Why Do People Worship Musicians and Pop Stars?
» Music
Does this help explain why people offer pop stars such extreme levesl of adulation and worship? Why the deaths of the likes of Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson prompt such baroque outpourings of sentiment?
… Successful musicians enjoy unprecedented wealth and wield a unique cultural power that reflects the wide diffusion of their work. To trace the development of this remarkable state of affairs, Blannning brings together a wide range of material, from stories of nineteenth-century celebrity virtuosi to a discussion of the role of studio manipulation in the production of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
As different as Lisztomania and Beatlemania may seem at first glance, Blanning provocatively insists that the two phenomena are closely connected. The link, as he sees it, is the enduring influence of Romanticism, which touched off a dramatic transformation of music’s function in Western cultural life. Before the late eighteenth century, music was often simply an ornament of power or an aid to religious contemplation. The Romantics changed all that. For them, music was the quintessential art form, the one to which, as nineteenth-century critic Walter Pater famously put it, all others aspired. When listened to for its own sake, with the quiet attentiveness audiences began to exhibit once Romanticism caught on, music seems to touch the emotions themselves. …
Review of The Triumph of Music : The Rise of Composers, Musicians, and Their Art by Tim Blanning - Isn’t It Romantic?
