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Poems and prose are constrained by the boundary of words, limited to the alphabet’s small alphabet of symbols. Paintings are fenced in by pigment and canvas, their emotion frozen by the moment of their completion. But music breathes as it moves through time in an unfixed, intangible and often an inexplicable manner- speaking directly to
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Our world has been blessed with life and cursed with humans. Since the beginning of our existence, we have constantly sought ways to divide ourselves, one of the finest techniques of our making being ‘Religion’. In our world, be it the past or present, the real war has never been between countries or in the
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Throughout history, all the forms of art we know have been seen as an instrument of control, music more than any other perhaps. During the Cold War, the cultural battlefield was as critical as the political one, with the USSR and the USA vying for global influence through their artistic output. The US had a
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Class is not an ancient or natural order—it’s manufactured. While we Marxists often speak in binaries like bourgeoisie and proletariat, the idea of class is much broader. Marx saw class as a group of people with intrinsic tendencies that differed from other groups in the society. But across the world, especially under British imperialism, class
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When we use the word commercialization we tend to think of smaller things that can be classified as commodities with value which can be sold to a customer and be used to make profit. In doing so many of us safely ignore larger concepts which aren’t always tangible- such as time. What is the time?
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The restless, relentless, mechanical and thunderous beat goes on as the left hand begins to pound the piano. The right hand follows suite and thus begins one of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s most well known compositions- his Prelude in G Minor from Études-Tableaux Op. 39 No. 6. While Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in G Minor seems to be glorious
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The year is 1501. That was the fateful year that sealed the future of Music as the world knew it. Till 1501 to the present day, music was the last way of expression that was not commercialized, however the first printing and publishing of the first music work that year by Ottaviano de Petrucci is
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Symphony of Censorship When Dmitri Shostakovich premiered Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk in 1934, its bold orchestration and raw emotional intensity shocked and thrilled Soviet audiences—until it terrified the regime. The modernist and sexually charged opera where Shostakovich intended to show the patriarchal society in which we live in, where through frustration and years of abuse
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In Music Theory, the fifth interval is always considered “perfect” because it creates a sense of consonance and completeness, sounding very pleasing to our ears. In many ways, we could relate the Perfect 5th Interval with the Utopian Society envisioned by Marx where there is stateless society with the means of production owned collectively- eliminating
