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Futurism and the Cult of Violence, Power & Speed

205.163.202.10

Posted by Neward T on February 28, 2001 at 11:34:32

In Reply to: Psychedelic Prokofiev posted by The Real Dave on February 28, 2001 at 07:54:33:

The 2nd is a product of Prok's Paris period, an experimental phase.
Pieces which share the same style are Love For 3 Oranges and the incomparable Scythian Suite.

The vogue of the day was noise and experimentation. There were a number of powerful influences at work. The backdrop for the
period was the rapidly accelerating optimism of the 1920's. Marinetti's cult of Futurism had set forth the aesthetic in the Futurist Manifesto which proclaimed as it's goals "Violence, Power, and Speed". It's ideals lay, as the group of painters and sculptors announced, not in the inspiration of nature as had been true in the past (and especially for the romantics), but in machinery, science and technology, the noise of urban life.

Into the mix came the dual-turbo powered influence of Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" and American jazz. Fortified with these influences, the group of composers that a critic named 'Le six', along with numerous other musicians, went on to forge a futurist style
of expression. It's reflected in contemporaneous works of Bartok, Kodaly, Martinu, Shostakovich, Raslavets and a whole contingent of
Soviet composers who's music is now surfacing, and on and on.

I find it deplorable that rather than learning something about the period and illuminating it, you, in the manner of some stoner adolescent, uncomprehendingly slapped a drug label on the music, thereby invalidating its genesis and meaning and instead placing a present day gloss of cultural refuse over it.
In point of fact, LSD was not discovered until the late 40s by a Swiss chemist (Hoffman, Julius I believe his first name wsa) working for Sandoz, a Swiss pharmacuetical firm. He was not searching for new ways to get high, despite what some present day kids may think, nor of means to inspire Prokofiev. He was, in fact, searching for a drug to ease menstral cramps, which had in folklore and in pre-medical-science past used the rye fungus ergot. LSD wasn't sythetisized until the early 50s, and secret CIA experimentation didn't begin until the mid 50s. It's debut in what became American counterculter didn't occur until the late 50s and early 60s. Prokofiev was long dead and not party to anything to do with LSD.

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