Abstract
Dennis Potter, reflecting on Pennies from Heaven, connects ‘looking for the blue’ to a more conventional understanding of utopianism as the quest for an ideal world:
I picked the Thirties … because the popular music was, perhaps, at its most banal and its most sugary, least challenging — and yet it also encapsulates, somehow, some diminished image of the human desire for there to be a perfect and beautiful and just world.1
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Notes
H. Carpenter (1998) Dennis Potter: The Authorized Biography (London: Faber and Faber) p. 350.
E. Bloch (1986) The Principle of Hope (Oxford: Basil Blackwell) p. 1063. The best account of Bloch’s musical philosophy is David Drew’s introductory essay in
E. Bloch (1985) Essays on the Philosophy of Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
F. Jameson (1974) Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press) p. 143.
E. Bloch (1998) Literary Essays (Stanford: Stanford University Press) p. 58.
U. Le Guin (1975) ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’, The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (New York: Harper and Row);
W. Nicholson (2001) Slaves of the Mastery (London: Egmont).
D. Barenboim (2008) Everything is Connected: The Power of Music (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson) p. 68.
T. De Nora (2000) Music in Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) p. 28.
E. Bloch (1991) Heritage of Our Times (Cambridge: Polity Press) p. 230.
Cited in D. Kemp (2011) Terry Frost: Lorca (Rutland: Goldmark Art).
C. Caudwell (1937) Illusion and Reality (London: Macmillan).
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G. Steiner (1967) Language and Silence (Harmondsworth, Penguin) p. 151.
B. M. Korstvedt (2010) Listening for Utopia in Bloch’s Musical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
C. Lévi-Strauss (1969) The Raw and the Cooked (London: HarperCollins).
A. Ross (2010) Listen to This (London: Fourth Estate) p. xi.
M. Solomon (1995) Mozart: A Life (London: Pimlico) p. 378.
T. W. Adorno (2009) Night Music: Essays on Music 1928–1962 (London, New York, Calcutta: Seagull Books) p. 46.
J. Edwards (ed.) (2011) Music Therapy and Parent-Infant Bonding (Oxford: Oxford University Press); E. Dissanayake (2008) ‘If Music Is the Food of Love, What about Survival and Reproductive Success?’, Musicae Scientiae 169–95.
Cited in F. G. Lorca (1998) In Search of Duende (New York: New Directions Books) p. x.
I. McEwan (2005) Saturday (London: Jonathan Cape) p. 28.
R. Hunter (2010) ‘The Music of Change: Utopian Transformation in Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny and Der Silbersee’ , Utopian Studies, 21(2): 293–312.
Luis Gómez Romero (2010) ‘Countess Almaviva and the Carceral Redemption: Introducing a Musical Utopia into the Prison Walls’, Utopian Studies, 21(2): 274–92.
W. Nicholson (2000) The Wind Singer (London: Egmont) pp. 337–9.
P. Heyworth (1983) Otto Klemperer: His Life and Times. Volume1 1885–1933. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) pp. 200–3.
R. Holloway (2005) Looking in the Distance: The Human Search for Meaning (London: Canongate) pp. 132–3.
D. Barenboim and E. Said (2004) Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society (London: Bloomsbury) p. 33.
R. Young (2010) Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music (London: Faber and Faber).
L. Davidson (2010) ‘A Quest for Harmony: The Role of Music in Robert Owen’s New Lanark Community’, Utopian Studies, 21(2): 232–51.
D. Henley (2011) Music Education in England — A Review by Darren Henley for the Department for Education and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (London: Department for Education DFE-00011–2011) p. 21.
J. Galloway (2011) All Made Up (London: Granta).
D. Parkinson (2004) Heimat: An Introduction (Tartan Video) p. 68.
E. Lunn (1985) Marxism and Modernism (London: Verso) p. 274.
L. Cohen (2008) ‘Anthem’, in L. Cohen, The Little Black Songbook (London: Wise Publications) p. 14.
E. Bloch (2000) The Spirit of Utopia (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univerity Press) pp. 64–5. In all previous instances I have used the translation of ‘The Philosophy of Music’ in Bloch, Essays on Music. In this case, I have preferred Anthony Nassar’s translation, which makes this point more clearly.
M. Solomon (1979) Marxism and Art (Sussex: Harvester) p. 577.
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© 2013 Ruth Levitas
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Levitas, R. (2013). Echoes of Elsewhere. In: Utopia as Method. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137314253_3
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