, and the obelisk that Napoleon stole from Egypt, then strolled down the river to the Eiffel Tower, past some disconcertingly attired riot police, who were there to keep the protesting communists under a watchful eye.
Seeing Notre Dame amidst the rationalist names such as Laplace inspired me to explain to Tex some of my views on religion, given the obvious veneration that the people who designed and built this magnificent catherdral soaring to the heavens felt for their imagined God. Religion should be about offering people a sympathetic ear, as a way to help heal some of the psychological damage of the world. Instead, religion has largely morphed into an expansionist political organisation that has destroyed its social trust by trying to brainwash people with bullshit, and as a result is in a state of crisis. Back to that stuff another day. The rest of this post is about brass bands.
The Eastern Australia Brass Band, with about fifty members, played a concert together with the leading brass band of Paris. It was great. Sadly, it seems that brass bands are a fossilized genre, dating from the era just before amplification when they were the loudest thing around, so got popular on that basis. Once electricity transformed music, the public audience dropped brass like a stone, partly because of its stodgy obsolete religious associations. So all those rotundi in town parks are rotting away, when a hundred years ago they were the hub of the community.
These days, brass bands exist for the enjoyment their members get out of playing, with any entertainment for the public just an accidental bonus. Diana is a wonderful singer, so fronting a big band to sing Autumn Leaves and Roses of Picardy at the first world war centenary is very special. I will share some scratchy film on youtube.
I am travelling around northern France and Belgium with my daughter Diana who is the singer for the Eastern Australia Brass Band. Today we were in Paris. I went with some others from our hotel near Laplace into Notre Dame by train. We managed to get into Notre Dame Cathedral with no queue, being early, so I filmed the stained glass windows, which are magnificent. Myself and a friend nicknamed Tex had a cup of coffee on the left bank of the Seine River, where we discussed some of the psychological difficulties of life, including the relation between existence, anxiety and freedom. As you do.
We then wandered down to the Louvre Museum, which is surrounded by the most magnificent and astounding sculptures, redolent of the mythology of the human conquest of nature. France follows the cult of supreme reason, so the Louvre has sculptures of all the gentlemen of logic, such as Descartes, Laplace, Colomb, Rousseau, Voltaire, all around it. We checked out the arch in which Napoleon celebrates crushing Austria at Ulm and Austerlitz, and the obelisk that Napoleon stole from Egypt, then strolled down the river to the Eiffel Tower, past some disconcertingly attired riot police, who were there to keep the protesting communists under a watchful eye.
Seeing Notre Dame amidst the rationalist names such as Laplace inspired me to explain to Tex some of my views on religion, given the obvious veneration that the people who designed and built this magnificent catherdral soaring to the heavens felt for their imagined God. Religion should be about offering people a sympathetic ear, as a way to help heal some of the psychological damage of the world. Instead, religion has largely morphed into an expansionist political organisation that has destroyed its social trust by trying to brainwash people with bullshit, and as a result is in a state of crisis. Back to that stuff another day. The rest of this post is about brass bands.
The Eastern Australia Brass Band, with about fifty members, played a concert together with the leading brass band of Paris. It was great. Sadly, it seems that brass bands are a fossilized genre, dating from the era just before amplification when they were the loudest thing around, so got popular on that basis. Once electricity transformed music, the public audience dropped brass like a stone, partly because of its stodgy obsolete religious associations. So all those rotundi in town parks are rotting away, when a hundred years ago they were the hub of the community.
These days, brass bands exist for the enjoyment their members get out of playing, with any entertainment for the public just an accidental bonus. Diana is a wonderful singer, so fronting a big band to sing Autumn Leaves and Roses of Picardy at the first world war centenary is very special. I will share some scratchy film on youtube.